NEW MEXICO, USA

Torgac Cave is in a desolate area with no signs of human life for miles. It is no wonder that it was discovered by a shepherd, who stumbled across it in the desert years ago.
In 1975, Torgac Cave was registered as a National Landmark and is managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

The road leading to the cave resembles nothing more than slight tracks in the desert. Without a GPS system in place, this cave would be impossible to find as there are no landmarks.

At least three hours was spent driving into the wilderness and even with modern technology at our disposal, we still lost our way. At one stage someone said, "We'll have to go cross-country now" and it seemed such an odd comment at the time :wasn't this what we'd been doing for the last few hours?!

The photograph shows the road stretching endlessly into the distance. Bear in mind though, that there is only green grass because of an exceptionally wet season. It would otherwise have been sand tracks all the way. In fact, the group was told later that Torgac Cave was the wettest it had been in years, so we were privileged to see the cave looking especially good.

Protecting the cave and its environment is taken very seriously:
- The whole area has been fenced off to stop animals from leaving manure near the entrance to the cave.
- The various grasses within a 50m radius of the cave entrance, are controlled so that the grass seeds do not enter or affect the water flow into the cave.
- The walkways in every cave are specially marked and no one deviates from the set route.
- A cave permit system ensures that specific caving ethics are adhered to.

The group had no idea what to expect from this first cave excursion. The entrance to Torgac Cave is a sink-hole - an unassuming subsidance in the ground that gives away absolutely nothing of what beauty lies beneath....
Everyone kitted up, knee-pads and all ( the visitors regarded the kneepads as totally unnecessary, until much later, when they found out how absolutely crucial these are).
Once through the cave gate, adrenaline kicked in with an unexpected immediate 'chimney' of about ten metres, that took the group into the cave (this technique is where the caver's back rests on one rock and his feet on another, as he shuffles across and up crevasses).
Happy to eventually put feet on 'terra firma' again, the cavers found themselves on a slope leading down to tons of gypsum formations. Torgac Cave is in desert terrain, where one would expect soaring temperatures inside and outside the cave. It was really surprising to feel how substantially cooler the temperature of the cave was, to the caves back home - even in a desert.

It was extremely interesting to note how the formations in this cave differed in structure. Unlike the smooth, white calcite stalactites and stalagmites the South Africans know so well, gypsum formations have a yellow colourant to them .
There is a skeletal appearance to the formations and it wasn't difficult to see the dancing skeletons in the gypsum columns stretching from floor to ceiling. In fact, this cave is best known for a formation named "The Witch's Claw".

The trip through this cave involved various passage ways - walking on haunches, climbing, to end up in a massive chamber called the Football Field.   The cavers divided up into two groups and put about twenty metres between the two groups. The lights were then switched off. One group then tried to find the other, using sound. Needless to say, the echolocation bats are so famous for, did not kick in.

In this huge chamber, the cavers came across a single rock filled with selenite crystals.
Selenite is a coarsely crystalline, transparent variety of gypsum, that the South Africans had never seen before.
The necessity for gating this cave in the middle of an unpopulated desert, became clear when they were shown how a large section of the rock had been mined for the selenite crystals.

After chimneying through the crevasse back to the gate, it was time to lock the gate and leave this cave the way they'd found it. Steve and Neil did the honours locking the gate and the first cave trip was over.
Time goes so fast when you are having fun and it was at least four hours before the cavers emerged from Torgac Cave.
It was quite a surprise to see the daylight had been replaced by the night sky and a full moon and the cavers faced the long three hour trip to Fort Stanton and their next cave.