April Fool Cave

Saturday, March 8th 2008 - Jason Baxter

Trip Leader: Dale Green On Trip: Dale Green, Dave and Val Stratford, Jason Knight, Jason Baxter(report narrator) Dale organized a reconnaissance trip to April Fool Cave. After determining that there was unnecessary damage being done to the cave, he has begun the process to arrange BLM funding for a gate to protect the cave. The trip description provided to everyone at the Grotto meeting was that we needed to remove enough amberat to take measurements for a gate on the cave. For the benefit of the scout troop attending, Dale explained what amberat was. “Rat feces cemented together by rat urine.” Everyone arrived at the arranged meeting place nearly on time. After a brief discussion and gear re-arranging, carpooling was worked out. We then proceeded to make a fairly uneventful drive to the House Range in approximately 3 hours. There were beautiful blue skies over Delta, grey skies over our destination. Luckily we were headed to a hole in the ground as usual. On arrival at the parking area we ate lunch, rather than carrying the extra weight to the cave. Jason Knight had an MRE that was supposed to heat up his main course by adding a bit of water. After 15-20 minutes of fighting with it, he gave up and ate it cold. Shortly there-after the garbage bag in the back of Dale’s truck started steaming profusely, providing some light entertainment with my meal when Dale walked up and thought his truck was on fire. As we prepared to head up the hill, everyone realized we would be carrying a lot of tools. In order to avoid excessive healthy exercise we emptied everything unnecessary from our packs, and loaded up the tools. While climbing the sidehill in the canyon we remembered a downside to early March trips. There was a disturbing layer of snow on the steep slope to be traversed. We carefully made our way up, with Jason K at a couple points losing some of his allotted tools from his open bag. In the interests of our own self preservation we took these away from him and put on helmets for the final pitch. Upon arriving at the cave, we quickly headed inside to end the discussion of whether it was snowing or simply “flurry-ing.” While looking at gate options it was decided the gate could be more easily located a little further back toward the entrance in an area that did not require as much digging in rat crap. There was much jubilation at this prospect. Then measurements were taken in preparation for the future gate. At this point it was discovered we had been a bit too aggressive in removing things from our packs—not a single person had a writing implement. Using the wonders of the modern digital camera era, a workaround was found. We also briefly toured the cave. The tape marking the trail areas had been haphazardly thrown aside, and sometimes removed completely. Unfortunately there were obvious signs of people traveling through previously pristine areas, and there were some recently broken formations. One of these was a large stalagmite, about 6 inches in diameter. Plans were made to re-mark the trails on a future trip. After the quick cave tour, some time was spent sitting and telling stories. At one point Dale observed that only cavers would happily sit on top of rat crap for an hour swapping stories. :-) After successfully leaving the cave, Val and Dave showed us an area to find Trilobytes down the road a ways. Given their previous practice, they each found many more than the rest of us combined in our short time looking. A great trip, objective was completed and new plans made. --BX