found myself reading an old page from this journal (June, 2001) and wishing i hadn't gotten too busy to keep updating it. The last year of my life has gone unrecorded and that's a shame; it's been extraordinary.

I'm not going to attempt to do a recap here; there is too much. But I'm going to make another shot at getting this running on a regular basis.

Since I moved to New Mexico I've become very active in caving. I've been caving at least once a month since I got here, and I've recently been elected as an officer in the Pajarito Grotto. Lots of caving pictures here.

Recently I started a cave dig project for the grotto at the Pajarito Canyon lava tube that Mike and I dug out in 2001 (see journal link, above). This is the first caving project for which I am the lead.

Our first dig day was last Saturday. Nine people showed up and we removed over 50 buckets of rubble over the course of five hours. The wind was incredibly strong and cold. Comments were made likening the airflow on this cave to that of Lechuguillia. Someone else has been digging in the cave since Mike and I were here in 2001; there was some wooden shoring evident and the upper passage had been elongated by a couple meters.

John, being the high-tech caver that he is, brought in a wind meter and measured the airflow at the entrance at 12mph. The entrance area is approximately 16 sq. ft, which gives an air flux of 300 cubic feet per second. That's 1,000,000 cubic feet per hour. This is indicative of a huge volume. He also brought his camera-on-a-stick and stuffed it into some cracks near the lower dig face to see what lays ahead. The video revealaed a 1-cubic-meter sized void just ahead, so that's something to look forward to.

We have another dig planned for tomorrow afternoon to continue the job.

In the past week, John and I have done some further research. A friend of John's indicated that he remembered reading about the lava tube in an issue of the Los Alamos Monitor [local newspaper] back in the summer of 1969. I went to the library and delved through some microfilm and found an article about a guy called Ernest Hodson who lived in White Rock and first located and excavatd the cave. He apparently did an airflow study on the cave and determined the internal volume to be appeoximately 255 million cubic meters (!!!). That's approximately a volume one square mile in footprint and 300' high. Wow. This is very encouraging.