02/10/2024

Caving and Alien Aishas

I finally got my alien aisha in neopets! I'm so hyped because this is something that was so unobtainable to me as a kid. I couldn't even get fairie quests in neopets done as a kid. I also got a maraquan aisha this week and I'm probably going to cancel Hulu in order to get Neopets Premium (screw hulu's password crackdown).

I'm also going caving for this second time this week today. This cave is really spacious and well mapped, but there is a pit at the back that isn't on the 1978 map I have. We're going to tie a light to a rope and lower it into the pit to see whats there. I love caving so much!

Cave Report

I went into a cave Monday night. From what we know, this cave is roughly horseshoe shaped, but there's lots of little side passages. The entrance was a 20 or 30 foot ladder down into a pipe that opened into the first room of the cave proper. From there, we descended into a ravine and it turned into a stream on the right while the left was a dome of clay-like mud. We had to put our hands on the mud and sort of scoot along with our feet in the stream. The first part of the stream was bitter cold, but the next part was significantly warmer. The mud was so deep that our ankles sank under it and we kept getting stuck.

We turned off the stream and onto a small ledge. That ledge led to a tight squeeze that required us to take our packs off to fit. We arrived in a ravine that was parallel to another, separated by a ten foot tall wall. We free climbed up and down the wall. The first side was significantly harder with fewer handholds, but the back side was cake. From there, we climbed up a muddy hill and started the first of three crawls. The crawls were roughly 18-24 inches tall. The first break happened in a room with beautiful stalagmites, shells sticking out of the walls, and fault-controlled mineralization. The second break led to a large room with three passages where large amounts of shale had fallen out of the ceiling. There was some fluorite here, suggesting MVT deposits.

The third crawl was up a pile of collapsed shale and under more shale. This made me a little nervous; I don't like shale because it's infamous for falling out of ceilings. Finally, we came into the largest room of the cave where fresh limestone, possible only a few hundred years old, had fallen out of the ceiling. Most of the room sat in a pit filled with the unstable rubble and we had to pick over it carefully as we explored. Everything was covered in fossils and more fault-controlled mineralization was visible. The back of the cave led to a dead end, but a side passage led to the stream. We'd heard that this was an alternative, more dangerous way back, but we didn't have a map on us and wanted this to be a short trip, so we opted to return the way we came. We retraced our steps and the exit was uneventful, except for bashing my ankle on a rock.