Trip leader: Ben Miller
Other surveyors: Dan Isabell, Amber Spohn
Area surveyed: Carroll River Passage
We entered the cave around 11:00, earlier than usual as we all needed to be out of the cave by 10:00 pm that night. Our goal was to push the main C survey all the way past the first side passage and to the Water Barrier. Bob and his team would start at the Water Barrier, Lawrence’s team would start at the first side passage CR-1, and we would start at the end of the survey.
Where my team started was in a nicely vaulted dome-like area heavily decorated. It was good that our conditions were at least pleasant, minus the mud, as it would take us a while to shoot the loop around this 80-90 foot-wide abandoned meander. The left/north side caused us to have wade up to our stomachs in water but the other side was just muddy. After the meander area we quickly shot a couple of shots on down to the side passage that Lawrence’s team was already in. We continued shooting on downstream heading towards the cave’s natural entrance until eventually we could hear the voices of the other team. At this point it was decided that we should probably take a break and chat with the other team. So we bopped forward to Bob and his team and after admiring some very nice formations we took a nice little break talking about survey and the types of passage we’d been in.
After the break I headed back to the end of my sketch while Amber and Dan conversed and set up shots to tie us into Bob’s survey. The passage was very large so I had some work to do before I caught up with the “end of the survey”. Eventually both Bob and I reached the very wide room in which we tied together in, of course leave it to us to try and tie our sketches together in an extremely wide room. Well that task being completed we headed back to the Backdoor Entrance and headed on out of the hole making it back to the surface just before sunset, out first trip seeing daylight coming out of the cave. All in all a very good and productive trip down Carroll River, we pushed main survey to the Water Barrier and got a strong start on CR 1 as well.