Anyone have a rock collapse near them from above?

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Re: Anyone have a rock collapse near them from above?

Postby BrianFrank » Apr 10, 2016 8:54 pm

It sounds like virgin and new dig outs are the biggest dangers, which makes sense of course. There is a crawl in Tumbling Rock before you get to the giant rooms with oil dripping from the ceiling area. That crawl has always concerned me as there are loose rocks above you in most of the passage. It's like people made this crawl by pulling out just the correct rocks that doesn't collapse the ceiling.
Last edited by BrianFrank on May 6, 2016 5:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Anyone have a rock collapse near them from above?

Postby eyecave » May 5, 2016 9:37 pm

i would bet that if statistics were assembled targeting the number of experienced cavers requiring a rescue that the vast majority would involve unexpected rock something movement..anybody remember collins?....caving takes place in an environment where things can fall in slow motion......physics can surely prove that a mass can shift in such a slow way as to never be visible movement until reaching a point of mass shift where suddenly it does visually occur.........virgin cave is the most dangerous, heck virgin landscape is also....semi is next most dangerous .....but ya know what.....it can occur anytime........recreational hazard...my only advice is don't touch the rock that is above you and watch stuff you climb up on or step onto......oh...and good luck.....................the rope at megawell was scraping againt a rock edge very near the lip with every climb cycle.....as i remember it might not have been obviously touching the rock until after one was looking up at the rope...or ascending the rope.....any rope would be stressed and the inferior rope they were using failed....
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Re: Anyone have a rock collapse near them from above?

Postby trogman » May 9, 2016 3:18 am

BrianFrank wrote:It sounds like virgin and new dig outs are the biggest dangers, which makes sense of course. There is a crawl in Tumbling Rock before you get to the giant rooms with oil dripping from the ceiling area. That crawl has always concerned me as there are loose rocks above you in most of the passage. It's like people made this crawl by pulling out just the correct rocks that doesn't collapse the ceiling.


I wouldn't be too worried about rockfall most of the crawls in TR, as that cave has seen so much traffic that most of the rocks that are going to fall have already fallen. Of course, virgin caves are particularly dangerous, but so are other, less visited caves. I recall my first (and only) trip through the big room at the end of Richard's Cave, GA. This humongous room is absolutely covered with very unstable breakdown from one end to the other, and the floor is sloped at extreme angles in many places. When I was there I had to carefully test almost every rock in my path, and several of them failed the stability test. There were almost no indications of previous visitation; the room is missing the usual "elephant trails" that we see in many caves here in TAG.

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Re: Anyone have a rock collapse near them from above?

Postby graveleye » May 9, 2016 8:12 am

that's how Camps Gulf was in those big rooms. The breakdown was slippery and almost every rock wanted to move. That cave flat wore me out with all the breakdown.
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