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.