Harties Cave 2 - Jamaica

Jamaican Caving Notes

Jamaican Caves Organization

Harties Cave-2 April 1, 2005 - 12:30-14:00 EST
District: Rock Spring	Parish: Trelawny
WGS84 L/L: 18 18 14.7; 77 34 21.8
JAD69: 189339 E, 183461 N	JAD2001: 689450 E, 683750 N
Altitude: 510m WGS84	Accuracy: +/- 10m horizontal; +/- 15m vertical
Type: Complex cave	Accessibility: Scramble/vertical gear
Depth: 15m	Length: 1058m
Explorers: KHE - 1965	Survey: KHE - 1965
JU Ref: Text - pg 196; Map - pg 197
Entrance size: 3m W x 4m H (Main)	Entrance aspect: 230 deg true (Main)
Vegetation in general locale: Bush, farm	Vegetation at entrance: Farm
Rock type: Yellow - White limestone junction	Bedding: Moderate	Jointing: Moderate
Speleothems: Stals, flowstone	Palaeo resources: None seen
Archaeo resources: None
Hydrology: Dry	Siltation: N/A
Sink: N/A	Rising: N/A
Stream passage with surface activity: N/A	Stream passage without surface activity: N/A
Dark zone: >95%.	Climate: Warm; semi-humid.
Bats: >500	Bat guano: Much
Guano mining: Historical; on-going	Guano condition: Fresh/fluff
Eleutherodactylus cundalli: Some	Neoditomyia farri: None seen
Amblypygids: None	Periplaneta americana: Some
Cave crickets: None seen	Sesarma: Some
Other species: None seen
Visitation: None	Speleothem damage: None
Graffiti: Some	Garbage: Some
Ownership: Private	Protection: None
Vulnerability: Medium. This site has a large bat-roost. Access is more difficult than Harties Cave-1.

Harties Cave-2
April 1, 2005
Team: Conolley, Slack, Newman
Notes: Elizabeth Slack

Harties Cave 2: The deep gully can be scrambled down and up if one is taller than average. Otherwise it's about a two-metre drop followed by a second drop of about two metres. When going down the first drop, make certain you have put all your weight on the rope, otherwise you will slip at the edge and whang your shins into some very hard, knobby rock. I hadn't done vertical work in a while and the manoeuvre left me with a couple of good-sized black and blue bruises. The second drop leads to a stream passage. We opted to follow it to the right, if one's back is to the second drop; I can't remember which way is upstream and which way downstream. The stream seemed to continue in both directions, but we only had time for the one. Ivor, Minke and I followed the stream as it meandered along, passing a few soda straws on the way. I don't recall seeing any trash. After some distance, perhaps a few hundred metres, we emerged from the stream passage and clambered up onto some boulders. At that point, we decided to call it, Ivor jotted some notes and we turned around to head back. I sensed that the cave would soon end in another opening, but that feeling is as likely to come from misplaced hope as speleological common sense. The boulders above the stream passage seemed to head in the same direction. But, though the stream passage was narrow, muddy and wet, it was certainly safer than the large, smooth boulders would have been.

Harties Cave-2
April 1, 2005
Notes: RS Stewart

The report I received from the three of the crew who visited the cave while Dietrich and I were finding Farmyard Cave indicates the following:

A large bat-roost is found well into the cave, in the dark zone. This in the further, lower sections, with guano extraction not reaching this point, but being limited to the outer, upper section. American roaches are present, but for other inverts the observations were not thorough, and are uncertain.

The three of them seem to have found the cave quite interesting in a "caving" way, and were impressed. There is a possibility that the cave is not thoroughly explored yet.

I will quote from my notes for Harties 1, on Mar 30 when I briefly visited Cave 2:

We now entered Cave-2, and journeyed in for about 30m until a deep gully was reached that required vertical gear to descend. The gully seemed to show that formation of the cave had taken place in two separate stages, with the larger higher chambers being first, and then an active stream cutting a gully through the floor of this at a later point. The process does not seem to have been steady, but instead punctuated, there being no gradual transformation from the older, higher chamber, to the gully which was carved into the floor. It appears that many thousands of years separated these two stages of development, with an extended dry period in between (this perhaps occurring during the last glacial age).

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