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.
Trogman