Sistema Cheve/CL6, Mexico - 24 March 2018

What a day of fun!

Witold, Kasia, Sonia, and Tomek went with Camp Cartman's only drill to explore passages to the east of camp, in an effort to break past the "Cheve fault".

Gerardo and I went to explore some leads from a precious survey trip I was on. We managed to squirrel away 20m of rope and 5m of webbing, just in case 😉

The first lead was where warm air was coming up through a breakdown floor in a large room near camp Cartman. After a short investigation Gerardo and I were squeezing, down climbing and digging our way down through the rocks.

Gerardo finishing packing the rope, and other equipment needed for the day.

After nearly 20m of depth we found some need for ropes! Tying off to some of the surrounding boulders we continued working our way down through the rock pile (the breakdown rock varied in size from bus size to baseball size). At last we ran out of rope with a vertical muddy squeeze between boulders to what looked to be a room with the sound of a distant stream. We had traveled down ~50m through breakdown at this point!

I went first through the awkward squeeze and managed to not fall off of the 3m shelf at the bottom. Then I tried to go back up, to be sure I could get back out... after a while expending lots of swear words and energy I managed to get to a point where I knew I could get up. Satisfied we both decended to investigate the discovery further.

We first headed toward the sound of the water coming to foot prints first, then unnamed survey stations.

Where the hell were we???

Continuing to the water we found a cascade downstream and a waterfall upstream still rigged with 11mm rope from the early 90's!

Gerardo and I just contected CL6 with Puente (one of Sistema Cheve's highest entrances).

Now having an idea on our where abouts Gerardo and I relied on the campfire stories told to us by Bill Stone about the Cueva Puente connection trip. Following the Puente stream and climbing down series of cascades we arrived at the reported calcified boulder choke where the stream disappeared into.

According to the story the top of Sistema Cheve's 23m drop (above the East Gorge) was located above us through 15m of breakdown. We climbed, squeezed, checked and rechecked but only popped out into our original connection room with Puente. The route to the 23m drop eluded us (we were trying to see if the route would be a viable shortcut to camp cartman from the main Cheve entrance).

Returning to our connection point Gerardo noticed a pit in the floor against the right wall. Wondering if this was the connection point, and it looking slightly down climbable, we began a steep and scary down climb. The first section was a vertical collection of boulders calcified together with a liberal coating of greasy mud. Very vertical but manageable. The second part of the downclimb was a step, almost vertical, choss pile of loose boulders covered in mud. Hand and foot holds sailed down to the boulder floor below as I pondered the decision to climb down this pit. 20m of scary climbing saw us to the floor. Here the passage split. The obvious way forward was a 4m × 4m passage with good wind, but a large hole in the floor would require a rope to safely navigate across it. The other way involved more down climbing and lead to a large stream carrying half the water flow of the Cheve river. Some further investigations lead us to two more smaller streams!

Where was this?!?!

We did not see any survey stations, and would have to ask the surface for information about nearby Cheve surveyed passages, to see if a return trip to this area was needed.

We began climbing back up to our survey tie in stations (we used two), and up in to the breakdown requiring the use of some interesting methods (Gerardo using various parts of me as key footholds).

We wore our smiles all the way back to Camp Cartman, and joyously relayed our days discoveries to the team. A return trip to this area would be required.