I tend to go to bed quite early as I start
work quite early, so my phone is usually on silent by 8:30. Thus is was that I
missed Michael’s in-coming txt late in the evening. When I blearily spied it
next morning hours before dawn my first, second and third thoughts were all the
same, ‘No’, ‘No’ and ‘No’.
Even without reading the txt I knew it
would be some cunning plan for a last dash caving excursion before Michael left
the West Coast, and ‘No’ I didn’t want to travel to some obscure corner of the
Coast mid-week, and ‘No’ I couldn’t afford to take any more time off work this
week and ‘No’ it doesn’t matter how exciting it sounds, I’m still not coming. So
I left the body of the txt message unread ’til a little later in the day.
When I did finally open the txt, “An Evening
Cave Trip”, “Exploring Uncharted Territory”, “Minimal Traveling Required”,
blurted out at me like a fistful of Newspaper headlines. Blast! Now he had my
attention. And having artfully dodged all of my pre-determined objections I was
forced to re-consider my response. Technically it would only be one hour off
work. And we would be home early enough for my usual bed-time – kind of anyway.
Aaaand it was a cave I really wanted to see. It would also be the last time I
would get to caving with Michael, at least for some time, whatever you may
think of that.
So ‘Yes’ was my txt reply, and I set about
tweaking my day’s schedule to make sure that the important things were covered
off in the first instance. Then if the afternoon got a little messy, it would
matter less when I knocked off early. Mid-afternoon Michael txt to say some
emergency had cropped up and was doing its best to delay him. I guess it’s hard
to expect absolute timeliness from an A&E doctor, people will have incidents
at inconvenient times – for them as well as me. As my schedule had been already
been foreshortened for the day, I just stuck with it, squeezed in an extra cup
of coffee and made my way leisurely toward our destination.
One of the handy things about Cairns
Catacombs is its proximity to the road. Park the car, hop out, grab your pack
and take three long or four short steps down to the river bed – it’s usually comfortably
dry, highly visible and clear from progress-hindering obstructions, a virtual
highway through the forest.
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| Where O where |
From here it can’t possibly be more than
80m along the river course to the entrance. A kind of ‘second on your left’
sort of thing, which for caving reads, ‘second gaping black hole at ground
level on your left’. Warren said it was thus, Michael recalled it being as such,
there was no reason, there is no reason to believe that it wasn’t just there
where it should be. Cave entrances are among the slowest moving things on
earth. If you drop one out of your pocket at the end of the day, you can sleep
easy for the night, confident of finding it in the self-same location the
following morning.
Discrepancies arise occasionally of course
as to ones recollection of where the
cave entrance was, this is well documented and makes for reliably good story-telling
by about mid-evening at your local watering hole. Having two or more people
recall that an entrance is in a particular place decreases the odds of it not being there by a factor of not quite,
but close to infinity. Does that make it sound like it was impossible to miss?
Excellent, so now then is perhaps the perfect time to mention that we missed
it.
 |
| Cave Search and Rescue |
We trekked confidently up this riparian
motorway for what we estimated was the appropriate length of trekking for such
an express-way. Yes, there was a gaping black hole which we could easily enter.
Opps! Except that it clearly wasn’t what we were looking for, as this entrance
went no further than the edge of daylight. Of course! We exclaimed to each
other with a chuckle it’s simple, the entrance we want is right next door. And
thus began our SAR for Cairns Catacomb. Under logs we peered, up on banks we
hunted, a little further upstream and a little further downstream we double
checked. We second guessed ourselves, we consulted our GPS devices, we recalled
to mind the time we were here with so and so and the funny thing that happened
that day. All to no avail.
Once our scalps would take no more
scratching, nor our mouths any more gaping wide-open, Warren pouted ‘It should be
just here,’ waving to a pile of logs
next to where we were moping. A pile we’d already carefully cast our eyes over.
‘Hmm,’ says Michael, ‘strange isn’t,’ leaning exhaustedly over a recumbent
beam, ‘just in here… here where there is quite a lot of blackness, and indeed of
general nothingness.’ And thus we found it, under our noses and more or less
exactly where it was supposed to be. Odd. Not really of course, just a tad
deceptive that’s all…
 |
| Here Tis |
I have to say it was the most
disconcerting cave entrance I’ve ever been through. Essentially it’s a rock
fall, through which you scramble, spending as much time and effort going
sideways and up as actually going in the desired general direction which is to
say down.
Some of the spaces between the rocks where
we crawled were of ‘conventional’ passage size, other were almost non-existent.
At any one junction it could not be taken for granted that the way on was
through the large obvious hole staring you in the face, or down through the
floor into the measureless suspense-laden inky blackness that you could just
tell was down there. There were moments when the way on seemed like it was
exactly back the way we’d just come from. It must be an extraordinary thing to
have to find your way back up through that lot to reach the realm of the living
once more.
It came as an incredulous revelation when
the cave finally transitioned from the rock fall that had gone on and on like a
particularly bad Friday afternoon (think ‘really could use a beer about now’),
into a solid single-axis bedding plane (think of the gap under your car) and
then shortly after into an orderly, spacious and quite frankly gorgeous
phreatic (think Hobbit hole) passage.
 |
| Which way is up |
It is certainly a bizarre feeling to be
aware that you’re quite some distance underneath
an ephemeral river bed. We wound our way further down and further in, passing
one junction after another. I began to hope all the more fervently that there
wouldn’t be some catastrophe that would necessitate me having to find my way
back out unaided.
Arriving at the ‘Uncharted Territory’
Michael quickly slithered out of sight down a one-way rift, leaving Warren Smith
and I to scratch about to see if there were any suitable anchors to secure the
rope to. There really wasn’t much on offer. Moreover the space that Warren and
I had to work with was uncomfortably cramped, it being a microwave sized alcove
on either side of 12m deep slippery sided rift. There were threads (holes
through the rock) but they were badly place and flimsy, brittle looking things.
While Michael is a compact individual one didn’t wish to be overly flippant
with the safety factor of the line. Happily for Michael (and maybe his wife
Sarah), Warren has a knack for making such things work and where others (me)
might have said there was no such anchor, he not only found the necessary
ingredients but also whipped up as nourishing an anchor as anyone could wish
for. Once the lead had been sufficiently assessed (as a no-go), Michael was
able to return from the inner most depths where no man had ever previously
been.
Michael’s promotional txt had specified a
maximum of 3 hours caving, which no sane person would have given any credence
to being even remotely realistic – we all know cavers right? Yet here we were
only 1 hour in and our primary mission was complete. So we puddled about on the
way out, exploring side lines, and eventually ending up at the Great Wall of
China. From there we crossed into Kublai Khan and into the Square Chamber (or whatever
it’s called) and thence to the edge of the tomo exit/entrance. After debating
the options open to us at this point we elected to cross through Xanadu,
picking up a couple of Warren’s much favoured features along the way and
ultimately out the river-bed level exit. 2 ½ hours from tip to toe and there
was still daylight to be had. The variety of solutional cave forms represented
in this one small area is barely less than astounding.
I couldn’t do it everyday, but there is
certainly something to be said for An Evening Cave Trip and of course we actually
got three for the price of one!
So far I’ve only gotten around to
uploading one short video of the trip, which can be viewed here
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