18th-20th October 2024 – Project Yeso

Carrin, Jesse, and Nikki arrived first at the field house, and set about preparing dinner (Japchae). The rest of the team arrived soon after, and we ate and discussed plans for the next day.

We had all seen big storms on the way down, and rain was forecast for Saturday, which was not ideal.

Saturday 19th October

For this trip we decided to split into two teams. The first team was tasked with working on survey in Tummy Troubles, while the second team would spend the day ridgewalking.

After a brief safety meeting, both teams headed out into the field.

Tummy Troubles survey

Carrin, Alex Seaton, Erin Vair-Grilley, Nikki Woodward

We were somewhat concerned about the bad weather forecast later in the day, but conditions in the morning were good so we decided to venture into the cave and survey for a couple of hours.

The team caved in to the junction between A and B-survey, and stopped for a moment for a quick refresher on using Topodroid. Topodroid has received several major updates since we last used it, so Alex updated the team on the new features.

Particularly helpful is the ability to colour splay shots. We’d previously run into problems keeping track of different types of splays (e.g. plan view vs. profile view), so this is a welcome addition.

After a bit of training, we split into two groups: Alex & Erin, and Carrin & Nikki. Alex and Erin worked on A-survey, which we expected to be tight and grim, while Carrin and Nikki were tasked with continuing B-survey, which we expected to be relatively spacious. Spoiler alert: both sides ended up being grim!

We agreed to meet back at the junction at 12:30pm, and send someone up to the surface to check the weather.

After the weather check, we ultimately decided to continue working in the cave until 4:45pm. The weather wasn’t looking great, but we had seen quite a bit of evidence in the cave that made us confident that it rarely floods (or even takes water).

Below are the accounts from the two sub-teams for the entire day.

A-survey (Alex & Erin)

Nikki and Andy had previously worked on this section of passage, and reported that it was tight. This unfortunately turned out to be accurate. The cave here has a limestone floor, which seems to be preventing the cave from cutting deeper. This means that first, the passage dimensions are small, and second, that the floor is hard and painful to crawl on.

We made our way to the survey front, and spent a little while figuring out where the last station was (station A26). Fortunately, Nikki and Andy had finished in a relatively spacious room. Such luxury!

Erin was interested in learning to sketch with Topodroid, so we spent some time getting her up to speed. She was able to sketch the the chamber we were in by the time we had to leave for the weather check.

After the weather check (and having done the crawl to the survey front another two times), we continued on. Erin did a great job learning to run Topodroid and work with its various idiosyncrasies.

From where we had started surveying, the passage continues with fairly tight dimensions for 50ft before reaching a spacious chamber (A29). From there, it goes through a constriction before opening up into a walking-height passage (A32). We found a bat roosting a little way into this.

We continued surveying until around 3pm. At that point, we decided to scout out the cave further ahead before heading back to meet the others.

Sadly, the passage narrows to a crawl again after a little while. Where this happens, there are several shafts in the ceiling leading upwards. They are easy to climb, and we were able to climb around 20ft into a dome-shaped room.

After climbing back down, we continued along the main stream passage. This dropped a little, and continued as a crawl to a section of passage containing a large amount of organic debris. This might suggest that the passage sumps at this location in flood, though we found everything to be bone dry, so there has been no water flow for a very long time. We found some large (1ft diameter) mats of mould, so a future survey team should bring masks.

At this point it was about time to turn back, so we headed up to the junction to meet the others. They had already left by that point, but we found their note and continued on to the surface.

On reaching the entrance, we were surprised to see that it had just rained. There were puddles and it had clearly been a decent downpour. Despite this, we had seen no water whatsoever in the cave. We still wouldn’t

B-survey (Carrin & Nikki)

Until the 12:30 meet-up at the junction for the weather check, Nikki set stations and Carrin ran TopoDroid. To get more practice with the software, we decided to do a sketch instead of a line plot alone. Rather than have one person run all the devices, Nikki took the Disto and took shots, which let Carrin focus on the sketch. We liked the distribution of work between the two people better this way.

In the afternoon, we switched roles and Nikki took over the sketch. After we surveyed through a small section with standing room, the passage began to shrink, and we wondered if this was actually the main passage after all, as it was starting to look pretty small. After pushing into a body-sized tube and sucking down a lot of dust, Nikki had enough; I pushed a little ways further only to see the dimensions continue to shrink and the amount of in-fill on the floor grow.

We backed out, took a moment to reset, and tried a side passage off the standing room. It was less dusty but turned out to be just as tight as the previous passage. Not feeling it, we regrouped in the standing room and wondered if a line plot would have been the wiser course for such small passage.

We exited a bit early, leaving the other team a note to let them know we were out. A great rainstorm moved over while we were changing out, and we got to watch the water pool all over the desert floor. (South of us in the state, this weather led to flash floods in Roswell.) Between the two teams, we confirmed that Tummy Troubles took no water with active rainstorms in the area.

Including the new survey, Tummy Troubles is now at 790ft of mapped cave, and almost 40ft deep. We’re excited to see where it goes from there!

Ridgewalking

Minori Yoshida, Jesse Adamczyk, Eoghan, Ryan Marshall

This was the first trip of the ‘24-’25 season and the project decided to work on new areas to maintain enthusiasm and momentum. The sky all around us was full of thick dark rain clouds and it was breezy/windy all day. Luckily it was unseasonably warm and did not have a cold winter bite.

The team drove out to an area further South of where we worked last year. We used County Rd B010 to access a parcel of BLM land east of Transwestern Rd and south of the pump station/airstrip. The first POI we checked out was a large drainage and looked like it had lots of potential to have significant passage. The entrance was choked with tumbleweed which helped keep out debris and animals. After carefully checking for snakes, we removed enough tumbleweed from the entrance and Ryan and Eoghan went in to investigate. The entrance is a narrow vertical crack in the gypsum blocks. The passage went in about 20 ft and had a large boulder precariously lodged above the stream passage. The passage appeared to continue but it was too risky to continue without securing the boulder as people could be trapped behind it. Meanwhile, Jesse explored the area around the entrance and found some karst features nearby that may connect hydrologically to the cave. Further exploration of the cave would involve securing or removing the boulder and digging through the breakdown.

We stopped and checked out an interesting outcropping as we drove to our next section. It turned out to just be interesting looking erosion but did not have any karst features to check out.

After going through a cattle gate and turning south onto a different dirt two-track, we found our next point right next to the road. On the huge pile of tumbleweed in the entrance, we saw a Black-Necked Gartersnake (Thamnophis cyrtopsis). Minori put on her cave suit and went in to explore. She found another Black-Necked Gartersnake inside about 5 ft from the entrance. It buried itself in a tumbleweed lodged in the floor so she maneuvered over it to continue. The passage is a stream passage in gypsum about stoop-walking height and barely shoulder width. It zigzagged for about 80-100 ft until the passage narrowed to 1’ by 1’ and got too tight to go further.

The next several POIs were shallow sinks higher up on hillsides and did not look to have much potential. We listed them as “digs” but they are probably not worth the effort as they don’t drain any water. They did, however, have plenty of snake sheds and live snakes in them. We saw mostly rattlesnakes, one Coachwhip snake, and one tiny Horny Toad.

The last significant cave we found was located on the top of a hill. We picked out the tumbleweed and let the wind carry them away. The small entrance opened into a large steeply sloping breakdown room. It was large enough for all of us to take shelter in it, out of the wind. Ryan found an opening at the bottom of the breakdown room, which led into another breakdown room. Minori followed behind him. This room had a skeleton of a small unidentified animal. A thin pancake squeeze at the end of this room opened into the biggest room. About 10-15 ft tall, 40 ft long, and 20 ft wide. There was a single bat sleeping and a carcass of a medium sized bird, its calamus of the feathers still intact. This is the moment Ryan realized that this room was full of ticks. Ticks of all sizes. He immediately turned around and quickly exited the cave with Minori closely behind. By the time she got to the surface, Ryan was already stripped down to his underwear, shivering in the cold wind, picking ticks off his clothes while Jesse and Eoghan picked ticks off his body. Minori’s cave suit had lots of ticks on the outside but she opted to leave the suit on untill we got back to the vehicle.

Despite being thoroughly disgusted with the ticks, we decided to check out a few more POIs since we were close to completing the area. The rest of the POIs in the area were small shallow sinks and/or had a snake in them so we couldn’t investigate. One of the POIs had a small leg-trap snare just inside the entrance. We successfully visited all the POIs in this area and headed back to the vehicle. We arrived just as a brief but violent rainstorm hit us. We didn’t have time to drive to a different section to do more ridgewalking, so we went back to the field house to clean up and prepare dinner.

Sunday 20th October

Zia Christine inventory & survey

Eoghan, Carrin, Alex Seaton

We’ve been working in Zia Christine for over a year now, and still have plenty to do. For this trip, we decided to split into two teams. Eoghan and Alex would continue working on the survey of the northern section (C-survey), while Carrin did graffiti inventory of the southern side of the cave (D-survey).

Survey (Alex & Eoghan)

We caved in to the area we had been working on in May, which was along the route to the crystal room (C??). Before getting stuck in, Alex gave Eoghan a quick update on the new features in Topodroid. We then got to work, with Eoghan continuing the sketch and Alex setting stations.

As always, surveying in Zia Christine is tricky and time consuming. Given that the cave is essentially a bunch of voids around the edge of a breakdown pile, it is complex and three-dimensional. To make matters worse, this particular section is extremely delicate, so we spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to best place our stations to minimize impact on the cave.

Despite these challenges, we were able to make good progress, and by the end of the session had finished the survey through to the final upper crystal room. There are still a couple of areas that need to be surveyed in the C-survey section, but it is getting close to completion.

Graffiti Inventory (Carrin)

To get a sense of the extent of graffiti in Zia Christine and help Knutt determine whether a removal effort is necessary and/or feasible, we began inventorying the tags in this cave last spring. At that time, the cave survey was just getting underway, so we weren’t yet able to assign a survey station to each tag. As of this trip, the survey had progressed quite a bit, so Carrin spent some time augmenting the descriptions of the tags in what is now the C-survey with station numbers. She also began documenting tags in the D-survey, until she was turned back at station D8 by a noisy, possibly wounded rat or bat that screeched unhappily when she tried to continue down passage. The graffiti is going strong along the C and D surveys, and likely elsewhere in the cave, so this documentation is to be continued on future trips.

Ridgewalking

Jesse Adamczyk, Ryan Marshall, Erin Vair-Grilley, Minori Yoshida

We set off to investigate POIs near a known cave, Sparks Zalea. We followed a two-track along a fence line to our first point. We hopped the fence and found a small sink with small shrubs and grass growing inside. Minori went down into it to take a closer look but jumped out as soon as others found a snake curled up in one of the bushes. The sink did not appear to have any passages or take on much water.

Our next point was close by, and could be seen from the vehicle. It obviously drained a lot of water and the entrance looked promising. Minori did not want to put on her tick covered cave-suit so the others made their way in as she waited on the surface. A tiger salamander could be seen from the entrance and a few more were found within. There are several tight passages in different directions. Jesse pushed a particularly small passage, moved some rocks and found a hole in the floor that appears to break into a larger stream passage. However, a dislodged rock pinned him in this tight section for several minutes before he was able to free himself. We decided to name this cave “Wedgie” Cave.

There were more POIs to check out north from there. Most were small sinks and collapses that had no hope of having cave passage. But one large sink at the end of a drainage showed promise. Jesse, Erin, and Ryan worked their way through the breakdown entrance. They used some webbing to make a handline for a steep section. They were able to find the main stream passage and explored for about 30 minutes. The area they got to was so tight they had to crawl sideways for a hundred feet or so. This cave will need to be surveyed and explored further in the future, and is now named “Sidewinder” Cave.

As we headed back to the vehicles to meet everyone at the end of the day, some of us started receiving emergency weather notifications alerting us that Roswell was flooded and highway 285 is closed. Ryan, who normally takes this route to get home, decided to take a detour through Ft Sumner to avoid the flooding. We were unable to get much information about what was going on until we had better cell signal, but later found out that Roswell suffered catastrophic flooding that weekend. Roswell received a record breaking 5.78 inches on Saturday night, which caused some areas to be under 6 ft of water. Two people were killed, and emergency responders made close to 300 rescues. We were fortunate that this weather event did not affect our area.

Summary

Tummy Troubles surveyed to 790ft in total, with 238ft of new passage
Crystal room surveyed in Zia Christine
32 points of interest investigated by ridgewalking team
Two promising new caves discovered: Sidewinder and Wedgie cave.
Two bats seen (one in Tummy Troubles, one in tick-infested cave)
Eoghan, Erin, Nikki, and Carrin trained on sketching with Topodroid