stuck in the mud

Hi Blog world, Its Sunday afternoon, just settling down to a night of editing the final script for my next book, Rockhounding, An Experience of the North. Thought I would get a few things off my chest first. I came down with a terrible cold this Friday, could hardly breathe, Ive been drinking dimetab and gargling with salt water and I can just barely speak now but I suppose thats not so important, I can still write. As mentioned, I am a new blogger, I am still trying to figure out how to hook up to the bigger blogging world so write as I might, nobody is reading yet. I am also trying to figure out how to include pictures, that has gotta happen soon. If you will recall I mentioned that I was heading down last weekend to a cave somewhere in southern Ontario, it turned out to be a mine, and what a place it was. A crevice cut under a clifface leading to a huge underground lake that just went deeper and deeper into the rock. Dan and I spent about two hours underground wandering between knee and waist deep in the water. I am thinking that the mine is somewhere between 100 and 170 years old, it cuts along through a layer of the Whirlpool Sandstone. Back in the 1820’s and 30’s there was a serious demand for building stone in Southern Ontario, the Whirlpool Sandstone was one of the most valued materials, being extracted from a thick layer just above the Queenstone shale. Up near Belfountain you can see the rock at the base of Church’s Falls. See the chapter on Belfountain on page 69 of my book “Rockwatching; Adventures Above and Below Ontario” The rock that came from there was a maroon colour and was used to build Queen’s Park and various buildings at University of Toronto. Down here in the more southerly areas of the escarpment the Whirlpool Sandstone seems a lot higher on the escarpment than it is further to the north. It is also more varied in colour and I am told that it is possible to find azurite and malachite in chert pockets in that rock. Anyway the construction of the Welland Canal generated a great deal of demand for building stone as did the increasing size of the urban structures around the “Golden Horseshoe.” Finally around 1900 the skyscraper came into being. The buildings strength came not from its ridgid outer shell but from its internal steel girder skeleton. This change in design meant that standard construction stones suddenly lost their market and materials such as Italian and Indian marbles started showing up. They formed a thin veneer as did materials like glass, labradorite and granite. they were in no way responsible for the buildings structural integrity. Sandstone had seen its day and the mines closed shortly thereafter. Last year Jeff Mirza and I had travelled up to Belfountain to see if we could find our way into one of these underground tunnel systems. Apparently there are several deep passages above the hairpin bend as you wind down from Belfountain into the Credit Valley. After a day of trudging along the hillsides we came to the conclusion that the entrances had all been blasted shut. Not the case here, I was very excited to find an example of this forgotten industry. It was as much a historical exploration as it was a geological one. The rooms were quite low though generally very wide and initially lit by small shafts that cut up to a brambly plateau above. The vegetation was so thick that it was almost impossible to progress on the surface, nevertheless, the shafts of light on the underground lake were really picturesque. At times high banks of rubble rose out of the water and it was necessary to slither along on our bellies. In places deeper into the mine calcite deposition had made a hard, translucent shell across the top of these banks and we had to be careful so as not to damage the profuse clusters of soda straws that were forming on the roof. The bats seemed quite perturbed by our arrival in their world and somebody was cheeping angrily from up a crack in the roof. On several occasions they flittered by and I could just catch glimpses of their chaotic flight. I was surprised by the extent of speleothem formation in the mine. I had believed that under good conditions soda straws could grow at about an inch every hundred years though in rememberance of a winter excursion Jeff and I had done up a storm sewer in Hamilton a few years back, that one inch can be quite drastically stretched. (I will include a piece that I wrote at the time called “Stairway to Paradise” later in the blog, (it covers that storm sewer journey). As we waded through the underground lake there were tunnels that branched off in every direction, the air deeper in seemed dead and the steam that rose from our coveralls clung to us making photography quite difficult. The water was so still and clear in one spot that I was surprised by the ripples when I crawled right into the pool. We continued on along a mound that was just beneath the surface. Dan wandered off to the side into the deeper water and suddenly found himself hip high in really treacherous mud. I had a similar experience moments later and we decided that further exploration would have to be done with an air matress. Up ahead it sounded like a heavy rainstorm and I think that there must have been a spot where the water was pouring in. Well looks like I have been rambling on so Im on way way for now.