Beyond Midnight Junction in Fort Stanton Cave
Exploration in the far reaches of the cave, while bivying beyond the standard Midnight Junction Camp.
This August, I did two incredible Fort Stanton trips back-to-back. On consecutive weekends, I did four-day camp trips in the cave, which means spending eight days in the cave in an 11-day stretch. The second of those two trips I won’t write about, because we had some objectives that we unfortunately can’t disclose yet. The first of these two trips was a standard exploration trip, and an incredible one at that.
The objective of this trip was to explore in the MK Ultra area of the cave, where many leads remained after the previous trip to this area in 2024. The MK Ultra area is what the Borderlands passage becomes when you go past MK100 or so. This whole area is the MK survey, and the far end earned the creative name MK Ultra on that 2024 trip.
On my last Fort Stanton trip back in June, we spent our third day in the cave exploring a lead at the start of Borderlands at MK64. This lead went for 2000 ft before we turned around at a four-way intersection where three walking passages continued off into the unknown in different directions. The rest of Borderlands, and the MK Ultra area beyond Borderlands, was apparently full of leads like that one. And the La Culebra Passage, which is the large pleasant borehole between the Midnight Junction camp and Borderlands, is wonderful passage that I love traveling in, so I was eager to see the passages that continued beyond La Culebra into Borderlands and MK Ultra.
This trip was with Garrett Jorgensen Olauge, Adam Weaver, and Rene Ohms. I had caved with Garrett previously on a three-day camp trip in Lechuguilla, but I had never met Adam and Rene. I met them in Albuquerque after they flew in from South Dakota, and I had one of those absurd moments that are very unique to caving: “hi, we don’t know each other, nice to meet you, now let’s go spend four days extremely far underground exploring the end of the world together”. I love moments like that.
The far reaches of Fort Stanton really do feel like the end of the world. We would travel over 12 miles one way underground to get to the MK Ultra area, where the original exploration would begin. There is no GPS to tell you where you are, and no way to contact the outside world except by spending a full day traveling underground to get to the cave’s single entrance.
Garrett, Adam and Rene do tons of Fort Stanton caving, and I was very much looking forward to caving with them, to see how the pros do it. I knew they travel fast, and they get a lot of survey (mapping new, unexplored passages) done. I like to do all of those things, and I wanted to see how much they/we could get done on a trip like this where there is so much travel to get to the far reaches of the cave and there are incredible leads to survey.
We got to the Fort Stanton bunk house in the evening on Wednesday, August 13th, the night before our trip. As usual, we frantically packed our bags that evening, spent the whole night wondering and worrying about what we might have forgotten, then unpacked our bags the next morning and looked at everything and packed them again, having not forgotten anything. Then we were ready to enter the cave Thursday morning, confident we were prepared with everything we needed for the next four days we would spend underground.
Thursday, August 14th
We entered the cave at the bright-and-early alpine start time of 9:31am. Man, I love that it’s always dark in the cave so there’s no need to start early. I saw firsthand that Garrett Adam and Rene really are fast and efficient cavers, as we made it to Midnight Junction very quickly, wasting little time and making few mistakes. We made it to Midnight Junction at 5:22pm, 7 hours and 51 minutes after entering the cave. That’s much faster than the 13 hours it took on my first Snowy River trip and the 11 hours 40 minutes it took on my second trip. Minimizing time spent at the changing stations, turning stops for food into quick snack breaks instead of proper meal time, power walking down the easy parts of Snowy, and generally having a sense of urgency all helped us make light work of the trip to Midnight Junction in under eight hours.
I didn’t take any pictures on the way there, so I’ll save you the glamor Snowy River shots and the explanation of how this travel works, which is unique and bizarre even by caving standards. See my previous Fort Stanton trip reports to read all about and see pictures that demonstrate why traveling on Snowy River is such a surreal experience with its own unique rewards and challenges.
Midnight Junction is the standard camp in the cave. It is far out there by caving standards, at 8 hours if you’re fast or 12+ hours for slow teams. It’s a good thing we made quick time to Midnight Junction, because at that point our day of traveling to camp wasn’t even close to over! We were to bivy that night at Camp Wolf, a bivy spot 2-3 hours beyond Midnight Junction. I say bivy, not camp, because Camp Wolf has no fixed camp gear left there. Right now it’s just an empty passage. This is unlike Midnight Junction, which is a proper camp that features permanently stashed sleeping bags, sleeping pads, ground tarps, stoves, among many other miscellaneous camp supplies.
Because Midnight Junction has camp gear stashed there, trips camping there can go fairly lightweight. There’s very little camp-specific gear you need to carry. Stove fuel and your personal mess kit and toiletries are just about it. You don’t even need to pack separate camp clothes, as is common when caving, as your clean-mode clothes will be dry and clean enough for camp, and the cave is warm enough (57 F) such that extra warm clothes are not necessary.
But the far out exploration trips bivy beyond Midnight Junction nowadays, as the frontiers of the cave have gone so far beyond Midnight Junction (4+ hours) that you need to camp further out if you want to get much done. This means much more to carry: a sleeping bag, pad, ground tarp, and stove. Thankfully, extras of these supplies are stashed at Midnight Junction, so you only have to carry them from there. At Midnight Junction, you can also ditch your clean pack and clean clothes, as all the travel is in dirty mode from there. That at least frees up space in your cave bag for all the bivy gear you’ll have to carry. Carrying all the bivy gear was going to be a challenge, but it was a challenge I was looking forward to. I was excited to do a really far out trip in Fort Stanton that necessitated bivying.
At Midnight Junction, we ditched our clean packs, which were the innermost packs that all our stuff was packed inside of. This meant we had to completely unpack our clean packs and repack everything into our dirty packs, which previously had been either rolled up inside our clean packs or covering the outside of our clean packs in dirty mode. We left our clean packs, and various small items we wouldn’t need until the way out several days later, on the camp ground tarps at Midnight Junction. After we spent a little under an hour eating, resting, repacking, and getting water at Midnight Junction, we were off, ready for several more hours of caving before we could sleep.
From Midnight Junction, we turned left down the non-Snowy passage and abandoned Snowy River until it was time to exit the cave three days later. A minute later we were at a T intersection, Harmony Hall. On the left from this T intersection is Midnight Creek, a faint stream that is the water source for Midnight Junction. The This Is Ridiculous passage, which we continued exploring on my last trip in Fort Stanton, branches off Midnight Creek on the left from Harmony Hall. To the right is the La Culebra passage, an impressive borehole that was our way on this trip.
We followed the La Culebra borehole from MK1 to MK65. Here, the lower level borehole ends in a breakdown plug and we enter Borderlands. This spot is also where we started surveying the low belly crawl that eventually turned into three walking leads on my last trip here with James, Beth and Ben. It was also the furthest I had been down this section of the cave, so I was excited to finally be in new-to-me territory and see what lie beyond La Culebra in Borderlands and MK Ultra.
Past MK65, the passage character changed significantly. As we climbed up above the breakdown, we abandoned the pleasant flat sandy floor of La Culebra and gained a series of multi-level canyons and confusing mazes. Many ups and downs and turnarounds followed. The route was lightly flagged, as there had been only two trips out here ever. We added some more flagging as we went, for our own good, although Garrett had the feeling that we wouldn’t come out this way, that we would connect to one of the three walking leads we left from the previous trip. Those walking leads were all right underneath Borderlands, and there were lower-level leads further out in MK Ultra heading this way, so connection seemed like a real possibility.
After eight stations that felt like forever due to the confusing level changes and turnarounds, we found ourselves at our first lead and survey objective of the trip, at MK73. There were many mop-up1 leads in Borderlands on the way to Camp Wolf, and we were planning on surveying them on the way to camp. We ditched our bags and got in survey mode. I took the inventory and photography roles. From MK73, two leads branched off on opposite sides of the main travel route. First, we took the one heading back towards where we came from, north as we were pretty sure it would connect back into known passage. For a mop-up lead, it was pretty fantastic: a huge walking canyon, 5-10 ft wide and 30+ ft tall.
I’m glad I got the photography role, because the passage quickly transitioned from big walking passage to beautiful, sparkly, decorated walking passage. Where we started, we could see nice velvet flowstone and columns down to our side. Then the passage quickly put us right in the middle of the velvet garden.
At MK73C we donned shoe covers and ditched our gloves as we had no choice but to walk on the gorgeous, colorful velvet cascades. Here the velvet became thick, streaky, brilliant yellow, and full of other formations like chenille spar and helictites. We surveyed carefully, minding what surfaces we touched and set stations on.
We were stopped after six stations by a huge cliff in the floor. We could see a big booming canyon beyond the cliff, and I got excited at the prospect of finding some way around the obstacle in front of us. But we then saw a station on the other side, and we realized that this passage was one of the leads we saw earlier in Borderlands. I even remember, as we were doing a U turn and climb up around, looking straight ahead and wondering why we weren’t continuing into the huge wide canyon passage ahead of us. Then I saw the chasm separating us from that obvious way on. “That’s a lead” Garrett told me before we continued on our sinuous route full of climbs and turns. From the other side, I recognized that lead, that we had now just killed.
With one of the two leads at MK73 killed, it was time to take the other one, heading west. This one was another huge walking canyon, which would be an incredible lead in any other cave than Fort Stanton, where it was merely a mop-up lead as it seemed likely to connect to known passage. Garrett was confident enough that it would connect to known passage further along the route to Camp Wolf that he even told us to wear our camp packs as we surveyed. That was a unique experience for me: I had never surveyed while wearing all my camp gear, expecting to stop for the night and sleep somewhere beyond the virgin passage we were exploring.
This canyon quickly turned left and started heading south, paralleling Borderlands. Eventually, breakdown in the floor forced us up onto a ledge in the side of the canyon walls, where we encountered awesome thick mud cracks. In the previous MK73 lead we got amazing flowstone formations, and now we were getting amazing mud formations—what a combo!
This pleasant large walking canyon connected back to main Borderlands at MK75, and we tied in, but our side canyon kept going, paralleling main Borderlands to the west as nice decorated walking passage. We continued surveying with camp packs on until we came to an intersection at MK73O. An intersection, in this big walking passage that was supposed to be a mop-up lead! Maybe this passage really would go somewhere significant, I thought.
From the intersection at MK73O, we went left down an attractive walking canyon (again!). I quickly saw a station and a stream below us, and I knew what was about to happen: we were about to connect to the walking stream passage from my previous trip! We ended up tying in to ML20, not ML40 where we turned around at the complex of three walking leads. Once I got down there, I remembered that lead crystal clear from 1.5 months ago: as we were walking in the stream passage, we spotted an extremely clean flowstone covered canyon heading up and right away from us. We wrote it off as a lead requiring a clean set of clothes (i.e., unlikely for anyone to do any time soon). However, it turns out that lead was actually two leads: the one heading south that we saw and marked on the sketch, and the same passage but heading north, that we didn’t see because we were heading south when surveying that passage. We connected in from the north side, which was decorated but not so pristinely clean as to require a full outfit change to clean clothes. The lead continuing south was definitely much cleaner, although it’s possible that one might be able to get it done with just clean shoe covers and gloves. After tying in to ML20, we left that continuing passage for another day, as we didn’t feel like all getting into (semi-)clean mode.
We returned to the intersection at MK73O and went right. This went for a few more stations before connecting back into main Borderlands again at MK73V. Garrett was right that this lead would connect back in to the way on to Camp Wolf! We were all glad we brought our camp packs through there.
Our next lead was at MK81, just a short ways on in Borderlands. This was really two leads, one going left (north, back the way we came) and right (south). We went left first, which was nice decorated walking passage, although it quickly connected back into Borderlands. The passage going right/south also quickly ended.
The next lead we did was at MK84, which was really a complex of leads where the right/west wall of the passage seemed undefined for a bit. One of these led to a crawl along a beautiful shiny flowstone river. This one was smooth and polished and had a clear direction of flow, unlike Snowy which is more of a pool and has a rough cauliflower texture. We donned our clean shoe covers and began down the flowstone river. Micro-pools full of chenille spar dotted the flowstone, and we soon encountered bigger pools and a formation forest we had to weave our way around.
This decorated flowstone river quickly turned into a crawl, and we had an awkward maneuver getting off the river and onto a dirt bank while in a 2 ft high crawl. While planking in a superman position to keep our dirty clothes off the pristine white flowstone, we had to put on gloves, get our hands on the dirt banks, superman forwards, and reach behind us to take our shoe covers off to get our shoes on the dirt. All while keeping our shoe covers clean, and all while wearing a camp pack and carrying survey gear. It was quite the athletic sequence of moves. Took some core strength.
Right after that maneuver, we reconnected back into Borderlands. We had one last mop-up lead to do at MK94. This one started out as walking passage, although it quickly turned into a crawl. One long shot in this crawl led to a big collapse rotunda room. Breakdown filled the entire room, although there was one spot that seemed most obvious as a way on. We could see void space beyond the breakdown there, and we spent about 10 minutes moving rocks to try to get in there. We gave up when we got to a rock that’s unmovable without a crowbar.
At that point Garrett decided we were done surveying, and it was time to head straight to camp. It was 11:43pm at that point. We had been caving for 14 hours with camp packs. We continued onwards in Borderlands, which at this point was still largely walking, although not the easiest as there were many ups and downs in the breakdown. At MK98 there’s beautiful flowstone slope that requires shoe covers. Around MK115, we left the decorated walking passage and climbed up into an obscure hole in the wall that took us to a crawl. Here the travel to Camp Wolf changed from mostly walking in large decorated borehole to more typical higher-effort caving.
We rigged a handline for that climb, as it required a balancey rockover move that would be extra tricky if we had to downclimb it. After this crawl the caving became a blur and blended together in my mind, because we had been caving for so long. I recall it was smaller passage with a mix of crawling and stemming.
We popped out of a popcorny canyon into a dramatic, interesting four-way intersection at MK135, and Garrett was eager to narrate what each of the three new directions did. Straight ahead went to Camp Wolf, which was just a few minutes away. Right led to MK Ultra, to the most remote point in the cave. Left went back towards Borderlands and was full of leads. Tomorrow, the plan was to go right towards MK Ultra and survey the many leads there. The day after, we would go left towards the passage with tons of leads heading back towards Borderlands. Garrett suspected that some leads there would connect with the dry walking tube beneath Borderlands that we turned around in at the end of James’ trip back in June. But tonight, it was time to head to camp, so we went straight after taking a moment to label the four-way intersection with flagging tape. We got to camp at 12:55am, after over 15 hours of caving.
Camp Wolf is a small walking tube with a flat dirt floor. It’s just barely tall enough to stand up in, and you even have to duck to go between the different sleeping spots. Still, it’s a pleasant, comfortable camp, and I knew I was going to enjoy my stay there as soon as we rounded a corner and Garrett announced we were sleeping here.
The smooth dirt floor was much flatter than that of Midnight Junction, which slopes ever so slightly towards Snowy and constantly tries to roll you out of your sleeping spot. Another feature Camp Wolf has that Midnight Junction lacks is rock furniture: shelving to organize your stuff on, and rock protrusions you can sit down on. I can never sit comfortably on a flat ground, so little rocks to use as chairs at Camp Wolf made the experience much more comfortable. And tables to cook and pack on made all the little camp tasks a little more ergonomic and pleasant.
After everyone scouted the camp and picked their spots, we all unpacked and hastily got ready for bed after our 15+ hour day of commuting and surveying on our way to camp. The only thing standing in between us and bedtime at that point was making dinner. Unfortunately, one of the two alcohol stoves we brought, the one that Garrett and I ended up using, always took forever to heat water. After waiting an eternity to get hot water for my dinner mix, I slammed a huge bowl of it and went to bed at 2:40am.
Here are my times and other miscellaneous notes I recorded on the way in:
Friday, August 15th
Garrett woke us up nine hours after bedtime, at 11:40am. We made haste in the morning and were out of camp at 1:06pm, after I finished choking down my huge bowl of dinner mix that was my breakfast. I ate dinner mix for every meal this trip, as I often do when cave camping.
I had heard that the trip out to the far reaches of MK Ultra was fairly hard, by Fort Stanton standards at least, so I was ready for some real caving. We had a few hours of crawling in low bedding planes and cobble crawls, stemming and climbing in grabby popcorn canyons, tricky route finding, and some nice walking borehole to top it off. It felt like Kentucky caving, as the cave would change character to something totally different, say from stemming to crawling, then stay that way for a long time. And the cave was much wetter than anywhere else in Fort Stanton: ceiling drips and flowing water covered much of the passage out here, at least when we had a floor beneath us.
On the way out, we rigged one handline at a tricky climb around MKA25-30. This handline was for route finding as much as it was for helping with the climb, as the spot where you climb up into the keyhole at the top of a narrow fissure is a little obscure and easy to miss. Near this handline, we surveyed one small “lead” that was really just a lower level of the keyhole passage that we traveled in above. After the handline we had a long stretch of low belly crawling before popping up into the Glorieta Borehole.
At another complicated intersection area (near the Hall of Sacred Mirrors on the map), we turned right/south and continued down the Midnight Climax borehole. This passage hits a climb up into a small crawl at MU12, which was the last station of the survey in Midnight Climax. It was marked on the map as a lead with caption “? Goes 100+ ft Stoops & Crawls”.
Garrett thought this passage would end soon, so we fueled up, drank some water, and ditched our packs2 at the start of the lead. We started the MV survey here at 4:02pm as we surveyed down a breakdown-filled stoopwalking and crawling passage, just as it was marked on the map. At MV4 we encountered our first lead, a low crawl off to our right that looked like one of those leads you almost wished you didn’t see, because now you’re gonna have to do it.
After a dozen or so stations of crawling and stooping in standard mud passage, the passage changed character and became covered in gypsum crust and other gypsum formations. I had the photography/inventory role on the survey team (i.e., the useless role) so I enjoyed my time looking at the pretties and trying to photograph them. They weren’t quite spectacular enough to make for good photos, but they did look cool in person.
This passage kept going further, but unfortunately I’m not yet at liberty to discuss what we found here. What lay beyond in the MV survey has to remain under wraps, for now. Check back later and maybe it’ll be public…
We went back to the low crawling lead at MV4. This quickly turned into a too-tight bedding plane crawl, although Adam thought he saw space ahead, and it was clearly diggable. High off excitement from our previous find, I launched myself at the bedding plane and began scooping dirt and rocks out of the floor, lowering the floor just enough for me to move further with enough space for my arms to dig in front of me. The dig would clearly go, as all I had to do was trench out the dirt-and-rocks floor, although it would take some work, as the rocks were tightly packed in the dirt which made lowering the floor more effortful than just scooping chunks of dirt out.
After half an hour or so, Garrett asked how it was going, and I shouted “six feet!” in an attempt to quell the impatience I could sense. There was definitely a void space beyond, and I was making progress towards it.
“Four feet!”
“Two feet!”
“One foot!”
After an hour or so of lowering the floor, I squeezed my shoulders underneath the sharp corner that was the ceiling and popped up into a low stoopway. No booming borehole, but it was certainly going passage. The rest of the team surveyed in and I let them go ahead, as photography and inventory generally goes last.
It almost seemed like we would have to dig again, as the stoopway lowered to a crawlway and eventually a tight squeeze. But at the squeeze, we popped upwards into a huge space! I squeezed through last, eager to see the borehole everyone was shouting about.
It was a nice walking passage, 10+ ft tall, 20+ ft wide, that went left and right from that obscure hole in the floor. We went right/straight first, and it tragically only lasted at those dimensions for 2 stations before turning back into a stoopway then a crawl. We followed this for 100-200 ft before it became a very low belly crawl. When it got to the point where some people on the team wouldn’t fit down the belly crawl without some major try-hard, we turned around and returned to the branch of the borehole going left.
After two stations in the borehole going left, we noticed a prominent hole in the wall. Air was pouring out of this hole, blowing in our faces, so we abandoned the borehole and did an awkward belly flop up into the hole. The air tragically disappeared after that hole, as it popped us up into a complex of tall fissures and breakdown-filled domes that were all too big to feel any air in. We scrambled up into the fissures and domes and couldn’t find a way on. The big breakdown-filled dome at MV38 still goes, as I didn’t get all the way to the top of it, although it was sketchy wide stemming in between huge breakdown boulders that seemed magically suspended in mid-air. It was not super safe to be questing up into that from below. Hopefully we can find our way into that dome from above, where we could presumably better assess stability as we go down.
After failing to follow the air past the hole at MV33, we returned to the borehole. We set a few more stations down the borehole, which unsurprisingly turned into a crawl. We turned around at a good going crawl. The crawl lead was pretty good, but we had been away from our packs for many hours now, and were all getting hungry and thirsty and full of pee.
We backtracked through the obscure hole in the wall/floor of the borehole, through the pancake dirt crawl I trenched out, and back to the start of our survey at MU12. It was 10pm then, and we had been away from our packs and all our supplies for six hours. We chugged water and scarfed down some food, and readied ourselves to begin traveling back to camp, hitting some mop-up leads on the way back.
The first mop-up lead at MU10 went for only three stations. The next one, at MV7, went for a bit longer, although it ended in breakdown without any reasonable prospects for digging. When we plotted it out later on the surface, we found out that this breakdown plug is directly beneath the going crawl the continues from the branch of the borehole that went left. Interesting.
We did one more mop-up lead at MU6. This one was nice and decorated, and a little mazey, but we killed all branches off that one. At 12:38am we were done with surveying for the day, and began our journey back to camp. It was an uneventful journey, with one exception. At MKA10, we took a right turn instead of a left, and realized that we were accidentally scooping virgin passage. This was a lead! And a very good one at that. It was a walking/stemming canyon, decorated, with a stream in the floor, 4w15h. We realized after 100-200 ft that we were in virgin passage and turned around, excited to continue exploration in that lead next year. I think that passage will connect to the This is Ridiculous passage, which I continued exploration in on my previous Fort Stanton trip back in June. The lead looks similar to This is Ridiculous: a tall, wide-but-not-too-wide-to-stem canyon, with big blobby formations lining the walls and a faint stream in the floor. The lead goes downstream towards This is Ridiculous (NE) at 4w15. This is Ridiculous ended as a 5w30h stemming canyon going upstream. They’re separated by 1800 ft, which means there’s probably 2000-3000 ft of survey in there, never mind if there are side leads. Something to do next year!
We made it back to camp at 2:23am. At not quite 15 hours, it was a fairly long day out from camp, especially considering that we took over 15 hours to get to camp the previous day. After waiting another eternity for the alcohol stove to boil water for my dinner mix, I was in bed at 3:45am.
Saturday August 16th
Garrett woke us up at 12:20pm. Waking up after noon—that means we’re on a real caving trip now! We made good time packing up camp, and we were out and moving at 1:42pm. From the four-way intersection right before camp, we went right. This would have been a left on our way in; it was the passage that Garrett labeled “To Lower Borderlands” on our way in, because he thought that passage would eventually connect into the wet stream passage below Borderlands we found on the previous trip with James Hunter. Today our task was to survey leads out there and see if that was the case. We traveled down this mostly nice walking passage, fully-loaded with camp packs as we thought we would connect back into Borderlands this way. At 2:30pm we arrived at our first lead, at MK120.
We started the MKB survey there at MK120. This was a pleasant walking passage heading down and right, while the surveyed way on stayed up and left. We mixed up the roles from last time: I sketched profile and took frontsights, while Rene did photography and inventory. Garrett stuck with plan sketching and Adam stuck with point/backsight. I was excited to be sketching some nice virgin walking passage in Fort Stanton!
After four stations, we tied in to MK114. Garrett was right that we would connect to other Borderlands area passages! Although this wasn’t a very big loop. Thankfully MK114 was really a pair of leads; one going south that we just came from, and one going north that was our way on. We continued surveying northwards, hoping to make more connections closer to Midnight Junction.
The passage became more decorated and gypsumy as we went on. The passage lowered to a crawl at one point before we popped past a big breakdown rock back into big borehole. Then it really hit me, I’m surveying virgin borehole in Fort Stanton! It was a pretty incredible time, and I was again shocked that Garrett and the others considered these leads suitable for a mop-up trip.
Around MKB12, the passage changed character and started to look quite familiar. It was a rectangular walking canyon, with a flat bedrock-ish floor, and with walls lined with white popcorn and gypsum. It looked quite familiar to the dry walking passage we turned around in during Jame’s trip last June. I began to sense that a connection was near.
We rounded a few more corners before Adam shouted that we had made the connection. After a few minutes for the sketch to catch up, I saw the blue ML40 flagging tape station, just as we had left it a few months ago. Garrett was right! This would be a much easier route back to Midnight Junction and back to the entrance that the way we came through Borderlands and through MK Ultra. It was 4pm when the made the connection; the night was young and we had plenty of time to continue surveying, especially since we now had an easier route back to Midnight Junction, where we planned on sleeping that night.
This spot where we turned around in June had three leads, and we had just killed one of them. Now it was time to do the other two! We took a moment to eat, drink, and ditch our heavy camp packs as we got into day-pack surveying mode. The first lead we did was the other dry upper-level passage, up a short flowstone climb from ML38.
This went as a nice walking tube for a few stations up a beautiful flowstone slope, although thankfully it was muddy enough that we didn’t have to use shoe covers. In fact there were beautiful mud cracks in the flowstone. Mud cracks on top of flowstone is not a combo I see very often.
As the passage turned around from going south to going north, we encountered another flowstone climb. This one Garrett did, and none of the others wanted to follow him, as the climb was tricky and on not-very-solid flowstone. I started up the climb, but was stumped after trying it a few different ways, so I let Garrett do his thing on his own. He surveyed just a few stations past the tricky climb and reported that is still goes in two directions as a decent crawl. Worth going back to at some point.
While Garrett was up past the tricky flowstone climb, we looked at a drain hole in the flowstone at the bottom of the room. It belled out below a small, barely-human-sized hole. Below that we could see a floor of running water. We figured we would be going there next, via the third and final lead from the ML40 area that was a wet walking stream passage.
After Garrett came down from the flowstone climb, we went to the wet lead at ML39. This was awesome walking passage, of a similar size to the rectangular-shaped walking canyon we had surveyed in from, although the floor was mud and deep water. Here we continued the ML survey past 40. We carefully stemmed and tiptoed across the water for a few stations before realizing that resistance was futile, and we were just gonna have to get our feet wet.
Once we all stepped into the water, it felt like we were doing Kentucky Caving. Walking through a muddy stream passage, surveying virgin walking passage very far into a horizontal cave. This passage went on for quite a while like this. There was not much floor detail to draw, so the survey went very quickly. In fact I struggled to keep up sketching profile. I had to remind myself that no one will ever make a profile map of this horizontal maze cave, so the profile sketcher role is kind of fake, so I shouldn’t sweat the detail too much and I should just sketch whatever I can while making sure to not slow the team down.
All good things must come to an end, and this passage was no exception. Eventually the ceiling started to lower on us, and we were crawling in the mud. At ML53, Adam encountered a sump. We were all disappointed at that, as the low water crawling hadn’t gone on nearly enough for us to want the passage to end. However, he found a way around, although it did involve a superman crawl over a section of stream that made keeping the survey book and Distos dry a bit of an athletic feat. We all got it done and were back into walking passage, for a moment at least.
We continued in more excellent straightforward walking passage until a pair of leads at ML68 and and ML70. We charged past the one at ML68, but the lead at ML70 was enticing, so we hopped up onto a ledge on our left above the water to check it out. This was a beautiful chamber full of shelfstone, pool spar, and pool fingers. There was a high lead coming out of the wall where it met the ceiling, and a low lead going into a very decorated wet shelfstone crawl. Both were maybe worth doing another day, not today. We set some good permanent stations in this room and photographed the pretties before continuing on in out wet walking passage.
Further on in the ML70s, our walking streamway once again lowered to a crawl, although this time the crawl was here to stay, rather than a brief duck before popping back up into walking passage. We surveyed many 70+ ft straight shots through the wet, muddy pancake, struggling to keep our survey supplies and hands out of the water. I did some advanced crawling on my elbows to keep my paper notes dry.
At ML81, we got to another intersection/set of two leads. On our left, a dry crawlway went up into a ledge above the water. The wet muddy pancake crawl continued to our right Air poured out of the dry crawlway, so naturally we went there first. Air was ripping through the low wet crawl right before this intersection, and we were eager to follow it somewhere dry.
Following the air into this dry crawl didn’t exactly warm us up, as we had hoped. Instead we got breaded by the dry dirt and dust, which stuck to us after we had rolled around in the muddy water and gotten all sticky. We were a bit cold from surveying in a muddy wet crawl without much for warm clothes, and getting breaded didn’t exactly help that. We turned around at a 2w5h lead with some air after a few stations. It’s a decent lead, although it’s somewhat trying to get out there. We’ll be back on another trip.
Then we went right up the continuation of the stream passage. We put a few more stations of belly crawling before calling it and turning around at ML86. This lead is 1 ft tall, many ft wide, with lots of water and mud in the floor to sap your body heat, but also with some air to entice you (and sap your body heat). We’ll be back at some point!
We traveled back out via the ML survey, stopping only to do the lead we left at ML68. This went for a few stations of boot-sucking mud before lowering to a grim crawl—not a lead for the next trip, but the next generation of cavers maybe. At 10:35pm, we were back at our packs, done with the new wet passage we had surveyed that day. It was time to head back to Midnight Junction, out the route we had surveyed from La Culebra back in June, the back down La Culebra to Midnight Junction.
I took the others down that route, as I was the only one that had done ML1-38 on that team. There was a lot more crawling that I remembered in that passage. Classic; you always remember the nice parts of any trip long after the suffering has faded from memory. Not that the crawling was long/intense enough to call suffering, but you know what I mean.
It took us under an hour to get from our packs at ML38 back to Harmony Hall, the water spot two minutes from Midnight Junction. After topping off our water, we were at Midnight Junction at 11:59pm, very fitting. As we ate our dinner, Garrett added up the survey footage from the trip. Just over 7000 ft, not bad for a mop-up trip! The nature of our trip, with many small sections of new passage instead of a few leads that went for a long ways, made us think we totaled much less footage; Adam was particularly worried that we might not have hit a mile. But it was no matter, as we ended up with a respectable one and a third mile of cave surveyed.
We took a little while to unpack our camp packs and start cleaning and packing a little bit for the next day’s journey out of the cave, although we saved most of that for the next day. We were in bed at 1:26am.
Sunday August 17th
The trip out of the cave was uneventful. The most eventful thing that happened that day was that everyone had tons of extra food, so they left a bunch at Midnight Junction for me to eat on my next trip in the cave starting Thursday. There’s a real pro to doing two trips in a row like that: you can leave things at camp because you’ll be back there a few days later!
There was so much food the others left at Midnight Junction that I made sure to note that I didn’t need to pack any day food for the next trip. Just breakfasts and dinners, and food for traveling in the cave to camp, and some food to stash for the way out. But all my day food for two days of exploration out of Midnight Junction would be there waiting for me in a few days.
After our leisurely 9:30am wake up time, we were out of Midnight Junction at 11:45am, and out of the cave just over eight hours later at 7:59pm. Garrett was so kind as to clean and put away my gear for me the next morning, so I could do the three hour drive home that night and go to work the next morning. Thanks Garrett!
In addition to Garrett for leading this trip, thanks to Adam and Rene for coming and making it happen, and thanks to the Bureau of Land Management and the Fort Stanton Cave Study Project for managing the cave and its exploration so trips like this can happen. Fort Stanton is a very special place, and I’m honored to take part in far out exploration trips like these!
A mop-up lead is a lead that you don’t think is gonna go very far or otherwise do anything interesting, but you still go there to survey it and put it on the map. Generally when you have a huge passage like the Borderlands complex of passages, you take the biggest, most obvious way on first, then leave the small insignificant side passages for later mop-up trips. Of course, small passages can sometimes turn into big passages and go for a long time, so you never know—sometimes mop-up leads and trips are quite good and lead to significant breakouts!
*Ominous music plays in the background*