Hannacroix (and Merritts), 1/17/2024
Cavers: Eugeniya, Rory, Vera, Michelle, Jayna, Hua
By Eugeniya
Desperate to go caving over the winter, we decided that a 15F day was a great day to do a cave. This was an interesting, and rather incorrect, decision, as we discovered pretty quickly. We began by trying to find the cave. Despite the fact that half of the people had been to Hannacroix a year earlier, the cave is a bit of a distance away from the parking and was slightly hard to find. We were decked out in full winter gear, climbing over various rocks, and any time there was a dip in the ground, a person would excitedly run over to check it out. We really tried to make any gap between two rocks into a cave. Finding Merritts felt even harder. None of us had been to Merritts, and all we knew about Merritts was that it was nearby and a photo of what the entrance to Merritts looked in the summer. While finding the cave wasn't going too well, we did get to have fun in the icy and snowy woods. Eventually, people started getting somewhat cold so we decided to approach finding the cave through divide and conquer -- some people went back to the car to get warm while some of us kept looking.
With only half the manpower we quickly first found Hannacroix and then Merritts. We were very very excited to find both caves and quickly ran back to the car to tell the others. After sitting in the car and warming up a little bit, we braved the cold to get changed into our cave gear and head over to the caves.
First we entered Merritts. We dropped into the cave and after some squeezing, crawling and avoiding cold water ended up at some passages that required us to get chest-deep wet or so to keep going. Already feeling a little chilly, and knowing the Hannacroix was the bigger cave, we decided to give up on Merritts and head over the Hannacroix instead.
Inside Hannacroix, we had fun exploring -- there are many aspects to the cave and as you follow the maze of Hannacroix around, you get to see bigger rooms and crawl through tight passages. We started off at the main entrance, and after glancing into the wet (but tall!) Lew's room, we kept going forwards along the tighter but drier passage. The cold outside made us have a strong desire to stay warmer, and hence drier, in the cave. We kept wandering through the cave, with lots of glances at the map to see where we were going. We wandered upon a rock that was pocking out into the passage, and looking suspiciously like an alligator. We also saw the window before wandering further around and going crawling through a muddy, and then wet passage. While it ended in a dead end, there were a lot of roots hanging down through cracks in the rock. Many of these roots had beads of water on them, creating a beautiful area of glittering crystals as the light from our headlamps reflected off of them.
Finally, we exited through the gallery. Personally, this is my favourite part of the cave. This exit is squeezy, but while you are squeezing through you get to see a nice side path which is too small to squeeze through, but as a consequence has nice formations and roots that are undisturbed (we took a photo of it!). And then eventually we all popped out onto the surface, where we once again remembered that it was 15F day.
We hurried back to the car, where wet things like our gloves started freezing in shape. In fact, by the time we muddled through getting changed in this cold cold water, and rescued the car keys from the pack -- an adventure since the clip of the pack had gotten wet and then frozen solid, so we had to melt them free by holding the clip with our hands -- we found that the clothes we'd changed out of, if they were thin had also frozen to a specific shape. While having things like pants look like they're still on a human with no human inside was an interesting sight, it did make packing the car harder. Luckily we had a 7 seater with only 6 people so we weren't pressed on space!
While Hannacroix is a fun maze cave with neat rock formations, we certainly wouldn't recommend the 15F day. Perhaps next time, one should admit that even if one has free time over IAP that's not necessarily the best time to go caving...