Cave Shaft at Twin Trickles – exploring rocks and minerals from within (Bancroft)

Cave Shaft at Twin Trickles – exploring rocks and minerals from within (Bancroft), originally uploaded by Mic2006.

In the Fall 1998 edition of the Canadian Caver, Brad Wilson relates an interesting experience that he had while exploring a remote cave in the Canadian Shield. He says that he could see a small room beyond a horribly tight squeeze so instead of going face forwards like he would normally do, he went feet first and after a little struggling he suddenly slipped through into a tube – chest deep into icy water. As Brad points out, to have gone head first would likely have been the end of him.

Exploring the rock from within, as we did at Twin Trickles Cave was certainly an amazing experience. The marble and calcite was incredibly sculpted and at the bottom of the shaft pictured above, there was a room that was bowl-like, and entirely striped black and white by the surrounding rock. When I mention a cave in the same sentence that I mention Bancroft, I do not for an instant suggest that it is a site for rock and mineral collecting. Caves are natural wonders that have been thousands of years in the making. They should be left exactly as they are found.

Check out this video documentary of exploring rock and minerals from within (Bancroft) here.

Twin Trickles Cave is some short distance into the forest and on the day that we visited, it was horribly inundated with ferocious black flies – food for the bats that reside within. although Twin Trickles is not a large cave, the rooms are sizeable for Ontario and there is a long tubular tunnel that seems not to have been followed either by ourselves or Brad’s group in 1987 – obviously it is no easy task and it dips down toward the water table. There are plenty of unprobed leads in the area of Twin Trickles so there will be more trips up in that direction this coming summer.

Read Full Post »

Exploring Stone Church Cave

Exploring Stone Church Cave, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

When the railway engineers sealed Stone Church Cave they must have thought they’d done a pretty thorough job, and in reading E.D. Ongley’s 1965 BA. thesis, I had thought the same myself, however, on the off chance there might be some surface clues I visited this area with a friend (Jeff) and was immediately able to access the suspected Stone Church Cave as the retaining wall that had been built by the railway has collapsed. Ongley was entirely correct when he theorized that there might have been a buried system in the area, this thought being derived from his observation of an albino crayfish in the railway tunnel.

There is a sizable space that leads off from the railway drainage tunnel and because of blowing air from a hole nearby I suspect that there might still be a tunnel sealed behind the retaining wall on the opposite side of the tunnel as well. When I look at that wall to the right of the above picture I suspect that I can see points from where a tunnel might lead, deeper into the rock. Just because the railway blasted their own drainage route, across the natural tunnel path does not mean that where the water now leaves the rock is where the water always left the rock. There is a low lying area nearby that has been cut off from Stone Church Lake and I wonder if the old drainage route had taken the water that was sinking from the swamp, moved it underground and then either had it meet the surface in that low lying area and from there it drained down through the rubble against the wall of the hill. I noticed that there was a seam of rock about 20 wide in this hollow that was eroded back into the side of the hill. Debris covers the natural seam, but the cleft that is made suggests that the rock is easily worn or decomposed; could this be the subterranean route by which the area is drained?

A surface search revealed a shaft leading down into the natural cave near the upstream insurgence.

To see a short video of the exploration of Stone Church Cave – click here.

Read Full Post »

Video on Looking for Caves at the edge of the Canadian Shield – Stone Church Cave (Ontario)

Stone Church 1, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

In 1965 E.D. Ongley produced his much sought after caving manuscript, ‘A Study of Caves in Southern Ontario’. In that work Ongley mentions the existence of Stone House Cave, a tunnel that had been blasted by the railways to drain a swamp that was seasonally flooding the nearby railway. In that blasted tunnel Ongley had found an albino crayfish and he speculated that the side of the tunnel, which had been blocked by a human-constructed rock wall, likely led onto a deeper, natural cave.

In the attached video, see – Looking for Stone Church Cave here, I show the caving possibilities at the edge of the Canadian Shield and I explore the small tunnel pictured above. This is not the fabled Stone Church Cave, but it is context for the next post that I will publish, which is the now revealed – Stone Church Cave.

Read Full Post »

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).

Read Full Post »

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

Read Full Post »

Caving in Ontario; Exploration of Buried Karst – An adventure in extreme sport in Canada

Caving in Ontario – Exploration of Buried Karst – JC following up a cave tunnel

“The newly published book, “Caving in Ontario; Exploration of Buried Karst”, is now available for purchase from Lulu at this link – “Caving in Ontario” – buy the book. On the Lulu web page you will be able to preview several pages and in paying on their site you can choose shipping options that range from single day to 1 week delivery time.

“Caving in Ontario” has been a joy to write, it records the underground caving explorations that I and those that I know have taken over the last 2 decades in Ontario. There have been some extremely hazardous, world class adventures beneath the rock of this province and I felt the need to document those as well as saying something of the culture of those who are involved in extreme sports such as this.

If you are in any way interested in what lies beneath your feet, the rock and tunnels of Ontario – this book is for you. I am personally attracted by the beauty of the underground and the mystery of what lies beyond. In “Caving in Ontario” I write of many of the known caves and some that are known only to me and my closest caving friends.  I summarize two decades of exploration and tell prospective cavers how to find their own caves. Finding caves involves understanding local geology and the clues of surface geographical features.

Buy the book “Caving in Ontario”. I look forward to hearing of your own discoveries, there’s plenty more to find.

Read Full Post »

Pushing Dead Mouse – A new Ontario caving area south of Hamilton

A disapponting conclusion – I’m to fat to go much further

 

IMG_7898, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

Just a quick post as promised – a conclusion to the newly discovered cave – “Dead Mouse”. In one sense, you did not miss out to much here Greg. The cave soon changed to something less explorable, but it was the exploration earlier in the day at another spot found by Jeff that really made the journey worthwhile.

I am again supposed to be studying for a health and safety exam. This is the last of the delay tactics that I can employ – a quick update that I will build upon in a following few posts later this evening.

As we have discovered over the weeks since our last visit, the Onondaga Escarpment (south of Hamilton) is a rich caving ground if you know what to look for. The escarpment winds all wriggly and convoluted across the top of Lake Erie – interspersed with layers of chert and some fabulous fossils.

More to come soon.

Read Full Post »

The Cave – Ontario

A cave like Nexus, but way south of there

Caving in Ontario

We realized that we were inadequately prepared to explore this new cave, we had only one flashlight and crawling on the cobbles without knee pads was painful to say the least. We resolved to poke our heads in a short distance and see what lay ahead with the intention of surmising what lay beyond that.

I am left with the impression of a system somewhat similar in appearance to Nexus cave in the Eramosa Karst (Hamilton), but the tunnels are a little larger in this passage.

I believe that the cave at the entrance is only a short distance beneath the rock, but with around 15 feet of dirt above the rock – that’s unusual in ontario, most Ontario caves are just beneath the cedars – little in the way of dirt above them. I do not see much in the way of mud and sediment banks in the trenchway that I am crawling along. Like Nexus, the rock is thinly bedded and from what I could see, much of it juts out into the passage.

Soon the water is getting deeper. The big mystery to us is still where does the water come from, a sinking stream, percolating throught the farmer’s fields, just dripping out of the strata with the snowmelt?

Read Full Post »

Unbelievable! A cave of Dahlias

Lake of the Dahlias somewhere beyond

P1010079, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

Here it is – over the hump. I pressed through this low slot and on to the passage beyond – an elliptical tunnel that wound off into gloom. Its hard to imagine but somewhere further on the helictites become so dense and interwoven that it is impossible to go onwards without damaging them. I did not get much further than this, but I was shown a map that indicated the most fantastic formations were isolated beneath a military zone. After my little private jaunt I saw a 3D movie that the curators were making of what was deep within – unbelievable!

One General Frederico F. Gavada wrote in 1870 in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine of his experience in the Cuevas de Bellamar saying that he eventually reached an underground lake, 18 feet deep and 180 feet long. He called it the “Lake of Dahlias” for the crystals that looked like petaled flowers.

As the general wrote …

“These dahlias are formed by triangular, concave crystals, starting from a common centre, in layers one above the other, precisely as the petals of dahlias are arranged. They vary from three to five inches in diameter. Their greatest beauty consists in the exquisite manner in which they are tinted with veins of violet and blue and delicate yellow and pale crimson. These colors are probably due to the presence of mineral salts which filter down with the water from the overlying strata.

Here, then, we have an enchanted lake in which the most fastidious of naiads would not refuse to dwell. A lake with its surrounding landscape of fantastic, sparry forms and its beds of wondrous flowers, and with its own sky bending above it full of sparkling constellations – a lake on which the sun has never shone, and whose smooth and silver surface the light wings of the breeze have never rippled, nor the rage of the tempest ever maddened into foam”.

Read Full Post »

The Abandoned Harcourt Graphite Mine near Bancroft

Abandoned Mine in Northern Ontario

P1010856, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

I had one heck of a time finding the Harcourt Graphite Mine, following directions from an old guide book only to discover that the directions were wrong. Simply put, the mine is only about 150 meters off highway 648 – just outside Harcourt. Being densely wooded, I wandered well past the old buildings and ended somewhere off in the middle of nowhere.

Amongst other somewhat unfortunate events that day I stepped on a rusty nail in the remnants of the old mill. I actually found the diggings by limping through the bush, imagining from clues how they would have situated the mill in respect to where they would have been digging their ore.

This is an example of the kind of mine that is better left un-explored. I went only as far as the adit entrance to get this picture. The roof looks like it needs scaling – just waiting for some errant explorer to bump a rock and down it all comes. I would imagine that the graphite is in the lighter coloured rock as the guide book says that ” yellow jarosite and and rusty goethite” are powdered over the graphite.

Read Full Post »