Barton Creek Cave Feb 25

Barton Creek Cave was only a few hundred feet stroll from where we were staying for our Panti Pit expedition but it took until nearly the end of the week until I had a chance to explore it. BCC is the main resurgence that drains the karst platform the expedition was focusing on including Panti Pit and is a fairly popular tourist destination managed by Belize's Institute of Archaeology. Most visitors take a guided canoe tour that goes in over 3000 ft from the entrance to a breakdown room stopping further canoe progress. Past this the cave continues for over a mile through swims and stream wading to where the passage splits at a giant breakdown chamber. For now this is the end of the cave with many people pushing hard to try to find a way through the terminal breakdown into the rest of the cave system but thus far not succeeding. What a joy this cave must have been to explore up to this point.

For my first trip into the cave earlier in the week we mostly just did a relaxing evening canoe paddle. The main passage has some spectacular cathedral ceilings in places and some interesting bridges of the river formed by eroded flowstone formations. At several points it is necessary to crouch down to slide through some of the low ceiling constrictions. We had a look around the breakdown room at the end of the canoeing and then returned the way we came. 

Before I left Belize I was motivated to have a better look exploring the depths of Barton Creek Cave and hopefully snap a few photos; Don kindly offered to join me for a few hour trip. Past the canoes was a swimming section and then nearly a mile of really nice stream passage. Sprinkled along the way were great formations including an "ice cream cone" stalagmite and some showerhead formations. We found an area that we thought was the purported new rockfall, and continued on until the stream passage ended at an enormous room. From here we would have to climb up and away from the river and so this seemed like a logical point to turn around for this trip. We stopped at a couple points on the way out to take a few tripod-mounted photos that of course do not do the cave justice.

I was probably back on the surface and hanging out at camp for a little more than an hour when I was invited to join Doug and Amanda for another trip into the cave. Sure! It is not often I have a clean and pleasant world-class cave 2 minutes from where I am staying! We did not go quite as far in as Don and I did earlier but we saw a few things I did not see on our first trip. I carefully climbed up a 50+ ft flowstone formation which gave me an amazing view looking back down on the stream passage below. Doug pulled out an industrial grade UV flashlight and we spent a good amount of time seeing how some of the formations and limestone chips fluoresced. Some of the formations had some of the very best phosphorescence I have ever seen with some glows lasting for over 10 seconds after the light was removed. This was another relaxed trip offering a few more opportunities for photos.

The nighttime float out the entrance was a nice change and Doug even spotted a scorpion on the wall with the UV light. Barton Creek Cave is one of the better caves I have been in in quite a while and was a good reminder of why cave exploring is so appealing to me. There are still many more excellent caves undiscovered and we probably have only explored less than half of the overall Barton Creek Cave system so far. It might only take one minor breakthrough to continue. It was a fitting end to my short trip to Belize. 

Caves Branch River Feb 24

An entry in Rocky's Mayan Whitewater guidebook on the Caves Branch River was my initial motivation for wanting to visit Belize. Though light on whitewater with barely riffles (and light on photos to give me a sense of what to expect), it offered a rare opportunity to spend a day floating down a river underground punctuated briefly by skylights, which sounded exactly like my sort of activity. Other than the guidebook entry and a single Alpacka blog post where some guys somehow managed to string together a three-day trip in the cave system, I could find no further information other than tubing down the last cave that clearly was a very popular tourist activity for cruise ship passengers. I brought my packraft to Belize without knowing really what to expect or whether I could figure out the logistics. Once in-country it became fairly clear that landowner and shuttle logistics were going to be complicated enough that it was going to be worth hiring a guide. Luckily our group's local caving guide Marcos was able to put me in touch with someone that could guide and I convinced Amanda, Carl, and Don to join me. 

We met at the Blue Hole Visitor Center and after some shuffling logistics of spraying our car with pesticide and getting a gate key we drove through an ancient looking orange grove, the trees barely able to produce fruit with all the moss and epiphytes covering them. We crossed the Caves Branch River a couple times on approach and then parked at the jungle's edge to offload kayaks. A short 400 ft long jungle track took us to a pool surrounded by dense rainforest. While I inflated my boat Amanda managed to spot some sort of giant python working its way out of the water. Almost immediately we had to carry boats about 15 ft over boulders to the submergence entrance to the first cave. 

The first cave extended over a half-mile with great formations, interesting passage shapes, and lazily moving blue waters. There were a couple minor skylight entrances up off to our left partway through, otherwise it was solid darkness other than our lights. At one point we had to maneuver boats over a pinch formed by two large boulders, otherwise everything was completely boatable despite fairly low flows.  

First cave resurgence (and below)

All too soon we reached the end of the first cave, a particularly picturesque entrance we stopped at for a brief snack before continuing on. We floated for only above 250 ft above ground before entering the second cave, this one the longest in the system at over a mile. We paddled downstream underground to a confluence and then paddled upstream to see the true submergence of the Caves Branch River. We got a particularly nice view of the jungle and limestone cliffs from here. The submergence passage was a neat pancake shape with about 4 ft of headspace for its 30 ft width. This longest cave had a river right side entrance, and then a river left skylight before we reached the tall resurgence entrance signaling the end of the second cave. 

Caves Branch Creek submergence

Second cave resurgence

Once again we were briefly back on the surface world and sat down to have lunch on a cobble bank. I could not resist a brief swim in the pleasant waters. As we ate, Jose explained that the submergence of the third cave sumps a short distance underground and so we would have to take a 0.3 mi jungle portage trail to enter a side entrance downstream. We walked to check out the submergence anyway, another nice spot with pretty blue-green waters.

Third cave submergence (sumps)

The jungle track was easy enough for me to carry my packraft and the others were allowed to drag their boats which was about as easy. The side entrance to the third cave had particularly excellent golden light filtering between jungle, boulders, and waters. We paddled upstream a good distance to a very convincing sump wall, then turned and headed downstream. The guide encouraged the others to paddle in pitch black darkness; I was more reluctant as ramming into a sharp limestone wall in my packraft would not be as consequence free as a plastic sit-on-top kayak. 

Side entrance to the third cave

The third cave continued very linearly for 0.2 miles to arrive at a very short skylight section separating it from the fourth cave. A stairway down here was the first hint of humans we had seen. There was some more excellent light filtering through the waters near these entrances.

Window between third and fourth caves

The end of the fourth cave signaled the start of the tourist hordes with dozens of people lined up at the submergence entrance to go on a guided tube through the fifth and final cave. I was particularly thankful for everything we managed to see without seeing another person up to this point. The tourists had to sit in large inflatable tubes daisy-chained together and pulled by a guide. It looked a bit silly, like wearing GoPros on Disneyland's It's a Small World ride. This fifth cave carried on for about 0.5 miles with an interesting waterfall and cave entrance entering halfway down on the left. 

Fifth cave submergence

Fifth cave resurgence

Once out the last cave we had a 0.5 mile paddle around more tubing tourists to reach our takeout. A short stroll brought us to the shops and vendors as we waited for the guide to sort out the kayaks. Thanks to Amanda, Carl, and Don for joining in the adventure. In all we paddled about 2.5 miles underground through 5 cave systems with about a mile above ground to link them. Now with the knowledge of hindsight I could see that we visited the whole system and the blog account I saw of people making a three-day trip out of it was rather ridiculous. It was a neat trip and I really loved the long stretches of packrafting through a cave system. I am sufficiently motivated to try to find other similar trips that might be possible elsewhere in the world!

Panti Pit Expedition Feb 19-23

In a small Belizean village there is a wooden shack that houses a spartan convenience store. Beneath that shack is a culvert pipe planted in the ground near the bottom of a sinkhole with chickens running loose around. Down that pipe is Panti Pit, a sequence of 8 rappels totaling 350 ft, the only known way into this 8+ km cave system that has been explored over the course of several years in annual expeditions. This formidable entrance series makes it one of the few demonstrable virgin cave systems in the area as most other entrances had abundant evidence of Mayan use and later visitation by hunters and landowners. I had been having a particularly long hiatus from project caving and recognized it as something I had been missing, so I was very appreciative to get an invite to join this expedition, the Boundary Fault Karst Project. Belize was already of interest to me based on my visits to nearby Chiapas and a strong desire to float through the Caves Branch System about an hour's drive away from the expedition base. The timing of the expedition was such that I could not join for the full two weeks but with careful planning I was able to get away for a week, which I figured was better than nothing. Thankfully it was well organized which made planning easier and I was able to contribute by obtaining lidar data access for the project area through archaeologists and Belize's Institute of Archaeology, which the expedition operates in agreement with and owns all data collected.

Upon landing in Belize I immediately noted the humid tropic temperatures that were a welcome reprieve from our [mild but still cold] socal winter. Our expedition was based along Barton Creek, a short 2 minute walk from Barton Creek Cave, a prominent resurgence important to both ancient Maya and modern tourist. The setting was pleasantly jungle-y with coconut and banana trees, colorful vegetation, growler monkeys most nights, and apparently toucans even (I did not see but others did). About a dozen participants stayed at a house and bunkhouse, a little rundown but otherwise plenty comfortable. Dinners were particularly social and we spent a chunk of each evening planning out what groups would be assigned different tasks the following day. The cave commute to get to the end of survey, sweaty climb up 350 ft of rope, and need to clean, decontaminate, and ideally dry clothes and gear generally meant that most people adapted to a day on, day off schedule for Panti Pit. The combination of mud and survey priorities meant that I came back with very few pictures of the cave itself.

With a day at the start to help calibrate distos while the entrance series was rigged and a day at the end for a guided trip through Caves Branch, this meant only two days underground in Panti Pit. My first trip in was shorter. Eric, Amanda, and I headed down the drops into the D passage, the main mid-level dry (but muddy!) passage heading downstream, to survey a weird maze area branching off. As sketcher I found this multi-level maze to be cruel reintroduction to sketching after a several year hiatus but slowly we worked through it. We closed all of our upper level climbing leads in this area but were turned back from the low leads due to high carbon dioxide levels. I was suitably sweaty and more exhausted than I expected by the time I reached the entrance. Overall this first trip did not give me a very positive view of the cave and the leads we surveyed seemed to be low quality. Fortunately this view would change.

As a rest day Don, Fredrik, and I drove around to check a few leads visible in the lidar imagery. This involved driving through the Mennonite area and meeting a friendly farmer that led us to a cave with his two kids in tow. It was a very promising stream sink with an entrance chamber. We climbed down to a lower level where we could see where the water drains during floods but unfortunately it was clogged with boulders and trash and had high carbon dioxide as well. Driving on we checked out the non-carbonate rocks on the flank of Pine Mountain Ridge and then stopped into a butterfly farm. Here a friendly caretaker led us to a pit entrance cave. A short entrance drop led down a slope to a small room with a second tight drop leading into a larger room below. We saw some bats and some Mayan pottery but no convincing way onward. On the hike back we checked out one additional karst feature, a stream sink that became too tight. We did not make any amazing discoveries but I did gain a lot of confidence in the quality of the lidar data and its ability to scout for karst features.

For my second survey day, three different groups headed to the edge of the map in the upstream C passage, which was a particularly long commute but with much more exciting leads. This involved traversing over a very pretty "boots off" flowstone area, swimming through a series of beautiful lakes,  a low airspace ceiling sucking section, and a further wet knee crawl section before emerging in walking passage. This was way more interesting, sporty, beautiful, and satisfying caving than the previous trip I did- I saw the appeal and potential of the cave this time. While waiting for others to catch up I noticed evidence of water formerly flowing down a side lead tube, then heard the roar of a creek in it! Carl and I went for a quick scout finding the tube soon emerged into a sizable stream passage with several promising leads. Brian, Daniel, Amanda, and I ended up being assigned to survey this passage. The nearest survey station was 50 m back along the passage so we began doing tie-in shots when we realized the tie-in station was actually the last station and the end of the map! This survey was much more satisfying to sketch. My survey team was a little disfunctional and distracted and we ended up finishing a bit earlier than we expected anticipating a slow journey back out of the cave. We surveyed down the tube, up a side lead, up to a stream sump, up a slope to a muddy climb, and down the stream passage to where it became swimming, racking up a few hundred meters of nice passage. Thankfully I got to be one of the first people up the ropes and felt a lot less fatigued this time around.

The expedition continued for an additional week after I left. Despite adding nearly 2 km of survey to the cave, it sounded like the best leads had fizzled by the end and there are talks of new goals and new approached for next year's expedition. I did not get as much actual caving in as I thought I would but it was a great reminder of how much I enjoy project caving. It was a great group of people, many from socal that are a further nudge that I should be more involved in the local caving community. A special thanks to Brian, Doug, and Carol for organizing and inviting me.