Lilburn is one crazy cave

Got back early this morning and am dragging *ss today. had to hike out over 5 miles and a 1000' elev gain in almost 2 ft of new powder w/o snowshoes (everywhere was rented out on friday). great trip though--Lilburn is one crazy cave. over 20 surveyed miles, yet its probably half the size of fitton's. parts of it there's a five-way junction every 50 ft... you could get lost so terribly easy. i'm bruised and sore as well since even the "horizontal" sections we did had a lot of REALLY difficult mantle moves and chimneys, plus the two guys I was caving with were far more experienced and set a crazy murderous pace. oh yeah the cave entrance was buried under about 6 ft of downfall from the last storm so we had to spend about two hrs lifting and cutting logs, branches, etc just to get the gate unlocked. what a start... the cave is full of this cool bluish blacknwhite banded marble, but unfortunately no one took a camera in so i've asked matt to send me some photos from another trip or a link so i can pass them along. one guy i caved with Matt (he's from AR, and working on his PHd in astro-physics--his wife is from Maben, MS and is working on HER Phd in Physiology) actually caved Fitton's the weekend after we did using Bryan's trip report! what a small freakin' world... we stayed at this great rustic hut built by the cave research foundation just a few hundred yards from the entrance; hiked in around midnite friday nite, caved on saturday, hung around the cabin on sunday trying to stay warm (temp hovered between 15-28 deg all wknd) but snowshoed about 2 miles that nite w/ the researcher to this spring (every 40 min or so this spring will 'flush' and the h20 flow will peak dramatically for about a half-hour--part of the research is to nail down why and test the effects on the cave environment and stream ecology), then hiked out on monday after closing up the cabin. trail went right thru the largest sequoia groves on the planet... just beautiful. - Kirk