Travels Through the Mountain

This past weekend we drove to the Crowsnest Pass with Kevan, Leah, and Jenna to hike to the Cleft Caves. We left Calgary at 5pm and hit some major traffic due to accidents in the city Friday night (see Karyn's blog below) and ended up meeting up with Aaron and Megan at about 8pm in the Pass. We drove to our campsite, setup camp, and basically went to bed (around 10pm, wow are we a wild bunch!).

Saturday morning was chilly, maybe about 5ºC if we were lucky. Due to our mix of marrieds and unmarrieds, our sleeping groups were Kevan, Aaron, and I in our tent, Karyn and Leah in another tent, and Jenna and Megan in the final tent. The boys kept nice and warm all night (Aaron kind of cuddled up with me because Kevan was taking up half the tent for himself!) and I'm not sure about the rest of the girls. It was a little cold for Karyn (who has no internal heat source) and she didn't sleep much of the evening.

We met up with Harv and Daniel (Kevan's father and brother respectively) at about 9:30 and started the long walk to the Cleft Cave. The first 7km in were along a "road" and was relatively simple. It would have been nice to have a 4x4 but hey, I'm not willing to feed a vehicle like that! When we got to the trail-head it was a pretty intense hike up to our lunch spot, about
an hour's walk on a pretty decent trail but with quite a bit of elevation gain. Karyn was extremely tired and didn't want to go on and Harv was also ready to turn around and call it quits. Luckily they kept going to our lunch spot where they were able to get some food and rest up for the final push up to the cave.

I took Karyn's pack (along with my own) for the final elevation-gain because she was pretty tired. I had my pack on my back and hers on backwards over my stomach. I finally realized what it would be like to have a giant gut hanging off my front. I don't think I liked it! The push up to the cave mouth reminded me of a hike up Tecumseh a few weeks ago with a poorly defined trail, loose boulders, and a lot of up. Everyone was glad to get to the top! In the picture below you can see the mouth of the cave just left of the top-centre of the picture.At the cave entrance we all put on our extra gear. It was about 20ºC on the side of the mountain but it gets very cool in the cave itself so we all bundled up in long sleeves, long pants, and some of us brought toques and gloves. It was about 2:30pm when we entered the cave.

If you've never been caving I would strongly recommend it. What an amazing feeling to be inside a mountain with millions of tonnes of rock overhead. The other amazing feeling is the darkness. There were a few moments where I shut my light off and just sat there in the cave, alone in the dark. We worked our way through the mountain, having to go on our knees and bellies at some points to get through. There were two points where we were able to get to the other side of the mountain and look into the bowls and the view was great (less all the smoke from the forest fires burning in BC, Idaho, and Washington).

Inside the cave the geology and ice formations were incredible. It is hard to imagine how these caves exist and what's inside them. There were a few rooms where water had run from the ceiling to the floor and made ribbons of ice. Very cool to experience. There were also ice spheres where the water would constantly drip and form a point and form a sphere around whatever it was dripping on. We ended up calling them ice boobs ;)

In the last section of the cave was the pinch point. Basically you have to go down on your back, head first, into this pinch-point where the clearance is maybe a foot and a half. Here you can see a picture of Daniel going down (it looks flat but I was shooting down the slope) into the pinch-point.This is a picture of me coming out of it. As you can see, there's not too much clearance. We were talking about how the first person to explore the cave got a lot of man-cards (we're assuming it was a man but we're in no way denying that it could have been a woman) for finding the route. Specifically in this section you would need to have some faith because once you started going in, it would be very difficult to turn around and go back out!

We emerged from the cave, dirty but all very fulfilled that we had just done what we did, at about 4:30pm. From there it was a long hike back down to the cars and it took us until 7pm. We drove into Coleman and had dinner at Popiels (a local favourite) before driving back to Calgary.

~D~