Secret Tunnel to Dracula’s Garden – A Hidden Passage takes us to a Secret Room

Secret Tunnel to Dracula’s Garden, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

Leaving from Jeff’s house in Guelph, the three of us braved the winter evening and followed a secret tunnel to a place that is known as Dracula’s Garden. The garden is really a secret room beneath a city in Ontario. The trip there and back was exhausting. We were underground for just over 2 hours, crawling, duck walking and stooping. We waded through an old and crumbling passage that is known as the blood sluice – and at the end, a most incredible place that is decorated in soda straws and various other formations that are usually found in caves.

See video on the secret passage to Dracula’s Garden here

Jeff found a strange green marble that we called the “Dracula’s Eye” and SNAFU discovered a symbol part way along the hidden passage that was etched into the wall; I say it is for the Illuminati, but that is only wild speculation.

Most intriguing about the speleothems in Dracula’s Garden is the fact that they have formed so incredibly quickly.

Soda straws, curtains and stalactites are composed of calcite that has been leached out of the soil and rock above and re-deposited within an underground cavity. The basic process is that carbonic acid dissolves the calcite as acid laced ground-water passes through calcium rich substrate. Cool temperatures, lots of water and the presence of organic matter adds to the concentration of the acid. By the time the carbonic acid rich water reaches an underground cavity, and is is heavily laden with dissolved calcite, it gases off carbon dioxide and becomes super-saturated with calcite, thus it dumps this at the edge of a speleothem and grows it as some fantastic lacy rock pinnacle or curtain or cave pearl.

In Dracula’s Garden the speleothems have grown with amazing rapidity. Decorations like those seen here are usually thousands of years in the making, these formations are pure and white and hard and yet they could not be older than the cavity in which they’ve formed – about 100 – 160 years in age. Conditions for speleothem growth must be ideal. I had once seen a single soda straw in a sewer in Hamilton  (Stairway to Paradise), but it was puffy and porous – more like tufa than the pure and well formed soda straws in this spot.

Two hours of crawling and duck-walking leaves my legs in agony today. I can barely walk and I’m sure my companions are suffering some similar pain as well – SNAFU more his knees being a problem as being the tallest he found the height most dehabilitating and he crawled more than duck-walked. In the video you can hear this strange whump, whump sound in the background, that’s him crawling in his hip waders. As it is now dark I think a little hot tub therapy might ease the pain – standing after sitting is the worst and going down steps is almost impossible (I have to go down backwards on my hands and knees).

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Waterfall in Cave – Underground Adventure in Ontario

Waterfall in cave, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

I suppose on of the most gratifying things about cave exploration is the ‘buzz’ that you get, and everything in existence seems to be encompassed in the yellow circle of your headlamp. Outside your headlamp there is mystery – turn your head and the mystery reveals itself. Each turn, corner and passage feels like it’s own first time discovery – I guess its something like the gambler’s buzz, and once you leave the cave the buzz dies away and then I feel like i’m in this slump and the rest of the week is grey and gloomy.

First human in a place that has lain untouched for several thousand years – beat that! How can you? The greater the challenge, the more the buzz. If somebody has already gone before you and poured a concrete sidewalk where’s the wonder there? I believe caving can become an addiction, and having caved for 26 years now I am hooked just like a junkie. And oddly I’ve become a connisour of rare and unusual sights – a flowstone dam, cave pearls, speleothems and speleogens, crawling in tunnels that are washed by frigid streams, deep tannin stained pools in marble, dolostone, calcite and limestone – privy to a sleeping porcupine’s bedside, wondering if a bear lies just beyond. Where does the waterfall come from? What wondrous crystal is that? some would pay a fortune at a mineral show, I prefer the mineral exactly where it sits – a concept of eco-mineral exploration which is something quite closely allied to ethical cave exploration.

See my latest cave trip here to the incredible beauty of Marvin’s Cave and its mysterious tunnels through marble beneath a forest escarpment.

I’d have a problem topping this discovery – Mountain River Cave here.

For more on caving see my book, ‘Caving in Ontario; Exploring buried Karst’ – there is a link on the right side of the blog that will take you to Lulu where the book can be purchased.

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Mescal Tequila and Many Sad Regrets – the Darkness of Tulum

Mescal tequila and many sad regrets, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

A free learning is something of value that you gather by way of the experience of another. while visiting Tulum – Mexico (Yucatan) I decided to investigate the properties of tequila – in particular, the mescal variety along with it’s distinctive worm that is found floating at the bottom of your bottle.
Being reasonable thinking people I would hope that you can enjoy a free learning at my expense.
see video on mescal tequila – here.
Not only should you derive wisdom from my suffering, but also an understanding of tequila’s psychoactive properties, and from a local, something of its preparation, consumption and the finer differentiation of various mescal drinks.

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Abandoned Mine near Niagara Falls – Ontario mine

Abandoned Mine near Niagara Falls – Ontario mine, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

As you might guess by my post I did not go to P-Lake today. I woke up At around 03:30 with a terrible headache (I always get one when the clouds are moving in and I hear we are in for a severe rainstorm tonight) and I thought  – “I’m on holiday, why do I want to do this to myself.” It’s a 5 hour drive either way, lots of hacking through the bush and then I’m not even sure of where the cave is. Last time almost killed me. So instead I switched the alarm off and slept in till about 10 and then I went south for 2 hours instead of north for 5 – to the Queenstone Sandstone Mine. It was relatively easy to find and just as big and mazy as I remembered from that trip with Dan about 10 years ago. Only thing that has changes was the path to get there.

See that pillar in the middle of the room – go ahead kick it – I dare you.

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nuit Blanche Toronto 2011 – Rave at the Heart Machine

nuit Blanche Toronto 2011 – Rave at the burning heart, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

With the arrival of Toronto’s good citizens it really started heating up in the square around the Heart Machine.

I understand the mobile rave had nothing to do with the official Nuit Blanche, the mobile rave was a grass roots event, not for profit loosely organized and with a number that prospective ravers could call to see where exactly the rave is at any time through the night. As for one of my favorite activities – people watching, it was a very colorful crowd and a mega sound system that literally shook windows in surrounding buildings.

Rave organizers advised ravers to not “be that guy”, keep it legal, keep from blocking traffic etc. The actual rave would not be illegal, it would be the activities that were taking place by rave participants that might push the boundaries. Well from what I saw, they pushed the boundaries a lot.

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Nuit Blanche Toronto 2011 – Pot fest, rave, mobile party crew

nuit Blanche Toronto 2011 – Pot fest, rave, mobile party crew, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

So I’d meant to visit the Heart Machine. It seemed to be a nifty concept, the idea of taking control of your city, instead of passively waiting for the city to happen and you just being an observer. As the artist had written, the interaction between citizen and city was meant to be symbiotic.

long before you saw the exhibit you could see the orange flicker of the Heart Machine on the upper walls of nearby buildings. I was especially interested as the Heart Machine had been featured last year at the counter-cultural Burning Man Festival in Nevada. the whole idea is that these 4 big severed arteries or maybe it was the Vena Cava would belch huge roiling puffs of flame into the sky when triggered to do so by some good citizen who was beating at the heart. Well it certainly was a spectacle and it drew a crowd of citizens who chose to interact with the exhibit.

Carl, Jeff, Maggie and I were standing around the Heart Machine somewhat passively watching this fire twirling girl toss a flaming stick around when this Mohawk’d  fellow climbed up onto a reddish mound that I took to be the heart. Imediatly the heart seemed to be picking up the pace. The pulse was increasing and the night above was lit by great roars and exhalations of fire and then the citizens arrived – planned or not they certainly added to the atmosphere and if it had not been for the chill in the air I could well have imagined that I was at the Burning man Festival myself.

I felt it first – this primitive vibration in my gut, a pounding beat explained as “step-Dub” by Jeff who is familiar with the raving scene. The street was packed and a mob was moving toward us – the smell of weed (cannabis) preceding their arrival. It was a mobile rave where the police were conspicuous in their absence, several hundred youths in varying degrees of stonedness, one fellow near me puffing a joint so large it lit the crowd up all around him. There was this guy who looked like Renfield from Dracula, faries, various pseudo Manga characters, kids in masks, costumes, fancy gowns and tons of neon glow sticks. And of course a couple of rave queens in a pickup and another vehicle behind that was kind of like a float. “Water, anybody got water?” a young fellow cried out to nobody in particular.

The music was pounding out so loud that I could barely hear Maggie saying “lets get out of here, this is getting out of control”. As though in reaction to the new arrivals the heart was now spewing flame as though it had just ruptured. A fire engine was caught up in the mess and its siren added to the chaos.

You might say that these citizens of Toronto had come to interact with the heart, and interact they did!!! It was a symbiosis that seemed symbolic of recent interactions – read into it what you will.

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Nuit Blanche Toronto 2011- the day after

Nuit Blanche Toronto 2011- the day after, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

This grim and rainy departure hardly speaks for the excitement of the night before. It had been a Nuit Blanche that spoke loudly of Toronto’s creative talent. And also it spoke of the involvement and uninvolvement of its citizenry.

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Soil pipe in Ontario – it speaks of buried karst

IMGP1675, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

Might this be the hole down which the white rabbit disappeared?

JC and I found this in a valley. Two deep gullies lead up to this spot and there is some obvious overflow where the valley fills up under flood conditions and flows out across the land. The landowner said that he’d heard of this feature, but he’d never really looked.

I believe if I dived down here I might get at least 8 feet before the hole got too narrow and then I’d lie there wedged until my eyeballs popped out or the rabbit set me free. A point on that story (Alice in Wonderland), my mother used to work for the Dean of Christchurch (where Lewis Caroll was a Don) and there was a constant flow of people wanting chestnuts from the Cheshire Cat tree which was right outside her office window – sorry I diverge from caving in Ontario.

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flowstone – Wasteland Waterway

Flow stone in new Ontario Cave – Wasteland Waterway

We went further yesterday than in the past and ended up passing a spot that JC called the Aerofoil – a plate of rock that sticks way out into the passage. I wiggled underneath this aerofoil and got a glimpse of passages on beyond. It’s more of the same, the tunnels are still dropping down deeper and I anticipate that they must soon reach the level of the Rochester shale. This shale layer is often undercut so either the passages will flatten out and become pheratic at that point, or we will be up against a pit.

It was an exhausting crawl and the claustrophobia of inward pressing rock. Everything is really jagged so my cave suit is pretty well shredded. I doubt that the best of Maggie’s stitching will bring it back to health.

This is caving in Ontario

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Wasteland Waterway Cave – this is what we crawled through

IMGP0810, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

This is JC as he and I wiggled our way on deeper into this unexplored Ontario cave system.

We have a mapping planned. Some time soon we should be able to provide more definite dimensions.

We finished the day’s exploration with (For me) a difficult crawl from our excavation hole. With a narrow tube such as the one down which we dropped down into the main tunnel, it does not make for an easy exit. Down below there is nothing to put your feet on, and higher up, the surface is just at that spot where you are unable to lift yourself. I struggled for some time with JC offering to help pull. Anyway I am now suffering from a multitude of delayed injuries including weird rashes, tiredness and bruises that I don’t remember getting. I was sitting at my desk yesterday and discovered a chafing on my belly – not entirely explained by the friction of rubbing against the keyboard. I had 11 hours sleep last night and I seem to be on the mend. Caving gives me both a mental and physical thrashing. This exploration of virgin tunnel keeps me on this mental overdrive that I suspect is costly for several days after.

Is that weird?

Check out JC’s pictures of Wasteland Waterway here – in particular the flowstone that looks very much like melted cheese.

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