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Booty Scoop
By: Glenn Ledbetter
From the July 2000 Flowstone
On May 27, we finally got most of the group together for a second push and hopefully bottom Thors Natural Bridge Cave. The plan was for everybody to meet at my house and head out early, but as most trips go, we were late getting on the road. We arrived at the parking, spot unloaded the A.T.V.'s, loaded them with cave gear, and headed for the entrance getting there around 11:00 am.
Once there, we climbed down into the cave and with a lot of cursing and flailing around we were through the tight spot and down the first pits. When everyone was down we started off down the stream crawl and then into the main passage. When we got to the point where the first trip stooped we split up. Jim Loftin climbed down through the breakdown while David Teal and Derick Mitchell went up in the breakdown and found a large room above. When I realized they were scooping, I took off after them followed by the others.
We regrouped and David and I went up to the top of the sloped room while Derick, Jeff and Wendy went toward the bottom. There was no apparent passages leading off from this room. We joined Jim back at his crawl to find out he had found a pit that looked very big. After we crawled down the passage for about 200', we were looking down a very large pit about 80' across and looked deeper than it was: 48'. We all
descended and once, on bottom, David went upstream and I went down. This is where the largest room in the cave is; my light just barely shined to the far wall. When every one came to this room, we located another pit taking in major water. The pit appeared to be around 80' deep with a huge black void below. We did not drop this pit due to the threat of rain and the fact the pit is directly in the water. David says this is a very dangerous pit due to the water. Upstream yielded some nice leads noted by Jeff Lynn. We could see large walking passages above the stream borehole, and we turned around in walking passage where the stream entered from two different walking size leads. We started for the entrance and got there about 2
and a half hours later. We are very excited about this cave as we have seen over a mile of mostly walking passage. With one more push trip we should bottom it and then start bringing in others to help survey and to push some of the upper level (walking) leads. More on this later. The next push trip is in the works but not certain when.
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