Hasler Cave 1/14/2024
Casey Tucker reporting
Casey, Harriet Flynn, Chris Meyle, and Katie Vik spent a little better than 4 hours surveying a cave on Sunday, January 14, 2024. The cave was known and had been explored, but did not have a known map.
Harriet & Casey made the landowner connections and set up the survey. While getting ready to enter the cave, a neighboring landowner came by to see us off. His report was that it was small and the 4 of us could barely fit in there together. Would we all be able to get in the cave?
This was Katie & Harriet’s first time surveying, hence the survey designation, BFS – Babies’ First Survey. They had a Disto & a Suunto Tandem, but after the first 5 shots, switched to passing the Disto back and forth for front and back sights. The team took a total of 25 shots for 264.8’ of passage, and a depth of 18.8’.
The entrance is at the base of a ~12’ cliff, which also holds a second entrance to the cave, impassable to humans without digging. The cave consists of two rooms connected by a crawlway and a few offshoot crawls and rooms off each of the big rooms. While well decorated with soda straws, flowstone, stalactites & stalagmites, the most prominent and consistent feature throughout the cave was scat. (Ah-brrr-iggy, brr-iggy, brr-iggy, haw) The was dry scat, fresh scat, slimy scat, moldy scat, scat growing hair like a chia pet on drugs, seedy scat, and scat dust. There were also numerous bones and skulls (raccoon)throughout the cave along with some old trash and organic detritus.
There are three digs in the cave, which may open up into other small rooms or passage. However, there was no air present on a very cold day (air temperature around 33 degrees F). Two of the digs connect via light and small room can be seen between them. There are no other leads, but plenty of scat if you’re into that sort of thing. Harriet, who had been in the cave previously, brought some dog bags to clean up some of the scat. Unfortunately, there was much more than she remembered, so only one bag of scat was removed. Thanks for the efforts, Harriet!
It was a good day of survey, and a map will soon follow. The cave was bigger than expected from the neighbors report, and we all fit comfortably throughout. Onward to the next cave!
You can check out the map here
Photos by Katie Vik
