03/21/09 Speleo weekend

Speleo weekend started off with a crazy letter from President Grant in Washington about an Airship crashing near Roswell and needing a task force to convene near Smithville AR to investigate. This took me several minutes to figure out it was about Speleo weekend and this year’s theme was the Wild Wild West but it eventually dawned on me. Was a five hour trip over there and attendance was smaller this year but we were able to come up with four teams of four to five people. Our mission was to document crash sights and record what we found as well as figure out what was wrote on the wreckage and a word puzzle using the translation code given to us by a strange Indian named Tom Tom. Task involved some compass and pace work, a Tyrolean across a small stream (I did that) and swinging on a rope around a tree, our mission involved four different stations. One of which was a small cave where we constructed a reflection device from materials we collected on the way. The weather cooperated for the most part but we did get some rain in the evenings but I had a good time. We had a community feed twice on Saturday and the food was great. Only issues were a late start on events and Jackie and Dan broke their camper winch and had to run to town and get another in order to raise their camper which kept them from participating in the first two stations. A few jokes were cast about them picking up a “Winch” from town of course. I once again managed to Bribe my way out of winning with decals and next years theme is to be “The Rocky Mountain Horror Show”.