Monday, July 6, 2009

Cueva Mucara

Sorry no photos, Jeff had the little camera and he is in the states on vacation.

I went up to Mucara hoping to be rappelling down 60 feet, climbing up ropes, getting muddy and wet and really exercising. It turned out that the group didn't have any rope experience so I left the harness and rope in the car and we headed into a different area of the cave I hadn't seen before to finish up mapping it. The Aquas Buenas and Mucara caves connect but until yesterday were not mapped.

The walk to the entrance is around a half hour of a semi real trail. It is always a fun part of the adventure just getting to the cave. Once there we went into a tunnel different than the one I'd been in before and began the crawling, squeezing, slipping, walking, climbing fun things. If there is a hole, I'll go in! We explored many nice rooms with different formations and rock types. This cave isn't all limestone...the rock types are really interesting where they join.

My favorite parts were seeing a bat with it's little group of still nursing babies (very talkative group) and a small room after a tight squeeze that I will call the "wet" room. This little room has all kinds of neat formations that are kind of like melted wax looking. Small formations but packed into a small room you can barely sit up in. The room was maybe 4x5x4? Maybe not that big. It was a slide-on-your-back-to-get-out cave. Just my kind of thing! We also saw a scorpion eating a cricket, lots of snails, crickets, spiders and albino Maria Tree Seedlings. As always, a thank you to Ron for leading and a thank you to the interesting people who joined the trip!

No comments: