Expedition Caving in Mexico
Monday, 31. December 2007, 02:54:05
For two years, fellow Socorro-ites and friends Tanja and James had been telling stories about their cave discovery and exploration trips in the mountains of Nuevo Leon, Mexico. This most recent discovery began when their caving team, incuding Yvonne, Mark, and Adam, were led by some sheep herding girls to a furiously blowing hole as big round as a grapefruit. They were excited by the blowing wind, which normally signals large volumes of underground spaces, and they excavated it to a 2' by 2' opening. Their team descended a few drops and ran out of rope, eagerly peering down the continuing shaft. The following year they returned and droped the cave to approx. 420m (1,345') depth and again ran out of rope.Then, last Fall I was fortunate to be invited along! The fortune being, it turns out, to help find the bottom of a giant mud pit. But, really, there can be beauty in mud. Read on...
This year, carrying in over 600m of rope (for rigging safety lines and rappels and replacing old rope), we added an additional 40m of depth to a total of 459.1m (1,506'). From the inauscpicious, grapefruit-sized original entrance hole, the cave, called "Soplo del Toro" (Bull's Breath, or "Soplo" for short) is now the 3rd deepest in the Purificacion area (covering a large karst mountainous area where the states of Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and San Luis Potosi converge), and only 6m away from being the 2nd deepest. A typical "pushing" trip into the cave took only 2 hrs of descent time; 8-9 hrs of exploration, hammering, drilling, rigging, and surveying; and 7 hrs of climbing back to the surface. The photo to the right shows James ascending the rope. Everything brown in the cave is sticky mud. Half of everything colored white is stickier mud. Ascenders became unreliable when turned into big mud masses.Despite the quantities of mud, which became fascinating and comical, there were some very cool live formations, such as the lily-white helectite on the soda straw in the image above, it was good experience in expedition caving, and was exciting to explore new territory where no people had been before and with a constant curiosity about what's around the next corner or dark drop.
Thanks to Eva, Tanja, James, Mark, Yvonne, Charles, Adam, Matt, and Emily for good company and good times over the holiday period. A 15-min video is below composed of images taken by Eva and I. We didn't have good photos of everyone, so here's 75 additional photos taken by Tanja, Yvonne, and Charles. Or, Click Here for some of James's excellent, high-quality in-cave photos. Saludos!
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By 4apay, # 14. April 2008, 10:08:03
By semicolin1, # 18. April 2008, 04:53:34