Northern Colorado Grotto

Horsethief Cave Trip Report - Part One

Robert McFarland

I

Fort Collins is far enough away from the mountains that one can choose any road to get out of town and not have to bother with the windy canyons or the pending threat of late winter snow. North and South are the best choices if your trip is loosely planed around the speed at which you intend to travel. It was February and my road trip itch flared up somethin' fierce, it had been two months since my last long trip and I was way over due. We started at two o’clock in the morning; screaming North on an empty interstate with hoarfrost caked to the inside of the windows and my partner asleep in the passenger seat. By driving just fast enough through the night we reached our destination way ahead of what we predicted without any legal inconveniences. So, after the benefit of a big breakfast in a small town, dawn was bright and traffic was being cooperative, everything else though, was ornery as you’ll find in parts this far north.

The weekend forecast had been vague and we couldn’t get an accurate condition report for the approach road. Along with the gate key, the BLM office employees gave us the distinct impression that they didn’t want us going anywhere near Horse Thief Cave. They spun tales of snow drifted roads, reproached our two person group size, and quizzed our experience level. Nothing we could really complain about, they just didn’t want to come get us and they were making no secret of it. Even our backup plan of ice climbing near Cody was being trampled by a concurrent climbing festival.

That said here’s how it played out: two snow shovels, four tire chains, a can of orange soda, a sunny morning, I was hyper, he was driving. We had nothing else to do but go caving.

The road was passable without chains, but you have to want it bad enough. We approached with enough caution and forethought that had something gone wrong we were willing to dig ourselves out or camp and hunt until spring. After shimmying uphill on ice and loose rock, plowing through the rut troughs, and pounding a few drifts into manageable size, we reached our weekend interment: Armpit Cabin. Like its namesake, the cabin garnered varying opinions. Some thought of it as an unhygienic pit, while others realized it only smells when you’re having fun. Whoever reclaimed this place from pending disintegration, whoever rescued the graffiti from the proposed whitewashing of ‘98, and those people who maintain it whenever they do should be lauded for their effort.

Since it was just after noon when we arrived, the only way to prevent boredom was to find the cave! The opening is unmistakable: a big hole in the ground, leading down a ramp into a big, dusty breakdown filled room. We both grabbed lights and ventured in to find the gate. The entrance chamber, though, has other ideas. Its huge opening flooded the first fifty feet with sunlight creating a host of dark shadows and swallowing the lamp glow. We walked in without any clear direction. Even though we had two very detailed maps, there was a certain amount of reality that is missing from them. What we had were boot prints in the dust, a large cairn in the middle of a big room, and the beta from a reliable source: “Just follow the elephant trail until you get lost, and then start looking around.” It was a beginning at least.

Our eyes took a long time to adjust and next we knew we had circumnavigated the second room inadvertently. So we spread out and poked around a bit more, realizing the size of this first passage was immense with crawl spaces and leads branching off in every direction. We checked the map and tried to work out where we were. We crawled into blind holes and ducked into any hollow looking for the little register that would alert us to the right path. But after an hour of looking nothing revealed itself and we realized neither of us had any back-up equipment or water. We worked our way back outside and quickly changed clothes and grabbed our gear and dashed back in.

We followed what we thought was the path to our stopping point, but this time we found the register laying next to a mouse hole. The discovery was just that accidental. Sign in, time check, and poke on through.

Ghengis Kahn had a plan, and so did we. Our map suggested that we keep right, great plan, I’ll lead. Every chance I had to take a left was made immediate use of. Every chance my partner had to remind me we need to stay to the right was made proud use of. An hour and fifty feet later we found the gate. We even remembered to bring the key. Seemed easy enough to get this far, lets get a little farther and we’ll be able to move quickly through here tomorrow.

Short story getting longer… this cave is very difficult to navigate your first time through. There are lots of dead ends and beautiful gypsum rooms, and choking radon infused dust. I had been awake for almost thirty hours but with every new room we crawled into, I wanted to go farther. We checked and rechecked the map, looked back to memorize the hole we had just come through, sat and had some water and realized that we should go back and rest.

The cabin, some beer, a game of darts, I couldn’t go on; my insomniac jag had me zany for sleep. Sleep is what I did.

The winter air in the high plains is crisp and bright with sun. The crunch of the frozen ground is clear and the open blue sky is a welcome morning. But we were headed underground, leaving the sweet air, for the poisonous, trading the sun for a few batteries. Our frozen February landscape would soon be the picture of geologic time, something infinitely more patient than either of us. Food, gear, water, batteries; it’s a short checklist.

The more ready I made myself, the more my mind raced toward that darkness. The first obstacle was easy to pass, we found the gate in less than 15 minutes, another 20 and we were at our previous stopping point. Not long after that I was sitting atop a wall looking across a pit, with my partner calling after me, “You find the Gypsum Wall?”

“I think so”, I called back. Next I know he’s crawled through a slot, over me, down the wall and is in the bottom of the pit saying, “there are supplies down here, must be the right way”.

In the bottom of the pit, I am humbled again by the enormity of this place.

We push on a bit further, stopping near the second Red Buddha. These are impressive flows of what looked like red clay which has exuded from a small crack high above. Why call it a Buddha, though? It’s wet, it’s red, it reminds me of Georgia. I’m not a scientist; I’m not going to pretend to understand. It’s time for a snack and a sip of water.

After considering our map we have a general idea of where we are and where we need to go to be where we intend to get. An hour, four dead ends and one impressive, though small room of nifty bubbly speleothems and we haven’t found what we had hoped for. Route finding isn’t going very well. We’ve split up to avoid each other’s frustration each of us checking different leads. We are both confused and hoping that one of us finds the way before we end up looking for each other for the rest of the trip Some climbing, some muddy holes, much more frustration and a register finally shows itself. While Rob’s signing in, I’ve climbed up a bit higher and made my way into a room that I recognize, a big room. There’s a hole in the ceiling that seems to be oozing flowstone, it looks revoltingly organic. I’ve seen that formation before, there’s a cairn and some survey tape over here. Rob catches up but doesn’t recognize a damn thing, maybe he’s right, I don’t remember those bat bones. Let’s keep going this way, anyway…

We talked about caving on drives home from climbs. The nature of the climbing seems to fit well with that of caving, enough so that our interests followed. I don’t really know how we got into caving. Our first conversation, was probably something like, “You want to check out some caves?”, “Yes, this weekend?”, “Sure”.

So, after buying twenty seven flashlights, and taping them all to my climbing helmet, I was ready. We spent 2 days looking for the view in a 30 year old photo. In less than a year we have scoured the canyons with maps, rumors, a compass, and more than enough warnings to crawl into and out of places that I am unable to describe accurately.

This trip would consume five days of vacation. We merely had the hope of success. Consciously being exposed to excessive Radon, accepting dehydration, and dust, and long days in the darkness, we kept moving forward. With every new success, another challenge presented itself.

It’s not a comfortable world underground, most of it is brown and grey, and there is plenty of mud and guano dust. The darkness is dense, and without light a three foot wide passage can contain the expanse of your imagination. After spending thirty minutes trying to figure out how to get your body through a space that was not meant for the human body, you may find nothing but a solid wall, or you may dumbly turn the corner and see for the first time a room bigger than your apartment, filled with sinewy golden stalagmites patiently waiting for a touch from one of hundreds of hanging partners above, lamplight causing the pensive suspended drops to shimmer in their stillness. I feel as though we have insinuated ourselves into an intimate moment, our presence at once startling, and unwelcome. Rob has crouched beside the entrance to a room of living stone, he seems aware of being small and insignificant, and only tolerated by this place. Now I know why there are Buddhas here. With no idea where to go, we found where we wanted to be, The Mindbender Pools.

The singularity of this area, in finite contrast to the areas we had come through to get here, lends itself to such dreamy descriptions. It is difficult to convey the full affect of awe while experiencing something commensurate to our capacity for wonder. We spoke in whispers to ourselves being only vaguely conscious of each other’s presence. The path through this fragile place is a specific line between formations. In places we were forced to balance on narrow strips of connective flow stone, or skirt a very thin lip of rim stone containing a still pool of clear dusty water. Making cautious and deliberate moves, dreading the consequences of any mistake, led by intuition and curiosity we continued to the end of the chamber.

From this precarious stooped position we stepped in to a great room of breakdown at the end of which was another Buddha and The Crack Where the Water Comes Down. It took a few minutes to figure out what we needed to do next, but after squeezing and sliding upward, we found another register and called lunch.

It had been a long day to here and we made more ground than we had intended, so it was decided that it was a good place to stop. On the way out we spent two hours taking bad photos of beautiful things. The concentration on photography focused my energy on these extraordinary scenes. Forcing me to consider shadow and texture where I once saw only form. This intense, forced myopia took me out of physical world and it effects, I was held in a place that existed only for my imagination and created by these intangible strings of rock. I was Botticelli studying a Rodin.

Once out of this chamber and headed back to the beginning, we stopped for some water. Both of us overwhelmed we decided to stick to the main corridor and forego our original idea of further exploration of the insipient leads we were enticed by on our way in. But in a fit of euphoria, I darted down a passage that we hadn’t been in before, I was happy, I didn’t want to leave. Through the climbing and bending and kneeling along this passage, I felt the fatigue return. I would be going no farther.

Rob led the way out, I followed. Focusing as much as necessary on the retreat, I let the rest of my energy kept my imagination swimming in the impossibilities of what we had seen and the possibilities of what we hadn’t. We find it difficult to leave, there are many things we haven't seen but it's necessary to move out, any side trip may keep us in here for hours rooting around in little holes and staring into the crystalline microcosms that make this world so addictive. It took much less time to crawl back the first register outside the gate. Signing out our destination was stated as EXIT. Neither of us mentioned tomorrow, our focus was limited to the next step, and the next all the way back to the surface, the sunset, the sweet cold wind.

II

That night we weighed the options of going back into Horse Thief. Our trip had started as a three day Cave/Climb/Cave endeavor but neither of us had the notion we would be consumed by this cave. We had already surpassed our predictions of how much of the cave we would see. Our curiosity was insistent though. The next morning we agreed to go back in and find out what was beyond The Crack.

Off to a good start with me leading again and taking every wrong turn I could find. Good thing one of us had been in this cave yesterday. I was moving quickly through familiar ground, happy again to be in this cave. Maybe it was the Radon mixing with my body chemistry creating this exhilaration. After bending through a narrow opening to a more comfortable standing room I noticed two holes, both just body size and both looked familiar. Looking back for my partner who in turn was coming into this room, I got back down onto my belly and went ahead. I managed to squeeze in to a comfortable size room with lots of shiny white crystals on the ceiling. When I stopped I realized that I had made a wrong turn, the thin tube I had just negotiated was challenging and it was definitely my first time through. I waited for Rob to call, or just follow behind.

Rob described this sojourn very well; “I saw your feet disappear into that tube and knew you were going the wrong way but figured you were just exploring another lead. So I stayed on track and when I stopped in the next big room I could still hear you grunting and sliding along the ground. It was pretty loud, kind of funny too. You were really working at something, huh? At first I thought you had found another way into the room I was in. Then the grunting stopped, so I called to you and when I didn't get any answer I figured you weren’t going to pop in to this room, and maybe I had better come and see what you were trying to do."

I was trying to figure out if I could reverse the move I made to get into my new room. I had to do a kind of head stand in a hole and bend my neck and one shoulder through, the only leverage I had for movement was from my hands. When I heard Rob calling I could only answer, "Goddamnit!". When we rejoined, I offered the lead, which he refused saying, “It's probably a good idea to have someone keeping an eye on you today.”

“I guess,” I replied and took off again.

It consumed an hour and forty minutes of our third day to reach our previous stopping point. We made a big effort to keep moving through The Mindbender Pools knowing that any trip into a long lead here would consume hours of our attention. This area a siren song quality about it but the lure of the unknown has an equally loud call. Sticking to our reason for coming back into this cave we were having a snack atop the crack in no time flat! (HA!)

After we slid up the crack and scuttled along a clay filled tube we stepped out into a room much larger than we had seen underground before. We came through smaller places where space is understandable by a physical recognition of distance and now have found ourselves at an area intransmutable by a beam of light. I had been driven to see more of this cave expecting to find my wonder had changed slightly. Lost in the bliss of first time experiences, I was suddenly very much aware of the alien, or supra-terrestriality of this place. The floor was mostly a very fine fill of dirt and dust that would cushion our steps like a high pile carpet. As we moved into this room we instinctively kept to the right wall. All of a sudden there we have room to spread out and get lost and we are subconsciously acting against that. We’re also looking for a natural bridge. Rob takes off to orient himself with the map and compass, while I’m studying some fossils. He suggests that the bridge is up a bit farther, or we’ve missed it completely. When I turn around, I see that he’s standing about two body heights above me in the middle of a tongue or rock resembling something in Arches N.P. How do you tell someone that without sounding smug?

“Um, I think you’re standing on it dumbass.”

“Really?”

“It sure looks like a bridge from here.”

“Cool. Then I think we want to go that way.” He says kind of quiet and heads off.

“Come check out these fossils.”

“Check out these bones.” I hear from a few yards away.

“How do animals get here?”

At the end of this passage we set off West toward the F survey and eventually back to the beginning of the big room in something called the F Survey. All of this area was walking passage with forty foot ceilings, it was very comfortable. Walking upright we were able to cover all of this section with minimal effort. It was refreshing.

When the F Survey began to narrow requiring us to kneel in places, we saw another pile of these bones and near-by what looked like fossilized sea plant life. This pile was definitely mammalian and contained a partial skull with large occipital cavities, and small teeth, except the canines which suggested this was a carnivore.

We kept moving.

This passage continued to neck down, with many crawly leads but also a very distinct one climbing a hill of scree. Atop is a large green water pool in a narrow fissure like room with many dripping formations. It’s active, and the water drops make a perfect tone when they hit the pool their slow rhythm, echoing in this small chamber.

We then crawled back into the main room and sat discussing what to do next. It’s getting to be another long day, but there is much more cave to see. We decide to look for the next register, then bail. On our map, it was just in a small distinct room just across from where we were now at the beginning of another new survey area called HA.

There was a fair amount of wet packed earth in this area. Some of these Mud Flats contained the evidence of drips from high above in the form of jagged holes resembling abscessed lesions in the middle of an otherwise unmarred stretch of smooth red clay. Route finding began to be troublesome again. As I started off into a crawl that was just big enough for me to squeeze through, I stopped just after the tight stop, reversed my moves and backed out. I was coming close to my limits. After Rob went through it turned out that I could walk around the wall he slid underneath. We were now where we thought the register should be but, it was somewhere else.

Forcing ourselves to continue up through the end of this chamber through some tight gaps in a breakdown we hit yet another big chamber. No idea where to look, we dropped our packs and Rob went down and into a small belly crawl, while I climbed up the breakdown.

After fifteen minutes of looking, we gave up. It was time to leave. After a few sips of water and a bit of sugar, though, I was feeling better. Retracing our path I noticed a faint red line heading up a large ramp of yellow/white breakdown. It seemed obvious enough, but I guess that’s how people get lost. I was not conscious of such fine details on the way in, and Rob was getting disoriented on the way out. Even though it might set us off on another hundred yards of an energy consuming search, we followed the line up the ramp. This was in fact a trail of boot prints leading up to the very register we sought.

Signing our destination as, once again: EXIT.

We crawled along picking our way back through the body of Horse Thief Cave. Pausing once again at the Mindbender pools for a few more photos. Stopping periodically to vent the sweat from our coveralls. There was little conversation left, a few jokes to be made, but we were ready to be outside again. This trip ended in the sunset of another cloudless evening. We posed for a parting shot in the entrance of the cave. Covered in dust clinging to sweat soaked clothes, the trace of fatigue evident in our posture. We stood smiling in the absence of our expectations, having quickly exceeded them in our willingness to explore. We shared this feeling of accomplishment, recognizing in each other the sum of such experience. In turn, this feeling was met by the temperance of witnessing a singular event in geologic history, occurring without the interaction of man and hampered only by his intrusions. In repeating our trip over subsequent days we gained knowledge of the physical dimensions of this place. We had learned a few lessons about traveling lightly. Our progress through this cave over these few days impressed us. Our reward, however is indescribable. Of these two and a-half days we spent a total of twenty-one hours inside. That’s a long time to be held in awe of nature.