Saturday September 5, 2009 Page County Cave Survey Trip Report

Nathan Farrar

Well, after waiting for 20ish minutes at the Zirkle’s entrance, I realized that Scott

Wahlquist and Bill Murray were probably waiting for me at the usual meeting spot – the

Luray park and ride, so I headed over there to find them, and sure enough, they were

wondering where I was. We had all been up early and we had met at that spot the past

four or so times, so I can’t blame them, and the cave didn’t have that much left to survey,

so time wasn’t very pressing anywho. We didn’t chat long in the park and ride before

heading (back) over to Zirkles.

We quickly got dressed and headed on in (the demon baby was still freaky, but

Bill pointed out that it was probably once some girl’s favorite at one point in time). We

started the “D” survey right off A18 where the “big room” had a small alcove off to the

side with a very low ceiling (1 foot) crawl space off of it. Scott had looked into this crawl

space before and saw that it went a little ways. Indeed it did go a little ways past the

room – there was a dug trench out of the crawl space into a little ramp up to a small to

medium room with a nice large breakdown slab as the centerpiece (the tip of which made

a very convenient station).

Finishing off that section, we headed to finish up the tail end of the big room.

What I had thought to be the wall of this room ended up being a long running mound

with a good portion of room on the other side. In fact, the mound was very interesting as

it ran probably 40ish feet at 3 feet tall and had a large solutionally enlarged fracture

directly above running right with it. In a little side room off of this part of the big room, I

found (among the MANY MANY claw marks) a set of large claw marks – bear size.

Immediately back into the survey of the big room, we found what appears to be a bear

wallow. Believe you me, jokes of bears killing us in the near future soon followed. We

later found another nearby.

At the high side of the lengthy mound was a very low ceiling continuing of the

big room. Scott and I crawled back in there as far as we could, but there was no way on

for a human, but the air sure was passing through. If there was a point in the cave to

modify, that would have been it, but it would be a project – definitely the best air at a dig

in the cave yet.

By this point, I was getting tired of getting frustrated (yeah, tired of being

frustrated) at the difficulty of sketching this cave (my first sketching project). But all we

had left was one little lead that Scott figured wouldn’t go far from when he checked it out

last.

He was wrong: fortunately for the length of the cave; unfortunately for a

frustrated sketcher.

So we did a little shot off of A22 to get down into ANOTHER LOW CEILING

LARGE AREA ROOM. As Scott put it repeatedly: “DAMN A22!”. Although, the

ceiling of this room was the best yet – it completely covered in soda straws. We decided

to start surveying around the perimeter of the room. Scott, while searching for the next

station location, found a “very shiny” pile of relatively new scat. Believe it or not, the

multitude of berries in the scat (not sure what type of animal this came from) were in no

way digested. The pile looked like a wet shiny pile of berries… but smelled horrible.

Maybe a bear’s??? After a few shots in, and joking about how we would surely

find “another low ceiling large area room” off of this one…. Scott did. So I decided I was

done for the day, and I had to get over to Phil Lucas’ for a barbecue anyways. It was a

good day of survey, and the ever illusive Zirkle’s cave continues to not have an end.

With all of these large rooms with perimeter surveys, I have no idea how I’m going to

come up with a total cave length…

As of now, the cave statistics are as follows:

Total survey length = 1409.7ft

Depth from entrance = 60.9 feet (at our last station, D24)

Average shot length = 17.3