Cave Survey Guidelines, and Other Things

A few years ago, Bev and I wrote a set of notes for new cavers on how to be a (both effective and efficient) part of a survey team. Basically, how to read instruments, set stations, communicate with the sketcher, etc. Which, really, is a good (the best?) way to get involved with and invited to caving projects, until you progress from there to learning how to sketch and draft maps, amongst other things.

David surveying in Punkin Cave, a couple of years ago... ;-)

While surveying in Quintana Roo over the holidays, I had time to reflect on this and also to collect some extremely useful comments from the fellow cavers who were around. I've finally managed to consolidate all this and publish an update on our Grotto web page:

Cave Survey - Using Tape / Disto and Instruments (PDF version)

In other news that will be less interesting to the general public, I'm currently spending a few weeks in Texas before heading to China for an expedition over Spring Festival. Besides participating in a cave digging project in Austin, (which is surprisingly fun, I have to admit as somebody who doesn't dig much in caves,) we made some progress in my project cave O-9 Well last weekend.

Line plot of survey data from Walls (a cave survey database application). 100 meter-grid. The orange stuff was added to the survey last Saturday.

Nine Texas cavers headed out west to continue the re-survey of the cave in three teams. All in all, we surveyed over 500 meters of fairly small, muddy, and wet passage. It took us longer than I had expected, too. But, all the main passage has now been re-surveyed, and what's left to do is to follow a side lead to where it's likely to end under a plugged sinkhole (the leg taking off to the north on the line plot above). And, of course, for me to draft the final map of the cave based on the survey data and sketches -- the primary reason for starting the project.

Apart from that, I'm dragging behind with accomplishing the various things on my to-do list. Something that hasn't changed since I left my job. Ah well.

Quintana Roo Cave Mapping Project

Over the holidays, Andrea and I went to Quintana Roo (in México, it's the state sharing a peninsula with the Yucatán) for ten days. Our aim was to help with the survey of dry caves in the region, conducted by the Quintana Roo Cave Mapping Project. (Dry caves in this context mean they aren't underwater caves that require cave diving -- there may still be streams and lakes.) The particular objective of this trip was to create a high-quality re-survey of a cave system that is also being used by a natural reserve tour operator, just south of Playa del Carmen. The resulting data will then be used to create a new map for the cave.

It was both plush and productive caving. All in all, our group surveyed over 27 km of cave on this trip. I personally contributed about 2 km of sketching over 9 caving days -- some in chest-high water, but most of it looping through a huge breakdown room with multiple chambers created by the breakdown. Frequently running out of pages made my brain hurt sometimes, though. (See photos of pages of my survey book. They will be replaced with better copies soon.)

A page from my survey book, showing the south-east corner of a large breakdown room we surveyed.

Survey notes. Distance between survey stations, as well as azimuth and inclination readings.

Since the caves are all located in the jungle and close to the surface, they have a rich fauna. Amongst other creatures, we frequently saw amblypygids, tarantulas, small catfish, cave-adapted fish, cave crickets, etc.

Amblypygid sensing around for prey. No scale, sadly, but there were some pretty big ones in the caves.

Our group of 20+ cavers mostly camped on the same property in the jungle that our main cave entrances were located on. We had flush toilets, showers, a pool, and daily breakfast and dinner were cooked for us -- couldn't be better! In between, we took a day off to visit the Maya ruins in Cobá and go snorkeling in the Gran Cenote outside of Tulum. Traveling from Texas to our camp was fairly straightforward, too -- direct flights between Austin and Cancún. Fun times all around.

Cutting (not quite ripe) coconuts to mix their juice with rum on Christmas Eve. :-)

I didn't take many pictures, and the few I took are of pretty low quality, but for completeness, the public photos of this trip can be found here on SmugMug.

Photos: Nepal, Bhutan, Bangkok

Happy 2013!

Views in the Khumbu Region of Nepal

Views in the Khumbu Region of Nepal

Over the holidays I finally managed to edit photos from my recent travels. If you are interested in taking a peak, here are the links to my public SmugMug albums:

• Glacier Caves in the Khumbu: Pictures, Blog Entry
• Trekking in the Khumbu: Pictures, Blog Entry
• Kathmandu: Pictures, Blog Entry
• Bhutan: Pictures, Blog Entry
• Bangkok: Pictures, Blog Entry

Bangkok and The Conclusion of Trip #1

On my way home, I stopped in Bangkok for a couple of days, since I had never been there before. What a fun place!

I spent a lot of time walking around, although the city is pretty accessible by metro, train, and cheap, reliable taxis. I felt pretty safe regardless of where I ended up, day and night - Bangkok's residents seem to usually return every smile and be pretty friendly folks. Obviously, there are enough tourists in the city that plenty vendors are in the business of marketing things and services (including "massages", of course) to the likes of us, but even those weren't very aggressive. (Or maybe I've just grown a thicker skin.)

I decided that the risk for montezuma's revenge was manageable, and ended up snacking constantly from food vendors on the streets and in little stalls, which was both quite affordable and super-tasty. I wonder whether it is even possible to exhaust one's appetite for Thai food in all its varieties? And my favorite thing about Bangkok's nightlife? Old Volkswagen Buses converted into mobile cocktail bars that set up in busy streets at night!

A T2 converted into a mobile cocktail bar - pure genius! I see a project in my (distant) future.

As the first trip of "David's Year Off" concludes, I am enjoying the luxury of getting home without having to go to work the next day. Although I am keeping myself busy with cave management reports that are due at the end of the year, and such things.

A few things that I have learned:

• While it appears that my renter's insurance principally covers me dropping my brand-new point-and-shoot camera into a hole in a glacier cave in Nepal, the deductible is higher than what the camera cost.
• I am still hostel / dorm-room compatible, it seems. I slept surprisingly well in the dorm room in Bangkok, and had fun drinking with the random strangers who were also staying at that place.
• I still consider myself a point-and-shoot photographer, but I think I learned a lot about using my (slightly outdated) Nikon D80 in the past few weeks.

Market on Th Din Daeng.

My Bangkok photos can be found on Smugmug. (The Nepal and Bhutan ones are still being edited.)

A Week in Bhutan

Since we were already in that part of Asia, Vickie and I had decided to use the opportunity and spend some days touristing in Bhutan before heading back home. A week was about the maximum that I wanted to afford on my year-off budget, as Bhutan is quite different from the style of traveling that I'm used to: regardless of itinerary and activities, you always pay the same government-mandated fixed daily rate and choose from a (fairly large) number of available tour operators that will provide a custom itinerary, driver, and guide. No taking the bus to places and choosing your own budget hotels. In return, you get to visit a country that successfully manages to preserve its culture and natural resources while not censoring its people or flat-out rejecting modern technology.

We got picked up by our driver and our guide at the airport, and got whisked to Punakha, where we visited the dzong (fortress) and the temple of the Divine Madman the next morning. From there, we moved on to Phobjikha, with the intent to see some black-necked cranes spending their winter in the Hidden Valley. The next morning saw us hiking the Shasila trail, a few hundred meters up and then about a kilometer down in elevation. It followed a day in Thimphu, and then two nights in Paro. (Including a visit of the Tiger's Nest, of course.) Beautiful places everywhere. We learned a lot about Buddhism from our guide, too. And, courtesy of the season, sun everyday, with a sweater (or more layers, at higher elevations) required at night.

Black-necked cranes

The hotels our travel agency booked us in were all beyond our expectations, to varying degrees. (Our expectations having been fueled by staying in mountain lodges in the Solukhumbu for the past month, but anyway. ;-)) Hot water anywhere anytime, comfortable beds, and decent food throughout, although most of the time buffet-style and, citing the Lonely Planet from memory, prepared "to not offend anyone". Talking about it...

Bhutanese food is quite interesting. Chilies are the main ingredient for some of the dishes, not just an addition to spice things up. The hottest ema datshi that we had was in Thimphu and drove pleasant sweat onto my forehead; others weren't quite as bad and had probably been watered down for us tourists. Meat is mainly brought in from India, since Buddhists have a hard time killing animals. Decent beer is to be had (Red Panda Weiss Beer, and Druk 11000 "Super Strong Beer"), although my IPA-loving friends might not get too happy here.

Chilies drying on a roof.

Thinking about going yourself? Make sure you tell your guide company your preferences, so that they can tailor your itinerary accordingly. In our case, deviations from a canned seven-day itinerary included making it to Phobjikha, and spending a day on a hike. If we had known/thought about it before, it might have also included staying in a hotel in town in Paro, allowing us to roam around in the evening, instead of at the really nice but remote resort we ended up at. Any spontaneous requests that don't involve changing hotel reservations can easily be handled by your guide, as well.

All in all, I think it was a worthwhile investment. Although a week of being driven around and guided to (admittedly beautiful) touristy sights is about what I can handle, I think. (We were limited to the western part of Bhutan, anyway, since driving up and down winding mountain roads takes its time and you can't just zip around 100s of kilometers in a day.) I'm glad we had some hiking built in. If I was to go again and/or for a longer time frame, paying the tourist rate, I'd probably want to build in some multi-day trekking. (Climbing mountains is off limits in Bhutan.) We also saw some Westerners riding around on mountain bikes, which could be fun.

Archery tournament in Thimphu. (A regional semi-final. ;))

Glacier Caves

The day we made it to Gokyo, we spent the afternoon climbing up the lateral moraine to get our first glimpse of the glacier. It was awe-inspiring. The Ngozumpa is a debris-covered glacier. It is fed in its accumulation zone by avalanches, so the snow contains a lot of rocks/boulders of all sizes. When the upper layers of the ice and rock mixture melt, the rocks (debris) is left over and covers the surface of the glacier.

View north onto the Ngozumpa from the lateral moraine at Gokyo.

Lakes of melt water form on the glacier, exposing ice faces. The drainage of those supra-glacial lakes into lower basins on the glacier is the primary cause for the formation of caves in the ice. (Water streaming across the bedrock under the glacier being another, but those were not caves we were expecting to find on this trip due to the depth of the glacier.) After such a drainage event, cave entrances are often visible in the ice faces of drained lake basins, and this is what we were after. (Entering crevasses or moulins in the hopes of finding caves on debris-covered glaciers does not seem to be a good idea, since inevitable, you will be showered in debris when attempting to do so.) Luckily, we were able to identify several potential cave entrances during this first recon trip, and even a convenient way onto the glacier down the steep moraine -- a few years ago, the trail that leads to Dragnag and the Cho La on the other side of the glacier had moved north about two kilometers and now allowed (relatively) easy access to the glacier directly from our lodge in Gokyo.

During our two weeks in Gokyo, we found a total of four caves that we explored, and investigated a number of other entrances that either didn't go anywhere or appeared to dangerous for us wanting to spend time in them:

Jason explaining the basics of glacier cave relevance for GlacierWorks footage.

Cave #1 had a huge keyhole entrance and was maybe 500-600 meters long. It turned out that Jason had already surveyed this cave in 2009. The cave had experienced several modifications since then, including a new branch of passage that led to another entrance in a different (dry) lake basin. We started a re-survey, and Vickie and I learned the particularities of surveying ice caves: setting survey stations with an ice screw and marking them with paper flags, and being particularly accurate with LRUDs (left-right-up-down measurements from the station). In the meantime, Jason and Pati started measuring the scallops on the cave walls that indicate the direction and flow rate of the water through the cave during the drainage event that created the cave. They soon realized that this cave had experienced too many such events to be useful for the model that Jason was looking to create, and we abandoned the survey.

Cave #2 was a small, nicely decorated room in the dry lake basin that could be reached by a trip through Cave #1. Caves #3 and #4 were found toward the end of our stay. #3 started out as a fairly large room with a low ceiling, and a canyon carved through the ice on one side of the room. Below that canyon, more cave passage could be made out, but not reached. At least not with the limited amount of vertical gear that we had made the porters drag up the mountains. (We hadn't bothered, because previous expeditions had not found much in terms of vertically developed caves on the glaciers in the Solukhumbu region.) Cave #4 was a few hundred meters long and fairly well decorated with ice formations. By the time we found it, we had run out of time for a proper survey, though.

Pati admiring drapery.

On our last caving day, we returned to cave #1 to help David Breashears of GlacierWorks, who we had run into a few days earlier, make the cave virtually accessible for education purposes. Mainly by Jason pointing out and explaining relevant features of the cave to support still and video photography taken by GlacierWorks.

To sum it all up: We had a good time, got to go play in some beautiful caves, help an education project, and learn some new things about the Ngozumpa Glacier. And since this was a self-financed trip, we also took the liberty to "tourist" around and spend afternoons climbing Gokyo Ri and hiking out to the Fifth Lake for a view of the intersection between the Gyazumba and Ngozumpa Glaciers. A truly beautiful place.

View from Gokyo Ri at sunset: Everest & Co; southern part of the Ngozumpa; Gokyo; and parts of the Third Lake.

p.s.: Don't try this at home. ;-) While some of the dangers of glacier caving are quite obvious (rocks hitting you while you run in or out of the debris-covered entrance), others (such as, false floors, and cracks in the ice that indicate the potential for a collapse) aren't. Jason spent several hours teaching us what to watch out for...

Traveling in the Khumbu

We made it. From Kathmandu at the end of October to the "most dangerous airport in the world" (Lukla, at 2840 m elevation), and then up the mountains for not quite two vertical kilometers, to Gokyo (at 4790 m / 15715 ft). And back about four weeks later. This blog post will summarize our travels, and I will write a separate one on the glacier caving we got to do during our two-week long stay in Gokyo...

Turnaround time for passenger machines seems to average something like 5-10 minutes. The one in the background is on the runway, about to take off.

Flying (into and back) out of Lukla airport, with its 12 degree sloped and 460 m long runway, is quite entertaining. (The seeming chaos introduced by the airlines' check-in systems is almost worth a separate blog entry, but on the other hand is nothing that can't be dealt with...) Due to our issues with getting a flight out to Lukla from Kathmandu in the first place, we had decided to actually make reservations for a return flight on a specific date, rather than getting an "open return" ticket that allows more flexibility. This proved to be a smart move a month later when we were ready to return to Kathmandu, since bad weather and the going bankrupt of another airline left many people stranded in Lukla, waiting for seats on full flights to open up.

Only Jason had been at these altitudes for a prolonged time before, so we had an interesting time figuring out how the rest of us would adjust to it. General recommendations for people who don't know how well they acclimatize seem to include to move up about 300 to 500 meters a day, and to spend a rest day every 1000 m or so. So we learned all about the symptoms of altitude sickness (AMS, HACE, HAPE), but our constant self-diagnosis attempts got interfered with by various colds and other aches that everybody in our group was fighting on the way up -- not the ideal condition for quick acclimatization, it turns out.

We spent extra rest days at Namche Bazaar, where a German bakery serves really excellent cappuccino and pastries, and in Machermo, where you can attend a free talk about altitude sickness every afternoon at IPPG's volunteer-staffed Porter Shelter and Rescue Post. And we decided to head straight for Gokyo and the Ngozumpa Glacier, instead of paying Gorak Shep and the Khumbu Glacier (at even higher elevation) a visit first.

I think I personally dealt with the altitude OK. I rarely felt sick, other than having a mild cold at some time and a stuffy nose most of the time -- things I usually incur quickly when in colder climates. But after two weeks in Gokyo, climbing up the lateral moraine to get out of the glacier was still quite a strenuous task, as was climbing more than just a few stair steps. But maybe that is just they way it is. ;-)

Trekkers trekking, horses porting, and cavers resting on the way up.

Apart from the elevation, traveling on the established tourist routes in the Khumbu is straightforward and convenient. Overnight, you stay in lodges that provide basic accommodation for a nominal fee and make their money by selling you (generally quite tasty) meals and tea, and often Internet access or the service of charging your batteries for many rupees. During the day, you hike along established trails that you share with tourists (a lot of them -- especially during our first weeks, beginning of November), horses, yaks (in the higher regions), and porters -- often chatting on their cell phone -- that either carry supplies to the towns at higher elevation, or tourists' luggage. Rare is the Nepali who isn't friendly, helpful, and hospitable.

We ourselves had pre-arranged to hire three porters on our way up to ease our own loads and drag our caving gear up the mountains. Unfortunately but not too surprising, they did not show up as agreed when our stuff needed to go back down two weeks later, and we had to improvise with lodge-arranged horses and porters that weren't quite as reliable as we had hoped. But it all worked out in the end.

One of the most valuable gadgets I dragged up into the Khumbu turned out to be my Kindle e-reader. I read about half a dozen books on rest days, in the evening, and whenever we weren't out and about. Probably more than I've read in the past year or so. Having to carry that much paper weight around would have been a burden. The solar panel worked out nicely, too, allowing us to re-charge batteries for our Sten lights, as well as Kindles, etc.

It remains a word to be said about the organized tour groups up in the Khumbu, based on many observations during the past weeks. "10-day trek to Everest Base Camp!", etc. -- I wouldn't do it. If you want to go "trekking" in the Everest region, either go by yourself (although I would always travel with at least two persons in case something happens), or get your own porters and/or guide. This gives you the flexibility to adjust your schedule and destinations on a daily basis, rather than being subjected to a pre-planned schedule without much respect to individuals feeling sick, tired, or needing an extra day to adjust to the altitude...