There has been some discussion in the past about the fact that nobody posts reports in the DIR forum except for classes like Fundies. I thought I would remedy that situation and report on an ongoing activity that began this past weekend. It will take me several posts to describe it.
The Rocky Mountain region does not have a lot of suitable sites for technical diving--few indeed, actually. The best that I know of is a sink hole in southern New Mexico, near Santa Rosa. Located on private property, Rock Lake is a large sink hole that can only be accessed by a limited number of identified groups, each headed by a technical diving instructor. With rare exceptions, unless you are in one of those groups or receive permission from the group leader to join them on a weekend, you can't dive it. One group is GUE for Fundies and NAUI for the rest. Another group is IANTD, although they are rarely there. Our group is UTD. There may be more, but I don't know--the groups try to schedule their trips on different weekends so we don't step on each other's toes. We thus don't have a lot of contact with each other.
The place has almost no facilities, although the owner recently left an old, broken fifth wheel trailer on site, which gives us some shelter on windy winter days. It is in relatively pristine natural condition. Thankfully, the owner has stopped leasing the area for cattle, so we don't have to push our way through a bovine mob (and the things they leave behind) to get into the water any more.
The lake has a long history of diving, but that history has not been passed on well to the current generation of divers. The property owner does not know all that much about what was done before her fairly recent time of ownership. There are rumors that Sheck Exley visited it once, but if he did, he didn't write about it. There are rumors that someone died in it once, and one of our divers did find remnants of an old BCD and a rusted out tank near the bottom. One person who knows more than others said that OW instruction was done in it in the past, which is surprising given the much more accessible, popular, and OW appropriate Blue Hole is only a couple of miles away.
Not only don't we know the history of the place, we know surprisingly little about what it looks like. Seriously. A wild estimate from Google maps suggests it is an oval about 400 feet by 500 feet. The slope of land into the water varies, but is generally pretty sharp angle. That slope is covered in dense but fragile vegetation that constantly gives off very fine, needle-like dead material that drifts down and forms a fluffy, almost talc-like silt on ledges below. After about 10-30 feet of slope, it plunges straight down in cliffs that are undercut in most places.
On a bright day, there is still a little ambient light at 100 feet, but by the time you are at 150 feet, it is darker than any cave I have ever been in because of the visibility issues caused by that gentle rain of organic debris from the plants that hang down from the tops of the cliffs. You have to be pretty close to the wall for even the brightest of canister lights to illuminate it. Consequently, we can only see a small snapshot of any place at one time. I only know a couple of people who have been to the bottom, which is a thick organic silt ooze at depths varying from 200 feet to more than 300 feet. We know of some interesting sights, including silt-covered ledges with selenite gypsum crystal poking though, but we have always found them by dropping on a descent line and the proceeding along the wall at a known depth. Most of the people in our group have only been to a tiny fraction of the possible locations, and a number of the locations have never been visited by any of us.
We know the wall is undercut in locations, but we don't know exactly where or how much. I know that I wanted to shoot a bag from only 80 feet once. We swam pretty far out from the wall, but the bag still hit a ledge somewhere above me, so I had to go even further out to the center to get it free.
We have talked about mapping it for a long time, but it was not until this past weekend that we decided to start the project.
The Rocky Mountain region does not have a lot of suitable sites for technical diving--few indeed, actually. The best that I know of is a sink hole in southern New Mexico, near Santa Rosa. Located on private property, Rock Lake is a large sink hole that can only be accessed by a limited number of identified groups, each headed by a technical diving instructor. With rare exceptions, unless you are in one of those groups or receive permission from the group leader to join them on a weekend, you can't dive it. One group is GUE for Fundies and NAUI for the rest. Another group is IANTD, although they are rarely there. Our group is UTD. There may be more, but I don't know--the groups try to schedule their trips on different weekends so we don't step on each other's toes. We thus don't have a lot of contact with each other.
The place has almost no facilities, although the owner recently left an old, broken fifth wheel trailer on site, which gives us some shelter on windy winter days. It is in relatively pristine natural condition. Thankfully, the owner has stopped leasing the area for cattle, so we don't have to push our way through a bovine mob (and the things they leave behind) to get into the water any more.
The lake has a long history of diving, but that history has not been passed on well to the current generation of divers. The property owner does not know all that much about what was done before her fairly recent time of ownership. There are rumors that Sheck Exley visited it once, but if he did, he didn't write about it. There are rumors that someone died in it once, and one of our divers did find remnants of an old BCD and a rusted out tank near the bottom. One person who knows more than others said that OW instruction was done in it in the past, which is surprising given the much more accessible, popular, and OW appropriate Blue Hole is only a couple of miles away.
Not only don't we know the history of the place, we know surprisingly little about what it looks like. Seriously. A wild estimate from Google maps suggests it is an oval about 400 feet by 500 feet. The slope of land into the water varies, but is generally pretty sharp angle. That slope is covered in dense but fragile vegetation that constantly gives off very fine, needle-like dead material that drifts down and forms a fluffy, almost talc-like silt on ledges below. After about 10-30 feet of slope, it plunges straight down in cliffs that are undercut in most places.
On a bright day, there is still a little ambient light at 100 feet, but by the time you are at 150 feet, it is darker than any cave I have ever been in because of the visibility issues caused by that gentle rain of organic debris from the plants that hang down from the tops of the cliffs. You have to be pretty close to the wall for even the brightest of canister lights to illuminate it. Consequently, we can only see a small snapshot of any place at one time. I only know a couple of people who have been to the bottom, which is a thick organic silt ooze at depths varying from 200 feet to more than 300 feet. We know of some interesting sights, including silt-covered ledges with selenite gypsum crystal poking though, but we have always found them by dropping on a descent line and the proceeding along the wall at a known depth. Most of the people in our group have only been to a tiny fraction of the possible locations, and a number of the locations have never been visited by any of us.
We know the wall is undercut in locations, but we don't know exactly where or how much. I know that I wanted to shoot a bag from only 80 feet once. We swam pretty far out from the wall, but the bag still hit a ledge somewhere above me, so I had to go even further out to the center to get it free.
We have talked about mapping it for a long time, but it was not until this past weekend that we decided to start the project.
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