Hi all,
My friends and I took our second trip into pettijohns cave today. The first time we went we took a copy of the survey, but did not this time.
I'm trying to figure out exactly where we made our turn around point.
We traveled straight from the entrance up and over several of the walk downs through breakdown. We ended up going through what I believe is the autograph room (where people wrote their names everywhere ) I'm assuming this is that room, there are two ways in to it. By banking to the left there is a hand line someone has left (which is now anchored, last year it was tied around a rock) or you can bank right and more or less drop into the room.
We continued on and came to another drop where someone has left a rope that appeared to be in bad shape. Lots of random knots tied in it and was tied into a continuous loop. We didn't want to put any faith into these ropes, the climbs were fairly easy without utilizing them.
Further progressing on we ended up coming to a very large room that had a third rope going down. It looked to be a very long drop and we decided that was a good turn around point. I noted that arrows with the letter "V" were pointing all the way to this area. We thought that we may have thus made it to the 'volcano room' since all the "V's" lead us there.
I guess I have two questions:
One: What is this large room called that we did not venture into? The drop appeared to be very long. It was a big room for sure. We just weren't going to risk an injury with the rope there.
Two: Is there a crawl somewhere to access this large room without having to climb down with rope? We would like to return to get in the bottom of the room but aren't too experienced with rope and we don't take any chances.
All in all we had a very good time. We also explored an area to the right of the entrance room a little ways that had a very pretty flowstone. We didn't see too much trash and picked up a little on the way out. Looking forward to going back but will probably hit another cave for our next trip. Thanks!
Edit...the room that I called the autograph room may not actually be THE autograph room. It was a pretty small room, like a cylinder. 3-4 feet wide by maybe 10-12 feet long. I am horrible at estimating distances though!