Goshute Cave

Saturday, January 29th 2005 - Duane McCully

Trip Leader: Duane McCully On Trip: Duane, Holly, David, Stephanie, and Nicholas McCully, Doug & Britney Vincent, Laura Vincent, and Ryan & Ruth ? This was a Salt Lake Grotto trip specifically for beginners. However, none of the beginners showed up. It was also scheduled on this particular day specifically to accomodate their schedules. That's the way these things go, I guess. After a fairly uneventful drive to the cave we ran into some problems. On the final approach to the cave the Jeep ended up getting stuck in a patch of snow that was only about ten feet long. It was very consolidated snow that basically high centered the Jeep after the wheels settled. We had no shovel so we dug on it for an hour with an ice scraper. After a while, someone suggested that we go down the road to a house to borrow a shovel. Noone was home but we saw the exact sort of shovel we needed leaning against the fence; a long-handled, steel, square shovel. We borrowed it and had the Jeep dug out in fifteen minutes. The patch of snow delayed us for a total of two hours. Inside the cave, Nick was too nervous to go any further than about ten minutes (he was five years old at the time). That caused me to not really do much caving on this trip. Stephanie, six years old, apparently went to the toilet bowl without any problems. Because Stephanie has asthma, I had the kids use the small size, North Safety brand, canister type respirators. They seemed to work well. I am entertaining the theory that when prospective grotto members come to a meeting, that offering them tailor made trips may not be the most productive idea. In fact, if you announce a bunch of really cool sounding trips and tell them they're not qualified to do them, it seems to pique their interest.