Hardins Cave

We went to Hardins Cave last night. This was my seventh trip to this cave, but it was still a lot of fun. We had a good group, including several new grotto members. I would try to name all of them but with my poor ability to remember names I'm sure I'd mess things up horribly. Joe Stewart was there with his seven year old grandson, along with Kylie. Jody Bailey actually showed up, which was great since he knows the cave so much better than I do and was able to point out things that I never noticed or had forgotten about.

We went back to the rope climb-up and then turned around since it was getting late and we had gotten a late start. I kept up pretty well on the way into the cave, but I started slowing down a good bit on the way out since my total lack of staying active over the winter started catching up to me and my quad muscles were just about shot from climbing over the piles of breakdown.

We found some really nice crinoid stem fossils in the ceiling in a few places. The biggest difference between this trip and most of my previous trips was the amount of water in the cave. This was the first time I've actually seen the stream in the cave with running water, and there was a small waterfall very close to the entrance that had never been flowing on any of my previous trips. The waterfall in the big room was flowing as well, whereas in the last few years it's only been dripping.