Had a lot of fun this last weekend! Also, it was a female dominated trip, we represented well with four of us gals and one guy! Except one day when some others came out too, then it was five gals and four guys (so we still win! mwhaahaa!) first time ever that's happened!

Very successful....

We go exploring...


We check out a hole previously found by two in our group but not checked out at all


And viola, it's a cave! Albeit a small one that is probably 60 ft (some peeps along did survey it, said it took 6 shots to do haha.) So welcome to Leaning Rock Pit.


While 3 peeps survey Leaning Rock Pit, the rest of us move on to check out sinkholes, sadly filled with garbage and mostly tires - and a lot of them (hundreds, literally and sadly, gonna try and get a cleanup organized for the landowner with permission) but in one spot we dug through the tires moving out a good 10-15 huge ones and then one dude was nice and did a lot of the harder work wiggling in, tying webbing through the tires jammed inside the hole, so we could work on pulling them out of...


What turned out to be an entrance into the known cave on that property! A through trip will not be possible without some work done - even our tiny little caver couldn't work out a 8" tall crawl that drops right into about a 12 foot deep narrow canyon to chimney down - just no way to work legs/body around that sharp 90 deg angle with no space


In the known cave, we spent hours looking for new passageway both low...and high!


Found probably another 100-200 ft of previously undiscovered passage, and one of them was my find (lovely little tiny belly crawl - I barely fit - for about 7-8 ft and then it opens to a room big enough for 3 people, lots of popcorn in it. I didn't drag my camera back through the crawl so no photo.)

Did some ridgewalking in the 583 acres we had access too, I found this hole, which is cold and blows! Needs a bit of digging though - that rock inside jutting out is really in the way - should be able to dig to the right (it drops behind that about 5 ft or so, it looks like it takes off forward/right below that though just can't get down there)


As an interesting side trip to a show cave (Diamond Caverns) they had this there, the base of a formation cut during the kentucky cave wars early 20th century (when cave owners would hire people to destroy each other's caves by taking formations - they could then profit from the sale and devalue their competitor's cave, also would post misleading signs, try and convince tourists their competitor's caves were closed or caved in, etc) so while of course it's not a good idea to cut down formations...well the base of this one is pretty durn cool and it shows how smaller ones grew, merged together, into one huge one (this one is about 2.5-3 ft diameter!)

Well done Amy and the gang! I guess we've given you the bug for cave digging now...

...and reward yourselves with some of that region's famous fried chicken!

Thanks!

I had the bug before this even, I keep reading the digging threads here with intense interest. I was right - project caving is even MORE fun than just caving to cave!

Now I'm working on finding a group that can teach me surveying...actually the known cave has a lot of parallel passageway so the actual surveyed length may well be around a mile, plus there are still a few areas we can push in it. In this particular county, the longest cave is only just over a mile, so this one has potential to actually be the longest cave. But, everyone down there it sounds like has so many projects already and this weekend, the three peeps who came who know how, were shaking their heads at this one. I mean, it's windy and twisty and so many parallel routes they were saying it will be a huge PITA. I mean, even thinking about it, I can't think of any shots that will be more than 50 feet or so (I'm not exactly sure how surveying works, but I assume it doesn't bend around turns for you ) and so many little side routes and stuff? Yeah...it'll take a long time to get all those numbers haha.

But Missy and Joy know some about surveying and Joy has the stuff for it, so if John, Rebbecca, and I can learn maybe we can all slowly knock it out. I know I wouldn't mind doing the cartography bit at all. Downloading Compass now and I already know how to use and I own Illustrator - I can't see that part being hard other than the time to imput all the data to Compass.