Trip purpose: Finish survey of DR4

Trip participants: Kohl Mitchell
Nathan Curran
Jack Rufener
Maria Rodriguez
Jerel Waters

Entry Time: 10:00 Exit Time: 18:15

How far: To the bitter end of DR4.

Injuries: No

Trash: Some debris left from the previous DR4 survey.

Biology: 10+ cave fish, 2 in Cutoff Creek
1 grotto salamander
1 larval grotto salamander
1 isopod
1 hellgramite

Trip report by Kohl Mitchell

We began arriving at the silo at about 8:30 Saturday morning, with Jack getting there first, unlocking the silo, and getting the shaft rigged. Nathan and I arrived next, and Jerel about 10 minutes later. Maria was running about 15 minutes late, having gotten lost on the Camden County gravel roads, but we were all geared up and started dropping down the shaft by about 9:45. As Maria and I got on rope, the Arkansas team who were doing some work in Upper Thunder River also began trickling in, so we said a quick hello to them and dropped down the hole.

We reached Thunder Falls at 10:30, and were at the beginning of DR4 in another hour. We ate a quick snack and prepared ourselves mentally for the ordeal of going through the main DR4 water crawl, followed by the upper poop tube. It took us another hour to go through the thousand feet or so of nasty passage between Thunder River and Cutoff Creek, in which we found a bottle of White-out, Caleb’s flashlight, and Maria’s elbow pad from our last survey trip. We tried to bathe in the few small pools in Cutoff Creek before heading to the bottom of Cascada Negra, where we ate lunch before climbing up the falls and starting survey. We initially planned on having Nathan, Jack and Jerel start survey at the top of the falls, while Maria and I would scoop ahead to the end of passage, where we’d turn around and work back towards the others. Maria and I started crawling down the rocky-floored passage, but upon reaching the first corner, we were greeted by the sight of a mud slump to the ceiling in one direction, and a small trickle of water, far too tight to push, in the other. A hole in the ceiling, just before the terminus, gave us hope for an upper continuation, but it also proved to be a dead end. I was disgusted with myself for not checking another 50 feet down the passage on our last trip, which would have saved us all a hard day’s work on this trip.

We shouted back to Nathan & co., and decided that I would just sketch the entire passage. In three shots, and about an hour, we were finished with just over 54 feet of passage. We decided to stick with the Spanish names, calling the final upper lead “Domo de Decepción”. Nathan also looked into an upper lead in the ceiling above Cascada Negra, accessible by a sketchy traverse over crumbly rock, which also proved to be a dead end.

On our way out of the upper bypass, the first, wet half of the crawl was far sloppier than it was on our way in. We were sinking nearly up to our armpits in wet, gooey mud as we crawled through the tube. The second half, which was mostly solid mud on the way in, had become thoroughly sticky and felt like glue as we crawled through it. After what felt like a thousand feet, we finally dropped into DR4 proper and continued back through the water crawl to the main passage. Once we reached the main passage at about 2 PM, we knew we’d have plenty of time for our only other lead of the day, an upper ledge in the Forevers just downstream from Black Rock Riffles, so we went further downstream from DR4 to look at the Little Lake Room, a place I’d always intended on checking out on a Lower Thunder trip someday but until then was always too gassed to do on the way out.

After this detour, we continued to the upper lead, which Alex Litsch had looked at on a prior trip I’d been on, and which we’d also briefly reconnoitered on the previous DR4 survey. This time, however, we were prepared with a trowel, Maria’s climbing skills, and lots of spotters below. We first hoisted Maria up onto the steep mud slope directly below the lead, while first Jack and then Nathan edged along a mud bank further upstream that they could access the lead from. The two of them helped Maria up onto the lead, which turned out to be a small dead-end room that she sketched in from memory when she got back to the stream. With that, we began to return to the falls, with a short detour for some of us to gander at formations in the DR1 side passage. After some shenanigans at Thunder Falls, we climbed up the ladder and were all on the surface by 6:30.