I was told my last blog didn’t make much sense and I should clarify what is happening with the dig—other than our filling the sink around the culvert and capping it. But what is happening is politics and it is really hard for me to explain that stuff. I don’t even understand the politicizing of the cave. The cave is a natural feature of the planet. It has its lessons to teach us. It is, so to speak, a totally unique library. We have a management plan designed not only to just go into the library, but to read it without altering it. And according to the Federal Cave Protection Act of 1988, you are not even allowed to check a book out. It must be read in the cave. And not only to just read it, but to share with the world the opening of those books.

A little history. My first cave experience was working at the Oregon Caves -- NPS -- on what we called the rubble crew. This was around 1989. The early days of discovery and tourism at the Oregon Caves had left a lot of blasted rock and cave sediments that were thrown aside and or stuffed into holes. These were being removed to expose the natural features along the trail. It was like the whole bottom half of the cave was buried under the dirt and rock that had been blasted and was being moved to make a trail that could be walked through and not have to be crawled through. 

Now as a digger and a treasure hunter of sorts -- I’ve dug a lot of agate in my life, even looked for gold -- I was fascinated by what was found in the dirt we were digging. There were of course human artifacts: coins, marbles, hairpins, flashbulbs, and buttons. Stuff that falls out of people’s pockets when they take their hands out of them. These artifacts were accidentally found and a lot of them I believe ended up in some kind of museum or storage that the park maintains. Not for the public. Also, and these were more interesting to me, we found a lot of bones. I remember at first when I noticed them, my first day of digging, I thought, “Are these left over from the lunches of the workers?”  I imagined cavemen gnawing on slabs of bear meat.  As the digging continued though, it was obvious that these bones, some of them in deep deposits of washed sand, were naturally deposited in the cave. Eventually some of them were identified as belonging to a 10,000 year old environment and are still available for study, but most of the found bones were thrown away. A few random finds including a wolf tooth, a Native American tooth, and many small mammal bones were picked out as they were spotted. These were identified by Dr. Rob Orr, paleontologist. 

I love to dig and am always interested in what I find in the ground, even just a rock. I grew up ½ mile from the Willamette River, and you could dig for weeks and not see anything but dirt and loam, not even any sand till you got down about 5-7 feet. Josephine County is fun to dig in. The Oregon Caves were the most interesting digging I’ve done. When the Cave Next Door (CND) was first entered, a bone and a snail shell were found in the first room. They might have come directly down from the surface, from an opening above. I think they were washed through the cave because a snail shell was also found on a sandbank beside the creek ½ way through the canyon passage. I have often hoped that the CND might at some place duplicate the fossil record lost and scattered, even just thrown away, from the Oregon Caves. A record of fauna in Josephine County from 10,000 years ago. ( In speaking of fossils, I want to mention here that there are some carboniferous rocks between Waldo and O’Brien in this county that I have seen some beautiful fossils from that different people have randomly gathered. There is a fossil resource in Oregon that has yet to be explored and studied.)

Another thing I learned on my first day of work in a cave (along with the abundance of information I could learn) was how difficult and impossible it is to go into a cave, much less build a trail through it, without some kind of significant impact. These issues have been dealt with quite successfully in many private and state tour caves, to preserve and maintain them for the maximum experience of future visitors. In my years of cleaning and building trail at the Oregon Caves, I learned abut Kartchner Caverns in Arizona and the efforts the discoverers made to protect the cave and build a trail to be able to share it with others without hurting the cave. Public television made a 15 minute TV show of some of our efforts to clean, restore, and rebuild the Oregon Caves and I think that had an effect on other cavers and their restoration projects.

So as the trail-building in the Oregon Caves progressed, these issues were always in my mind, and guided many of the daily decisions that had to be made in construction there. The first issue was the vast amount of knowledge a cave can contain that is too often missed or ignored because of the overwhelming experience of being in a strange environment with such unnatural beautiful decorations. Also “seeing” a cave by the light of a lamp encourages tunnel vision. After over 100 years of tourism and caving by thousands of people, an ancient bear track was found in the Oregon Caves, as an example plus the revelation that some of the bones were 10,000 years old. Another example of information from the "cave library" is the climate record recorded in the precipitates. This is a recent important field of research. The other issue was how to discover, explore, and share a cave without significant impact while learning that cave’s particular lessons. And these issues were uppermost in my mind when we received the challenge.

The challenge was a $1,000 reward for anybody who could find the “Lechuguilla of the Oregon Caves,” referring to a magnificent cave found near Carlsbad Caverns. The challenge was put out by Craig Ackerman, then superintendent of the Oregon Caves. Well, myself and my friend, Don Young, couldn’t help but take up the challenge. We both have loved to dig and explore from our youths. We went to the resource department at the Caves, did some research, geological and historical, and put together a list of possible places to look. We found and searched around every marble outcrop and hole in the ground we could find. The result was the discovery and mapping of the first 700’ of the Cave Next Door. We still have videos of the first room of the cave. A nice shot of John Roth’s (Oregon Caves resource manager) boots disappearing into the trachea, the narrow passage to get into the heart of the cave. These were exciting days for me and I regularly informed both the Park Service and the Forest Service of my progress and results. Some of John Roth’s ideas were incorporated into the management plan. It was obvious that this was a significant cave. For some reason though, it didn’t fit the criterion of the challenge so we never got the reward, but subsequent work has shown the cave to be much larger than the 700’ of mapped passage. 

 

Now it is important to notice here that from the time we first punched a hole in a layer of sand near the ceiling (August 15, 1999), the CND has had airflow. In fact the last trip into the cave, January 2000, was a very cold night and the air was rising through the cave quite well. It was telling us how much more cave there was and most definitely telling us there was another opening. Not just air seeping through micro-fissures and soil. 

That same trip brought us to the sump at the end of the mapped passage. On a silt bar of the sump were mouse and rat tracks that had not gotten there the way we came, but from another entrance. That rat’s skeleton was lying in the stream a short distance away. The CND is very open at some other end or ends.

Anyway, the one end we came in, where the stream came out, by April had collapsed with large alluvial boulders filling the tunnel we had dug. Subsequent investigations showed that had not only alluvium collapsed but what had been the ceiling of the first room called the Boulder Room, was now the floor. The marble is like Swiss cheese with intense dissolution along joint fracture lines.

After a couple of years of geological and hydrological work, I located a sinkhole (part of a cave, according to the Federal Cave Protection Act of 1988) connected to the original dig. I started digging. About once a year, I would give a letter or a disc to the local FS office and they would usually just give me a “What do you expect us to do about it?” look. We would go back to digging. Turnover of personnel at the office was pretty high; sometimes we found someone who was interested. Once we had some meetings with the cave specialists and natural resource types, and we visited the site. They told me that they recognized my right to be doing what I was doing. We kept digging. Eventually we found marble, then airflow. Then we found a whole cave room, but the passage leading down was still blocked with rubble.

Over the years there were many people who helped with the digging. Much of it was done with a jin-pole. There were as many as 6 people involved in the raising of the 1/3 cubic foot of dirt in a white plastic bucket. Often there was only a digger and a lifter, and even more often the digger and lifter were one in the same person--that is, me, David. You had to climb up to the top to fish for buckets sitting 30’ below with a hook on the end of a rope you were holding down attached to a pole with a counter-weight of rock to help you lift the bucket when you caught it. I calculate there are over 10,000 hours of voluntary community service put into this project by over 50 individuals in one way or another. 

 

Much of the help came from seasonal employees at the Oregon Caves. I have enjoyed working with those kids over the years, and some still keep in touch. I remember Greg. He had a bad back, but loved to dig, that didn’t hurt. He would come out of the hole so happy and dirty. He was a timber cruiser by trade and I took him for his last walk on some specials trails I knew of in the forest around the site. He died soon after. Sure hated to lose such a dedicated helper. All these folks believed in the project.

What is the project? The project is a process designed to discover, explore, and digitally map a cave with zero to minimal impact. Do this with at least some kind of WWW Internet connection to share the opening of the cave with the whole world in real time. And at the end, be able to roll back up trails and leave the cave alone. In effect, we want to show how to satisfy the requirements of the Cave Protection Act. Yes, we have set very strict standards for ourselves, for the sake of the cave; otherwise it would have been entered and explored years ago. These standards apply especially to any engineering in the construction of the shaft or the trail. Much extra time and expense has been put in to make sure everything would be safe and sound and would last at least 50 years. I know of no other plan for entering and exploring a cave (something that’s usually done the night before as you hastily gather ropes and gear), other than some NASA experiments, that adhere to such strict regimen. The project is not about caving, it is about the cave. It is about applying 21st century technology to one of mankind’s oldest, recreational, or perhaps, religious pursuits.

So now we are in the process of filling in the sink with its own rubble and sealing up the top. We seem to be right at the neck of the sink because air flow is increasing and all the rocks are getting looser with more air voids all the time. After 10 years—what excitement and hope. Also, once again the powers that be, the FS in this case, are taking notice of our efforts and visited the site. Now I have always known that this project cannot ultimately succeed without FS approval. Unless of course, I’d have chosen to just forget safety and engineering and other people and busted that cave for myself. But I didn’t do that. I kept trying to get some official help. I think they were hoping it would collapse on me and I wouldn’t be pestering them anymore. It didn’t and I am. Almost 2 years ago, we went to them and applied for a special use permit. Phone calls were never returned. Well let me tell you, I think it is much easier to build a stable trail right down the throat of an active sinkhole than it is to find a way through the sinkhole of regulatory agencies. I have been informed that right now they are planning to put in a grate at the top and then return and fill the shaft with expandable foam. How green of them! I’m thinking of taking my meager retirement somewhere else where they only laugh at an old man who likes to dig for nothing, and not make a criminal out of him. I feel like the bottom is about ready out of this hole, and I need to chain myself to the cave so I don’t fall in with it.

End of July—maybe the last week.

The old men have been pretty busy this spring just doing the “making a living” thing. Not much time for changing the world, but we had a chance yesterday to work at the CND and slowly continue the process of filling around the culvert to enable us to seal up the shaft. It still takes ½ hour to produce a cubic foot of fill. 

The FS is really touchy about anybody disturbing the surface of the ground in their old clear cut (of course, they get to use bulldozers and drag logs, and totally destroy the two inches of humus that took a thousand years to form), and all I get is a little shovel and a bucket. But for some reason my little pile of dirt that already has trees growing on it is a much bigger danger to their “resources” than cutting the trees ever was. I wonder what all those rocky barren patches of hillside looked like before the trees were hauled away 30 years ago? 

Anyway, I want to state here that I have held myself to a much stricter standard for treating the surface than the FS ever has, just as the management plan holds me to a much stricter standard for treating caves than the park service has ever managed to do. I feel a little put upon when either the NPS of the FS preaches to me about “resource management.” 

So...we continue to use the sinkhole deposits to fill in around the culvert. Fortunately we are almost done and in a short time will have the hole filled in and capped. But then again we are just three old men.

Now while working yesterday, Tony and myself were surprised by visitors. We never get visitors. It was an entourage of various levels of government clerks form the FS, even one from the NPS. This was the second time in 12 years we have been honored with such a visit. True, I would have felt a little more honored if they had told me they were coming, as was the case before.

--After all, this project is going on 10,000 hours of voluntary citizen work to help bring the process of cave exploration and discovery into the technology of the 21^st Century. This is happening on an international scale, and I am really trying to convince the powers that be in this county (the FS do own and control most of it) to throw the dogs a bone and allow this project to proceed. So I was awfully excited to have a representative (five of them, a district ranger included) on the site, and to be able to once again promote my dream. It was a hard sell, but I put my heart into it, and if nothing else, this old man got some sympathetic smiles and chuckles. Even a chance to recite a poem, "Outwitted", by Edwin Markham, Oregon’s first poet laureate.

“He drew a circle that shut me out;

A rebel, a heretic, a thing to flout;

But Love and I, we had the wit to win,

We drew a circle that took him in.”

I have sometimes wondered if that approach could ever work on bureaucrats. I hope it does; they seemed really human to me.

For instance, the last time--maybe six years ago-- (remember, I have always been open and honest with the FS and the NPS about the fact that I was working on the cave, and about what I am trying to accomplish) --the last time the FS paid me a visit, they told me that I had the right to be doing what I was doing. How I wish I had that in writing now. They said they recognized that right. How often do you hear that from a government official? And they weren’t even selling me a permit! I didn’t need one at the time. Still don’t know if I do. One says “yes” and one says “no,” but I am starting to get the idea that they are both saying “stop!” until they can figure out what to do with me and my shovel. Sometimes I think I know what they would like to do with me and my shovel. I also think that me starting to get that idea is making some of the local officials a little more comfortable. I have noticed over the years that it always pleases the government when the people voluntarily give up their rights. Saves them the trouble of taking them, I guess. Helps them to secure their jobs, when they assume the responsibilities of the people. 

Anyway, I find this total change in their attitude towards the project to be very human, and I am always happy to be able to relate to someone else as a unique human being. I also believe that some real communication took place. Might have had more to do with my listening and hearing them voice their ideas, but if any kind of communication is to take place, somebody has to listen.

Well, I was able to show Roy exactly what we were doing to close the hole up, but only at the top. Nobody wanted to climb down the ladder. He assured me we were both headed in the same direction, but I think we are still in disagreement over how far in that direction we are going and our final purposes in going in that direction. They had to pretend what they were being paid to pretend and then they left and I went back to work where absolutely zero pretensions are allowed. But then, the cave isn't human.

We were able to bring up a couple more cubic feet of sinkhole rubble for fill. The dig is at the neck of the hourglass, so to speak. The pinchpoint where it either opens up or closes. And although for the last five feet all rocks and walls came with voids, none of the voids showed any evidence of airflow—until just before we quit! A 1” hole bored with an iron bar down into the SE corner made the flame on the lighter waver and dance. Back to airflow at last after what?—three or four years and 25 feet down? I may even be able to crack that bottle of cheap champagne that’s been lying in the creek waiting for the day. 

There used to be two bottles, but one disappeared—washed away I think.

Stay tuned.

March 24.

This is an update of two work days.  Last Sunday Charlie and I hiked in to the Mistress for more safety work.  I found the handles and attached them to the timbered walls below the collar, using longer drywall screws than the short ones provided.  I put them on the walls and bracing wherever I had found myself reaching for a handle that wasn't there.  This is in the 60-70 foot depth.  The ladder is vertical on the wall and there is a near vertical , 10-20 foot plus hole below you and all the teps are narrow ledges.  Handles are nice -- all caves should come with them.

I worked out a way in the digging bottom of the hole to divert the steady stream of water -- the one that can always find your open neck -- even further to the side.  this makes working much more comfortable.  I removed more cobbles from the west side, sorting and stacking the larger ones on ledges and set up 5 buckets of small ones.  We pretty much have the North and East sides of the sinkhole filled in.

This Sunday Charlie and I went in again without Tony.  I fully expected to spend the day lifting buckets anyway, but instead worked at the top of the sink.  Years ago as the top part of the shaft was built, to prevent the original walls of the sinkhole from collapsing, a lot of temporary backfill was used.  This was mainly cobbles and chunks of gathered bark and wood.  Some had been stored for warming fires on snowy days.  (Our present snowpack is down to less than 3 feet.)  This was removed, went back to the surface where it came from or stored around the shaft for walls and backfill.  The dig is even more prepared for a major finishing effort.

Resurrection Sunday.
Charlie, Tony & myself hiked in, slightly rainy weather, less snow, and got 25 buckets up from the bottom.  Everything went well.  He is arisen and the tomb in empty. Praise God.

Late Winter 2013

March 10.
Charlie and I made it up to the Mistress through six inches of new snow.  it was a short maintenance day.  We got the turbine back on line -- more snow shoveling required for that, digging the line out, and light work fine.  Charlie did some clean-up and organizing up top while I did the same down below.  I had intended to attach more handholds on the shored walls below the collar, but never could locate them.  I moved the lower light down to hang at the top of the dig area.  I tried to divert the inevitable trickle of water from the center to the side so it wouldn't always find the neck of the rain jacket -- moved it a foot, better but not best.  I also spent some time breaking up boulders, bucketing the chips up and moving the cobbles up the shaft and parking them for future wall building.  We lifted five buckets up and called it a day.  

March 3.
A birthday dig for Tony.  Another 30 wonderful eventful buckets.  How I do love boredom in the shaft -- boredom being simply the lack of any cataclysmic event, and all the tedious details seem to be timely and proper -- NO SHORTCUTS!!

Three more shoring timbers installed.  That makes 3 tiers we have installed and they all three have wedged tightly into place.  That puts us two feet deeper for our 100 buckets, which is about 1 yard of rubble.  Three old dudes and two months; not bad.

The 100 pound boulder that was actually a loose slab of the south wall, has become a 200 pound boulder as its roots are excavated.  As much as possible it is being sledged up and removed.  One and two hundred pound boulders are a big problem.  If you park them on the floor of the dig, you always end up digging under them.  They can be lifted with the winch to a parking place on a step or ledge, but there is only so much room for that and I hate loose rocks in the shaft.  If you know they are loose and never forget it, they can be worked and stepped around, gingerly of course, preferably even with trepidation.  No room for a mistake -- remember gravity is always waiting for its chance.

To end on a positive note here, our power system seems to be unfrozen so we will have more light in the dig, which means, above all (besides the soft glowing ambiance the water drips make as they play games with the light), that the work site is a little bit safer.  Remember:  the only requisite for success is nobody gets hurt.  The cave will happen when we get there.

February 20.
More considerations:  Are we at a bottle-neck for sure -- as believed at this point -- and what might that imply for shoring and trail building below? 

The shaft for the first 60 feet down was pretty much dug through loose dirt and rock, and result of sinkholes' collapse up to the surface.  Hard bedrock was encountered at various levels on the south and west sides.  The deepest section of steel culvert trail is cemented to this bedrock.  Below 60 feet (through the collar), the south and west sides (including Chamber A -- a natural void) are solid bedrock with all loose rocks and muds removed.  The west side is the marble seam descending down at about 70 degrees.  The North & East talc walls extend straight down to a boulder pile of chunks of an igneous dike.  At around 80' deep these boulders have pinched the dig into the SW corner with the talc seam a mere 3-4 feet wide on the east side.  The floor is loose rock with a little mud.  If you imagine the bottom as a 4-5 food diameter circle, then for 270 degrees the walls slope away leaving voids and descending air-spaces above the loose rock.  Exactly what one would expect when digging into an almost filled vertical void below.  Our walls seem to be turning into ceilings, but leaving a back wall -- the East wall -- still wet and crumbly and needing to be shored up.  My concern is how to crossbrace this vertical shored wall to a retreating ceiling/wall as the trail descends down the talus slope.  The rubble is looser than ever with more rock and less mud and that tells me we are closer to a larger void.  As the dig progresses down the passageway formed by the marble seam being dissolved back from the dike, I believe we will eventually find a hole under or through the dike that will lead into the main cove.  Until then we must find a way to continually keep the vertical shored East wall stable and safe.  Biggest cave in Oregon -- here we come -- a bucket at a time.

February 10.
Another beautiful blue sky walking on drifts of snow at the Mistress.  Five inches of new powder snow on frozen 2-4 foot drifts.  28 degrees topside and a cobweb spun on a twine across the top of the culvert showed slight air-flow -- seemed to be coming out.  The first order of the day -- after Charlie took pictures -- was to put in the next shoring timber and ascertain that there was safe ceiling-wall.  The timber eventually fit in -- south wall to north side -- staired -- rock pile -- and the measurement taken to brace the northern end over to the west wall.

A check of the voids along the south wall, a little digging and prying that is, showed that what at first appeared to be another crack up into and behind the wall was actually voids around the sides of a 100-pound boulder that was jammed against the ceiling wall.  We are finding places in the shaft to park these boulders.  the only places really being steps (everything else is vertical) and most steps are too narrow.  This also puts the most unwanted object in the shaft:  a loose rock.  I think it is safer to leave them in the shaft, if possible, than to raise them and have to lower them again later to build wall.  Some break up and are taken to the top.  It is the ones that don't break but are too big to fit with until we build concrete wall.  Our parking space is very limited.  Tony filled buckets, Charlie lifted them, I worked in between, escorting and dumping.  I did 500 vertical feet today.  Six rounds, thirty buckets, maybe 1/4 yard.  The next tier of shoring -- east wall -- is cut and ready for placement.  End of dig.

        

Spring 2013:  The New Crew:  David, Tony, Charlie, and Mr T.

February 2013

The last year has been one of waiting: Waiting to be sure that the sink is stable and that none of the construction compromised the geology or the hydrology, waiting to see how the FS felt about our management plan (they seem to approve), waiting to see if the Western Cave Conservancy might want to join the effort (they might), and waiting for me (David) to decide that the political cracks are wide enough for us to just fall through and get the job done. I can’t help but get the feeling that this is expected of me.  I guess, since I said I was doing it.  I still feel there’s some doubt out there that the Mistress dig will get us back into the Cave Next Door.  I think it has already done that and now the work must begin as per the management plan.  Right now, no matter what the future of this project, it is still necessary to fill the sink in around the culvert, and to cap the top of the culvert.  The filing in has been going on for 3-4 years.  The material for back fill is coming from the bottom of the shaft to minimize surface disturbance.  Right now, the most disturbing surface phenomenon is how fast the re-growth in the clear cut is growing, and being a native of Oregon, I’ve seen lots of them growing night and day keeping Oregon green

        But the surface is supposed to change like that and in many other ways for many different reasons, and believe it or not, not all those reasons have to do with man and his manipulations of that which he calls his resources.  For nature, even drastic changes seem to be acceptable and common on the surface.  It adapts fairly quickly.  But-not nearly so common underground.  There, changes are much slower and occur, usually on a much smaller scale.  This would imply to me two things.  One-what goes on underground usually does not have a large impact on what happens on the surface.  It is of course the other way around.  And. Two- we have to be much more careful of what we do underground and how we do it because even our most casual visitation, activities that are invisible and have almost zero impact on the surface, can have very long lasting effects underground.  Our management plan is of course designed to minimize these impacts, and constrain them to the “defined” trail.

        So what has changed below in the dig during the last year?   (You can see the previous blog for other info about this.)  I have made it a priority to check for any changes, which means—“Has anything moved?”  I can find nothing.  Small cracks around fractured slabs of igneous dikes at the opening to Chamber A still hold the same tiny chinks of mud they held when they were uncovered over 3 years ago.  I checked very carefully for any separation that would imply movement in the concrete work with any rock imbedded in the wall.  Many of these were boulders in situ and had never been moved by us, only uncovered.  They were wedged and stable naturally.  I looked for spaces between the concrete wall and the igneous bedrock of the south wall.  There is not the slightest sign of any movement what so ever and this in spite of earth movements that were felt in the Illinois Valley from an earthquake off the California coast by Eureka.  Dripping water has washed everything bright and clean.  The Mistress is looking beautiful.

        The past year did see progress though.  The stonework around the top of the culvert which is part of the locking cap on top, was continued as was the filling in of the sink with its accompanying stonework and drainage.  Meanwhile at the bottom, the last section of concrete work, that firmly cemented, and wedged the bottom-most sink boulder to the south wall was finished sometime last summer.  It was like we constructed the perfect chink rock that held everything in place, although nothing had moved.

        Now geologically, all that construction, right down to the 80’ depth has brought us to what seems to be the neck or pinch point in a sort of hourglass shaped sinkhole.  Below us the rubble is more loose and hollow.  There is much less talc-y mud.  The 12’ wide talc seam of the north and east walls, below the collar 20’ above, have compressed down to not much more than a 1 foot seam at 80’, leaving only 3’ or 4’ from the marble west wall to the igneous south wall at the pinch point.  This space seems to be mostly due to the dissolving of the marble by the underground water that caused the sinkhole to happen, and by the washing out of collapsed talc.

        Late in January of this year, Charlie and I snow-shoed into the Mistress after many months of absence.  We removed almost 4’ of wet packed snow from the roof, (It’s the most water I’ve seen stored in the mountains this time of year for some time.), and crawled in and found it as described above and briefly noted earlier.  Last week another 21 buckets were lifted from the bottom to the top with the help of Tony.  Charlie and I are learning how to integrate another body into the system while maintaining absolute safety.  Tony’s cave and work experience, his common sense, and his enthusiasm for the project are a great encouragement and motivating factor to a couple of old men who may not doubt their sanity but have had to measure it on a different scale.  Now remember that everything is vertical and gravity always has the last word if you even give it a chance to speak.  We are moving 150-200 pounds of rock and mud out of the bottom in white plastic buckets strung out and clipped onto a pigtail cable, being lifted  20’ up to and through the collar into a 30” laddered steel culvert, and then 60 more feet to the surface.  Hopefully all you ever hear is the soft scratching of bucket friction and never a peep from gravity who always seems to take its slightest whisper to cataclysmic proportions.  Every wrap on the cable, its speed even at any particular point in the lifting, every twist in the pigtail cable, and the idiosyncrasies of each bucket clip and bail, and how each bucket hangs from each clip, the threading of the buckets through the safety collar, and each imperfection in the culvert: each and all must be within very small parameters for 5 buckets, less than ½ full, to make it all the way up.  So, it’s not really surprising that while lifting those 21 buckets, only three fell back down the shaft.  Kind of scary though, especially for Tony who was digging at the bottom.  Also not surprising, was that all safety structures and procedures worked perfectly, unlike those moody swinging buckets.  Now we were hampered by difficult communications due to old ears, and something about radios.

        As we continue to move through the second largest void we have encountered-Chamber A being the largest- more air is showing up behind the igneous south wall.  At first I noticed where some rubble had fallen from a 4” crack about 2’ above the dig floor, and exposed a narrow void extending up and behind the south wall.  By the end of the work day, Tony reported that further down the wall you could look up into more void that seemed to be connected to the first.  I think his is what I expected as I believe the main cave void to be behind the south wall, much like Chamber A was behind the west wall.  I think this because of the airflow and water drainage through the joint fractures (1”-2” wide) in the marble at the adit level 30’ above.  We have to dig down and find a way under and through the south wall.

        Now since it is my job to worry about everything that might possible go wrong, I’m going to worry about igneous ceiling.  I continue to believe that the sinkhole exists because faulting has broken some of the igneous dikes and these broken dike pieces have fallen into the void as the marble dissolved allowing the sink to collapse on up to the surface.  I know I have said all this before, but it is important for me to constantly review my theories and compare them with what we actually find.  We do find loose pieces of igneous on the south wall-ceiling.  All these must be removed of course, while they are still at floor level. As we descend we can leave nothing loose above our heads.  They tend to be think plates and they come form some different type of igneous that appeared at 80’ where the hard blue solid wall we had been following down, angled into this softer, browner variety.  Perhaps a meta-basalt as opposed to a plutonic dike.  I don’t know, but I do know I prefer a nice solid marble ceiling/wall to this igneous stuff.  We are going to have to be careful, especially with it being riddled with voids.

        At this point everything is too drippy to do any concrete work so shoring is being done with timbers.

CND Update 2013

Update of the Cave Next Door project---
(discovering the biggest cave in Oregon?)

It's been over a year since this has been updated.  I think it got lost in the caverns of bureaucracy.  So to satisfy the bureaucrats I would like to say at this point--and make it perfectly clear and plain--that this whole project is really just a figment of my imagination.  Sometimes I wander around the forest and find myself in this quaint little village with a hole in the ground.  I look down this hole and make everything up.  What else can you expect from somebody who hangs out with giants?  (But I do avoid dragons.)  

So after a year and a half of wandering the giants' kingdom  and trying to communicate, Charlie and David have found themselves back at the bottom of that imaginary hole.  A thorough inspection of all the concrete work done up to this point has revealed no cracks, failures, or any sign of movement in the boulder jam that was cemented together.  The sinkhole has remained stable through an earthquake and two rainy seasons.  Material is still being moved from the bottom of the 80' shaft to fill around the culvert at the top of the shaft.  All of this, of course, is inside the original sinkhole. 

Last year due to bureaucratic delays and problems with communication, the hole was only dug 2' deeper.  But--a management plan was worked out that seems to be acceptable to everybody.  At least nobody has said, "No."  I want to be positive and upbeat about this whole thing. 

The process of putting an air-lock gate at the top of the culvert is continuing.  Dirt from the bottom is being packed around the culvert filling in the sinkhole.  Ten buckets were moved last week.  In our prime, we could move 50 in a day!  :c)  Because of the amount of water, concrete work won't be possible, and any shoring will have to be done with timbers until the dry season.  There is air space on 3 sides.  The dig appears to be at the hour glass pinch point of the sinkhole.  The rubble seems loose and hollow with good drainage, air on the ceiling/walls, and more rock than clay.  Boy is it ever wet down there! 

I am more convinced than ever that the water that flows into the shaft all goes into the cave.  That the shaft goes right down the throat of the sinkhole.  And into the CAVE!