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.
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