Death Trap Cave

Aug 21st
Sean and I went to Death Trap to survey last night. The cave entrance is a small hole at the bottom of a large ravine that takes an ass load of water - like every drop from a one mile square area. It's a small cave that is basically a high fissure crack room with a couple of small side leads. I call it Death Trap because if you get caught in there in the rain you are dead. There are branches wedged 25' up the crack.We figured we would be in there for a couple of hours, but...

Sean is very detail oriented, and it took almost 20 stations to get to the back wall with the right side passage still to survey. I think we have about 115' so far. Has anyone been down that low, coblestone/glass choked crawl. It's cool as hell (if you've had a recent tetnus shot.) This is where all the water goes to and it is highly sculpted passage. I didn't push it to the bitter end because my light was dimming, but it continued on for some way. The cave gets deep here and if this ever hit the water table level, it could bisect Rosevelt type stuff.

Sept 9th
Sean and I went back to Deathtrap Cave last night to finish up the survey. We picked up where we left off and surveyed down the drain. All of the water from the ravine system shoots down this 2 foot high cobblestone passage. It eventually makes its way to the top of a ten foot high pit that drops down to the water table. It was pretty nasty because of all the floating debris, but you could tell it was aquifer and not standing water. The entire character of the cave changes at this point and it really looks like Roosevelt. We couldn't go on from here, but if the water table was down about 10 feet... who knows what's down there. It looks like the ravine system formed the cave and the drain intersected a lower level water table cave. Very interesting.

We didn't finish surveying this little cave because it is such a pain to survey in there. One more trip should do it.

Bill Walker in entrance.

"Dome Climb" in Death Trap Cave.