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There have been many questions lately concerning the area just beyond the ’Jumping Off Place’. Why is this rope hanging there? Where does it go? The answer lies in a strong flashlight and a bit of looking around...
If you are standing on the Big Room trail at the place where this rope leads upward, take your flashlight and shine it at the ceiling of the room, almost directly above the Jumping Off Place. What you will see is another rope suspended from a balcony leading into a drapery-lined hole in the ceiling. If you look even harder, you will see another rope extending upwards in this hole and out of sight.
This area has been the recent focus of a team of cavers/climbers led by Don Doucette and Harvey Miller. Don and Harvey have worked in the Caverns before, discovering new areas accessible only through the use of free/aid climbing techniques, including the Chocolate High area out of the New Mexico Room. Chocolate High produced over two miles of new, highly decorated passages during the first part of this decade, and without the efforts of volunteer teams these ’high leads’ would remain a mystery, nothing but a dark hole in the ceiling.
As for the rope hanging near the Jumping Off Place, this climb was begun in February of this year and was the subject of a CNN filming project showcasing ’extreme sports’. The filming was done from the trail below and showed nothing more than the climbers disappearing into a crack in the ceiling. During that trip a fissure was discovered trending in one direction towards Spirit World and in the other direction towards Jumping Off Place. During that and three subsequent trips, this fissure was explored and found to pinch out as it headed toward Spirit World, yet in the other direction it led to a balcony overlooking Lower Cave. This balcony is the one from which the rope emerges above the Jumping Off Place, and the distance from it to the floor in Lower Cave is approximately two hundred feet, offering a breathtaking view of Lower Cave and allowing the person suspended on rope to see all the way to Bottomless Pit!
From the balcony, it is necessary to descend the rope to its low point and then ascend the other side into the hole above. At this point, there is yet another rope leading upwards through a vertical tube to what is currently the farthest extent of surveyed passage. This station is 125 feet above the beginning of the climb in the Big Room, and almost 400 feet of passage must be traversed to get there. Unfortunately, all leads in this area contain delicate cave features, and so the cavers involved in this passage’s survey have decided to not attempt any further exploration.
Does this mean it was a wasted effort? Certainly not. Through the efforts of cavers such as these we are constantly learning more about Carlsbad Caverns, and the more we know about the cave the better prepared we are to protect it. When Don, Harvey, and crew next visit the Caverns they plan to remove all ropes, equipment, and signs of their exploration efforts, leaving this part of the cave as it originally was. So, if you have the opportunity, take a walk down to the Jumping Off Place to see where the ropes are before they are taken down. Seeing where this climb goes will present you with an excellent idea of what cave exploration often entails in the Guadalupe Mountains.
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