With a group of six, it was back out to the Carrizo Badlands for more mud cave survey and exploration, the third trip of the year. Heather and I arrived the night before for some cold camping, selecting a choice spot and then later being joined by Carol, then Carl. Fredrik and Rob joined at the trailhead and we all set off together.
We had enough people this time to split into groups and most of the way through the badlands, Heather and I split off to finish the survey of Five Star Cave while the others went to explore a new area with potential for a long cave system.
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| Looking towards the two branches of Five Star Cave disappearing into the hill |
The last passage left to survey was a fairly grim low crawlway to a submergence entrance. Heather lacked enthusiasm and I actually ended up a surveying it solo, slow progress for the short shots and a couple mistakes I made requiring some backtracking. At least the cool cave provided some respite from the sweaty outside world. Eventually around lunchtime I finished, adding 100ft of survey to get the cave to a total of 1487 feet in length, making it the longest mud cave in California. After completing our survey we went looking for the others but did not find them or their stuff at the entrances we expected. We did a pretty unpleasant angle of repose climb up a mud slope that Heather very much disliked. After that excitement and not feeling 100%, we decided to instead head back to the trailhead rather than explore further. The others ended up coming out much later and both groups surveyed though neither find a very high quality cave.
We decided to drive through San Diego for a change with a detour to Casa de Pico for some tasty Mexican food, somewhat marred by some extremely incompetent waiting staff. So all in all it was quite a lot of effort for very minimal surveying, but we did manage to finish the survey of Five Star Cave, the product of seven peoples efforts over three days. Later I drafted the map of what is currently the longest mud cave in California, map below.
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