Last weekend five Binkley Cave project cavers entered Blowing Hole Cave with two objectives. One team made up of Dave Everton, Rand Heazlitt and Gary Roberson would be surveying on the frontier at the upstream end of the river beyond the Moisturizer. The other team of Brad Barcom and Wayne Cottrell's objective was to attempt to enlarge a narrow canyon to follow the air in Brad's Passage just above the waterfall in the Upper BoreHole. To the team's amazement, the usually ice cold entrance pool was frozen over so they could slide in over the ice for the first 200 feet of the cave. Great fun!
Dave Everton's team surveyed around 1500 feet of new cave to extend the length of Blowing Hole to just over 4 miles. They stopped in a sizable breakout dome room. Exploring just beyond the survey, they found another large room, which Roberson dubbed "Titty City" as a result of the large semicircular chert balls hanging down from the ceiling of the room. Just beyond this room, Rand and Dave pushed into a second Moisturizer type passage with a couple hundred feet of near swimming depth passage with only a few inches of airspace for over 100 feet. Beyond this low airspace, the ceiling rose again into walking passage with waist to chest deep water and continues. The frontier of the upper rive is now about 2 1/2 miles from the entrance most of which is in deep water. The upper river above the waterfall is highly populated with cavefish numbering in the hundreds. Project cavers have taken to calling the larger one's "white dolphins".
Wayne had purchased an inflatible two person kayak to navigate the deep water of the Eerie Canal as far as the Torrent Room area. It worked great. They succeeded in enlarging the narrow canyon at the end of Brad's passage and climbed up into a domepit complex. On previous trips when the temperatures were colder, this passage had sucked in enormous amounts of air. There appears to be a sizable upper level passage about 18 feet above the floor of the first dome, which could be where all the air goes? Project cavers are hoping that it could be an upper level leading towards the closed Hollow Floor Cave and the Strike Section of nearby Binkley's Cave, which has just over 24 miles of surveyed passage. It will require bolting to reach the upper level.