1/06
The crux of all this was the Howe Caverns cleanup. It's one night a year every January, when cavers are invited to clean up their local show cave. It was cancelled last year due to a blizzard, so the cave would have two years of algae and other nastiness to scrub off.
I drove up from Jersey City with Andrew Foord, after some unsuccessful attempts to hook some new people into coming aboard. Oh well: we'd be staying at the Schoharie cabin on Saturday, so if the outhouse wouldn't scare away the new people, the cabinmates probably would.
We were hoping to meet Joe Armstrong at the Alley Cat Diner and then go to Baugh. As usual, we left Jersey City on the late side, so we got to the Alley Cat just a few minutes after Joe had eaten and left. There were a half-dozen other cavers there to tell us this; we weren't the only people with the idea to spend the whole day in the Howe vicinity.
We quickly ate breakfast (OK, maybe not quickly) and heard the Joe might be planning to go to Canyon Cave #2 for a dig. The whole Canyon Cave series are right by Baugh, but neither Andrew nor I had been there before. I knew how to get to Baugh, though, and from there we could just shout until we found Joe standing over a hole.
We got to the parking area, and were the only car in sight. The dirt road didn't have and of its ice shattered, so no cars drove up the road to park. So where was Joe? Was there a better place to park if you were going to Canyon Cave #2, wherever it was?
Last time I was here I walked all the way to Baugh from the lot, stood around uselessly while other people went inside, and then turned back to get my gear. I wasn't going to do that this time, so I suited up in the lot, and walked the frozen mud road to Baugh. No need to get prissy about not stepping in deep mud puddle snow.
We reached Baugh in the howling wind, and found no one there. Ice was falling off the entrance ledges, making the normally-nasty lip even more treacherous. There was no cable ladder set up, so we were the first ones here. No sight of other cars anywhere on the horizon, or any nearby bits of movement to indicate cavers walking around.
We worked our way left, against the wind, looking in the woods to see if any karst features caught our eyes. Baugh isn't at the bottom of a huge scooped-out area, it's just some deep crevices that looked like someone poured acid on level ground. Any cave this close to Baugh would probably have the similar lack of flagrant visibility. We crossed a caveless patch of woods, walked out into another huge, empty field, and realized this wasn't looking for Joe so much as it was half-assed ridgewalking.
We walked back to the cars. The wind blew down like an invisible avalanche. It was constant and relentless and stole your body heat like a violent pickpocket. I was really going to hate this wind once I got to the car and would have to stand outside in my coveralls for the sake of my upholstery.
Fortunately, this never had to come to pass. Just as we reached my Camry, in came Joe and seven or eight of his closest friends. Half the caving crew from the diner was here. They were here for Canyon Cave #2, and would take us right there.
We walked right by Canyon Cave #2 getting to Baugh, before we were in spot-the-cave mode. #1 and #3 were so close we were jumping over the narrow points to get to the #2 entrance. None of them had much meat to them, but that was why we were digging.
Once the cable ladder was unrolled, Andrew and I were two of the first three people down Canyon Cave #2. This was partly an eagerness to do something, and partly an eagerness to escape the wind. The entire dug passage, along with the rest of the rock face, was covered in icicles. We smashed them, since they were in the way. No one took much glee in it, since it felt awfully close to breaking formations.
A tripod was erected over the small pit with a pulley at the top. Two five-gallon buckets could clip on with carabiners and be hauled up. I filled the first one or two with some big loose rocks nowhere near the lead. It wouldn't help the dig much, but it was rock out of the pit.
The buckets were one by one lowered into the lead, and would come back straining under the weight of ... water. There was a small pool of water at the bottom of the lead, and it was hard to dig away solid matter with the pool in the way. So we would take a few bucketfuls to drain the wee pool.
The novelty of this wore out bucket by bucket, since there was never anything other than muddy water with floating icicle chunks. This wasn't digging, it was bailing.
Then it started raining. There were a half dozen people standing up top, exposed to ugly January winds, hauling nothing out but the occasional bucket of water, and now they were getting rained on. The word "mutiny" came up rather loudly.
So we climbed out of Canyon Cave #2 and wrapped up the dig portion of the day. I saw a big pile of wet debris, and asked if that was what we had hauled up. Nope: that was a dry pile of debris, which today's debris was poured onto like packets of soy sauce.
Gary, Seth and Chris were always up for something difficult for the sake of difficulty, so they decided to rig Wolfert's. Wolfert's is a locked cave, also right next to Baugh's, that starts off with two 40-foot drops. It's a long nasty crawl from there to another cave entrance. It's conceivable to do a pull-down trip, but it'd be easier to just come back to Wolfert's and haul the rope out.
This was a free vertical trip for me to glom onto. Good thing I left my vertical gear at the bottom of my equipment tub. I got it, clipped the harness on, and was at the Wolfert's entrance within a few minutes. It was long enough, though, to chill me like a flower dipped in liquid nitrogen.
I warmed up a bit during the 30 feet of crawl Wolfert's has before the first drop. Joe was sitting there, watching the others slide down the rope but not going himself. There was some water coming over the edge, so anyone going down would probably get wet. The whole descent crew was wearing waterproof yellow Petzl suits (a.k.a rubber duckies), aside from me and Seth.
Did I really want to get soaked? No, but I didn't want to pass up a caving opportunity when I was literally in the thick of it. It'd suck, but an hour after it was over I'd be glad I did it. Joe lent me his neoprene gloves, I hooked my rack in, and slid down the first 40-footer.
Joe said at the top that it was the second drop that was the real wet one, so you might be able to stay dry during the first drop. This was false. The rope naturally swung right down into the path of the water, so after just a few seconds on rope you got good and drenched. At the bottom of the first drop, I heard that the second drop was the dry one, and since you're already soaked, might as well do that one. So I did the second one, even though, had I known, I might not have even done the first one.
At the bottom I clumsily got my Ropewalker on for ascension, while Seth stood around politely with his easy-as-pie Frog system. The crawl that led to the other entrance was just at our feet, although it was more miserable than any quick ascension through water, no matter how strong the shower was.
It took five minutes for me to get the Ropewalker on and latch onto the rope, two minutes to ascend, and ten minutes to get my four points of rope contact clipped off. Meanwhile, Seth politely froze. I really need to get a Frog. Why the hell am I doing 40-foot nuisance ascents with gear that takes ten minutes to clip off?
Repeat the embarrassing why-the-hell-is-is-taking-so-long-for-me-to-get-off-rope story for the other ascent. I got back on the ground level,with Seth fast-approaching behind me (and somehow not throwing things at me for making him wait so long). I crawled out of Wolfert's, soaked to the skin in howling January winds.
I ran to the car, imagining those cartoons of guys coming out of the water in giant ice cubes. I had my polypros, coveralls, neoprene socks, boots, pack, harness, Ropewalker chest plate, and about ten pounds of assorted metal to get off me, in reverse order. I tried to rush through a couple at once, leading to one embarrassing minute when I had half an elbow pinned by my own backpack, not able to move it in or out.
Andrew was in the passenger seat of my car, enjoying the windbreak while I was dropped Wolfert's. He got out to help me speed up the de-gearing process. He shaved a few valuable minutes off the elapsed time before I was in my coat in the car, blasting my car's heater.
Once warmed up, I ventured outside to give Joe his gloves back. The 45 seconds it took to do that sapped all my heat again. I ran back to the car, back under the kiln coming from the vents.
Howe Caverns is like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence. Once a year during their off-season, they allow cavers to A. do unpaid janitorial work for a commercial business, and B. bring their own food beforehand. In exchange, they give out whatever random stuff hasn't been selling in the gift shop (this year it was portable clock radios with the Howe logo).
If cavers had a little more sense, we'd hold out until Howe paid us for showing up, or at least catered the event. But we have an instinctual urge to take care of caves regardless of who profits from the cleanup, so Andrew and I went straight from Wolfert's to the Grand Union to help cater this thing.
I bought romaine lettuce and cherry tomatoes for a Caesar salad. Everyone brings desserts to potlucks, but no one thinks to make a salad. Andrew bought Chips Ahoy.
We got to Howe early, which gave me time to wash the lettuce in the Howe cafeteria kitchen. Afterwards, Andrew and I stood about the food tables, empty aside from a salad bowl and prepackaged cookies, hoping other people would come to the party.
There was worry for an hour that the turnout was drastically low from last year, but a lot of people must have just been looking to be fashionably late. Around 60 people made it eventually, which sounded like a good turnout for this. No one else brought a salad, so my food was gone before the first half showed up. Multiple people brought pasta, pies, baked beans, casseroles, and cookies, so all of those were among those leftovers once everyone got stuffed. I tried to eat a little of everything, but I had to give that up after the 40th person.
After rolling ourselves out of the dining room, we geared up for the conservation part of this conservation trip. Some people were putting coveralls on, some people were just wearing old shoes, some people were full-on getting wetsuits out. All my gear was icing over in my trunk, so I opted to just get the boots. The boots were so muddy, however, I didn't dare put them on in the Howe lobby. I carried the frozen things in my rapidly-freezing hands for fifteen minutes, until I carried them down into Howe, shoved them in a corner, and never used them all night. Sneakers are just fine for Howe.
There were dozens of spray bottles, brushes, and bottles of rubbing alcohol set up for our use. We'd be scrubbing the parts of the cave near the light bulbs for algae, which tends to grow in moist environments with lots of light. (This is why a lot of show caves turn their lights off when not leading tours, or rig a system where only the part of the cave with tourists gets lit. Saves electricity, too.)
I was among the last groups to enter Howe, so all the cleaning utensils left were a few empty squirt bottles, one abrasive scrub brush that would scrape the enamel off your teeth, and a toilet brush. I picked the toilet brush, hoping I wouldn't get reassigned to a job more appropriate for the tool.
My designated spot to clean was near the far end of the cave, so I got to pass the other crews as they were staring work. The wetter the walls, the more green there was to scrub. The wetsuit people were in the stream that runs along most of the Howe tourist track. There were acres of algae to scrub along the far side of the stream, so wetsuit people were the most productive in the bunch. I'll have to remember to bring mine next year (especially if I'm doing Wolfert's again).
I found a patch by a light with sporadic green spots, and got to work with the toilet brush. The algae came off easily enough, but I then needed to spray it and spray it until the loose green blobs would slide down the rock and dribble on the brick walkway. My water bottle ran out within a few minutes, so I tossed it down to a wetsuit guy in the stream and he refilled it for me (I couldn't reach the water by myself; the walkway's good three or four feet above the waterline).
There were small greenish patches of rock all over the place that resisted the toilet brush. You couldn't scrub too hard - that would just erode the rock - but nothing else was getting rid of the green. Whole forests of kelp were hanging off the wall by the stream, but the only stuff we could reach were these vague greenish stains.
There's only an hour or so of scheduled scrubbing time, since with 60 people the work gets done quick. As I was walking back, I saw a big patch of algae just on the other side of the railing, and at a spot with footholds. I climbed over, knelt on the footholds, and scrubbed away. Giant clumps of green fell off into the water, revealing natural. It finally felt like I was doing something.
The night in the Schoharie cabin was spent with Jenga, a Simpsons edition of the Life game, and a lot of leftover potluck food. I always have an emergency Risk board in my car for situations where I could get a game of Risk going, but we were starting at 10:00 P.M., and no one wanted to roll dice until dawn.
We shoved a lot of wood into the cabin stove, enough to counteract the constant wind and to dry our gear hanging overhead. As the night went on, the chairs were piled with coats and sweaters. You wouldn't know it was January from the sweat lodge we were stoking.
In the morning Francois, Rob Hogg and his crew went into Schoharie Cave, while the rest of us just packed up and drove south. Most of us were going to City Island, for Met Grotto's dinner (which was really a lunch, seeing as it was at 1:00).
Last year I ordered the steamed lobster; this year I got lazy and got the broiled lobster, with the tail meat already cracked open and breaded. Next year I'll order the lobster milkshake and suck it down in 30 seconds.
(Yes, there are five parts to this quadfecta.)
Nothing on the record can be said about this. Sorry. But if you get the chance, do it.