Speliolific Underground Happening

My friends and I (Lance) went caving today above Tony Grove Lake. We went down to the very bottom of Polygamy Cave, a cave which I have been exploring since I was 12 years old. We set off at six o'clock this morning and drove to the parking lot. A short 30 min. hike found us at the entrance of the cave, gearing up for the long trip down the orifice. At the end first cavern, a squat beneath a large boulder brought us into a new room which ended in narrow crack that led to the top of a 60 ft. drop off. A short rappel set us in a series of small, sandy-floored rooms. The further we went, the smaller and tighter the cave got. Soon, we were in a section known as the persecution crawl. Over the centuries, sections of rock have collapsed into the passage leaving extremely narrow gaps through which a spelunker is required to navigate if he wishes to reach the further sections of cave. Some of these gaps are nine or ten inches tall and a few feet wide with tight angles to twist and contort your body around. The cave finally opened up again just in time to find us at the top of a 200 ft. drop off. As we rappelled down the entire length of the rope, the bottom was nowhere in site, just a black hole that seemed to never end. Only the dim glitter of my friend's headlamp illuminated the walls of the pit far below. The side of the cavern opened up dramatically to the point where my headlamp was barely enough to expose the obvious features of the far side. Finally we hit the end of our rope. We were about ten feet short of a large ledge that sat about twenty feet of the cavern floor. Luckily, we just happened to have a short piece of rope that sufficed to get us to the ledge. The down climb to the floor was easy enough that we backed it up only with a single strand of webbing to hold on to while we climbed. Just when I thought that we were at the bottom, my friend found a way through what looked like a dead end and from there it was thirty feet of down climbing and slithering through a tiny tube with the tightest squeezes of the trip. Our efforts paid off. We all ended up in a kitchen-sized room which ended up being the true known bottom of the cave. Even though you can hear the water percolating through the cracks in the floor, all the holes turned out too tight to get a human body through. We took some pics and slapped each other on the back and then began our ascent which took about three times longer than our descent, mostly because of the two hundred foot ascent that we had to make up our free hanging rope right up the middle of the large cavern. We finally made it out exhausted and made the hike and drive back home. In all, the trip took us about twelve hours with nine and a half of them in the cave. It was tons of fun, but now I'm tired and don't feel like writing anymore. Pleas excuse the photos. I'm not in any of them because I was the one behind the camera.