Tower Domes

So today was a trip to Pine Hill Cave.  And it's only been a week since I took my cousins and a few friends from school... It seems like that was such a long time ago, already.

Anyway, the same guy that gave me directions to find certain rooms in Pine Hill Cave this summer, invited me on a trip to Pine Hill today.  It was nice to finally meet him in person.

We got to the entrance and made pretty good time.  I showed him the pool formations at the top of a crack.  He had never seen them before.  We made it to the Main Fork, and then we took the right passage.  Brandon and I tried several times to find the route to the tower domes, but we never did.  The first Dome was pretty impressive.  But what was even better, was Mike brought some high powered lights.  They lit up the domes pretty nice.

The second tower dome was close to the first.  It's almost like a connected maze.  And still after the second dome, is a large canyon.  It stretches quite a distance, and it twists and turns a little bit.  It's probably about 100 feet high.  At one end of the canyon Mike took me up into a little room where there are some impressive formations.

After we were done checking out this area, we made our way back to the main fork.  We took a short break, and ate some snacks, and then we continued on to the left fork.  We climbed up into the upper level.  Mike actually showed me a way that is safer to get to the skylight dome passage, not that my way is all that "dangerous".  But then he had me lead the way to the Art Room, and those surrounding passages.  I showed him some shortcuts I'd found up in that area, and we went through the passages.  I did make a discovery.  At the very back of the Art Room the floor slopes up and Mike and I studied the ground.  There were a couple fair sized tree roots coming out of the embankment, as well as smaller, more fibrous ones.  So we couldn't have been that far from the surface.

We made our way back, and dropped back down into the main level.  We continued on up to the waterfalls.  We went through most of them, except right before you would turn right to go to the "big" one, we climbed out of the stream passage.  It was time for some exploring.  I had been wanting to go away from the waterfalls for quite some time.  We followed it.  For a while it was mostly just a straight passage where water used to flow through.  Pretty soon, though, we began to see formations.  And at one point there is a massive flowstone formation, with stalactites all around.

We continued on past this.  There were two ways to go.  We eventually check them both out.  Both eventually end in breakdown.  The cave does not go much farther than this because it butts up against a valley floor.  However, on the second route we chose to go we did emerge from some breakdown to find a new dome.  Neither of us knew it existed.  But it's pretty cool.

We finished up exploring and then made our way out.  Overall it was a really fun trip.  Mike and I got to know each other some, and we had some really great conversations.  And, I've had a big situation come up in my life right now, and it was really nice to spend 5 hours caving today, and forget it even existed.  And it was even greater to see some brand new cave passage, compliments of God's handiwork!

                                           (Me, standing in the canyon)

Link to the rest of my photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/jholcomb8/20110116PineHillMike#

Link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnENWf2_wEQ