Northern Colorado Grotto

Where to go caving this weekend? With the only prereq being to a place I haven't been to, but been meaning to go to, I called upon Alaric Strauss to see what's up. He said he'd been wanting to check out Patterson Creek from upstream which sounded cool to me. We decided to take a day off work and make it a 3 day pokefest, since it was a good drive from the Front Range.

It ended up being Alaric, His brother Eric, Chris Nelson and I. We got up there early Saturday morning, about 2am, and set up camp on the side of the road because we figured not too many people were crazy enough to drive down it. (We only saw one vehicle the whole time). The next morning, or should I say when the sun came up, we heard the only vehicle to drive by our campsite. We arose to a beautiful view of Elk Lake, Patterson Creek and the Blair Bench. We ate breakfast while discussing what we wanted to do. It was decided that we fan out and head across the limestone park that lay out to the south of our campsite.

We encountered a couple of little cavelets, one of which we named MANHOLE CAVE due to the way we opened it up. It was about 10-12 ft deep and 4-5 ft wide with a tight slot at the bottom. The limestone didn't look good for big cave, however there are probably a large number of small ones to be found.

We ended up circling around and followed Patterson Creek down a little ways before crossing it and spreading out onto the Blair Bench. We were looking for anything that looked like cave and dint find much until I came up on Moose Calwell, a cave found by Larry Fish and Company back in the mid 80's. After a couple of photos and a good poking, we traveled on down to locate Shadow Lake Sink. We had a good idea where it was due its name. Find the lake and find the cave. Sure enough we heard water a hundred yards or so before we saw a sink. Yahoo! Wet nasty crawl and drop cave! We didn't plan on doing any vertical on this particular day, just tight crawls. Upon entering, we saw the creek going down to the right, and dry passage to the left. In the middle of this passage, about 20 feet into the cave, there was a breakdown covered hole. I told Chris about it and proceeded down the tight, sharp squeezeway beyond.

Upon my return, I saw Chris and Alaric trying to open up the hole. They were moving rock from the bottom, which looked like it wanted to fall inward, but how deep was it? I kept telling them they were crazy for trying to kill themselves, but they kept on until, all of a sudden, the floor started to move. A split second later the rock fell in and dust erupted like a mushroom cloud. After the dust settled and the exclamations stopped, we looked in and saw that the floor dropped only about 4-5 ft more. However, we saw a passage about 4 high by 2 wide heading down at a slight grade. The dirt and rock ringing the hole made it hazardous to try to venture down. We pushed in a large volume of rubble down trying to make it safe, but decided to leave it for now. We left the cave and decided to check out Shadow Lake since we were up here. At the lake, Alaric and Eric got excited about the thought of catching fish. Chris and I decided to head on around to Blair Lake and see where it drains. We came across the overflow and followed it down into a sink where it disappeared into the floor at a couple of spots. We donned our helmets and preceded to check all the holes, but the longest one we entered was about 30 ft long. We couldn't get to the large uplead next at the entrance that headed back up toward the lake. It looked like it needed rope to be safe so we took off down the slope to a meadow on the bench.

In the southern end of the meadow, we came up on a crack at a low spot. I walked to one end of it and was trying to pry up a rock in the way of a little blackness below when I turned and saw Chris looking into a much bigger hole at the opposite end. He geared up and dropped in after moving a rock or two. It only went in about 10 ft or so and Chris came out and gave me a chance to look at the end. It looked like it continued past the sharp limestone blocks that lay wedged in the crack. I finally managed to flip a couple of rocks out of the way and saw that it went about another 8 ft or so and got a little tight for me. We decided to mosey on and try to find Double Sink.

On the way back, Chris long legs got him way in front of me and I soon found myself walking in the trees. Pretty soon, I heard water up in front of me. I quickened my pace until I came up to a nice sink, but no water! It sounded like the water was still up ahead a little. It came to me that this must be Double Sink, and the water I was hearing was entering another hole. I skirted around and immediately came up on the creek making its way into a much smaller sink than the first. I clamored down into the hole and noticed that the creek was split with a majority of the flow entering a low hole to the right. The smaller part was sumping out near the middle, and I could see a couple of dry holes on the left side of the sink, one of which I could see into the adjacent sink.

Not really up on going solo this late in the day, I decided to go around and check out the larger sink. Down in the bottom, I saw a small waterfall, which I assumed was from the sumped part of the creek, which eventually sumped out in the back of the lowest point in the sink. In this part of the sink, I looked at the ceiling and the mad deposits laid down from the spring thaw. I also began noticing some nice fossils in the walls and breakdown in the hole. I spent about 15 minutes checking out the sink before deciding to head back to the camp site.

However on the way back, I found myself tromping through the woods. I came up on another old revine and followed it up. On the way, I found a small slot the looked like a possible dig. I was getting tired of all the treading I had done that day and started heading out. On my way down, I came up on another hole in a small sink. I looked in and noticed it immediately opened up into a comfortable room about 35 ft in diameter with a dirt floor. I poked it really quick, figured it was a bonus cave after finding all the holes I'd set out to locate that day, and headed back to the campsite where we swapped stories and ate.

The next day, we went up to Double Sink intent on getting into a cave. We geared up and I led the way down the major stream passage. After 25 or 30 ft, the ceiling came down to about 2 inches off the stream surface. I stopped and said something like, "You're crazy." Alaric looked around me, dropped prone into the creek and yelled "It goes!" or Its cold!" or something and flipped through the hole like a salmon. I decided to follow him or I would never hear the end of it. So I dropped in and went into convulsions trying to get through the squeeze while holding my breath and trying to scream at the pain from the cold at the same time. After the entrance squeeze, we came up into a small room with the passage heading on as stooping and walking passage. About 40 ft in we came to an 8 ft waterfall that Chris started down. The footholds and handholds were under the waterfall, which made decent challenging. I was already numb from the entrance squeeze, so the stream flowing over me wasn't that bad. The passage was good size at this point, 20- 25 ft wide, 20 ft ceiling and 100 ft long at a slope of roughly 40 degrees. At the bottom, the stream went under a ledge and disappeared into the rocks. I spotted an uplead and climbed up it entering into a steep trickleway that was heavily decorated with fossils. It also had some young stalagtites and flowstone. At the furthestpenetrable distance, I encountered a collapse. Chris made his way up with me and we looked at the fossils and discussed the collapse. Getting colder, we climbed down and got out of the cave sopping wet. The sun was out in force which helped once we were in dry goods. A storm rolled in and we headed back to camp to drink beer and eat good food.

The following day, it looked like it wanted to rain some more so we packed all our stuff and started out before the roads really got soupy. We decided to go out on the road from Elk Lakes to Deep Lake. It turned out to be a little easier than the way we came in. We saw a hole of the road that Alaric dropped. It ended in a possible dig about 25 ft in. However, the area is loaded with small caves, and we kept pointing at small sinks and dips on the way out, checking out a couple with a mini-mag. We plan on checking this area out again a little more thorough in the future.

All in all, it was an excellent weekend. There was good beer, food and caving to keep us entertained. Here's to caving in Colorado.