The cave dig went really well. I made a fancy register out of a blank journal I found at R Books and put it in a tupperware container. I put a copy of the 1969 Monitor article in it so that other visitors to the cave can get some historical perspective.

We opened up some serious blow holes in the floor of the lower chamber that were very encouraging. I hope this project becomes a regular occurance. Attendance has been good, with 9 people for the first dig and 8 this time.

This guy Philo, who I guess is sort of a rogue independant caver in the area, heard about the dig on the grotto mailing list and showed up with his son and some friends. I guess he was expecting something a little more extreme. They showed up in full vertical gear and with a 5' long pick axe. Of course, you can see the entire cave in about 2 minutes without any vertical gear and there is nowhere to swing that huge pick at all. It was humorous, anyway.

Yesterday I wanted to get out and stretch my sore muscles from the dig, so Nina and I went for a walk in Pueblo Canyon here in town. I scoped it out as a possible venue for an orienteering race and decided to start making a map there.

The terrain is great for orienteering, with lots of small cliffs, good open running forest, foot bridges over impassible canyon, etc. Plenty of space for a long advanced course too. I downloaded the new version of OCAD and was pleased to find that they have increased the max object count for the demo version from 500 to 1000, making a real orienteering map much more feasible.

I got some satellite imagery of the canyon and the topo map online and started the base map. Hand-tracing contours really sucks. Especially when there are a ton of them and they are really close together (i.e. when there are canyons present). But I got a good base map done and now I get to start the fun part - the field work.

Chimley Steve and Peter have expressed interest in helping make the maps, so I'm going to try to do an hour or two after work here and there with them until we finish the map. If we can get a few maps made by this summer, I can do an actual orienteering series like the one I participated in last summer in Boston. I suspect that the interest level here should be plenty high. I can't believe that no one is doing this already!