September 4, 2011.

A good dig yesterday -- Saturday.  I got there early and got started with the last prep work.  Charlie was picking up free food in Grants Pass for food give-aways and churches in the Valley.  We got started with the actual mixing, moving, and construction after 5pm and worked until after 10pm.  There was twice as much wall to build and the wall on the north needed two steps on it.  

Thinking about it now, after they are built, I wonder why I didn't make them wider, so I would still have room to work back on the East Wall.  I'm having a hard time visualizing what I'm doing now (building a concrete wall) -- or I should say, visualizing the effect that the work I'm doing now is going to have when I get down to the depth of that compromising boulder.  You know, that one that hangs over you like a sinister plotting Lord, trying to figure out when it would be most to its advantage to crush you like a bug.  Yes, that one.  The one I can't dig under until it is either broken up and hauled out of the hole in pieces or securely cemented into a permanent trail wall.

The other possibility I need to keep in mind is the chance that the way into the cave is over towards the East, and that I am currently digging down alongside the cave and will come in at the floor level.  Think about the air coming out of the dissolved joint fractures in the marble in the side tunnel (the adit) almost twenty feet above my current position -- twenty feet above the deepest I've dug.  Or Chamber A that had been ten feet from the shaft for years and wasn't found until we dug down and found a break in its intrusive walls and looked upwards into it.

To the east is where I've never found bedrock.  Chamber A was found behind the bedrock (igneous) wall of the SW corner.  The South wall being igneous plutonic I believe and the North some kind of talc and the West an igneous basalt or very altered and mixed chert.  I have felt bedrock by probing to the East from 60 feet down, but what is a wall at 60 feet might be a ceiling at 70 feet.  Once I'm cemented out, though, it would be hard to go back and look.  My tendency is to follow the mud down, and the water that comes in from the NE corner.