Nice there lambchops. did you find any bats in there? You gotta watch out for the white fungus they carry.
Anywho ... I drove down to the Crowsnest Pass this weekend and found a cave.
The trail in was easy enough that a stocker could do it. As a matter of fact there were 3 chevs, a range rover, a frontier and a T-100 parked at the end.
The first pic is taken at the trail head. My destination, the cave, is just to left of the saddle in the middle if the pic. The trail went for 5 miles or so up the valley, crossing a mild creek about 8 times.
At the end of the trail I had to get out and hoof it. I had expected this but fawk, it was brutal. It was about two miles almost str. It was probably 35 to 40degrees steep. The second pic is from about half way up. The 45 is parked at the end if the cut line.
The third pic is at a plateau at tree line. The cave I was headed to is the vertical slit in the middle of the pic just above the scree pile. There where a dozen or so cavers camped here.
did some when I was a kid (and a fool). In retrospect pondering a bit the wisdom of having gone for the very long very steep downhill muddy slippery barely wider than your shoulders and barely higher than your head is deep gotta crawl the whole way head first and disturbingly narrowing kind of passages with WW2 vintage flashlights...
So, I putzed around at the plateau while I waited for my heart to get back to normal.
Pic one is a closer look at the cave opening. It's another several hundred feet of vertical and then scooch along a ledge on the clift band.
The second pic is from the ledge near the opening. You can see a light green patch way up at the beginning of the valley where the first pic in this thread was taken.
And pic three is the welcoming committee. They were just hanging out at the entrance.
Pic one, success, I have arrived. I was about 20 feet into the cave at this point. It was still very light, but the tempreture had already dropped at least 20 degrees F.
Pic 2 is looking into cave about 50 feet from the opening. I already needed my headlamp.
Pic three is about 100 feet in. It was the first room and that rope was hanging from a hole in the ceiling. I later found out it goes up about 50 feet to couple of short dead ends.
It's pitch dark now. I turned my light off and there is zero sence of sight. I wave my hand in front of my face and there is absolutely no awareness of it at all.
About 200 feet into cave the walls and floor are covered by a thin layer of ice (you can see them on these pics). The temp is probably a few degrees above freezing. I heard once that the ambient temp of the ground in this part of the world is about 40F. It must be a bit colder or else the ice could not exist.
There were places where the walls were covered in frost on top of the ice.
There is a constant draft in this cave becuase there are more than one opening to the outside. I didn''t get to the other opening but I will next time. Apparently it opens out half way up the side of a 1000 foot cliff.
I went into the cave 3 or 400 feet when I got to a small room with two very small tunnels leaving the room at floor level. They were both small enough that I would have needed to push my pack in front of me while I shimmied through them. To this point the smallest tunnel required hands and knees (see pic with pack for reference).
I didn't know which tunnel to take and I only had one light and no helmet, so I turned around and made my way back out.
