Going Deeper

August 14, 2011

Eight digs later and somewhere around 200 buckets deeper.  I cross-braced the wall boulder, found another one under it with a long, peaked top sitting perpendicular under the big one, and that one sat nicely on a good block that was sitting on bedrock that appears to be an igneous wall, and so on for another two rocks.  There was a mud pocket in the SE corner behind the large wall boulder, that a basketball sized boulder rolled out of starting a mud slide and sending me scurrying back up the shaft today.  It turned out well.  I was able to use the rock to wedge brace a gap in the rock pile between the large wall boulder and the south wall.  I added another step by dropping a peaked rock with a flat bottom up, into the air hole beneath the steps along the descending marble west wall.

Boulder by boulder I descend, never knowing when I dig the mud away if I will really find the rock pile still sitting on something stable.  Now I seem to be headed down into a mud pit.  Found air space in the SW corner but no air-flow.  Did a temperature gradient from top to bottom?  65 degrees  above the shaft under the roof.  41 degrees at the 30 foot level and 40 degrees below the collar.  This winter the same readings were: 35 degrees above the shaft below the roof, 38 degrees at the 30’ level, and 39 degrees below the collar.  I believe these temperatures indicate air going into the shaft in the winter and coming out now in the summer.  There was always air-flow through the dissolution cracks in the marble of the adit and it also seems to be weeping through ceiling spaces below the collar.  I have been filled with doubts this week that I have somehow missed the way in.  The adit air-flow is almost 30’ above me!  Yet the mud and rock I’m digging in is still soft and hollow and filling in a void that existed before the collapse of the sinkhole covered the boulder pile I’m digging down alongside.  Nothing to do but to dig on.  No direction to go but down.

        Too much work,

        Not enough rest;

        Too much chocolate,

        Not enough sex;

        Way too much of not knowing

        What comes next.