On friday afternoon I left work, picked up James at his place, and headed down to McKittrick Hill for what was probably my last weekend off until I get my thesis submitted. Aaron had receieved permission to lead a survey expedition into Dry Cave (with co-lead Stan) and he invited me to join him.

Backstory: Dry Cave was the first gated cave on New Mexico BLM land. It was gated because it contained a lot of Paleo-era animal bones including sabretooth tigers, camels, and assorted other oddities. The bulk of the bones were removed for study and a few small scientific projects were undertaken in the cave, but they eventually stagnated and the cave was left closed due to assumed scientific value.

The group that was assigned the task of mapping the cave did what can only be described as a half-ass job, mapping one large passage to the far end of the cave, and a few side leads, but leaving numerous large going passages unchecked. The map they generated is truly an embarassment and all of their survey data was lost. Still, the measured length of the survey places it as the fourth-longest cave in New Mexico behind Lechuguilla, Carlsbad Cavern, and Fort Stanton.

Recently, the cave specialist for the local area BLM office decided [or was convinced, I'm not sure] that a better map was required and that significant cave was probably still unexplored. Only with a reasonably complete map could the magnitude of the scientific value of Dry Cave be understood. Anyway, he assigned Stan and Aaron to head up a multi-year project to survey and sketch the cave for the BLM. The three of them did one introductory trip to familiarize Stan and Aaron with the cave, and there have been a couple small survey trips since then. Aside from these trips, there have been people in Dry Cave maybe twice in the last three decades.

So, Aaron announces at the last grotto meeting that he is going to do a survey trip this past weekend and I jump on the opportunity to see a very long closed cave that has a high potential for virgin passage. James and I arrived at the camp site (which is a pleasant ~100m from the cave entrance) at 11:00pm on Friday night and met Aaron and Phyllis.

I set up my tent and had a very pleasant night's rest. I was able to sleep in (for the first time in awhile) and didn't wake up until 7:30. We were in the cave by 8:30 for what would be a 12-hour trip.

Stan and Aaron's survey strategy was to put the main survey down the main passage that had been surveyed before, then start at the entrance and shoot side surveys down each lead. Since this was among the first of the trips, we were doing leads that were literally within sight of the entrance. For the first portion of the day we choose a major lead near the entrance and surveyed the entire thing. It was a low boneyard maze that took a lot of time to work our way through, but we manged to close it up with the exception of two very tight bellycrawls that were beyond our effort threshold for this survey. The map that Aaron sketched looked great. It was nice to get an area of the cave checked off - we reduced a major lead on the main line to two uninspiring grode holes significantly off the main line. Comparing our new sketch map to the old cave map showed that everything we did was off the map.

Next we went over to the Balcony Room and Boulder Room, the two big rooms near the entrance. Aaron had negotiated permission to do the Boulder Room survey in return for Stan getting to do the Balcony Room (where a lot of the big bones were originally found). The Boulder Room was considerably decorated, whereas the rest of the cave, for the most part, had not been. I estimate that the main room was 30' tall, 20' wide, and about 100' long. Not huge by Guadalupe Mountains standards, but for a largely boneyard cave it is impressive.

We started surveying the main part of the room and got sidetracked by a dark hole up high which we felt probably wouldn't go, but decided to send a survey shot up there just in case. It ended up going strongly and we spend the rest of the day in this new area (which may or may not have been on the old map; it was drawn so badly that we couldn't tell). It was a heavily decorated series of small rooms along a joint in the limestone. There were some amazing sawtooth draperies and a lot of corrosion. Everything was coated in a brittle corrosion crust and Aaron ended up calling it Uncle Krusty's Playground or something like that. The passage runs above an easier-to-reach lower passage and the two are connected by a series of cracks and pits, two of which were climbable by James.

By the time we finished Uncle Krusty's, we looked at the time and were surprised to find that it was 7:30pm, so we packed up and headed back out. It felt good to have closed-out two big leads, leaving nothing major to investigate.

When we got outside, it was raining. It looked like it had probably been raining all day. My tent was keeping rain out of the inside, but the ground cloth was pooling up pretty badly. We ate a quick dinner in the rain (we were starving) and hit the sack before 10.

This was the most miserable night I've spent in a tent in a long time. The rain was strong enough that the sound of it was keeping me up. At about midnight, the wind picked up and became very strong. The tent pad I was on had bedrock down a few inches so I couldn't drive my stakes in well and the wind kept lifting them out and collapsing part of my tent. I had to get out in the middle of the night, in the rain, and readjust my tent. Anyway, the end result is that I got about 2 hours of sleep and was exhausted on Sunday morning.

When I got up at 7:30, the wind was still present and had dried out most of the exposed surfaces, though there was still a lake between my tent and ground tarp. It took awhile to pack up camp and get everything dried off.

We decided that rather than return to the Boulder Room and continue that survey we would grab one of the virgin leads right at the entrance and work on it. For this survey, I was on lead tape doing backsights, which meant that I was the first person going into the new areas. This was the first time that I've gotten to be the first person into virgin passage in a major cave! The area we were surveying basically bifurcated into two and we chose the less-bellycrawling way. This was divided up into an upper and lower area and we did the entire lower passage to its end. It apparently ends at a surface sink. The elevation of the highest point we got to was above the elevation of the main cave entrance and was very close to a small sinkhole in the surface. It was plugged in with chunks of limestone and dirt, and showed signs of water flow coming in the sinkhole and down the passage we surveyed. We didn't finish the entire area but got the main passage complete and survey points set up for the remaining two major leads.

We left the cave around lunchtime and headed home. I collected a benchmark nearby. It was a great trip, but I was really really tired. On the way home we had to contend with a blizzard around Vaugn. Ironic that on a trip to "Dry Cave" (which, by the way, contained several small pools and several areas of active wet formations), we got rained on bigtime and then had snow.