Caving Begins

I was outsmarted by my smart phone.  Last night we made arrangements to eat breakfast at 7am and get an early start.  Unfortunately, last night was also time to "spring forward" for daylight savings time.  Since Galapagos sits on the equator, there is not really any benefit to daylight savings time, so they maintain standard time year round.  My android phone does not.....  The short of it is that when you set an alarm for 6:30 on a smart phone that usually finds itself in the midwest USA, it does not adjust well to the tropics.  On the upside, I was up before sunrise and had time to stroll down to the harbor and snap a few photos of sunrise.

Galapagos sunrise

We began our cave explorations today.  Our first objective was to check out a cave that has been operated as a commercial cave for several years.  It is a large tube segment that the owners have installed a simple fluorescent lighting system for the visitors.  As is the case in many cave systems, this small segment of about 800m is well known, but the continuation of the tube (both upslope and downslope) are not well known to locals.  We offered to survey the known part of the cave, and also to document the non-tourist parts of the cave.  There are currently 2250m of known cave, but we hope to be able to expand this greatly during our trip.

We broke in to three survey teams, with each team having two people.  The goal was to finish the tour trail section of the cave and begin work on the non-tourist portion.  Bob Osburn and Geoff Hoese headed to the skylight in the rear of the tourist part, while Chris Omura and Scott Linn headed in to the non-tourist section.  My team included Rick Haley and we began our survey at the main entrance of "Tunel Del Amor".

The cave was a typical lava tube with mostly smooth floors and occasional breakdown (rock piles).  IN some areas it was possible to see the lines on the walls where past lava flows had used the cave as a conduit.  The lava tubes on Santa Cruz island are quite old (+100,000 years), so there is no real danger of the tube being filled with lava today.  There is ample evidence to suggest that this particular tube has been a main lava conduit for the volcano during multiple events.  This phenomena is observable when the tube takes on a "stacked" form that results in a tall horseshoe shaped passage.

Cueva Gallardo, Santa Cruz island

Overall, the surveying of these tubes is straightforward.  The two teams working in the tourist area of the cave were able to complete the 800m of mapping in about five hours.  The team working in the non-tourist section of the cave was able to survey about 114m, for a Day 1 total of 914m.  Just shy of a kilometer on the first day is not a bad way to start the trip.