Summary

Description

Basswood Cave is on Nevin Davis' property, about a mile down the road from the BCCS homestead.
Went in at 10:40am. It was 24 degrees and snowing with a blowing wind when we arrived at the cave.
Came out at 6:20pm. The temperature had risen to around 32 degrees. There were a few snow flurries and thankfully no wind. It was almost pleasant.

I was tired since this was the second day in a row in Basswood, and I'd worked fairly hard the day before. I went through the crawlway a few times to help with setting charges and moving rock. With Tony's supervision, I drilled and set 2 charges. A couple of other times back there I set charges (2 and 3, respectively) for Nate after he had drilled the holes. (We were using Tony's soda straw charges again.)

Sara, Nevin, and Keith came in around 1:30pm. Nevin brought survey gear and cable ladders since we thought it would only take a few hours to blast enough to be able to get everyone through. We we wrong. After a day of work, there was still a very tight squeeze to get through.

Lisa got through the squeeze again at the end of the day. I really thought I would be able to get through after the work that had been done, especially with Lisa just ahead of me giving me light and encouragement. However, when it came time to try it, I wouldn't quite fit. When I lifted my chest above the mid-line horizintal protrusion in the vertical passage, the now upper part of my chest started to get caught on an upper protrustion. And as I pushed in, I felt my hip starting to bind which would have just added to the fun when I already could only advance after exhaling. I backed out.

Sara was able to get through as well, and she and Lisa looked around a little more and took my webbing to use to measure the pit at the far side of the big room.

Nevin also tried to get through and couldn't make it, even with some additional application of a hammer and the hammer drill in hammer-only mode with a chissel bit to use of the last of the battery charge. That made me feel a little bit better about having decided to back out.

We went back to Keith Wheeland's house ("The Roost") for dinner Sunday night, then Lisa and I got on the road for home. Mostly uneventful drive with one short period of very hard snowfall. We got home around 1am.

TBD.