The thing about caving is, it's not that easy to find out where the really good caves are. Real cavers keep the prime locations a secret. Ever since I learned that real cavers also don't say spelunk, I've wanted to be the real thing. I'm nowhere near that, but I no longer say spelunking, and I have no intention of telling you where the caves in this writup are. If you've been there, no doubt you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, please don't ask me to tell you. All you will get from me on that front is the email equivalent of nyuk nyuk nyuk, and not even giving me copious amounts of shrubbery will change that. Nope, not telling. I promised not to, that was part of the deal of finding out about this magic place.
I will, however, tell you that these caves are on private land, and that we had permission to be there from the landowner. We had some verbal directions from our secret caving source, and following the instructions we located the warren of access holes in no time. The first hole we looked at had a sheer 10 foot drop, so we checked out others. The second one looked like it would be difficult to me, so I - being the big chicken that I am - made Lee go first. Turns out he discovered a ledge and it was actually a very easy climb in, and down, to a low area which very quickly opend up into a water-filled cavern.
Here's a little fact from p.120 of the MEC catalogue: over two thirds of the world's fresh water is found underground. We found a small but impressive portion of this in these caves. We were mentally expecting very tight passages, but it turns out that this place is full of big caverns connected by various sized passages - and we only had to wiggle on elbows and knees a few times. In most places, you had several options whenever you got to a tight spot. The downside of this was that Lee very quickly pointed out that this would be an easy place to get lost. We were only 15 minutes into our first cave exploration when we decided to turn back and discuss how we would avoid getting lost.
This was a good plan. Unfortunately, we thought of it 14 minutes too late. We were thoroughly lost already. For the next 45 minutes, we crawled along a maze of passages, deciding to follow a consistent compass bearing (south-west) and, where possible, discernible current in the water. This mostly didn't work - we felt like we were going around in circles, but we couldn't have been given the compass. A couple of times we saw daylight - but it was either too far above us to even attempt to climb, or too narrow a crack to think about wiggling through. We stayed with the bats and the spiders for a lot longer than we had thought we would that time... (I'm not kidding about bats and spiders)
Our lost underground experience really made it clear why Lee is such a great adventure buddy: he stays calm and in control. I knew that the caves would spit us out eventually, and that there was no point getting freaked out since we couldn't do anything about it and needed to consistently follow the compass to get anywhere, but it was nice not to have to reassure someone else. Unlike most sports, you can't just quit in caving. You have no choice but to keep doing what you're doing until you come out again. So that's what we did, and eventually one of our daylight options yielded a climbable opening, and we climbed it. Hurrah, sun and my water bottle (after a short bushwack to get to the river and then to our packs).
Down by the river, we met Gord - who knew a lot more about the caves than we did (that's not hard, when all you know about them was scribbled on the back of an envelope by Lee, and Lee wasn't making any effort to write small). He even showed us a map, and then let us join him on a visit to a huge cavern down a dry cave. The dry cave was very deep, and much colder than the wet ones we'd just been in. Near the back is the cave register, and we signed it while looking at the iridescence of the bat poop on the walls and marvelling at the vastness of the caverns. At least that's what I was doing, Lee I think was cursing himself for forgetting his kneepads. There was a lot of muttering from that quarter, something about knees, and new installations and Merrill Lynch and who knows what other unpleasant thoughts he was having.
After the second cave trip, we decided to take a break and head into town to find some lunch and stop by Canadian Tire for kneepads and, more importantly (says the girl who had kneepads for the whole day) a whole lot of string. I really wanted to return to the underground water kingdom we were in earlier in the morning, but I wanted a chicken string to follow back out. We went shopping, and then invited Gord to join us on our exploration. He wasn't too thrilled about the tightness of a few spots near the entrance and went on to adventures elsewhere, but we kept going. I felt very important. I had the string, after all.
So we sloshed along, feeling completely at ease now that we had our route back guaranteed. The mutterings from Lee turned into pleased grunts, even when he banged various parts of his body on the cave walls. There were only a couple of tricky spots - one where the limestone appeared extremely unstable and Lee was not entirely comfortable going under it. He had stepped on a very big boulder before, and it shifted on him - it was big enough that I half expected a secret passageway to open up, and I was thrilled that it didn't shift onto any part of Lee (I suspect Lee was even happier about this than I was...)
At one point, I was crossing a big drop when my knee dislodged a big rock. I froze, feeling it move on my right. I explored very carefully and was happy to find out that the rock wasn't supporting any other rocks, and its descent - once I moved my knee - wouldn't start a landslide. Lee wasn't confident that the sound waves from the rock crashing down the hole wouldn't be an issue, and climbed back to where I was to manually move the rock to a safe spot. That overcome, I moved my knee, and kept playing out more string. We got to a spot where we were in knee-deep water and came to (for me) slightly taller than chest high straight-sided block. Lee said he'd invstigate, and grunted his way over this rock while I stayed in the water. Then he said something along the lines of, it looks interesting, but don't worry if you can't make it up the ledge.
Here I am so proud of how I manipulated Lee into doing what I wanted this weekend, but I suspect the manipulation goes both ways, because - as I'm sure he knew - my response to "if you can't make it up the ledge" was "huh". While he explored above me, I used a technique which combined flailing like mad, pulling as hard as I could with my arms, and launching myself onto my chest on the ledge and then flailing and wiggling until I was up. I then said, very calmly, "it's okay, we can go on, I'm up". I wanted to say "I don't know what you're talking about, it was a piece of cake", but the panting and sweating that was happening on my end made that deception a little tricky to carry off.
We hit the end of the first ball of string soon after that - and the balls were 168 meters long! We took a few breaks in some of the many caverns we came across, and kept very calm on one passage that went for more than 10 meters without opening up at all - just a tight crack. Lee wanted to talk about how this gives you a new perspective on what you see on the surface, but I was having none of that - picturing layers of rock and then trees and stuff above me made me freak out. I don't mind being underground as long as I'm not that conscious of the "under" part of it. So I took some pictures to distract him from this topic of conversation (of course, saying "yikes, don't talk about that, it freaks me out" may have helped too).
At what I think is about 200 meters of string, we decided to turn back. There was lots more to explore still, but we were thirsty and very aware of the whole idea of you can't just say "I've had enough now" when you want out. So I got to roll the string back up. That big ball on the left would make a kitty cat very happy. Two cats, actually, since that picture was taken only part of the way out, so by the end we had two balls of string (Lee cut my string and told me to start a new ball after I complained that it was getting too heavy - shaddup, water-logged sisal *is* heavy, and we all know that if it's heavy and I whine, Lee ends up carrying it...)
With our magic string, we came out quickly. We talked about going into more caves, but looking down I proclaimed that I was a very dirty girl, and in short order we were splashing about in the not underground part of the river. I'm sure we were still very dirty, but dirt is relative - after our long bath, we felt very clean. And very tired, caving takes a lot out of me mentally - it takes far more energy that you would think for me to get over the whole tight spaces and way underground fears, and there's always that edge of "what if...". So we called it a day.
Our friend Jim rates adventure destinations by what rank of girlfriend they are worthy of - the really good ones are "best girlfriend", the ones that you're not entirely sure will be good but you suspect will be are worthy of a "second-best girlfriend". I proposed that these caves should get a best girlfriend designation, but Lee, after some thought, demoted them to a lower rank. I asked why, since he seemed as captivated with them as I was, and he chose to share this little gem: "caving is not an aphrodisiac". Once again, Lee Bowes manages to succinctly capture the essence of the matter.
Oh, one more thing - the day before, we'd gone mountain biking (it was the weekend of sports involving helmets). I crashed four times. Lee stayed on his bike and had no trouble. Thus I was way ahead in the scrapes and bruises count. But My rad pants and synthetic t-shirt were sturdier than Lee's shorts and cotton shirt, and he has nasty scrapes all over his body whereas mine are confined to my elbows. So I took a picture of his back, because I now felt the beating your body up score was even.
Heh, what a great weekend. Considering that Lee's original intent was to not tax our bodies too much and thus not go wilderness camping this weekend, we did an awful lot... I wonder what he'd consider a tough weekend? Me, I had so much fun. But the best part... the best part is that there are still countless passages in this maze that we haven't explored yet, so we get to go back!