Still hung over from a party the night before, Ken and I headed out to the Kolapore area to do a little caving. We were supposed to meet Angella at the caves at 10:00, but no Angella when we got there at 11:00. So we decided to start without her. ;)
I decided that we should start with a cave that Ange and I half-finished on our previous caving expedition. I have no clue what the cave was called, but it has a "4:21" spray-painted above the entrance. This was Ken's first cave, so he was very excited.
We finished the 4:21 cave (which is the deepest cave we found at Kolapore), and explored the cliffs a bit. In particular, there is a very strange tree which grows at the top of a cliff and whose roots descend at a 45 degree angle to the ground and has obviously been used as a ramp for quite some time. We used this tree to get ourselves to the top of the cliff and get a breathtaking view of the ground below (and our car by the road).
At around 12:00, we decided we had better go and check if Ange had shown up by the cars. When we got to the cars, she had just arrived.
We immediately began to explore a cave that Ange and I had previously done a few weeks earlier. It turns out we missed one area that forms a loop to the main passage. The loop is an incredibly tight squeeze that I could barely make through without breaking any ribs. I did get bruises, though. The funny part is that when we all were through the squeeze, we found a spraypainted arrow pointing the opposite direction than we were travelling. Evidently, the squeeze is much easier to do going the other direction. We were travelling uphill, while the arrow was pointing down. Oops.
Exploring some more at the top of the Niagara Escarpment, we found a strange hole in the ground from which warm moist air was streaming out. We thought this would be a great cave to explore. However, the entrance was too slippery and we didn't have any rope. Deciding to err on the side of caution, we put the exploration of that cave (the "Sewer" cave) to a later date.
While Ange was busy checking out a fissure for possible openings, Ken and I were resting when we heard some cries for help coming from up the trail. Ken and I immediately ran off to see what was going on. When we arrived on the scene, we saw a chain of people (person behind holding person in front's ankles) lying on the ground reaching toward the cliff's edge where a kid was hanging on for dear life. The human chain was slowly sliding toward the edge, so I grabbed the last person's legs, dug my feet in, and stopped the sliding. Ken carefully chose a route to the edge of the cliff avoiding the loose rocks and sand that the kid slipped on, and helped the kid climb up to safety. It was a very stressful moment.
After a breather, we took a few pictures of the scene. We have a pictures of the people at the scene. We also have a few pictures of the edge of the cliff where the kid slipped off.
We finally managed to get enough courage to get one more cave in before we called it a day. So we moved further down the trail and came upon a fissure that looked promising. We left our packs at the top, so we didn't get any pictures of the cool spiders and bat that lived inside the cave at the bottom of the fissure. It turned out to be quite the interesting cave with a real bitch of an entrance.
You can see all the pictures from this caving trip here
Email me: kinthelt@gmail.com
