DAY-2 CUEVA PENCHO
January 21, 2015
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| Cueva Pencho Puerto Rico |
set out on our own to visit some caves in the Camuy area as everyone else had to work. I was told about a sink hole that had a small cave passage with some excellent waterwork system called Cueva Pencho. According to Jeff Kruse, This cave was throught to be Ponor 4 and apart of the camuy system but it turns out to be a separate system. We got some cords and set out to the landowners house early in the morning to avoid the afternoon rainfall. The landowners were nice enough
to allow us to park in the front of their house so we didn't have to worry about the car being broken into along with having the opportunity for a rather easish walk back to the car from the cave.
I had a couple of cords to this system so we set out and ended up hiking up a steep saddle in between two mogotes that took us down into thick thorny vine brush which was not easy to whack through with a dull edged machete. We eventually found a trail that was leading east and west so I scouted up and down it without any luck in finding this sink. It turns out that some of the cords that we got were not accurate so we retraced our path and went to a lead that I saw which turned out to be Pencho.
I had a couple of cords to this system so we set out and ended up hiking up a steep saddle in between two mogotes that took us down into thick thorny vine brush which was not easy to whack through with a dull edged machete. We eventually found a trail that was leading east and west so I scouted up and down it without any luck in finding this sink. It turns out that some of the cords that we got were not accurate so we retraced our path and went to a lead that I saw which turned out to be Pencho.
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| Cueva Pencho |
The sink hole had around a 70 to over a 100ft drop down to the bottom of the sink. We rigged a tensionless to some wild looking tree and rapped over the edge and down to the bottom of the sink. It was dry, there was no water running through the cave like we were told to be aware of but the sun was shined through the forest and the array of vines that dangled and traversed across the sink gave this sink, a very interesting charteristic to it.
This cave appears to be a whirlpool of sorts as run-off water recharges this sink and appears to swirl around bottom. I am sure this is quite the site to see in a flood! There is a bottom level that has static water with garbage floating and a water passage leading to the sump.
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| Looking up at the vines in Cueva Pencho |
Down in the lower level of the sink there was a static pool of water that I was told has already been pushed by cave divers without a successful connection to any other significant passage. We continued to walk upstream through the passage and recognized the interesting wall and formation growth on the walls of this cave |
| Cueva Pencho Puerto Rico |
After about 10 minutes we found the exit to the cave and we were able to walk out if we wanted to but we came back down and decided to climb back up the rope to exit the cave
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| Exiting the horizontal section of Cueva Pencho |
This was a nice little system with the amount of growth from the tree roots and vines that are attempting to dominate the space within this sink but we wanted to check out some more caves in the area and decided on visiting Cueva Humo and Evaporada!
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| Adam Haydock in Cueva Pencho |
I am glad we got a chance to come here as it was a beautiful place and interesting to visit while we were down here but In my opinion, it was no comparison to the next two caves we are going to visit, Evaporada and Humo.
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| Cueva Pencho Puerto Rico |
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