Jerry Atkinson reminded me about another infamous crawlway
we worked on in Langtry Lead Cave in West Texas. In the back of the
cave is a pit that periodically fills with water after big rains and
overflows into a body-tight crawl. The crawl has airflow and is a
good lead, but it was almost impossible to pursue because it was
floored with small chips of rock that made it too tight. There was
just barely enough room to push the chips aside and squeeze through,
but after each flood they got redistributed and it again became
impassable. Every trip we had to painstakingly dig it out and were
never able to make much progress over previous attempts. The only way
to really make progress would be to have several trips in a row
during a dry spell, but it was a long way from Austin to the cave and
we could only visit a few times a year. As far as I know that crawl
has never been pushed successfully.
In Honey Creek Cave there are many low, wet, muddy crawls
(including one we called the Tar Baby Tunnel), but one of the
interesting places we had to crawl was not in a crawlway at all. The
passage was of walking dimensions, but was floored with deep, viscous
mud covered by shallow water. The mud was too deep and thick to walk
through and there was not enough water to swim, so we had to lie down
and simply wallow through the mud. It was a disgusting mess and
located in one of the main routes to the back of the cave.
Fortunately that obstacle largely disappeared after enough people had
gone through it because the disturbed mud slowly washed away to the
point that it was walkable.
Mark
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