Babylon Cave, Paparoa NP

Day Two of the Cave meet dawned very chilly, but very clear and I was glad to be away early with our keen bunch of cavers to Babylon Cave.

The trip began with a wee walk up the Fox River Gorge, which was rather spectacular.

Dan approaching up the Fox River Gorge

At the appropriate spot, we speared off the track and climbed up a very faint trail for 15 mins to the cave entrance, perched at the base of Fox's sheer gorge walls.

The entrance of Babylon Cave

The entrance wasn't huge, but as we scrambled down the steep slippery rock fall I began to appreciate the enourmous cavern that was the main passage of Babylon. Perhaps 40-60m wide and up to 80m tall in places, it was a huge underground canyon!

In the huge entrance passage

We did our 'underground tramping' for about an hour, climbing the 'Ziggurat' which was a giant rockfall boulder pile middway through the cave. Not far from the otherside of the pile was the gated entrance to the 'pretty' part of the cave.

We had NZSS members, the appropriate permits and most importantly the gate Key. On the other side of the gate, we actually did some caving with a little bit of smaller passage and a couple of very mellow chokes to negotiate.

Dan going through the first choke

"Don't tell anyone, but that was fun.."

Once on the other side, we had to navigate ourway around the place through various rooms and passage ways to find 'Ray's reach' which was a sketchy, exposed traverse to get us to 'The naked lady series' which was to be the highlight of the trip.

I set up a psychological belay to 'protect' the traverse, but Nic decided that he wasn't willing to try the crux moves. I didn't blame him. Any fall would be a long pendulum swing down into a nasty boulder field. At the crux he was facing a 15m ground fall.. Not nice. Sadly he couldn't find any intermediate pro, which would have made things much more likely to go.

We were a little dissapointed, but as a consolation we found another chamber with some neat 'pretties' in them.

Still a very neat adventure :)

Chucky admires the pretties

Paparoa Coastline