Participants: Shaun Larson, Jim Pisarowicz, Darren Ressler

Duration of Trip: 3 hours

New Cave Surveyed: 135 feet

It sure seemed like a long day. We had a blowing lead and all of us could not wait to get back into the cave. Six o'clock finally rolled around though and we were standing in the elevator building getting set for the next adventure up Plummer's Pit.

Shaun climbed the rope first into Shattered Hall. Darren would go in the middle since he had never climbed a rope with ascenders. In this way we would have cavers both above and below him in case he needed any assistance. Everything went smoothly and before we knew it we were all standing in Shattered Hall.

The climb out of Shattered Hall did not look as serious as the Plummer's Pit climb. I attached the climbing rope into my harness and with Shaun as belayer, began the climb. It was fairly easy and soon I was worming my way through the floor of another room. It was smaller than Shattered Hall, but just as broken up. I called it the Shattered Sky.

The others scrambled up into Shattered Sky, but unfortunately the passage ended in this room. The ceiling was a breccia of red clay, limestone, chert, and sandstone but did not go.

We then took out the survey gear and began the mapping of these rooms and the pits that eventually led down to the level of the tour trail. This was most interesting survey as we had to hang off our rope while we measured the distances or read our instruments. All the time we were doing this we were being showered by debris knocked loose from above.

Fortunately many of the survey shots were vertical and before long we were tying our survey into the previous point at the bottom of the drop. The only bad part of the day was that we had topped out Plummer's Pit.

Report by: Jim Pisarowicz