Profanity Cave Oct 23

After the long drive to the NZSS annual general meeting in Murchison and sitting in a council meeting all day Saturday, I was all to keen to get in a cave. Profanity has an interesting history and a reputation to flood spectacularly. In 1980 three cavers became trapped in the cave for three days waiting for flood waters to drop as police were unsure how to respond and cavers begged to be able to act. Eventually the cavers located an entrance which had collapsed in the 1968 Inangahua earthquake and managed to dig their way in to rescue the cavers. The result of this informal rescue was the birth of Cave Search and Rescue in New Zealand.

With good directions we managed to find this entrance through which the rescue took place, now known as the Salvation entrance. Most of us donned wetsuits and found our way down the precarious breakdown and into the cave. We followed the distant roar to arrive at the cave's stream. Heading upstream we shortly found ourselves at an overhanging 4m waterfall, which looked rather difficult to climb, not to mention wet!

Consulting the map we realized the best way to bypass the waterfall was to go through The Maze, a network of joint-controlled passages. We followed our noses and eventually found our way back to the main streamway. Before long we reached The Lake, a 70m long wade/swim. Stashed nearby were some old tire tubes some of us could use. A handline was rigged across the pool so that the tubers only needed to pull themselves along as they floated beneath the glowworms. The Lake was the start of a large 600m long passage that was often 10m wide, clearly not formed by the modern stream, but by some ancient river. We clambered up a large rockpile and found a great rock at the edge of a chamber to have a lunch break and a brew.




    The end of The Lake


    The lunch rock

After we continued along this most pleasant (though a bit slippery) passage to its offending rockfall at the end. The cave continues for quite some distance down a small side passage, but this enormous passage is never encountered again. There is probably about a kilometer more of this large passage beyond the rockfall, but we may never know or see it. We thought this a good place to turn around and head back downstream. Gavin and I opted to climb down the 4m waterfall which was a sporty good time. Once reunited with the others, we all followed the stream down.


    In the large passage

The passage dimensions became smaller with several crawls on our hands and knees. We passed a couple squeezes through rifts and downclimbed a couple waterfalls. Once down the final waterfall, I could immediately see down the straight tunnel-like passage with silver daylight reflecting in the stream. I could certainly see why this was called the Drain Entrance and I could see how this cave would flood spectacularly. The modest resurgence opens out into a pleasant grotto with ferns and moss. A mere 50m walk brought us back to the state highway!


    Satisfied cavers exiting The Drain

Profanity is nice. I found a couple good leads including one that will probably connect to Damnation Cave so hopefully I will find myself in the area during a prolonged drought!