Page 2
The cave entrance was a tad tricky, with no foot-holds I ended up letting myself down gently off a rather worn, smooth rock, and as my feet came to rest on a solid surface I realized that a rather chubby person like myself would have an even worse time getting back out. It would require a belly-crawl and -flop at the end. But, hey, that will be later!
Letting the eyes adjust and walking down the moderately steep, rocky slope after the entrance allowed some nice views back to the entrance:
It is time, of course, to quit turning around and looking back. This cave has about three large rooms, all connected with wide passageways. There is, of course, an occasional hole, but nothing particularly dangerous.
A little farther into the cave, I experimented with the light options on the camera and found myself in a black and white world unless I set the camera on its most sensitive settings, then I got color again, even with only a flashlight and flash:
In the center of the cave I sat and tested the acoustics with a chant, it was perfect in terms of reverberation of tones.
Next I experimented some more with darkness. I was amazed that I thought I could see my fingers in front of my face as if in black outline, and wondered if I was seeing or imagining. I was probably seeing.
When I turned on the camera, its viewer provided some light. When I took a picture by just that light, I got a black picture. When I brought it home and enhanced it, I got --to my great surprise-- this:
Of course I did not see these "droplets" while in the cave on a picture that was black and featureless, but a picture with flash afterward showed these same features in the viewfinder.
Wiping the lens cleaned them up, suggesting it was dust. This next photo was taken by the light of the camera viewfinder only, as well, but after wiping the lens. These photos show more detail than I coulddiscern by eye only.
There appear to be ceiling formations, stalagtites, in this room, as shown in the bubble-filled photo. Of course I had already spotted them with my flashlight, and a flash picture showed quite nicely that this was a "living" formation with an active seep in the ceiling:
And below that ceiling seep area with its living stalagtite was a living stalagmite, here shown without use of flash. There is an unmistakable angle to these formations, and after a while I realized there was a steady breeze from right to left in this picture. I decided that breeze must have had something to do with the dust-droplet problem that bothered me in this location more than elsewhere. But the dust droplets were a mystery even with a breeze. Droplets? Well, that's how they look on the lens, don't they? And if you go look at me Carlsbad pages, you will see the same distinctively-shaped dust droplets. Maybe it is one of those "cave-things," to have dust fall in droplets as if they are very small particles associated by some force like electrostatic attraction perhaps?
Several other places in the ceiling showed seepage, darker areas with some mineral precipitation evident:
But there were more impressive formations:
Several of the photos had new dust droplets on them, I kept wiping the lens off, but the worst was in the central narrower part where the breeze was tangible.
The central portion of the cave has what looks like huge blades of calcite-cemented fault-gouge (broken chunks of brownish limestone rock embedded in light colored caliche-like [calcite and silica cemented] material). Huge, thick sheetlike structures were hanging from, and in some places had fallen from, the ceiling. Many places it reached to, and was cemented into, the floor. It is like faults were filled in with calcite-cilica cements long ago and then surrounding limestone was dissolved away around it. I don't know if that is how these formationsactually formed, of course.
In places, it looked like huge chunks of these hanging formations had broken off and fallen.
Some of these broken features suggested earthquakes, with shaking loosening the hanging portions. On the next page we will take a closer look at such features.