Paxton’s Cave - 5/25
Aidan Ward reporting
Cavers: Stephanie Gibbons, Renee Erickson, Robbie Erickson, Scott Buchanan, Kelly Mathis, Mimi Feuerlein, Griffin Yates, Hunter Yates, Ben Eppard, Robert Joseph, Michael Brookshire, Aidan Ward
We all met at the Wal-mart in Covington around 10:30, and once everyone had arrived we loaded up into a few vehicles and drove about 25 minutes to the cave's parking area. We geared up and entered the cave at approximately 11:45am.
We first spent some time exploring the labyrinthine network of canyon passages near the entrance, walking through large passages, squeezing through pinches and scrambling up and down breakdown. To my surprise, we eventually popped out into a large room, about 30 feet wide and 120 feet long, with large breakdown covering the floor and branching passages leading out in several directions. I had never been to this room before, but I believe it's somewhere on the far (south) end of "The Great Maze" section. I didn't realize it until looking at the map after the trip, but had we continued venturing further from here, we might have made it to the Anthodite Galleries or the Crystal River Section.
That'll have to be for another day though, because from here we backtracked to the entrance room and headed to the Big Room, which is about 50 feet wide and 130 feet long. We had lunch here, found a frog, and some of us poked around the well-decorated side room and the mud passages beyond it.
After our break we backtracked again, leaving the eastern end of the cave and heading west towards the First Formation Room. Stephanie and I hung back while Renee led the rest of the group through crawls that they discovered were unusually muddy and debri-covered, with the mud being very wet and slippery. Renee hypothesized that this was due to the recent flooding that happened in Paxton's earlier in the year.
Stephanie and I exited the cave around 3:20pm and were greeted about 20 minutes later by 10 very muddy but smiling cavers.
