May 2011 Log

May 2011

     With the last piece of culvert installed at the top it is now possible to install wiring for lights below and above the collar.  But, I can’t help digging. So one day in April, with the help of longer days and easier hiking (you can walk on the snow without snowshoes), Charlie and I got in a forty bucket day!!  I told Charlie that was a record that might not ever be broken.  The result was a lot of backfill at the top, of course—there were slumps to fill in outside the shaft, and the digging at the bottom proceeded faster than the shoring going up.  This is the east wall.  Slump muds oozing between he cracks.  I think if I wasn’t careful this side could slump all the way to the top. 

     In fact, while installing the last piece of shoring and congratulating myself on digging a shaft right down an active sinkhole, mud started flowing out of the wall and slumping began immediately.  I could hear rocks and cobbles rattling behind the walls and falling down.  I went up—FAST,  Climbed up into the culvert, pausing to listen before I shot to the surface.  The noise of water dripping and running was all I could hear.  I climbed back down to the bottom to check on damage.  I tried to plug the hole (which was up against the ceiling), and that had the effect of starting the slumping again.  So I climbed back up into the culvert again, and waited for the action to cease, if it was going to cease.  After a short while, things quieted down while I was imagining everything I’d dug during the winter filling back up with med and clay from behind the walls.  Thankfully, that didn’t happen.  Actually what did happen was probably good.  The rocks I heard were rocks that I had stacked in a cairn alongside the east wall, and as the mud flowed out the bottom, the rocks settled down and eventually plugged the hole the mud was coming out of.  

     Oh well, there’s more to do than dig.  We drug in some 2” electrical conduit, packed in fittings and sweeps, and started running the electrical wires.  These will reduce the extension cords.  There will be a line for 12 volt, 110 volt, a culvert light, and 2 phone lines for a video feed to the surface.  The phone lines will run through separate conduit.  We have had 2 digs working on the wiring where we only got five buckets out.

     The boulders are getting bigger and every one has air under it.  Yesterday I hammered a big one up and started barring it out of the mud under the east wall.  It split longitudinally, a clean break right through the center, leaving two beautiful flat pancake rocks.  They will be useful for something. Walls? Steps?  I am overwhelmed.