TOOK A WEEK OFF from digging while the youngest grandchild, Ruby, was down with her mom. It was great to see Sarah and read her some poems. Ruby wasn't too sure of me unless I had food; then there was no doubt her grandpa was all right. Sarah helped us with putting videos on the internet and wants to help with the blog-site.
I need to do a little more choreography and get some more interesting video. It is hard to make one dig look different from the other. I can change light and change camera position.
Charlie and I had one more dig. Now I know why I didn't mind too much not to dig for a week. More problems in the SE corner, behind the large wall rock. I thought I had filled the gap between the south end of the big wall rock and the South Wall by wedging that basketball-sized rock in there, but when I removed the mud from the south wall the rock I wedged there moved. Now this was a chair-sized rock and looked like it was holding back a lot of mud and rubble and I was stacking a rock wall on top of it to hold up backfill. I had my 25 buckets sent up the shaft and had just my four extra to fill. So I got down in the hole below the rock pile for four more buckets and gouged out a depression for it to fall into. I then removed all tools from the hole and, climbing as far up as I could, I kind of started poking blind with a seven-foot piece of rebar to see what wanted to fall down into the hole from behind the rocked and shored East Wall.
It makes a person a little nervous being 75 feet deep and trying to start a slide at the bottom... The rule is, though, that I don't leave anything loose about me as I dig down. All muds must be removed to determine the foundation of any rock. Any wall in question must be shored and cross-braced or a cement and steel support wall be built under and in front with 100% back-fill.
So sure enough, little by little by little, the boulder rolled out of the SE corner and plopped down into the hole, even rolling over and giving a tap to the bottom foundational rock that sent a shudder up the rocks I was standing on. I could hear more mud and rock plopping down and peered around the corner to see my stacked wall hanging in mid-air. I kept poking blind because I didn't want to get down in there. If there was going to be a disastrous slide I would definitely be better off above it... I heard a few more rocks fall but nothing that I hadn't stacked. So I left the dig to do whatever it was going to do.
Now, two days later, I will go down and see what there is to see. I need to get that boulder out of there. Will it break up with the sledge? I would have to be below the slide, swinging the hammer. Is it too big to lift? And even if I can lift it, where do I put it? it's too big to go up the shaft, much less through the collar. I have to find some way to building a reinforced cement wall to keep the rock-pile stable and get the wall built before any major movement occurs.
~SIX HOURS LATER~
That's not going to work. The whole rock pile below the shoring is unstable. All visible rocks and boulders are loose. The big wall rock is just hanging there, still cross-braced but with nothing underneath. This is a complication of the worst sort.
~CONTINUED~
I had gone down there and examined the boulder and rocks that had slid down, having given it a couple of days to do whatever it was going to do. It didn't look too bad; nothing much came down, more than I had stacked up as backfill. I could even possibly roll the largest boulder into a hole on the west side if I could break a point off and make it smaller.
So I kneel down under that 1/2-ton wall rock like an offering to the stone god and roll away and pick up all loose rocks out of the mud, manage to get the 300-pounder iron-barred around so I can get some kind of swing with the sledge.
That's me: the hammer, the bar, and some boulders stuffed into a 5'x4'x4' cranny in the SW corner at the bottom of an undercut boulder pile, whaling away on the biggest rock, trying to make it small enough so I can wrestle it around and park it on the west side up the shaft, and then something above me moved.
Now this digging at the bottom of an active sinkhole is always an adrenaline charged work. If I don't feel it, I know I'm being way too casual. In fact, I'll charge myself up any way I can, even raise my debt limit, to keep myself from being casual about even one step! So, with zero thought process my hand was planted on what had moved (which was the 400-pound rods under the 1000-pound wall rock) and hardly before it stopped moving I had catapulted myself 5 feet up the shaft and was ready to climb the next seventy. All was loose below me. Charlie was parked above the collar, keeping an eye on things that he could see.
All was still, except my heart and any other body part that could vibrate from the adrenaline rush. I sat, stood, or squatted on the step above, perched on a bedrock ledge. Hmm. Wow! Gosh! What now? Yep -- the big one's hanging. Oh my! I am so little and they are so big, but here we all are. It was obvious by the second or third thought through my head that I was not going back down into the hole to dig until the wall rock was 100% stablized [Editor's Note: VERY GOOD IDEA.]
How to do it? fill the space around it with concrete and rock -- maybe. Drill, and blast, and fire? Can I get down in there to brace to the South wall? If it slipped would I be safe in that cranny? Could I get there fast enough? What would happen if I lassoed the nose of that rock with a sling and rolled it back with a hard winch? What do I pull from? How can there be such a large rockpile at the bottom of a 4'x4' hole and where am I going to put them so they won't just keep fallowing me down as I dig? ...Like monstrous gravitationally-enslaved beings dogging my elbows... All these questions need answers that only I can find. I pulled myself back up the culvert to the surface, following Charlie to talk and think it over and find the next thing to do.
Eventually, it becomes obvious that, since the shored wall above the large wall rock was mostly just a rock cairn, I could build another wall behind it that would be two to three feet further East. I would start back up at the ledge level, 10 feet below the collar, and tier by tier with concrete, steel, and stone build the wall down until I was entirely behind the whole rock pile and hopefully have a place big enough to get the boulders out of the way for good. Of course I don't know what other rock I may find that is equally precarious, but the hole is as dry as it ever gets right now and the wall will have to be built sooner or later. I was hoping to build it from the bottom up, but that isn't going to happen.
So the next dig found Charlie and David packing in more concrete mix. Twenty bags on the pallet, ready to mix.
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