April 14, 2001 Colorado Bend State Park

Photo Gallery (6 pictures)

The regulars, (Rafal Kizderski, Terry Holsinger, Dale Barnard, etc.) had been concentrating on a chunk of land on the opposite side of the river, which is part of the park, but which has no access, except by crossing the river near Gorman Falls. They had apparently had a pretty sporting river crossing the previous month, as a result of the heavy rains that had the river way up. However, after much ballyhoo, and everyone girding for a raging torrent, the water was down substantially when we got to the river, and although it was flowing well, and still a bit brown with runoff, the crossing was really low-key. I rode down to the river’s edge with Geoff Hoese and Aimee Beveridge, and we set about running a guide line across so those without kayaks (they'd just bought two, and were itching to try them out) could pull themselves across in an inflatable raft. Once the line was run, we took turns going across two at a time, with one person towing the other kayak back for more people and gear, while Rafal and company did the same with the raft. Holsinger managed to capsize a kayak in about two feet of water, causing a bit of laughter.

Aimee and Geoff had decided to continue a survey in a recently discovered cave near the eastern park boundary called Fallingwater. They'd been discouraged in during their first trip by a dead and rotting raccoon, floating in a pool that filled the floor of the passage just inside the entrance. Now they were returning with heavy duty gloves and a garbage bag, with which to remove the rather malodorous carcass. The cave was a fair walk from the river. We hiked up the bluff, and proceeded to look for a fence that was marked on the topo sheet, without finding it. After twenty minutes or so, we did find the fence that the first one was supposed to intersect, though, and with it, the remnants of an almost non existent road. While walking along the fence, we happened across some ranchers on the opposite side, who hailed us, so we stopped and chatted for a bit. As it turned out, the fellow we were talking to was my mother-in-law Alice’s boss, a lawyer in Austin named Jerry Saegert. We all had a pretty good laugh over the happenstance of the two of us running into each other out in the middle of the woods, and he invited us to call him and arrange a caving trip to his land in the future. Sadly, this will probably never happen, because he died suddenly from complications after surgery about six weeks later, and this turned out to be the first and last time I would ever meet who I found to be ( from that one encounter) a polite and cordial old style Texas Gentleman.

Geoff’s GPS was pointing the way to the cave, and as we made our way from the fence, I spotted a sink off to the left, that was clearly not the cave we were looking for. Just beyond the small depression I'd initially spotted was a pretty good sized crevice, that didn't appear to have been noticed on any of the recent trips, as it was really overgrown with vines, and shrubs that we had to move to get to it. It looked chimneyable, so after a little rattling of sticks, and a few “Here, snakie, snakies,” I climbed on down. Unfortunately, at the bottom, it started out low, then proceeded to stop after about 15 feet. Aimee climbed down behind me, and measured the drop (12-14 ft.? I can't recall). I shot one survey shot back to her, she sketched it in, Geoff took a GPS reading and we moved on. I named it Environmental Law Cave, after our chance meeting with the attorney, who'd told us he did a lot of environmental work, just moments before.

From there, the GPS pretty well pinpointed Fallingwater, and Terry Holsinger caught up with us about five minutes after we arrived at the entrance. The first order of business was Raccoon Decay Assessment and Removal. The decay assessment was easy from the entrance, and the verdict was “rather.” Geoff undertook the arduous assignment of stuffing the wet bloated carcass into a garbage bag, and Aimee and I fire-brigaded the festering beast entranceward.

Fortunately, from there, the cave improved drastically. The ceiling was low at the ex-raccoon pool, but after a little manouvre to avoid the water, the ceiling lifted again, and we found ourselves in a comfortable, if small room, with two crawlways leading on. Aimee sketched, while Geoff ran tape, Terry read instruments, and I generally made a nuisance out of myself by blinding everyone with the Really Big Flash. The crawlway in front of us led immediately into another low small room, and the crawlway to the right took an immediate left, and opened into the same room. The crawlway on from the second room was wide, and mostly hands and knees, with one dome that looked up-climbable to possible parallel upper passage, though I didn't pursue it, as it was rather tight, and the way on was beckoning down the crawlway. The passage turned left, the a few feet later, left again, so that it nearly doubled back under the “Post ‘Coon Chamber.” We could now see that we were below a drain that led down from that room, but was too tight. The crawlway took a sharp right at a rather squeezy part, which necessitated a large quantity of groaning and squirming, but then it straightened right out into a nice tube which allowed some seven & ten meter shots. It would have been classic booming borehole for a G.I. Joe. Terry turned around to head out, because he wanted to check on his dogs which had been hanging out at the entrance for about an hour by now, and I took over on instruments for the last four or five shots of the day. The G.I. Joe Borehole came to a T intersection with another crawlway, which petered out a few meters to the left, and got really really tight a few meters to the right. Geoff took a stab at squeezing on, as we could see the passage getting taller after a bit, but it was too low for him. I took a stab at it, and managed to push myself through the worst spot by exhaling, but I didn't go far, as there was no one who could come after me. The passage at that point was about ten inches tall, and perhaps three or four feet wide. I could see on twenty or twenty five feet down the crawlway to what was either another left turn, or the end of the cave. I'm planning on getting back down there this fall, and finishing off that passage, just to see what’s around that corner.

June 10, 2001 Maple Run Cave.

I didn't think much of Maple Run, the first time I went in May of 1994. In fact, my journal entry in its entirety reads: “May- Maple Run W/Biko. (sic) A LOT of very tight crawling & steep. It gets wet towards the bottom, & this cave made me nervous. Not much fun at all.” In retrospect, that was actually a very formative trip. Despite having the bejeezus scared out of me, and thinking over and over that maybe I just wasn't cut out to be a Caver, after I went away that afternoon, I was hooked, whether I knew it or not. Somehow, the apprehension etched the experience into my mind, and I was unable to escape thinking about it for days.
There's a general rule of thumb that caves grow in size in your mind after you visit them and that they tend to shrink on a second visit. Returning to Maple Run again, 7 years later, I have to say that this is the only known instance for me in which a cave grew larger in my absence. With a wealth of caving experience under my belt, I was utterly unbothered by the crawlways and down-climbs, as I had encountered enough of these in the intervening years that I knew my limits, and that this cave was far from challenging them.
Tara, for her first wild caving experience, seemed utterly unflappable in situations that I know Erin would have been made nervous. She cruised through the crawlways, naturally, being that she's small enough for hands and knees in places where I was reduced to wallowing, and grunting like a beached seal. She helped me with some photography, although I was no help to myself, as I forgot to slow the shutter down slow enough for the flash on at least 6 pictures. I did come away with one decent shot from the larger room, and some good pictures of her in the entrance gate. All in all, we spent about two hours in the cave, and I'm still not positive I've seen every inch of it. According to Justin Shaw, “The Aggies,” whoever they are, have recently completed a map, which he feels is pretty accurate.

July 5th, 2001, McCarty Cave.

A couple times a year, Jim Kennedy will call me to do some weekday caving. BCI will send him out on land-owner relations trips, or to look at bat caves when they're contacted by a cave owner, and he calls me since I can occasionally get away from work on short notice. Trip like this in the past led to the Marneldo Ranch project, and a great trip to Ney Cave, so of course, I try not to turn him down when he offers.
The owners of McCarty cave recently purchased the cave when they bought property in a subdivision where they're having a house built. McCarty cave has been known for quite some time, and the McCarty ranch was apparently quite big, and the family has been slowly parceling it off over the years. The new cave owners actually chose the lot with the cave on it so they could protect it. They mentioned that after they'd seen the property, they had worried about it becoming degraded by the development, and figured that since they were buying land anyway, all the better to get their hands on the cave before the wrong person did. The house they are building was a respectable 100 or 150 yards from the sinkhole, and they had no plans to clear any of the land around the cave in the least bit.

Jim had been to the cave once before, to look for bats, but this time, he and another BCI employee (a woman whose name I forgot) were going back mainly to try out their new firefly slave units and take some note on their use in the largest room at the back of the cave. I went along, ostensibly to help with the photography, but I think mainly he wanted another experienced Caver on the trip, just because. I brought Erin along, since her and I hadn't been caving together in quite a while, and it was summer break, anyway.
We met the landowner there at the driveway to her house-in-progress, and she showed us through the nearly finished structure before continuing along with us to the cave. She was rather personable, and her and her ill-equipped niece (wearing sandals) came with us all the way to the back of the cave, though they exited after just a couple minutes, as the niece “wasn't feeling well.”
The cave has two entrances, both along the side of a large, shallow sink, positively huge, by Texas standards. The sink is about 3-6 feet deep, and probably 20-30 feet across. We climbed down into the left entrance first, just to look around, though ti leads to a smaller section of the cave, which headed to the south about fifty feet, then ended. A small crawlway connects this section to the main section of the cave just under the breakdown at the edge of the sink, otherwise, the two sections would actually be different caves, separated by the collapse of the sink. The main entrance is walk-in, but becomes tight pretty quick. The passage from the main entrance heads north, then west through a series of small to medium sized room connected by some really tight and irregularly shaped crawlways.

I was afraid that Erin would not do well in these crawls, but other than jabbing her back on a ceiling protrusion (it was sharp! I would have cried, too!) she handled them really well. As we continued towards the rear of the cave, it became wetter and muddier, and we all got really filthy. I had a difficult time not sliming all my camera gear once I did get it out, and I would have taken a lot more pictures, if the cave hadn't been so muddy.

My new Pelican case performed really well, though, and despite the fact that it was a bit of a pain in the tight crawlways, it was really nice to just be able to open it up and have everything laid out, instead of having to dig down into a bag, and pull everything out and scatter it around. I did manage a couple good photos, though some kind of syncing problem has developed with the Really Big Flash, and I took a whole series of pictures where the little flash worked, and despite Jim seeing the big flash go off, it doesn't show up at all in the pictures. My cheap slave might be too slow to trigger the flash unless the camera is on bulb. I need to work this out.

Sorcerer’s Cave, 22-25 Sept. 2001

The deepest cave in Texas. I’d been itching to get into this cave for years, and only got the chance due to a trip scheduling fluke. Jim Kennedy and Charlie Savvas had both already signed on for a Ray Ranch dig trip that weekend, but when they both got word from George Veni that they were invited on the first trip to Sorcerer’s in nine years, well... plans change, sometimes.

Jim and I rode out together in his 4-Runner, leaving Austin around one in the afternoon, with plans to get to the campsite before dark. We took the south route through San Antonio, then west on Highway 90 to Del Rio, and points west. Neither of us had seen the high bridge over the Pecos river, so we made a lengthy rest stop there, and took some pictures. A few cave entrances are visible in the bluff walls along the river, and one of them is quite large, although it’s reputed to be mainly a shelter cave, with some pictographs. Its name has thus far eluded everyone I’ve asked, though Logan McNatt was able to debunk one theory that it was Panther cave.

We arrived at the gate to the ranch at about 7:00 pm, but there was no combination lock, and no sign of George, who’d originally planned on being at the ranch by three or four o’clock. We debated a bit about the trip possibly having been called off at the last minute, (sept. 11 was forefront in the news, and everything in the world seemed tentative, right then) but we figured we’d sit it out until at least ten. We pulled lawnchairs from the back of the truck, put on some music, and lit up a couple of cigars, thanks to Jim’s quick thinking, and thorough packing tendencies. We were treated to a nice sunset, an active thunderstorm some miles off in the distance, and after dark, a spectacular sky. The cave is in one of the most remote parts of the state, in one of the least densely populated counties, so the sky didn’t have much competition from lights on the ground. About every thirty minutes or so, a single vehicle could be seen to approach us from a great distance, so each passing truck (maybe 6 in four hours?) was anticipated by us for some while, and each time, we’d say “this has GOT to be him, now,” but he didn’t pull up until nearly 11:00pm, having been importuned by his work at the last moment, as he was preparing to leave. Over the next few hours, Charlie Savvas, Pam Tanino, Terry Holsinger, Vivian Loftin and Jean “Creature” Krejca rolled into camp, making sleep a dodgy affair until at least three in the morning.
The purpose of the trip was to dive the sump at the upstream end of the Sirion river, which is some 540 feet, and several pits, underground. We spent at least three hours after breakfast loading up our packs, and divvying up the three air tanks and diving gear between us, so no one made it into the cave until nearly one in the afternoon. Jim and I also spent some time clearing a trail from the campground to the cave entrance. Whatever trail had been there was long since overgrown in the years since the last trip, and the cave entrance itself was pretty badly overgrown as well. Jim always tries to clear brush from entrances if there are bats present, to ease their navigation and the entrance looked much better after we had worked on it for about half an hour.

The original idea was that a rigging team would head in a couple of hours before everyone else, but it didn’t quite work out that way. Charlie and George did get a head start, but we clumped up pretty quickly. It wasn’t too much of a problem, though, due to the fact that the tight spots slowed our air-tank hauling to a crawl in several places. There's a very narrow slot right at the top of Poltergiest pit, and then a windey keyhole-shaped crawlway at its base. Both of these spots necessitated a fire brigade to get all the stuff through, and it took everyone a good while just to get into position in the crawlway. Those of us hauling dive gear pretty much moved at the same pace as the rigging team, although there was a little sitting around here and there.

Below Poltergeist pit, another deep pit called the Demon Drop delivered us at the beginning of the wet part of the cave. Up to this point, the cave is characterized by dry and dusty guano on the floor through tall and narrow canyon passages. The cave gets very wet all of a sudden at the bottom of the pit. There was just enough room for us to mill around at the bottom of the drop and contemplate the very nasty stream passage that stood between us and the bottom half of the cave. The dry guano had turned to very, very wet guano. The v shaped floor here is filled with between two and three feet of water, which is clear on top, (until you stir it up) but underneath, is basically a guano suspension the consistency of a thin split-pea soup. For the first 20 feet or so, we took elaborate pains to cling to the right wall, thus avoiding a plunge into a pool of “undetermined depth,” in George’s words, but after a point, there are no more handholds, and the method is a pretty straight-forward one-- get in it up to your knees, then thighs, then crotch, and try not to slip. There must have been fifty feet of this, varying from ankle to nearly waist deep, and George assured us with a smile that we were seeing a new high-water level. If the bottom of the deepest cave in the state hadn’t been on the other side of it, there’s not an irresistible force in the world that would have moved me to traverse what simply has to be the single most disgusting section of cave known to mankind.

Eventually, though, we climbed out into a section of the cave known as the Inner Sanctum, and it began to get pretty. This is a wide, flat room compared to the rest of the cave, and there are wet formations here and there. It was here that I discovered that my fancy new Goretex boots, which were designed to keep the water out while wading through shallow pools were now doing an outstanding job of keeping the water in. I found myself humming a verse of a song for the occasion, sung to the tune of ?These Boots are Made for Walking,? that went:

These boots are filed with guano
That’s why they smell like poo
How’m I ever gonna get this
Guano off my shoe...

We took a break here, and shook off the mud as much as we could. Charley and Viv took a few pictures, while George and Terry rigged the cable ladder for a muddy little nuisance drop down 12 feet or so into another canyon, which opened up into the Sanctum Santorum, the largest room in the cave. The cave here started to feel very, very remote. I finally began to get a sense of how far underground we were in this room. The flat ceiling over head is the bottom of the Segovia member of the Edwards limestone, and we had just traversed its entire depth, some three hundred and fifty feet. The left side of the room is taken up by a set of massive flowstone stalagmites, one of which is supposed to be the largest in Texas, at fifty-something feet tall.The room slopes sharply down, the floor a jumble of boulders, and flowstone cements them and the guano together. The rocks were pretty stable, but it was slippery in places, and Terry took about a ten foot slide down a leaning slab at one point, but managed to land pretty soundly on his feet.

At the bottom of the funnel, there’s a climb-down through thirty feet of breakdown to the top of the river pit. George swore that the rocks here which comprised the “top” of the pit seemed to have shifted in his ten-year absence, and he confirmed that there were some boulders on the floor of the pit that hadn’t been there previously, later when he reached the bottom of the rappel. This revelation naturally inspired a round of hearty sarcasm concerning our confidence in the anchor Charley had set in one of the larger boulders that spanned the top of the pit, but although it was impossible to tell which rock was holding up which, they all seemed pretty solid, so away we went.

We changed into wetsuits here, and I choked down a power bar and some water, then refilled the water bottle from a small, clean stream that issued out of a small hole where the pit opens up into the stream passage. From the pit we couch-walked through a low sandy bottomed stream for a couple of minutes until it emptied into the Sirion River. Upstream, it gets deep pretty quick, and this was the way we were headed to deliver Creature and her diving gear at the sump. The water is calm, and waist to chest-deep, with an occasional swim, or duck- under, the lowest of which had maybe 6 inches of airspace. This was my first experience with a low-airspace stream passage and I was surprised by how little it bothered me. I’d always assumed that it would be nerve-wracking in the same way my first tight crawls or deep pits were, but I was so enthralled by the mere fact of where I was that I forgot to get uptight. Five of us had come upstream-- Creature to do the diving, Terry and Jim carting gear and hoping to do a dome-climb near the sump, and George, who was taking water samples and had assigned himself the task of waiting patiently for Creature to return from the dive. Pam and I delivered our duffels, and hung out, watching Creature gear up until we started to get cold, then figured we'd push off towards our other objective, which was to try to extend the survey up a small side passage some 2 or 300 meters downstream from the intersection. Charley and Viv had already headed off downstream a ways to a high bolt climb that had been started some twelve years before, with hand-drilled anchors. Charley had lugged along his Bosch hammer drill with the intention of making significantly more progress towards a possible passage that could be seen perhaps 30 feet up.

We stopped at the intersection, where there’s a little dry ground on a gravel beach, and Pam played flash-monkey while I took a couple pictures before heading on downstream. Beyond its intersection with the stream, the Sirion River gets shallower and more rapid. It was mostly ankle to knee deep, and flowing along at a pretty good clip.There was the occasional waist-deep pool, but I was happy that at least while moving, my wetsuit which I’d bought for the trip was doing a pretty good job of keeping me warm. I’m notoriously thin-blooded, and I chill easily, so this had been of some concern to me prior to the trip, and I had nearly bought a much heavier wetsuit than the one I ended up with. The shorty that I settled on ended up being just the right compromise between thickness and mobility, though. I can’t imagine trying to move through a cave in a full wetsuit. I’d just fall over.

George and Jim had been discussing the curious absence of bats in the cave up to this point.Unfortunately for us, we found them-- several hundred-- in the small side passage we were supposed to push and survey. This was a small winding tube, maybe 24 inches by 48 on average, and there was no way for the bats to go around us and get out, so they kept bunching up tighter and tighter ahead of us, and I started to worry we’d cause more harm by trying to push on than it was worth, so we backtracked to the stream, and let the bats have their privacy without netting any survey. We took a couple more pictures, then decided to head downstream and see how Charley and Viv were doing on the bolt climb. We got there just as they were preparing to descend-- alas, the supposed lead was merely a six-foot deep alcove that went nowhere-- and I took Charlie’s drill back to the bottom of the River Pit for him while they derigged.

It was on the walk back upstream towards the River Pit that I began to realize how tired I was getting, and that we’d been in the cave for 10 hours already and had just started out. Pretty much everyone converged at the bottom of the pit at once, where the mood was celebratory. Creature’s dive had ended when she’d played out all 200 feet of her dive line, in the middle of large, going passage. I took the opportunity to take a break while Jim, Creature and Terry climbed. Terry hadn’t worn a wetsuit, and wanted to keep on going so he could get warm, as he’d been hanging around in the water at the upstream sump for a good while. I chewed up a power bar, and categorised their flavors into three groups; bad, terrible, and worse. The lemon powerbar, by the way, is not for eating, it is only for cave-pack ballast. Pam, and I were the last to head out, right behind George, who I had asked to wait for me at the top of the River Pit, as there is a tricky climb up through breakdown that I didn’t want to try for the first time without the helpful eyes of someone who had done it before. When we got to the climb, Pam was still on rope below us, so George suggested I give it a try, and see how it went. I quickly found myself sprawled out across the chimney, with no obvious maneuvers that would get me any higher. George said ?That’s the strangest way I’ve ever seen anyone attack that.? Then proceeded to effortlessly scale it the RIGHT way. ?Oh,? I remarked, concisely. Pam, being short-legged, was also glad to do the climb up there under George’s tutelage, so the three of us continued on out of the cave together.
The surface began to feel a very long ways away. We still had the cable ladder at the Inner Sanctum, the godawful traverse through the guano and slime-infested waters of the Bubble, Bubble Guano and Trouble passage, the Demon Drop, and another short climb right after it, the tight crawlway leading to the Poltergeist Pit, the pit itself, and what was to nearly be my bane, the tight crevice at the top of Poltergeist, followed finally by the Guano Drop, and the Witch’s Well at the entrance. I was feeling a bit tired, but not exhausted, as we got to the bottom of Poltergeist, and by then, we’d caught up with Terry and Jim, who’d let Charley and Viv pass a few minutes previously. I felt pretty rested by the time Jim had given the “off rope,” so I took first stab at Poltergeist, climbing relatively fast, and winding myself in the process.

I didn’t rest long enough at the bottom of the crevice, and tried to barge straight up it, without really thinking about what I was doing. Mistake. I managed a foot hold or two, and shinnied up about three or four feet, then progress halted. I couldn’t see footholds because my helmet would get jammed every time I tried to look down, and I started to flail, exhausting myself gaining the same ten inches, then slipping back down over and over again. The original explorers of the cave had rigged an elaborate pulley system out of steel bits that they welded and bolted together in the cave, a large hunk of which was jammed into the floor at the top of the crevice. Out of the top of this, at floor level, protruded two inch-tall rusty bolts, and beneath them was a loop of steel that looked like a good foothold, but that I just couldn’t quite get my foot into, over and over again. I tried moving sideways towards it, but slipped down, and caught the leg of my shorts on the bolts. Now, there was no way to move back or forth, and I couldn’t find anything under my left leg but air. I thought that this would be a good time to give up, slide the ten feet back down to the bottom of the crevice rest and regroup, but the shorts were not going to let go of those bolts. I was quite stuck. I pushed, thrashed, grunted and squirmed until I was literally out of strength, and the only way out I could see was to just flop down on my side, with all my weight on the bolts, but at least by doing so, my head and probably my shoulders would be clear of the crevice, and out on the floor of the room ahead. I just slid over and tried to ignore the stabbing pain of the bolts digging into my hip while I lay on my side and panted as hard as I could, completely out of strength, for maybe two minutes though it could have been longer. George finally hollered up from below “Everything all right up there?” to which I replied “I.... am..... NOT..... HAPPY!” Finally, after pondering the thought of him having to climb over me to summon a rescue, I decided I’d laid there long enough, and that I’d be goddamned if anyone was going to have to pull my ass out of there, and finally summoned the strength to push and pull myself, two inches at a time (I had bolt-marks at two-inch intervals along my thigh to measure by the next day) until I flopped, fish-out-of-water style, onto the floor of the Guano Drop. After 20 or so deep heaves of the chest, I managed a feeble “off rope,” and Pam headed up. She muttered and complained at the crevice, but got through in pretty short order, then in testament to our mutual exhaustion, proceeded to fall immediately asleep, snoring ever so softly. She got a little ten minute nap while I laid in the dark, listening to George climbing, then watched with chagrin as he easily placed his left foot on a protuberance I just didn’t see, and hauled himself out of the crevice in about 2 minutes flat. I’d recovered enough to make tracks for the entrance, and the Witch’s Well seemed like just a little speed bump between me and my sleeping bag. It was a clear, cool night, and as I topped the climb just inside the cave entrance, I caught sight of a rip-roaring campfire, welcoming me back and sending it’s embers up towards the roofless sky.

PESO project, Aquismon-Golandrinas area, Nov. 2003.

Imagine, if you will, six gringos jumping up and down, stamping their feet, running around with flashlights in the new-moon darkness shouting random phrases of surprise and dismay, and you'll have a clear enough picture of the scene as it began. Mark was the first to notice, as he wandered off into the vanguard of the storm before they had completely engulfed us. We'd been sitting serenely around our little campfire for a good while when he decided he needed something from his tent. "Man, there's a bunch of ants over here." was the first thing the rest of us heard, followed by "Shit! They're all in my tent" (Lesson one, dear gringos, keep your tent zipped up tight.) followed by "Shit! They're everywhere! Thousands of them!" This of course, got the rest of us up on our feet to see what all the excitement was about. "Whoa! Geez, look at all of em." was the first thing out of Jerry's mouth, followed pretty quickly by "Oh shit! They're over here too!" About this time, I decided to get up from my comfy chair and see what all the hubbub was about. I grabbed my headlamp and headed over to where Jerry and Ron were now busily exclaiming and doing a little "they're on me" dance and sure enough, all our caving gear, ropes, drills, tubs of carbide, etc. which was gathered in a pile under a little rain fly had turned to an undulating mass of black. "Where the hell are they coming from?" I wondered. I started to look around the periphery of the swarm as Ron headed for his truck to fetch a camera so he could get some shots of Mark furiously sweeping ants out of his tent. Mark at least had come prepared. His Taj Mahal-sized tent had all the comforts of home, including a full sized broom, which was coming in really handy right about then.

It was about this time that Mark made a couple of observations-- one was that his tent was also full of other hapless bugs who were fleeing ahead of the marauding invaders and the other was that they seemed to be underneath everything and weren't climbing up at all. He'd sweep for a bit, then pick something up and say "Oh, shit! There's a thousand more ants under here," followed by a fresh frenzy of sweeping and foot-stamping, until he'd brought that spot under control, whereupon he'd move something else and repeat the process. "They're getting under everything! Shit Aaahh." Stamp, stamp!

While the emergency tent-decontamination was underway, Jerry, Enora, Ben and I had been wandering about the campground trying to find the edges of the swarm, and figure out where they were coming from and what general direction they were moving in. What we found were several wide trails of streaming ants, moving more or less from lower ground to higher ground across the front third of the area we'd occupied between two pastures. There were two ant superhighways, one going under, and one emerging from underneath Mark's tent, both at least three to four inches wide. Another was moving right along a rain-diversion trench he'd dug behind his tent. Another large streaming trail had begun to form in front of Ben's tent and was moving through the gear tent, where formerly, they'd been just swarming in every direction. We began at that point to get a picture of the Modus Operandi of the invaders. The apparently have a roving swarm which seems almost directionless, but which really moves as a front, and they overwhelm whatever insects they happen upon in the 20-30-foot-wide front. Behind the front come the columns, 2, 3, 4 inches wide. And they come,and they come.

While the sweeping was winding down in Mark's tent, Ron had determined that a good spray of Off would generally deter them from moving in a certain direction, so those of us who hadn't had our tents overrun yet, proceeded to spray a nice, fat line of off around them. We retired to the relative safety of the campfire for a while until we noticed that the swarm had taken an ominous turn towards the cooking tent. "The food!" We jumped up again and hurriedly carted all our food tubs off to various vehicles, the whole time wondering aloud what good that could possibly do should they decide to mount the vehicles. It was probably futile, but we felt like we were doing something, and as it turned out, they never moved towards the trucks.

We watched from the periphery of the swarm for a good while as they caught and devoured one hapless bug after another. Jerry spotted a 4-legged spider attempting to effect an escape after losing all the legs on one side of his body, and everywhere out ahead of the swarm was a scattering herd of bugs of all sorts doing what they could to get gone before they got et.

After determining finally that they really weren't getting into the shut tents, Mark decided he'd had enough excitement and went to sleep even though a large quantity of ants was still moving under his in giant 4 inch swaths.
Those of us still around the fire got a good laugh watching him in silhouette shining his light in all the corners again and again. Ben decamped to his Jeep, as his tent, although shut, was still surrounded by the beasts, and he didn't think he could even get to it.

By then, a couple hours had passed, and there seemed to be no end in sight. Jerry and I sat up for a while after everyone else had decided it was safe to go to sleep (Jerry and Enora's tent as well as mine seemed to be outside of their path, Ben and Ron were sleeping in vehicles, and Mark was there in the thick of them, with the Ant Superhighway going right under his tent as he slept) and just sort of marveled at the phenomenon. There were interesting things we'd noticed while watching the passing of the swarm unfold. We could actually hear them where the swarm was sufficiently dense-- a sort of crackling, rustling noise as they walked through the grass and leaves. That gave a particularly ominous feeling, in a Hitchcock movie sort of way. These weren't (thank god) the kind of Army Ants that denude absolutely everything, like the Brazilian Leaf-Cutter Army Ants you see on the Discovery Channel on T.V. They seemed to be only interested in insects, and ignored the bits of food we tossed in to the swarm out of curiosity. They also stayed on the ground, except for one tree that they climbed. Although they bit, they didn't leave a stinging welt, like a fire ant, which is a good thing, because we all got bit a lot. They didn't go over anything that they could go under. They gathered in dense numbers under stuff, like ice chests or rocks that were laying on the surface, and they seemed to move mostly uphill.

When we got up the next morning, they were entirely gone. Thursday was thanksgiving, and we had invited Juan Casillo and family to Thanksgiving dinner at our camp, as a way of paying them back for their generosity. That evening, after dinner, we tried our best to explain what had befallen us the previous night, and we managed to glean a bit of information between slugs of "Caña," the potent sugar-cane hooch which the natives bootleg up in the hills. They are indeed pretty common, and they pour gasoline around their houses to keep them out when they swarm. What did they do before gasoline? I have no idea. Carlos explained in his broken English that the Army Ants always precede a rain. Sure enough, late Thursday night, it came, just like he said, just in time to wash away the second invasion, as it was beginning. We had barely enough time to jump up and shout "Hormigas!" before the sky opened and carried the pesky buggers away in a brief, but rather effective torrent.

TOP • CAVING MAIN PAGE • COMMERCIAL CAVES • PHOTO GALLERY • HOME • MUSIC