CF – 18 Hornet Pounds Insurgents at the 2012 Kitchener Waterloo Air show

CF – 18 Hornet Pounds Insurgents, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

When, “Clear to Engage” came over the radio, 2 CF – 18 fighters streaked by, sound following behind them and a massive chain of explosions rocked up the runway. Who would expect that at a sleepy little airport just outside Guelph?

Check out the video of the CF – 18 Hornet bombing run here

It appears that the Royal Highland Fusiliers were the unit who were functioning as infantry in the LAV III vehicles, they were supported by reinforcement from a Gryphon helicopter. All in all it was a worthwhile demonstration by the Canadian military at the Kitchener Waterloo air show. Today being Sunday, and the show still being on, I recommend that you go. Other big attractions were the Snowbirds aerial acrobatics team, parachutists jumping out of a Hercules, a corsair and numerous other displays, stunt planes and militaria.

As for the insurgents, well they were the target of artillery, the infantry assault and repeated air strikes by the CF – 18
Hornets.

Creepy Tree – While Looking for Caves near Toronto

Creepy Tree , originally uploaded by Mic2006.

Looking for caves we spent a long hot day slogging through the forest near Toronto. The bugs were really bad and we were pretty much disoriented for a significant part of our search. Jeff had located some deep conical sinkholes on a high-rez aerial photo. It appeared that here were 4 or five of these pits somewhere out in the bush. we began by following fields, then a fence line that disappeared in the forest and then finally, just us, the mosquitoes and a bear.

Not having drunk enough water, this creepy looking tree seemed to have qualities other than just natural ones. I imagined it as some sinister kind of entity, inhabited by all sorts of odd figments of my imagination – but sinkholes and finding caves, were those a figment of our imaginations?

See video of our day of cave hunting here.

Death Bell Cave; Real Horror Show

Death Bell Cave; Real Horror Show, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

We descended by cable ladder into the cave that we call the Death Bell. That morning we had no idea what we would find. My greatest fear was rattle snakes. I have come across the Massasagua rattle snake in caves before, but being in Ontario, we are fortunate that the Massasagua is the only poisonous snake.

We cleared loose rock from the lip of the shaft and Greg joked that it was like an episode from the X – Files where Skully and Mulder found the black slime alien in a cave much like this one.

See video on the Death Bell here.

As we followed into the cavern – down the swinging ladder it soon became apparent that this shaft was like no other that we had visited. You step off the ladder onto a boulder that is perched atop a 10 foot high mound of bones. Some of the bones were those of animals likely thrown in, along with some garbage from a nearby farm, but by the size of the mound you would imagine that it would have taken thousands of years to grow and depending upon the initial depth of the shaft, the pile might go down well beneath ten feet.

A tunnel led off at the deepest point, following downward along a joint. Crunching through a sediment of charcoal- black nuggets similar in appearance to grains of charred rice. We reached a pinch point from which blew a noticeable puff of wind. Possibly the tunnel goes onward, but has been blocked by this odd dry and crunching material. My two caving partners, Jeff and Greg suspect that it may be the casings of a thousand years of maggots that have feasted on the fallen animals.

I am optimistic that this is a solution cave as opposed to a sea cave. Sea caves in Ontario; Rover Cave or Grieg’s Caves for example are generally wide mouthed and narrowing like a funnel. This cave seems to have no surface connection but the porthole in it’s roof, and that hardly provides a suitable portal for erosion.

Whatever the case, an animal that falls in to the Death Bell is doomed to a slow and lingering death – there’s no way out. And for a human, much the same without a ladder.

Cave shaft – Exploring Karst in Canada

Cave shaft – Canada, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

In the same area where we discovered the Tooth Tube, a cave that we have been clearing of a glacial plug of clay, we have also found numerous deep shafts, aligned along joints they tend to be deep and narrow with fluted sides and moss around their upper lips. To a caver, a cave shaft is generally indicative of something that might be occuring lower down. Often, but not always, the shaft represents the dominant passage of water as it drops beneath the surface, and as Marcus Buck had pointed out in the excavation of the ‘Birth Canal’ at Olmstead in the Eramosa Karst, “Usually if you follow where the water goes, it takes you on to tunnels”.

This particular field of shafts and pits is in an area that is not too far north of Toronto, Ontario , Canada. For a Torontonian I believe it is one of the coolest things to do near Toronto.

The shafts that we found occur in a plateau that sits well above a large body of water and though the local water table is sometimes known to be perched, it would appear that by looking down into some of these holes, it must still be way below the surface. Many of the more slender shafts appear to be relatively debris-free. Wider shafts tend to be clogged with soil and leaves and logs. They can approach a diameter of about 10 feet in width and we speculate that like in the St. Edmunds System, water may have entered the underground at a time when the area was beneath a kilometer thick sheet of ice. As the pressure head built up, the water beneath the glacier was forced down tiny crevices, down to the bedding plane, and then out at the base of the plateau. Most of these shafts are at the bottom of a conical depression of between 10 and 25 feet in depth. In an old manuscript Martin Davis mentions a stream that he had dye traced that seems to take most of the surface water from this area and drains it out at a single point in the cliffs around the edges of the plateau.

Strings of shafts line up along the general orientation of local joints and we intend to plumb the depths of one such shaft this weekend. Our best case scenario is to find an open cave tunnel that requires minimal digging to clear it. I dropped a bolder down one deep shaft where I could not see the bottom and after an impressive pause I heard the muted ‘thunk’ of tin that had been pounded by my falling missile.

In one relatively shallow shaft we have found a crevice that seems to drop down into a water worn passage beneath, that will be our first priority. It was hard to get a good look at the passage as the crevice above still requires some cleaning, but I had the distinct impression it was human sized and floored with cobbles like we found in the Wasteland Waterway – still to be pushed to its endpoint.

For a final look at where we got with our excavation on the Tooth Tube – Click for cave video of the Tooth Tube here.

Check out the shaft at C-H sink, it is also in an area where sinks dimple local fields. Check out a short video of the C – H sink here

Death brings life underground

Death brings life underground, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

It would seem that one night in the middle of one of those incredible storms that blow off the lake, one hapless creature stumbled over this narrow crevice in the grass and slid down to become wedged between the back and the front of it’s skull; it was as good as dead the instant that it disappeared beneath the surface. There was no returning from the crack and as it’s head became wedged the creature would have hung for days before it died of suffocation, hypothermia or thirst.

Now moss is starting to grow on the skull and the remainder of it’s bones are likely scattered beneath it. Next time I visit the area I am bringing a hook to try and retrieve the skull. This is by no means a rare sight in caves and cavities beneath the rock of Ontario,, especially in systems with precipitous entrances, like shelburne, G-Lake and a new cave that we’ve just found this past weekend.

to see the video on this macabre find click here … ‘video – Death brings Life Underground’

Lower level discovered in Ontario Cave – Digging Open Sealed Passages

Lower level discovered in Ontario Cave, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

This was our third weekend of digging in the cave we call The Toothtube. We suspected that there was a tunnel entrance in a blind valley and in digging in a likely spot this tunnel was broken open. Glacial clay filled the sealed passages to within about a foot of the roof, but with bucket and garden claw we persevered.

Admittedly its nice to open up a passage but our real goal is to intercept the main branch tunnels that we know must lie beneath. It only stands to reason that there must be some huge underground rivers in this area, all the features point in that direction – in particular some impressive shafts that are partly filled with soil, the lack of surface resurgences, the thickness of the local bedding planes and other nearby tunnel systems that stretch beyond the ability of humans to explore them. This lower level if dug out might provide an eventual connection to this main trunk drain.

See the video on today’s efforts and the downward sloping conduit that we found – video for Ontario cave passage here.

Cave vandalism – Galt Shelter Caves

Cave vandalism – Galt Shelter Caves, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

As JC was in the process of studying for a test today, we could only make a short trip. Our excavation of the Tooth Tube will have to wait till next Saturday. We initially visited a place near Paris called Sinkhole Swamp and that was a bust though the place was quite beautiful. I suppose we should have known it from the start, the whole area is too thickly overlain by till.  On the way back to Guelph we made a diversion to the Galt Shelter Caves as I had never seen them.

I believe I had first learned of the Galt Shelter Caves from Ongley’s Manuscript. He described them as “small”, I add to that description, “shallow nooks in the cliff along the shores of the Grand River – humble in appearance, and by the added blight of spraypaint, not worth the struggle down the cliff face and through the vicious thorn bushes”.

Some of the features were in the upper portion of a heavily fractured cliff face. We climbed a short way to access most and where for the most part pretty disappointed. There was nothing but gutted hollows – cave vandalism at its worst. Fortunately I don’t believe there were any formations to break, just the usual empty cavities of a shelter that had been worn by running water.

Two things that work against preservation of these features, firstly they are well known by local kids, and secondly, they are easily accessible as they are literally within an urban area. Can you imagine the impact of people who did this kind of thing visiting LS Cave or Rovers or the Tooth Tube or P Lake Here.

I am very selective about whom I share locations and this is why..