ADAM HAYDOCK

Last day in TAG and we picked up everything that we had at Troy's house and made it out to Hoopers Well for one last drop.  This 100ft drop is in Monte Sano State Park area and is a very popular pit near the road.  A lot of cavers come here to practice vertical training which is a nice location to practice and a nice pit to drop. We dropped the pit and afterwards grabbed some BBQ which was absolutely amazing!!! UGH now for the ride back to Chicago which took us a total of 11 hours to get home.

I want to thank Troy Fugua for hosting us at his place and for spearheading the access to the caves we went to. Thank you my friend, I am glad we got to go caving together again and we had a blast.  I want to take all of the landowners that allowed us to visit each cave we went to on this trip in return for helping out.  This was a fantastic trip and I am so grateful that we go to spend it with friends and have the experience we had with a great group of cavers. 

We woke up a bit later to make sure we were as fresh as possible for the days trip. One of the cavers stayed back to relax from the trip yesterday so we set out to go to a beautiful pit and go to Butler Sinks afterwards to enter Paul's Cave. 

  We drop the entrance and made it down this beautiful cave and I got some great shots of the pit from the bottom up. The sun beams came through as everyone climbed out of the Pit.  This was one of the more beautiful pits I have been to in TAG.

 Soon after we left this Pit, we made out and way over to another location and our sites were dialed in to visit an with large waterfalls.  I looked at the map and it appeared to be a crawl that gradually got bigger until the 300ft drop was encountered.

 We parked the car and had to hike over a mile in the woods to get to the waterfalls Sinks area.  This place was beautiful! There was a lot of water just pouring over ledge from above and that was impressive in itself!  Where the hell is all this water coming from?  and where is it all going? We drop our packs and look around for the entrance.  I find some other entrances that lead to drops into dome rooms under the breakdown piles above and I continue to wonder if there are other cave systems that feed into this cave due to these passages.  Eventually, we found the entrance to and climb down into the river system.  This passage will be serving as a natural filter or a body compressor due to how tight it was to contort our bodies just to get to the stream passage crawl.

The crawl turned into hands and knees than opened up to walking over boulders to get to the DROP!  We made it.  This drop is 300ft to the bottom which can either be dropped from the water fall using two bolts over the falls or a traverse into a small room away from the waterfall.  This room, the waterfall, and the system itself IMO was extremely impressive!!!  There was a waterfall drop with a climb around and some breakdown that you had to walk over in order to get to the exposed climb so we rigged a hand line to ensure nobody would fall into the pit below us.  After come challenges we had the hand line established and continued to rig the drop.  We were not prepared for this flood of water that we encountered so we did not have our wetsuits available to us which was a concern for some of the cavers so what we decided to do was to drop down to the ledge which was only 60 ft which would avoid the waterfall.  This was the majority ruling and it was thought that the waterfall would be hammering everyone at the bottom.

ALABAMA PIT FLICKR: https://www.flickr.com/photos/exploration-worldwide/sets/72157644477894663/

BUTLER SINKS PAULS CAVE: https://www.flickr.com/photos/exploration-worldwide/sets/72157644024344098/

  The night before I closed my eyes at midnight and a minute later it was 7 am, at least that was what it felt like when the lack of sleep started to recharge it's empty bucket. Day Two, and we had a long day ahead of us as we had to hike up a large hill to a waterfall entrance known as Thunder Hole. This cave is considered a classic as it is a beautiful waterfall entrance rappel into a series of 5 waterfall multi drop rappels down to the bottom sump.  We get breakfast, pack wetsuits, and go through the rope lengths for this multi drop waterfall cave.  The drops were approx as follows: Two 100 ft drops One 70 ft drop, One 60 ft drop and another 100 footer, don't quote me on these drop lengths because some of the ropes needed longer lengths than the drop itself to set up a proper rig. We get to the location and hike up to the entrance. The entrance has a 90 ft drop with water cascading down and eventually cascading all around you before you get to the bottom. We rig and drop down to the bottom of the first drop. When I looked up, the water and the light from the sun created a green tint from the green leaves on the trees.

As we continued down to the second drop, we followed a slot with water traveling down like a waterslide carving its way through the slot to the next drop, and I thought only Puerto Rico had water park like caves! This cave was so amazing!  We get on rope and continue to drop over the lip with the water pressure pressing against us until we passed the lip, than it turned into a rain storm cascading all around us

 The water itself was not too insane but it wasn't a light trickle either.  All the drops were a wonderful combination of water pressure and depth so roll on the wetsuit for this cave and its a must do experience!!!!  So much Fun!!!  We got to the crawl squeeze and start contorting our bodies around to fit through the tight stream passages that eventually opened up to the Third Drop.  This one we rigged to the bolts in the ceiling and dropped 50-60 ft to the bottom.  I went over to the natural bridge ledge and attempted to get a shot of people coming down in the waterfall.

We all make it down to the 4th drop and notice this one is a bit deeper at around 90-100ft.  The water pressure is pushing us out into the pit as each of us drop down through the waterfall and into the thunderstorm of water blasting down on us from above as we rappel to the bottom.  SOOOO much fun!!

I went back down to take more pictures of the drops and practice change overs in the waterfall while waiting for the rest of the group to come back out of the cave.  As I continued to start back down the first and second drop to help out the others with rope and de rigging my lights start to flicker.  I was draining my lights taking pictures inside the cave and did not bring my backpack with me with spare lights to replace the batteries. As my lights dimmed to a point were they went out the faint glow from one of my zebra lights was left which faded away.  Motherfucker!!!...Caving 101...is what I thought to myself and shortly after could feel the perceptual narrowing of the dark within the darkness, the cold water conducting heat away from my legs and the loneliness that was creeping around and up my back.   I can see where people can panic at this point but with the training and experiences I have gone through, I took that a different direction with learned behaviors when the feeling starts to come which subsides panic and a plan starts to come in place.  Follow the river and go up.  On my belly,  I start to crawl back the way I came feeling my way as my memory confirmed the dimensional features that my eyes remembered coming in.  I made it up around another crawl and listened for the waterfall.  I felt my way around and found the rope to the second waterfall.

I got on rope and climbing the 2nd drop until I got to the top, got off rope and followed the river until I could see the faint green light from the entrance drop becoming stronger as the dark within the darkness faded and sunlight burned though to cast its comforting guidance out of the cave.  In my defence, I know this wasn't too complicated of a system to find my way around and the rest of the team would have been coming through where I was BUT it is no excuse for leaving your pack behind as I have seen cavers do this in the past.  I can see where some would have lost their shit and panicked in my situation so I decided to talk about this in the trip report as a reminder to be mindful when deciding to leave your pack somewhere because you might run into a situation like mine and it might not go as easy.

Eventually the rest of the group came creeping up the rope as night fell. I was told that one of the team members got off rope at the bottom of the fifth drop and fell into the darkness between 8 and 10 ft.  The other members were really concerned about the caver so as the next one came down, they could see the caver climbing around and in good condition.  LUCKY!!! This will speak to focusing on your surroundings and making sure you are observant of your surroundings.  Sounds like we were not all thinking straight BUT this speaks to knowing how tired you are and staying that much more focused on the tasks you are accomplishing.   Team work, a good attitude, strong mentality, and good physical conditioning are great components but keeping your mind focused until you are out of the cave will be one of your best assets.  We get down the mountain and back to Troy's house for another nights sleep and ready for the next group of caves.

 The Entrance was gated so Troy had to drive to get the key the night before which was really nice of him.  We entered the cave system and down into a series of decently large rooms.  The cave reminded me a bit of Wolf River Cave with regard to the size of the rooms until we got to the sand and water crawl ( more on this in a bit).  After a few dense gravity climbs around exposed rock, we made it to a junction.  This junction was a decent size room with two passages, one left and one right. We took the right route first to get to the the Pisa Room, and The beyond the Beyond room.

We continue to a stoop walk through a passage, than we had to get on hands and knees to crawl for a bit which led us through an abundance of formations and flowstone features as we passed through this room. The Room opened back up again and we dropped into the Pisa Room

The Pisa room had a Stalagmite formation and a small crawl passage that was really tight and constricting but it lead us to the final sections of this faction of the cave. This crawl was really tight,  a natural Filter of sorts if I may say so.   We squeeze through this and dropped down into some breakdown with a waterfall, followed that to a few more passage rooms, and made it to The Beyond The Beyond Room. Well at least we made it through one section of the cave.  

We double backed and got to the art room where we were able to contribute to the wall of art where all of the artistic cavers that have travelled through this part of the cave left a piece of artistic memory.

 We continued back down into the stream passage and it quickly got interesting as the ceilings were lowered and the water level was lifted up a few feet.  Some of us went ahead and a few of us stayed back to take a rest but we all eventually got back together in the stoop walking sand crawl passage.  This went for almost a mile that eventually got us to the Y section where the cave splits.  The passage was bone grinding and joint bearing as we had to stoop and slide in the mud, sand, and water to get to the Y section. We decided to return back the way we came due to the camera equipment I left behind and the fact that it was getting a bit cold for some of us. It was easier to go back the way we came than it would have been to continue out of the cave and travel back through the woods to the car.  Plus the keys were inside the cave so we had to get them.  We traversed back through the sand crawl and made our way back to the confluence to exit the cave. That was a great cave system and I wish we dropped the entrance pit and made the through trip.  We got pizza afterwards and attempted to look for Trent Chasm, Narwell, Hawks Hole on Green Mountain but we were not successful as it was nighttime so we ended the search early to make sure we got some sleep for the next days trip into Thunder Hole.  

 Toadpool canyon is located in the Red Rock recreational area just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. There are three rappels that we encountered up to 35ft in length that all looked like they could have been bypassed and easy to go around. The canyon itself is pretty straightforward and ghosting techniques are used to minimize the impact to the rock itself.   The rock is interesting in itself as it has some thin strata layers in the sandstone walls. Furthermore, the drop are through some small entrances so it is a good place to practice chimneying. This canyon took around 2 hours to complete.