Whose Goat is this Goat: Adventures at the Scapegoat Cave System

0:01 Let's see if I can get this to work. I see it. All right, perfect. Slideshow.

0:19 All right, everybody can see it? Bunch of horses' asses? Bunch of horses' asses, that's right. That's who comes on these trips. I'll move this aside. All right. Okay, this all works. All right. All right, well, for those of you who have never met me, my name is Brian Gindling. And I started caving in Montana probably in like 2009, I think was my first trip I did, or 2008, I can't really remember. But I went to Scapegoat and Silvertip, both cave systems, in a year when I was unemployed in college. So I had all the time in the world. So this is going to be a whole bunch of stuff, not just our most recent trip, but it'll just give an overview of the Scapegoat Cave System that Daryl Greaser and I have been attempting to re-survey since 2009. So this is the view from camp pretty much. This is our water source and we get the mules right up to camp, which makes it really nice. Beautiful views, a little different than Silvertip for those of you who have been there, but nonetheless beautiful. So here's Montana.

1:52 Here's the Bob that we all love so much, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. Here's Silvertip. I feel like a lot of...

2:01 The screen didn't switch. We're still on the intro slide.

2:06 Oh, it didn't? Uh-oh. Okay, hold on. [Audience] And there was much rejoicing.

2:20 So do you see Montana right now? [Audience] No, you went back to Scapegoat Cave System. Oh my God. Maybe it's a little slow. Now you got it. Okay. Okay, maybe I'll just slow down a little bit. Can you see the wilderness outline now? Not yet. In light blue? No, you got a state outline. Uh-oh, there it is. Yep. Okay, is that full screen for you guys? It just went to not full screen, and now I'm assuming it's going to take like 10 seconds and then show up as full screen. Okay, let's see what I can do about this. Maybe my computer's slow or something, I don't know.

3:22 Yeah, that could be. Well, this is the magic trick you promised us, right, Brian?

3:27 That's right. That's right. This is it. This is it. All right, who sees the wilderness outlined in white-blue? [Audience] I do. I do. [Audience] But it's not full screen. [Audience] Okay, try clicking [Audience] slideshow. Yeah, that's what I had it on before and it wasn't like...

3:53 How's that look?

3:56 That has not changed. [Audience] I feel like [Audience] this is like trying to communicate [Audience] to Mars. [Audience] Are you, in fact, [Audience] in some kind of basement? [Audience] Your Wi-Fi can't [Audience] penetrate that OSB.

4:21 Okay, we can see the wilderness outlined in white-blue now? Yep. Can you zoom that up real quick? That's asking for a lot. [Audience] I was going to say, it might break things here. Yeah, I'm not zooming up.

4:39 We've had a request that folks turn their videos off because it might help. We could see if that helps speed it up. I'm not sure if that'll make a difference, but we could try that.

4:59 I see some [Audience] videos going off.

5:06 All right, feel free to proceed whenever, Brian. Okay, are you all seeing Silvertip outlined on the screen? Yep. Okay. Do you now see Scapegoat outlined on the screen? No. [Audience] Oh, now. Yep. Okay, so there's just maybe like three or four second delay. Maybe that video thing is helping.

5:36 We'll just chime in if it doesn't catch up. So here's Scapegoat down in the bottom right-hand corner of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, just outside of Great Falls, pretty much right on the edge of the Eastern Front. You can see it outlined over there in red. You all see it outlined in red? Perfect. Okay, so here's the geologic map. Let's go through this stuff quick. The main thing we want to focus on is just the orange here. It's just a huge Cambrian thrust fault.

6:18 Are you using your pen? There's like a little laser pointer.

6:23 Yeah. Okay. Yep. Okay, now that's what you do. [Audience] It's up now. [Audience] Sometimes if you use a pen, it won't switch slides, [Audience] but if you use a mouse click, it will. Okay, sure. So here's an actual Google Earth image of the Scapegoat Plateau itself. It's got three mountains on it. Scapegoat, Flint, and Cigarette Rock. So the actual plateau itself is like 16 square miles of karst pavement up on top. It's pretty much all flat. I mean, for the most part, flat and then completely surrounded by cliffs on all sides. So it's just a huge chunk of limestone where everything not in orange has been completely eroded away and just left the little bit that is orange. So here's the caves that are right now known and surveyed on Scapegoat Mountain that we've worked on. There's actually only two caves on top of the plateau, and there are about 10 on the cliffside of the plateau that you either have to rappel into or climb up into.

7:59 Here's kind of a Google Earth view of looking into the cirque. You can see the plateau up on top, still covered in snow in this image. And then you can see the glacial cirque with the waterfall pouring out of the Green Fork Falls main cave entrance right there.

8:24 Here's the cave entrances we know about so far in yellow. And you can see that they're kind of in like these groupings. On the very left, you've got Ramsey's and Campbell's. There's two little yellow dots stacked on top of each other, and there's some water that comes out of there. Then in the middle of the image you have Scapegoat itself with the major waterfall pouring out of it, and then on the very right you'll see a little lone yellow dot, and it's got a waterfall coming out of it, and that's One More Day Cave, and that's supposedly the lowest point of the water in the cave where it all finally comes out. Though that is not definite. No dye tracing has been done besides one dye trace long ago that just turned the waterfall green.

9:19 So you see this image with the red rectangle about it. If you look at Scapegoat right now on Google Earth, there is a large chunk of the plateau that's doubled up on the image. And you can kind of see that if you look closely, it's really confusing and it infuriates me. It makes it really difficult to figure stuff out up there. So if you do look at this on your own, you can go back in time and this image isn't doubled. This is just the most recent satellite image. And I'm not sure what's going on. And I'm pretty sure the government's trying to cover something up. Because there's like 300 meters of extra land on Google Earth that's not supposed to be there. So who knows what they're trying to cover up, but something's going on. Google won't answer me about it. Here is the Scapegoat cirque. Here's base camp right next to this nice blue tarn where we get our water, and those yellow dots represent the cave entrances, and pretty much most of the water that flows through this valley, which is a pretty healthy stream, comes out of Green Fork Falls Cave. So this highlighted here in light blue is the main stream coming out of Green Fork Falls Cave.

10:50 There's also a seasonal stream that comes out of Campbell's and Ramsey's Cave, usually only in high flood. I've never seen it, but you can see that it's wet on the Google Earth images. And I've heard from people who have been there in the wintertime that water does come out of there. And then One More Day Cave, which is the supposed resurgence for the whole cave system, the furthest down. That is usually always flowing as well. I've only seen it dry maybe once up there. The other two caves you see marked are just little slits in the cliffside, and they never have water issuing out of them as far as I know. So here in red, we've got the Scapegoat Cave System as it's been resurveyed by us so far. 3.3 miles and pretty much heading of what we've resurveyed, it's pretty much heading northwest into the mountain up here. Here in the orange is some of the part of the cave that has not been resurveyed. Down here in the bottom of the image, you'll see this really long passage. This is the main river gallery of the cave.

12:22 Full-on swims, lots of rappels. We just haven't gotten to that yet. That's, you know, pretty much next on our list. And then up in the top left, some of these angular lines, this is the very backside of the Kathy's Icebox section of the cave system heading off into the mountain. We just have not gotten back there with the resurvey yet because we keep finding, you know, other newer passage that keeps taking our time.

12:58 Here on the very southern side you can see the very lowest point where the water's coming out is Campbell's and Ramsey's Cave and you can see that it's really close to connecting into the river gallery of the main Green Fork system. I guess it's just a muddied up hole. I've never been back there but that will probably add in another entrance to the cave system if we can get some people back in there digging through some mud in the canyon. You can see these blue arrows are the in-cave water that's known. They're mostly, the bottom one in Campbell's is just a small stream. The very top one on the north side of the image is also a smaller stream coming in. But the middle one there on the left side is the main river passage that is, I have not been all the way back in there, but the passage is usually around 20 feet wide, 40 feet tall, canyon passage full of water in the bottom.

14:23 Here I just marked the three places that water comes out of the cave system

14:32 and then here on this image of the whole plateau the one arrow here pretty much in the middle of the image, is the only flowing surface water on the plateau that we have found. It comes off of a permanent ice field, but that's to this date the only place that we've seen water anywhere on the plateau that will be feeding the cave system.

15:01 And then these two points in yellow circles are the only two caves that have been surveyed on the plateau. The bottom right one is Arm Pit, which is the second deepest pit in Montana. It's 226 feet deep, just a blind pit. And then on the top left is Left Hammer Pit that Daryl and Kat and I surveyed, which is like a double pit I think 140 feet deep and then it goes to maybe 200 feet of sinuous stream passage. So those are the actually only two caves besides on the cliffside that we know about that have been surveyed and explored of any length. This black line is the geologic, this is like the trough of the whole plateau, kind of like how Silvertip has a syncline that controls all of its cave passages. Scapegoat has very much the same thing, though it seems, I don't know, I don't really understand quite what's going on up here, but we talk about it a lot. You know, we talk about where water... Here you can see all the blue arrows. this is where water theoretically should be flowing from the edges of the plateau into the middle to the black line.

16:33 And then from there, maybe Sun Lake up in the top left. And then in the bottom right, obviously going into the cave system. These are all just hypotheticals. We have no clue what's going on, and, you know, hours and hours around the campsite and the campfire drinking beers and talking about cave systems. Here you can see in the red is what we hope to find, you know, all of our hopes and dreams. We've got cave passages all over this plateau. We got here in the middle, you got the biggest cave room in Montana. Obviously we're going to find it there. You got this big thick line. That's the whole borehole. That's going to go completely into the mountain. You know, this is everything that we hope and that we have ideas for. Of course, none of them are really going to come true. And this is the reality. Right now we just have hundreds of little flags on Google Earth of all these karst features that have been descended in the past that you can see in Caves of Montana, that we're not sure which ones are which, and then other ones that we've just thrown rocks down into. But very few of them have been dropped, But they all are, you know, pretty good leads. So getting away from Google Earth, now that you kind of get an overview, this is what was in Caves of Montana when Daryl first went there. And then a few years later, I first showed up.

18:06 This is their survey of the cave system. Up in the top, you have Kathy's Icebox, and in the bottom half you have Green Fork Falls Cave. And on this map, they're not connected. They were two separate caves, but apparently in the Shining Mountain Grotto newsletter back in the 80s they did talk about a connection between the two caves, but there was no definite idea of where that was and they never really shared it. So Scapegoat is another one of those caves where there's maps for it, but there's no survey data. I guess they first went there in 1972. You can see on this map, it was like J. Arnold, Newell Campbell, Jim Chester, a bunch of really good cavers went there and they surveyed a bunch. And it was some of the main articles in the old Alpine Karst publications. And they kept writing articles until about the late '70s, and then it was just, you know, radio silence from then on out. Alpine Karst wasn't published anymore, and you never saw articles about this stuff anymore. So this is what we had to go off of back in the day when we first started. So at first we were just trying to refine these passages, and it's kind of like mazy in the middle area. So trying to find out where we were and where we were going took quite a number of years. I was, some of my first Montana alpine caving, and I had no clue what was going on.

19:48 So then, you know, over the years we started writing some articles for NSS News, and we took their old map and we started a resurvey. And here you can see in the more bold lines is our resurvey. And here in the middle, you can kind of see it says connection passage. That's when we were able to connect the two sides of the [inaudible] system in one, which was great, to refine their passage and actually survey it. So that really, like, you know, galvanized us to continue the resurvey and see how much more we could find up there. And over the years our survey has gotten better. This is the line plot as it stands right now. Still missing the major river gallery passage which will be another mile of cave on there and a good bit of the Kathy's Icebox, which will probably be another mile of cave. So they said there was 10 miles of cave that they surveyed back in the day, not all connected, but we're so far at like 3.3, so, you know, we're slowly inching our way up there. Here we're starting, you know, the old survey standards were, you know, they were in quarter- inch wetsuits using Suuntos, you know, way out in the wilderness with carbide. So their survey notes were pretty, they were good. They've lined up really well, but they just didn't have a lot of detail. So we've been going back and trying to do much more detailed surveys, and finding a lot of new cave, like this Octopus's Garden survey, which they've been into. I don't know how much of it they've been into.

21:45 There are carbide survey marks, but this is some of the stuff they just never talked about. Maybe they found this after they stopped writing Alpine Karst, but we never knew any of this was supposed to exist. So this is where we've been spending a lot of time resurveying recently and finding new leads in the cave. And I've been using CaveWhere a lot. It's a program by this guy, Philip Schuchardt, which allows me to project all of the survey pages, plan and profile, onto one screen so you can see it. And it's really helped the way I draw cave maps to kind of like visualize how the passages are moving through the cave because this is the most complicated cave I've ever tried to like even just manage the data for, let alone try to draw. So this program has been helping a lot. And you can kind of see right here, you can kind of see the plan and profile of the cave at the same time. So it's much, it's a lot different than like, say, just a straight up line plot you'd see on Compass. And they both have their uses, but I've been finding this really, really nice to find new passages where stuff might go, and then just to visualize it for me to draw it and to make a good cave map, because this cave deserves a good map.

23:18 This is the profile so far. It's not very deep. It's only got maybe 1,400 to 1,500 feet of potential cave depth, and we are going upstream from the entrance, so we've only got about 350 feet of depth so far in the cave realized through survey. and there on the left AC2 and AC6 those are the very highest points in the cave right now and then there on the very, very right, it says 052, and that would be the deepest part of the cave right now. And here it is in Compass, and a little easier to see the depth. Up on the upper left-hand side you have the river coming in and the main Green Fork side of the cave, so it's higher up, and the water's flowing from left to right down into the Kathy's Icebox part of the cave system down there in the blue and the pink and that's where a lot of our new survey is happening is down in Kathy's Icebox. So that's a little bit about just like the maps. I hope that didn't bore you at all, but I really enjoy maps and it's really helping to like figure out what's there and what we're going to find in the future. But here I'm just going to show some videos of the cave and the area and kind of like what to expect if you ever came on a trip.

24:48 Some of these pictures are going to come from all sorts of different years, but these right here is from Kai. Kai amazingly drove from Ohio and some marathon middle of the night thing, showed up by himself at the trailhead and knew we were all up there, and he had been there before, but it's a 14-mile hike, so it can still be daunting, and there's large predators out there that could eat you. So hiking by yourself is always interesting. So, you know, [inaudible]. So it looks like he started off pretty good. Looks like pretty soon in, started to snow. This is the beginning. This is like Labor Day. And we've had a number of storms around Labor Day, but the fires are a lot less. We've actually been burnt out of here numerous times. So we've been trying to extend the season a little bit. So here we can see Kai extending the season of his hike as he gets in, starts getting snowier and snowier. And then when you start seeing grizzly bear prints in the ground and the snow that's only been falling for a few hours, it really makes you wonder why you're hiking alone in the middle of a blizzard to go up somewhere, not even knowing where everyone's camped. But as he went through, he got to see, Daryl and Kat were nice enough to go up at the trailhead or the trail right above camp and to set an American flag.

26:29 And here is his little friendly helper snowman right in the middle of the trail. So even if he was just staring at his feet, wondering why in the world he was here from Ohio in the middle of a blizzard, he would run into this little snowman and stop him, hopefully, so he would look up and know to get off trail right here because we've had a number of people pass this point and just keep on hiking. Bobby this year kept on hiking before the snowfall started and got to meet a grizzly bear pretty close. So yeah, so luckily Daryl and Kat made this little helper for Kai to get home safe and sound. Here he is, nice close up, and his arms waving his distance down to camp. So here's camp. You know, here's our nice, here's my nice little tent spot, and Caitlin here. This is what we woke up to one morning. You never know what's really going to happen in the mountains. This was September. I'm not going to get, I'm not even going to say date because I can't remember the exact day this was. But yeah, it was really nice the day before and it was still nice. Now, in the past it's been absolutely beautiful. You know, if you bring a nice big enough air mattress, you can go swimming on the tarn with the leeches and the three inch long crazy devil beetles and all sorts of other stuff that lives in that little tarn.

28:03 Unlike a lot of wilderness camps, the mules drop everything in camp. So you know in the past we've brought percolating coffee pots and big propane burners and whatnot because you don't have to really hump it from everywhere, anywhere else. Drops right there, so that's very nice. There's, you know, it's a nice camp, but there's still the chis that are everywhere. You know, the little chisel-teeth rodents. They like to take care of anything that's left on the ground, even if you're just, you know, camping or caving for the day. Come back and who knows what you may find. So we've been improving camp a little bit, you know, getting some better bear hangs and rodent hangs hung up, instead of trying to find some little scrabbly tree to hang your food off of. First off, we now have some nice rails hanging up in the trees. And so here we're going to start talking about the caving, because this is what we're here for. You know, we're all here for talking about caving. So here's Daryl. This is one of our very first trips. You know, he's super excited. This is the wilderness, so we'll be using his little rock hammer and self-drives. And Scapegoat, as far as I know, I think is the tallest cave entrance in Montana for sure. And it goes in at this height, probably about, I think, 150, 200 feet in before it starts hitting the canyon.

29:35 So it's quite large. You get in here and there's still a lot of daylight shooting through. Here is what it looks like from camp. This was actually during a record rainfall. We had one other Labor Day that flooded the whole cave system. Usually the water comes out just maybe 50 vertical feet above the lip of the waterfall and low water when we're there in the summertime. But there was a massive rainstorm that night. And as you can see, the water here has risen up just about 100 vertical feet below where you walk into the cave system. So actually what we surveyed the day before this storm was actually flooded this day when we left. So luckily we weren't down there. But there is, people say in Alpine Karst that the water has actually come out of the cave entrance another like it would be like another 120 vertical feet of water. I've never seen anything like that, but that's what they wrote about. We have camped at the cave entrance before when there's only a small number of people. it does cut down on the hiking but there's really only room for as you can see one hammock tent and one tent and then a little kitchen tarp.

31:07 And here in the middle, going into the cave entrance, you can see kind of the ledge right to the right of the tent. They said in the past that that ledge was under a foot of water. And I don't even know how that's really possible, but you know, maybe there was some huge massive flood. This is looking out from the cave entrance. And here on the left-hand side, you can kind of see a caver down there in red and in the far distance, and he's going up to Kathy's Icebox. Oh, look, I don't know where those blue lines came from.

31:50 Do you see those blue lines on the screen? Yes. Okay. Well, I don't know where those are from. I don't know what that is. So here you can see Daryl Greaser, one of our first trips. This is how they apparently got over on this ledge to Kathy's Icebox.

32:11 Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.

32:22 Brian, what are you doing?

32:24 I'm not doing anything. I'm not doing nothing. Nothing at all. So, the Kathy's Icebox. Oh, my God. I'm telling you, I'm not even moving the mouse.

33:09 I don't know what's going on. Someone's writing on my screen.

33:22 I imagine you can all see this, right?

33:29 Yes. I'm not sure how to turn it off. Okay. I don't know who that is, and I don't know what that is, but someone's drawing on my screen, so I'm sorry about that, guys. Yeah. I don't know how someone's drawing on my screen. Okay. So here's Kathy's Icebox up here in the top. You can see this person rappelling out of the entrance to it. It is, it's a really phenomenal cave entrance. You know, you're a few hundred, quite a few hundred feet above the valley floor when you come out of it. You got views of Scapegoat Mountain there off in the distance and the cirque. It's quite spectacular. And this is an old photo. This is pretty much what a lot of the passage looks like in the Scapegoat Cave System. Tall, extremely tall, narrow canyon passages. All walking passage, as I like to say, that I usually can't remember the horrible parts, or maybe I just forget about them. But yeah, there's some not walking, but it's few and far between and I've also said it's all rigged, which is obviously also not true. Going back in there recently, I saw a lot of stuff that was not rigged and I was very surprised that I'd somehow gotten down it in the past.

35:06 And even though I sometimes say you're probably not going to get wet, you are going to get wet and we find boats all over in this cave. I think we found seven or eight boats now. Here in the bottom right, this is one Daryl brought. Here in the top right, here's Kat holding one of Bill Steele's old inner tubes. I think we got that out for the NSS Museum, they asked for it. I think we found like four or five inner tubes so far. And then here on the left, we found an '80s vintage inflatable boat. This is, Kai dubbed this the USS Half Hitches. So we'll be using this in the future in one of the lakes in the cave. And yeah, eventually, you know, we get in boats and you start pushing. A lot of these leads are full of water. A lot of them don't need to be done. This one actually didn't need to be done. There's actually a bypass for it, but we didn't know that at the time, so I got to go boating. There's nothing finer than boating in the dark in a cave.

36:21 This is the river passage in Scapegoat. This is Joe Oliphant back in, I think, 2009 or 2008 or something, maybe 2005, I can't remember. He went there with Jason Ballensky and Mark Peterson and a few other folks to push the back of the cave along with some Polish cavers. So these are probably some of the best pictures we have of some of the passage back in the back of the cave. And here's, you know, here's kind of some of the shenanigans that we get into trying to get back into the cave passages. We have half-eaten shark victim wetsuits. You know, we've got old inner tubes we find, blow up for no reason. And then deep, deep pools of water that have so far kept us away and let us survey a bunch of drier passage. This is getting into the main part of the river passage that our survey has not reached yet. Still trying to figure out the best way to negotiate this. I don't feel like wetsuits are the best idea. They do work, but they always used inner tubes back in the day, so maybe we're just going to start getting back on the inner tube party and just start bringing some inner tubes back in here. So since we have, you know, not all of us have wetsuits to be going in 33, 34 degree water, we've been focusing a lot in upper level leads.

37:57 As you go through the cave system, we found numerous domes like this. Most of them have not really succeeded in taking us anywhere, but, you know, next one might. You can sometimes climb the walls of the canyon to try to get out of it. Up in the ceiling, the connection passage is only 15 feet above your head but you can't really see it when you're walking on the floor below because it just it's flat with the wall. So there's a lot of good leads up on the walls, and some bolt or you can see some hand drill bolts here. And then some of these bypasses were known back in the day, but they're not really marked on the map very well. So we've found a whole bunch of different ways through the cave now. Lots of stemming. If you've ever been to Papoose Cave also in Idaho, it's kind of similar to that. It's tall, narrow canyons where you can stem all sorts of places up in the canyon and find passages above and you can also use your friends to help you know get that extra five feet or so up on the wall by jumping on their back and placing that first piton or sling or whatever you can on the wall. And, you know, a lot of times they've just kind of led up into dead end mushroom-topped domes. This is one we found last year.

39:30 It's not the greatest picture, but you can see there in the middle bottom of the picture is a little blackness. You can stick your hand through those rocks into standing room passage, but it's just a bunch of flowstone-cemented breakdown that is perched above your head in this kind of pretty much body-tight 70-foot tall dome called Crab Butter. And yeah, so this, I mean, it's a pretty good lead. You can move those rocks a little bit, but we're still trying to figure out a way to get it through. But there's a lot of passage up in the ceiling of these caves, and with standing room just right on the other side, you know, we'll definitely be back to try to push this part of the cave. And when you do climb out, you climb out of the bottom passages and you get up into this really nice, like dry, sandy, kind of like tubular passages up in the ceiling. Sometimes there's a little streams in them, but it's nowhere near as wet and drippy as the bottom. And sometimes, like I said, this is the connection passage, and it really just comes out of the side of the wall. It's like so difficult to see from the bottom, so we've been going around with, you know, better LED lights. They were doing all this in carbide back in the day, and we're finding a lot of stuff up on those walls. And this is some of the stuff that, you know, we've been trying to get back to in Kathy's Icebox.

41:05 We got up in the really upper reaches of it. I'm not exactly sure which limestone formation we're in. Like, most of this cave is in the Cambrian and the Dearborn limestone, but it's usually gray and stuff, and there's so much flowstone up in this upper section, and instead of canyons you have these roundish tubes. So this is a lot of stuff that we're pushing and mapping these days, trying to find some upper stream stuff to get out of all those active passageways below. Hopefully into some like bypassing paleo passages up top would be nice. But we still find water up there. Lots of pooled, long, long lakes of cold, cold water. They don't really seem to fluctuate that much. You can tell from the rimstone, you know, ledges on the sides, but there's definitely a lot of perched cold water up in this cave. And then, you know, after a while the darkness and the wet and the cold, you got to dry out the wetsuits. So you end up going up on the plateau. It's a spectacular plateau up there. It's the largest chunk of alpine karst in Montana. And it doesn't seem to have as many, you know, the Silvertip cave entrance, or cave system, has almost 20 different entrances, and so many of those holes on Silvertip go so easily.

42:41 Not so much at Scapegoat, and I don't know what the difference is, but there's hundreds of karst features and hundreds of pits you can drop into, so, you know, we're always hoping that one of them is going to be the one that leads in. Here we have Adam going off the 400-foot cliffs there, trying to get into Campbell's and Ramsey's Cave, which have not been entered since the '70s. Two of those caves that we just haven't gotten to yet. We just haven't had the manpower really up on the plateau. You know, this is the land of the marmots. You see a lot of marmots up there, and a lot of them live in the karst features, so, you know, they'll always be eyeing you, giving the side eye. And there's a number of wrecks. I don't know if it's the flatness, or if because of the flatness it creates weather or whatnot, but there's three different airplane wrecks up on the plateau in very different areas. I can imagine just like looking at the plateau from far away and thinking it might be like flat enough to land an airplane and then you hit your tires on something like this. There's a lot of really classic karst landforms up on the plateau. It's such a nice place just to take a walk around on. Some nice, you know, you're always trying to find ways down benches and in all of these little nooks and crannies you always see more cave entrances, and, you know, there's a bunch of caves in Caves of Montana that are marked that apparently they use these aluminum tags and nail them into the, near the entrances and cracks. So we're always trying to relocate some of those caves, but apparently the wind has eroded those and they always fall off, and some of them have been found in the bottom of pits.

44:36 So we haven't really come up with the best way to really start inventorying all the karst features up on top of the plateau yet. But this is a lot of what you're going to see. I mean, I've got hundreds of these and these are like, you know, 20 to 50 foot deep pits with big ice and snow down there and some, you know, standing walking passage. But, you know, we're not always carrying a rope and vert gear on us to get down in these things. So maybe, you know, we're always trying to go up on the plateau. The mules can't get us up on the plateau, but we're still trying to look for different ways so we can actually set up a base camp up on top so we can actively start looking at some of these karst features up top, because right now it takes so long just to get up there from base camp and back down, let alone caving in the middle of the day as well. And these are some of the other leads we got right on the cliff face. You can see where these yellow arrows are pointing towards these six holes on the middle of these like 700-foot tall cliffs. You know, that'll be, that's a whole trip in itself. But this isn't a whole another section of the plateau. We haven't, there's no cave passage in there, but all the other cave entrances look just like this. They're just like little holes in the side of the cliff, so getting into these is some of the best leads still up there, and especially they're going to, you know, they're going to be nice virgin cave if they go.

46:15 Here's one of the largest ones that overlooks, this is just a picture from the campfire. Like, this is looking at you every single day, and no one else, no one has yet attempted to get out there. As you can see, I've tried to figure out like some, I'm not a mountain climber or rock climber in any means. So I don't know the best way to go about this, but it would be great to try to get in some of these large holes. And of course, it's the wilderness, so you can't just fly a drone up in there to try to check it out. Maybe you could do with a balloon if you could find a way to get a balloon up in there with a camera. But with the spotting scope and stuff, like, it looks like there's, you know, it looks just as good when you get up close. So hopefully someday in the future we'll be able to get in some of these cliff leads, and hopefully, you know, it's been going better, because, you know, this is usually what you would see. There's very few of us, like Daryl and I and Daryl's wife, Kat, and then a few people in the past, like Mike McEachern, Bob Stott, some people have come out, but, you know, we have not had the numbers like Turtle had or Silvertip, and nor have we had, you know, a lot of DistoXs. I think this is the first year DistoXs have really been used a lot down there. Actually, no, last year and this year. And Bob brought some really early versions of it. But now that we're getting a lot more professional-looking cavers up there, a lot new, we've had a lot of good people coming up in the past two years. Some of the largest trips we've had.

47:57 So now more people are learning how to get through the cave, and it's not just really like me and Daryl and Kat who know the passages. So hopefully as we get more and more people in there, a bunch of, you know, new trip leaders and new survey teams will get up in there, and hopefully we can start really pushing this cave system into quite a few more miles. I mean, there's a lot of potential in there. And here's our crew from this year. I think this might be the biggest crew I've ever been with up there, and we've got people from, you know, West Coast and Ohio, and then, you know, all of our local Montana crew being ridiculous. Thank you very much. That's what I got.