Moderator: Moderators
danwern wrote:Thanks, all, for the great suggestions. We ended up going to Steward Springs Cave. We turned around at the beginning of Idiot's Crawl. Overall, it was a really fun trip. One of the kids wasn't so keen on getting wet in the beginning, and he was even less pleased with the Compulsory Pool. By the time we were heading out, though, he was pushing through the wet passages without complaint (enjoying them, in fact). He ended up loving tight squeezes and in fact sought them out... crawling into almost every tight passage he could find. The kids loved seeing some bats and the nice formations, and the ongoing restoration work (looking really good!) gave me a good excuse to talk about conservation/responsible caving. The worst part was the short walk back to the car. The outside temperature had plummeted while we were in the cave. One of the kids ended up getting really cold in his wet cave clothes on the way back to the car (I may be partially to blame... I insisted on taking an "after" pic of everybody at the mouth of the cave, which added a few really cold minutes of standing around). By the time he got to the car, he was shivering uncontrollably and pretty upset. The grown-ups had to strip off his wet clothes and get him in dry clothes with the heat blasting in the car. He was, of course, fine (he has a tendency to be overly dramatic), but it was a lesson learned: when going to a wet cave during the winter with kids, stash dry clothes and a thermos of hot chocolate by the entrance... or save wet caves for the summer when with kids. If the car had been farter away, it wouldn't have been pretty.
I should add that Steward Springs is particularly kid friendly because for the most part it doesn't have any hazerdous drop-offs. Where we did scramble (or slime) up and down to/from dry passage, the consequences of a slip would have been a short and harmless slide. I had gone to Tumbling Rock Cave a couple weeks earlier with my oldest son. That's a really fun kids' trip, as well, but a fall from one of the breakdown climbs would have been more serious.
While I was there, I pushed a ways into the Dilemma Drain. which whetted my appetite to take on a dig project. Anybody intested in the working on the grim 200 foot connection between Steward Springs and Dilemma Pit?
Return to Caving General Discussion and Questions Forum
Users browsing this forum: No registered users