ADAM HAYDOCK

Cueva evaporada is on the other side of cueva del humo and is part of the rio camuy system. These two caves are at the upper section of the system which goes from the rio evaporada through cueva del humo and apparently we can exit cueva del humo into cueva angeles which connects to the tourist section of rio camuy and down into sistemo bocaza del infiernillo where ponor 1,2,3 exist which eventually emerges into the rio camuy river. We entered the cave which looked like the top part of the entrance had teeth fit for a monster and as we were walking into this beast of a cave the views were just spectacular from the inside out. One of the best views I have ever seen inside a cave EVER. We continued into this massive passage and came into a large room with two eyes at the ceiling the allowed light to shine in like a spot light down into the ground level. The formations looked ancient and the room echoed with the reverb of an opera house. We continued to climb up an ancient flowstone into a mountain room which appeared to end in breakdown.

 

We traversed back and up to the right to go to the second entrance which is a sink hole with vines and a large tree growing out of the sink. It reminded me of the movie santum but instead of finding a tank we found a micro rain forest inside this sinkhole.

 

It was spectacular to find this location as we were able to climb out of it to view from the top and crawl through side passages to view fossils. I was drank all my water and started to drink pats water and realized I was getting light headed from the high humidity and temperature inside this cave, luckly we were close to the entrance so we traversed back and slowly took our time coming out of this amazing cave

 We actually had a chance to sleep in a couple extra hours today due to the fact that we got a hotel room, two beds and closer to cave country in PR so we didn’t have to drive so far. We met up with Tom Miller, Jeff Kruse, Katrina Kruse, Richard, and Bro at a pastry shop near the Rio camuy. We were really excited to see these two caves because I have heard they have large passage rooms and we are going into a section of cueva humo that is not well visited. We enter the property and the landowners were a bit upset that we had a lot of cars with us but we were able to smooth that over with them. We quickly got out of their way and started our traverse around a ridge bend into the forest and down the sink hole. We walked up on cueva evaporada and it was breathing fog.  It was

beautiful to see the entrance of the cave system but we went to the other side of the sink hole where cueva del humo is. This entrance was just a little bit smaller but it must have been hundreds of feet from the bottom of the lip to the top. We all enter the cave and switchback down to the bottom of the monster system and when we finally get down we look back out and you can see the headlamps of other members making their way down to the main passage. Once at the bottom we would shine our light on the ceiling and thousands of bats the size of small gerbils fly hundreds of feet up above our heads. At times it looked like the ceiling was morphing into some kind of sci fi phenomena as you heard the wind move from their wings along with the squeaky communication these amazing creatures had. At times you can feel the atmosphere change a little or feel a slight breeze from the bats flying around. Cricket sounds echoed in the lower sections of these cathedral rooms that are able to fit 15+ story buildings. I pondered to myself how the bats could feel our light shining on top of the ceiling which would start this mass movement of bats down the passages. 

 

We started our climb up into the main hallway passage as we passed ancient flowstones possibly hundreds of thousands of years old. Everything was gigantic in this cave and I could only imagine how nature created these massive rooms. We continued down the main passage with a carbon dioxide meter and went down slopes over some water, into a more massive room and continued to traverse down this monumental passage.

 

  The guano was thick and at some points it may have even filled pits inside the cave and created bridges to get from one side to the other but we could not confirm that. We came to a restriction that had multiple pits and a Tyrolean traverse set up. The problem with this set up is that it has been there for over 20 years, most of us didn’t have vertical gear, and if the rope were to break we would tumble down one of the 25 foot pits which would not been going to be injured for me in Puerto Rico at the bottom of a pit. Not having my vertical gear and my own rope I opted to not continue and nobody else wanted to go first either. So we turned around back out of the cave enjoying the geology of the cave and all the inhabitants. Some sections you can take a step and worms would pop out of the ground after each step and other places we found scorpions lurking around under rock shelves. We climbed back out and went over to cueva del evaporada.



Adam Haydock Cueva Sorbetos Puerto Rico

We drove through a small town in Arecibo to get to the location where we would parks our cars and walk to the cave. The neighborhood had a few murders happen a few days previous so we had to park the cars and get into the rain forest quick without causing too much calamity. We walked to the Tanama River and crossed the unusually clear water to get to the entrance of the cave. Attempts have been made to block the cave using concrete but efforts have been made to open the cave which is where the main entrance is. There is a small crawl once you enter but when you able to stand, we look up and at the bottom level of this muddy cave hangs hundreds of thousand white calcite soda straws varying from a few mill
imeters to over two feet in length!!

 

The passage is very slippery and muddy but we were able to get down to the bottom and stare in awe at the shimmering calcite columns that were the size of Parthenon columns, and the chandelier rooms saturated with these white soda straws. I don’t think I have ever seen this many soda straws condensed into once cave like this ever and I am not sure of any other place on earth that has this kind of decoration.

 

  We continued to walk down the passage into a breakdown room and into a large highway like coliseum passage with a stalactite 3 stories high.

 

We viewed a pit that lead to a sump and I was told that a dive was made into this sump but it did not render any favorable results. We continued to the end of the cave where a breakdown mountain has collapsed a room but built a stairway of break down to the top leaving another 100 ft to the ceiling. We traversed back and took a side passage route to more chandelier rooms full of helectite soda straws that extended up to 6 inches from the main formation which looked like nerve connections in some of these oddities. 

 

After four hours we exited the cave and washed off in the Tanama River. This cave far exceeded my expectations and left me pondering how these amazing systems exist in the underworld of our planet. We got back to the car and headed to a hotel to eat and sleep right away to get ready for the next day of caving within the twin giants, evaporada and humo.





Entrance to Los Chorros

Day2 it can be a challenge to sleep in Puerto rico at night with the coqi frogs chirping away all night. I am not sure how many hours of sleep we got but we had to wake up 530 Atlantic time which is 330 AM central time so we could get to the other side of the island to meet up with the cavers to go caving. We got up, striked camp, and started meandering our way down the mountain to the main highway. Map quest was telling me one way to get to Arecibo, Pats Google maps was telling another way to get there, and with my experience being in Puerto rico I knew I had to trick my GPS. It makes driving interesting when GPS tells us to get off on a road and it is a completely different road than we are supposed to be on. Plus there GPS told us to go down roads that are not even there to get to a destination. We worked our way on the highway towards san juan so we can go west and ran into a toll system that we found to be very confusing.

Los Chorros Puerto Rico

Not only do they charge a lot of money but there are 4 different kinds of toll systems where they will give you a card if in replacement of giving you change, or you have to buy a pass to go through the tolls. I should have just activated the toll at the car rental and got the insurance too.We made it to Arecibo an hour early so we had to chance to casually prepare for the caving phase of the trip and organize everything in the car. Jeff Kruse showed up to the meet location and I followed him to the first cave, Los Chorros.

Boa at the entrance of Los Chorros

Los chorros has two beautiful entrances but one of them requires the use of rope to enter the system.

We parked our car and Jeff started to explain to me that last time American cavers went into this system they were getting shot at. On top of that parking our cars at any cave we are taking a risk of our cars getting broken into so we had to bring our valuables and everything else is put in the trunk. 

We came this far so we walked up the hill following the waterfall entrance and climbed up into the mouth of the cave. A Boa constrictor was welcoming us at the entrance to the cave, there were snakes, crabs, the “mango” spider (which is a large spider the size of both of my hands), and scorpions. 

 

We got into this active water system and the temp inside was 75 degrees with 100% humidity and the water was 65 degrees. It felt really warm inside this cave. We started our traverse and the wall passages were lined with formations from flowstone to stalactites and stalagmites. We had to wade in water and go under some small sections to where the cave opened up into walking river cave passage. Bats were flying gall over the place as they squeaked flew in a chaotic frenzy yet they were aware not to run into anything.

Crab in Los Chorros Puerto Rico

We meandered around breakdown and got to a section where we had to climb up into an upper passage where water carved out tube like sharp formations under our feet. It’s still amazes me how water has the power to slowly evolve rocks into some of the most amazing features over millennia.

Scorpion in Los Chorros Puerto Rico

We continued down the passages enjoying the features of the cave and came to the sump. The sump has been recorded as a dive before with dive line but I was not able to get too much more information about that. We started our traverse out of the cave and went down another couple side passages which were even narrower than the previous canyons and the torrents of water raging through these small canyon passages have created a mosaic of well defined and sharp sculptures which were beautiful to observe. I could hear my clothes tearing as I would pass by some of these formations but we walked over small waterfalls and made it to the other entrance. It was nice to see that our cars were still one piece too.

Los Chorros Puerto Rico

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Pat and I woke up early Thursday morning so we could get to the waterfall cascade hike before the afternoon when flash floods typically can happen. In Puerto Rico flash floods can happen at anytime but since we went in the dry season the threat of flash floods was minimized. We got a ride to the bottom of Rio Blanco which is called “EL Hippie” this has a pool of water with a canyon right above the first waterfall. 

 

We ascended the jungle trail until we got to the drop in of the Rio Blanco. The boulders were large and slippery, very slippery. One wrong move and you can slip crack your bones wash down the river over a waterfall or get keyed in with the swift current in some sections. We wore 5.10 canyoneer boots which have a sticky rubber that will give good traction even with slippery conditions. I wanted to be extra careful taking pat upstream as swift water is not something he is familiar with and this hike is not for beginners. (you have been warned).We made it to the confluence of the Rio Cubuy and the Rio Icacos which had a series of large swift water waterfalls, hydraulic boils and deep water swims which required traversing at times to make sure we had the right angle of approach. Some boulders we had to use webbing and help each other to counterbalance ourselves to leverage the other over boulders.

 

It was beautiful to be immersed in the rain forest swimming in 65 degree water with the temp at a humid 75 degrees. We kept going until we got to the main waterfall. This water fall you can see from the road 10 miles away and according to the map is 500 feet up and it looked like it was on a 30 to a 40 degree angle at points. We had lunch and decided to flank the falls to the right. We found ourselves bouldering over rocks and thick vegetation that had skin irritation properties, thorns, and in between these slippery rocks were small cavern like holes where one wrong foothold you can go tumbling down stuck in a very hard to reach jungle. “And this was going so well” I said before we found ourselves in this hell hole. We decided to turn back and quickly lost our traverse so we have to overcome each boulder, negotiating and planning each step and we moved. One step I took my foot went through the shrubbery and caught myself before slipping into one of these nightmares. Knowing the river is to our right we made a b line to the river and found ourselves half way up on a boulder that acted as a shelf over the waterfall, “how did we get so lucky” We got our bearing and continues to ascend the waterfall to a section ¾ of the way up and had another break to talk about what just happened and to continue our plan. 

 

We continued back to the right and found the section was too slippery so we went right and WHAA…found a small trail through the other side of the river. This section of the rain forest felt like a highway compared to the left side. We made a hasty climb to the top and meandered around the bend to descend back into the water on top of the water fall. We continued to encounter smaller waterfall challenges but were able to overcome those challenges and make it to the pipeline trail in good time. Wow what an amazing hike that was cascading route finding, planning and great team work. We followed the easy pipeline trail to the top of the road where we walked back down and got back to our camp. We dried everything out and re packed everything for the next section of the trip (the caves).

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The commercial section was interesting to be in because everyone was clean well rested and excited to take a trolley down to the commercial cave. It was a bit expensive to get in but it was very interesting to see this section which turns out to be a very beautiful section of the cave system and where we would have washed out of if we got caught in a flash flood. We took this trolley down and was talking to people around us about where we have been which peaked their interest since this was a lot of their first times in a cave. The trolley took up to the entrance and it was another nice entrance (pavement of course) which took us around and inside the large dome room. The light inside the cave gave a nice overview of the size and mass this room has which was another nice aspect of going to the commercial section of the cave.

 

We made it around to the river portion and exited the cave relaxing and pondering how nice it would have been to have a trolley take us down some of the other sections of the system. We made it back up to the visitor center and I soon found myself surrounded by a classroom full of children asking me questions about caving and the sections of the rio camuy system we have been into. Apparently the people we were talking to were teachers and they wanted us to talk to their students a bit about our adventures and what caving is like. Once we left the location we headed back to the el yunque to live out the last day of our vacation, relax a bit and traverse the rio cubuy.

We got in the truck and headed down to South central Indiana to visit a beautiful cave system called Salts Cave.

This is a nice cave with all kinds of interesting features going from slot canyon passage to river passage with large rooms and other interesting features.

We worked our way down and found a talus slope to climb up which was slippery and muddy to get to the top.

Once we got to the top we followed some side passages until they ended and traversed back to the slot canyon passage down in the main river conduit.

We work our way through the slot canyon and crawl around in the cave water which I found an interesting side passage that took me back around into where we were sitting around.

The passage continued so we followed the large walking passage until it came to a sump that was not passable.

The sump itself does not seem to be a divable passage

After we left this section we headed for the cold exit that awaited us which included a run across the field and a quick car change

I highly recommend this cave for anyone who wants to enjoy some caving fun in a interesting and challenging cave.

It was great to get everyone together for a trip to Sullivan cave and after talking with Windy City Grotto, we got around 13 people together for the trip into the cave.

It was a bitter cold day with some snow in the forecast but nothing we thought would create a flood which changed a bit once we got into the cave.

We entered the cave and continued down some canyon like passages and missed the back breaker passage which took us to the lower sections maze canyon and through the bowls of the cave.  we went left and right but ended up getting a bit mis oriented and had to stop a few times to find our way around.

Finally we worked out way up into the back breaker passage and continued down until we got the corridor that took us to the merry go round room.

The cave opens up into walking passage and we took a tour of the merry go round room and continued to find the mountain room which was through a hole in the ground and into a fairly large room.

This was quite impressive and we took some photos here while enjoying the cave a bit more before going into the river passages.

We worked our way down into the lower river passages which consist of some large river passage which had some raging white water passing through.

We noticed that the water levels went up a bit when we were down in the river passage so we decided to turn around and head back out.

we all made it out safe with no incident and it was a fantastic day in Sullivan cave.