raggles.kiwi

Metro, Te Tahi, B52

For my second trip with the Caving Group, I headed to Charleston as part of a family weekend aimed at getting kids underground.  I decided that dealing with some kids would be worth meeting some more local cavers and finding out where more caves were in the area, which certainly paid off.

On Saturday we went into Metro cave, a large cave which is gated, with entry by permit or tour only.  We had two groups with permits, but having kids meant we had to stay on the marked trails through the cave.  Metro is very dirty due to the large amount of traffic it gets, but it was still a nice walk through cave with many stals, gloworms and we saw one cave weta.

We followed this up with a trip through Te Tahi cave, another well known local cave.  This can be done as a through trip, however it is a bit long for kids so we did the rebirth passage to the whale skeleton and back.  This entrance is narrow and very muddy, but it is pretty dry further on.  The whale bone side passage is quite tight too, but at least its not muddy!  I found the whale skeleton (just its spine really) to be quite fascinating - unfortunately I was unable to photograph it as I had worked up quite a sweat rushing up and down the passage twice (long story) so was creating too much steam, and there is not much room to turn around let alone take photos.

On Monday we only had a few hours spare, so we headed for a cave that one of our number first surveyed some years ago called B52.  After spending over an hour hunting for the entrance (we walked past it the first time!) we squeezed in past a well preserved set of bones, and past a section of thick mud/sand to a short vertical shaft.  Unfortunately we were out of time to continue, so after a quick recce we retreated.  This is definitely a cave I will be returning to in future to fully explore.