Post by L Roebuck on Sept 22, 2005 6:41:05 GMT -5
DOWN UNDER Cavers explore splendors of Snowy River
By Staci Matlock The New Mexican
September 22, 2005
In 2001, four cavers dug and crawled their way along a treacherous narrow passage into a new section of the BLM-managed Fort Stanton Cave in Lincoln County.
It was a breakthrough more than three decades in the making. Albuquerque building contractor and dig team leader Lloyd Swartz said it took seven trips that final year and a lot of coffee cans filled with dirt before he and his team broke into the new cave branch.
The speleologists’ reward: a spectacular long strip of white calcite stretching as far into they could see into the cavern’s darkness. “It was astounding,” Swartz recalled. “We weren’t expecting it. We sat on a slope nearby and just stared at it for about five minutes.”
They called it Snowy River.
Joe “Buzz” Hummel, a Bureau of Land Management natural resource specialist and caver, calls it “the greatest and largest cave discovery of the century.” The calcite river is the longest known such deposit in the world, he said. And cavers have only mapped 2.7 miles of it so far.
For cave scientists like Penelope J. Boston, director of New Mexico Tech’s Cave and Karst Studies Program, Snowy River represents the perfect laboratory to study microorganisms capable of living in extreme places. “Snowy River has many things it can teach us about cave environments, the surrounding geology, probably a lot to share about climate change in the last 10,000 years and about the biology of organisms that make their living there,” Boston said.
For Swartz, Snowy River was a study in the perseverance and instinct it takes to discover new sections of caves. “Almost none of the big cave discoveries now are made just walking into one,” Swartz said. “They all take digging.”
A bill currently before Congress, co-sponsored by New Mexico senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, would make the Fort Stanton/Snowy River Cave complex the first National Cave Conservation Area. The bill would conserve the cave complex for research and public education. Public access would be allowed “as appropriate,” while protecting newly discovered cave complexes such as Snowy River. It would allow the construction of research facilities and withdraw the area from any mineral exploration except for existing claims.
Fort Stanton Cave, situated between Lincoln and Capitan, was discovered by humans centuries ago. Archaeologists have found evidence Apaches and Pueblos used the cave. U.S. soldiers first entered the cave in 1855, leaving their names and units etched on the walls. The first serious exploration came 22 years later when a group called the Wheeler Expedition discovered deep-cave spots they named Hellhole and Lower Breakdown Passage.
Cavers follow airflows to figure out new passages into unexplored caverns, Hummel said. “Caves are always sucking in or blowing out,” he said.
By the early 1970s, cavers were focusing on a steady, strong flow in one spot of Fort Stanton cave. But after a couple of years, and a few hundred feet of hard digging, they got frustrated and stopped, Swartz said. Thirty years later, Swartz and others began where the other team left off. Their main tools were a crowbar, a pry tool called a wonderbar, a coffee can and a bucket.
The going was still hard and dangerous. They had corkscrew turns and places where they had to crawl under rock dragging their equipment behind them. “At one point we dropped a boulder the size of a piano (when they removed a rock),” Swartz said.
In the end, they finished a 1,100-foot passage to enter the Snowy River Cave. “It takes over an hour to crawl through it if you’re in good shape,” said Hummel, who was in the cave this summer.
Swartz said he’s one of about two-dozen cavers in the state who actually do the rigorous, risky work of digging routes to new caves such as Snowy River. “Digging is my thing,” he said. “It’s hard to find people who’ll do it.”
Shortly after the team found Snowy River, politics came into play like they did after Lechuguilla Cave complex was discovered in 1986, Swartz said. “You had everyone arguing over who should study the caves and how it should be done. It was cavers against cavers and cavers against the land management companies,” Swartz said.
Exploration of Snowy River came to a stand still for almost three years. “There was a lot of angry letters back and forth,” Swartz said. “Some people think only specialists should be allowed to study the caves. But diggers risk their lives to find them. They should get to explore them.”
Swartz credits BLM New Mexico state director Linda Rundell with jump-starting the Snowy River Cave exploration again. In part, research had to stop while an environmental assessment was completed. Cavers began surveying and documenting new portions of the cave complex in 2004.
Hummel said cavers are essential to the continued study of unexplored voids like Snowy River on BLM land. “These caves are essentially managed by the cavers, who are all volunteers ,” Hummel said. “We don’t have the expertise or the money to manage them.”
In Snowy River, cavers keep finding unique formations, like large star-like gypsum crystal formations scattered across one cave’s ceiling. The crystals appear to grow from the center and scatter out, but scientists still don’t understand why they form the pattern, Hummel said.
The already explored Ft. Stanton Cave is open to the public with a special use permit from the BLM, Hummel said. But the Snowy River passage and its entrance are closed to all except cave researchers mapping out its secrets. Cavers are trying to create a new, safer entrance to the cave complex.
Cavers like to share their discoveries — such as the Lechuguilla Cave in the Carlsbad Complex, now mapped to 115 miles in length. But they also know how hard the general public can be on caves, leaving behind trash and graffiti. In 1960, cavers carried out whiskey and beer bottles, tin cans and other garbage from the entrance to Fort Stanton Cave, according to a history by Sam Bono.
Cave environments are fragile and sensitive, Boston said. Even researchers have to be careful to avoid contaminating Snowy River or any new cave with food, hair, or equipment. Researchers pack out everything they take in — including their wastes.
On weeklong underground research excursions like the ones Los Alamos electrical engineer and caver John Lyles leads into Lechuguilla, researchers don’t worry much about what they wear. “We stay filthy for a week,” he said. “We look like coal miners when we come out.”
Researchers don’t stay overnight at Snowy River but they have an extra challenge. Researchers don’t want to leave imprints on the pure white calcite. They change out of the grubby clothes used for crawling into Snowy River into clean clothes and special shoes that won’t leave scuff marks.
The Snowy River Cave is what researchers call pristine. It’s an underground wilderness millions of years old and untrammeled by humans until now. It gives researchers like Boston a unique opportunity to study the microscopic and other organisms that somehow have managed to eke out a living with no sunlight and little organic food. These tiny survivors eat rock, leaving behind a black mineral crust on the ceiling and walls.
Boston’s team has cultured and examined more than 50 different strains of microbes. At least 20 are new discoveries . What Boston’s team learns from these new rock-eating organisms will provide clues to how life might thrive in extraterrestrial extreme environments such as Mars.
Caves, like Snowy River, represent a kind of last frontier for inveterate cavers. “We just have no idea what’s underneath us when we walk around,” Hummel said. “It’s a whole other world.”
The unknown mysteries appeal to cavers. “Mainly it is the ability to go where no one else has on earth,” Lyles said. “It is like climbing a new route on Everest, only underground. It takes you into a frontier most people don’t get to see or want to see.” WANT TO GO?
Snowy River is off-limits to the public but adjacent Fort Stanton Cave offers hours of exploring with velvet formations and selenite needles. Only experienced cavers should venture past the aptly named Hellhole, according to BLM officials. The names of other cave sections — Sewer Pipe, Devil’s Backbone and Skinner’s Squeeze — might make the faint-of-heart think twice before crawling in.
Fort Stanton Cave is off N.M. 380 between Lincoln and Capitan. You’ll need to request a permit to enter the gated and locked cave about two weeks in advance from the Bureau of Land Managment, Department of the Interior, 1717 W. Second, Box 1397, Roswell, NM, 88201. Go prepared with good boots, a helmet, three light sources, water, gloves and knee pads. Dress warmly. Cave temperatures are around 54 degrees Farenheit. The Fort Stanton Cave is closed to the public from Nov. 1 through April to make room for guests with standing reservations — wintering bats. Contact Staci Matlock at smatlock@sfnewmexican .com or 470-9843 .
www.freenewmexican.com/news/32825.html
By Staci Matlock The New Mexican
September 22, 2005
In 2001, four cavers dug and crawled their way along a treacherous narrow passage into a new section of the BLM-managed Fort Stanton Cave in Lincoln County.
It was a breakthrough more than three decades in the making. Albuquerque building contractor and dig team leader Lloyd Swartz said it took seven trips that final year and a lot of coffee cans filled with dirt before he and his team broke into the new cave branch.
The speleologists’ reward: a spectacular long strip of white calcite stretching as far into they could see into the cavern’s darkness. “It was astounding,” Swartz recalled. “We weren’t expecting it. We sat on a slope nearby and just stared at it for about five minutes.”
They called it Snowy River.
Joe “Buzz” Hummel, a Bureau of Land Management natural resource specialist and caver, calls it “the greatest and largest cave discovery of the century.” The calcite river is the longest known such deposit in the world, he said. And cavers have only mapped 2.7 miles of it so far.
For cave scientists like Penelope J. Boston, director of New Mexico Tech’s Cave and Karst Studies Program, Snowy River represents the perfect laboratory to study microorganisms capable of living in extreme places. “Snowy River has many things it can teach us about cave environments, the surrounding geology, probably a lot to share about climate change in the last 10,000 years and about the biology of organisms that make their living there,” Boston said.
For Swartz, Snowy River was a study in the perseverance and instinct it takes to discover new sections of caves. “Almost none of the big cave discoveries now are made just walking into one,” Swartz said. “They all take digging.”
A bill currently before Congress, co-sponsored by New Mexico senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, would make the Fort Stanton/Snowy River Cave complex the first National Cave Conservation Area. The bill would conserve the cave complex for research and public education. Public access would be allowed “as appropriate,” while protecting newly discovered cave complexes such as Snowy River. It would allow the construction of research facilities and withdraw the area from any mineral exploration except for existing claims.
Fort Stanton Cave, situated between Lincoln and Capitan, was discovered by humans centuries ago. Archaeologists have found evidence Apaches and Pueblos used the cave. U.S. soldiers first entered the cave in 1855, leaving their names and units etched on the walls. The first serious exploration came 22 years later when a group called the Wheeler Expedition discovered deep-cave spots they named Hellhole and Lower Breakdown Passage.
Cavers follow airflows to figure out new passages into unexplored caverns, Hummel said. “Caves are always sucking in or blowing out,” he said.
By the early 1970s, cavers were focusing on a steady, strong flow in one spot of Fort Stanton cave. But after a couple of years, and a few hundred feet of hard digging, they got frustrated and stopped, Swartz said. Thirty years later, Swartz and others began where the other team left off. Their main tools were a crowbar, a pry tool called a wonderbar, a coffee can and a bucket.
The going was still hard and dangerous. They had corkscrew turns and places where they had to crawl under rock dragging their equipment behind them. “At one point we dropped a boulder the size of a piano (when they removed a rock),” Swartz said.
In the end, they finished a 1,100-foot passage to enter the Snowy River Cave. “It takes over an hour to crawl through it if you’re in good shape,” said Hummel, who was in the cave this summer.
Swartz said he’s one of about two-dozen cavers in the state who actually do the rigorous, risky work of digging routes to new caves such as Snowy River. “Digging is my thing,” he said. “It’s hard to find people who’ll do it.”
Shortly after the team found Snowy River, politics came into play like they did after Lechuguilla Cave complex was discovered in 1986, Swartz said. “You had everyone arguing over who should study the caves and how it should be done. It was cavers against cavers and cavers against the land management companies,” Swartz said.
Exploration of Snowy River came to a stand still for almost three years. “There was a lot of angry letters back and forth,” Swartz said. “Some people think only specialists should be allowed to study the caves. But diggers risk their lives to find them. They should get to explore them.”
Swartz credits BLM New Mexico state director Linda Rundell with jump-starting the Snowy River Cave exploration again. In part, research had to stop while an environmental assessment was completed. Cavers began surveying and documenting new portions of the cave complex in 2004.
Hummel said cavers are essential to the continued study of unexplored voids like Snowy River on BLM land. “These caves are essentially managed by the cavers, who are all volunteers ,” Hummel said. “We don’t have the expertise or the money to manage them.”
In Snowy River, cavers keep finding unique formations, like large star-like gypsum crystal formations scattered across one cave’s ceiling. The crystals appear to grow from the center and scatter out, but scientists still don’t understand why they form the pattern, Hummel said.
The already explored Ft. Stanton Cave is open to the public with a special use permit from the BLM, Hummel said. But the Snowy River passage and its entrance are closed to all except cave researchers mapping out its secrets. Cavers are trying to create a new, safer entrance to the cave complex.
Cavers like to share their discoveries — such as the Lechuguilla Cave in the Carlsbad Complex, now mapped to 115 miles in length. But they also know how hard the general public can be on caves, leaving behind trash and graffiti. In 1960, cavers carried out whiskey and beer bottles, tin cans and other garbage from the entrance to Fort Stanton Cave, according to a history by Sam Bono.
Cave environments are fragile and sensitive, Boston said. Even researchers have to be careful to avoid contaminating Snowy River or any new cave with food, hair, or equipment. Researchers pack out everything they take in — including their wastes.
On weeklong underground research excursions like the ones Los Alamos electrical engineer and caver John Lyles leads into Lechuguilla, researchers don’t worry much about what they wear. “We stay filthy for a week,” he said. “We look like coal miners when we come out.”
Researchers don’t stay overnight at Snowy River but they have an extra challenge. Researchers don’t want to leave imprints on the pure white calcite. They change out of the grubby clothes used for crawling into Snowy River into clean clothes and special shoes that won’t leave scuff marks.
The Snowy River Cave is what researchers call pristine. It’s an underground wilderness millions of years old and untrammeled by humans until now. It gives researchers like Boston a unique opportunity to study the microscopic and other organisms that somehow have managed to eke out a living with no sunlight and little organic food. These tiny survivors eat rock, leaving behind a black mineral crust on the ceiling and walls.
Boston’s team has cultured and examined more than 50 different strains of microbes. At least 20 are new discoveries . What Boston’s team learns from these new rock-eating organisms will provide clues to how life might thrive in extraterrestrial extreme environments such as Mars.
Caves, like Snowy River, represent a kind of last frontier for inveterate cavers. “We just have no idea what’s underneath us when we walk around,” Hummel said. “It’s a whole other world.”
The unknown mysteries appeal to cavers. “Mainly it is the ability to go where no one else has on earth,” Lyles said. “It is like climbing a new route on Everest, only underground. It takes you into a frontier most people don’t get to see or want to see.” WANT TO GO?
Snowy River is off-limits to the public but adjacent Fort Stanton Cave offers hours of exploring with velvet formations and selenite needles. Only experienced cavers should venture past the aptly named Hellhole, according to BLM officials. The names of other cave sections — Sewer Pipe, Devil’s Backbone and Skinner’s Squeeze — might make the faint-of-heart think twice before crawling in.
Fort Stanton Cave is off N.M. 380 between Lincoln and Capitan. You’ll need to request a permit to enter the gated and locked cave about two weeks in advance from the Bureau of Land Managment, Department of the Interior, 1717 W. Second, Box 1397, Roswell, NM, 88201. Go prepared with good boots, a helmet, three light sources, water, gloves and knee pads. Dress warmly. Cave temperatures are around 54 degrees Farenheit. The Fort Stanton Cave is closed to the public from Nov. 1 through April to make room for guests with standing reservations — wintering bats. Contact Staci Matlock at smatlock@sfnewmexican .com or 470-9843 .
www.freenewmexican.com/news/32825.html