Ice cave - ice block sampling

I brought my crampons and ice axe on our final ice cave/cliff trip.  Turns out, if I wear two pairs of "summit" socks in the size 9 Job Master rubber boots they can take universal crampons pretty well!  In fact, they become "slip-on crampons."  Somehow I don't think the notion of slip on crampons is going to take off ;) ...but it served its purpose.  I kicked my way up the rocky permafrost behind the half frozen waterfall.  My axe bit into the ice above the waterfall well enough (better than expected for a general purpose ice axe!) that I could work my way into the ice cave above.  Above the waterfall the permafrost disappeared.  I stood in a chamber of ice.  The cavern walls glowed a faint blue.  On the floor of the chamber was an ice covered catchment with a small deposit of rounded stones in the bottom.  The image was something like an icy, zen rock garden with water silently flowing beneath the smooth, window-like ice surface and around the submerged rocks before remerging and flowing over the waterfall…I soaked it in…then, I destroyed it all.  For the sake of continuing on into the ice cave, I had to punch through the cm thick ice film in order to find footing on the cavern bottom.  This is where the slip-on job-master rigged crampons excelled, dry feet and solid footing!  Now the water was flowing freely though the cavern, no more serene blue zen-gardens.  I sort of crashed my way through the calf high icy waters, ducking around the turns and hugging the cavern walls to avoid the deepest parts of the pools.  A couple turns in the cavern narrowed and the water became too deep for my boots.  I strained to see around the next bend but could not determine how far the cave continued.  Ron took a turn with the crampons and made it past the place where I stopped.  He managed by pulling what I understood to be a chimney move, over the deep pool and through the narrow passageway; a move I considered but decided to forgo…apparently the cave ended shortly thereafter.  In retrospect I should have given the chimney move a chance!  

By that point we had moved on to taking ice core samples with an ice screw.  It’s really quite a brilliant way to collect a point sample from an ice layer!  For those folks unfamiliar with ice screws, they are open cylinders that are threaded about half way up the shaft.  “Teeth” in the end of the screw help it set and cut the ice as you screw it in.  As the screw penetrates the ice, the ice inside the screw is pushed out the back, where we collect it in a bag.  The screws are made for ice climbing protection, i.e. for clipping a climbing rope into…but they work great for collecting point samples in an ice profile.  We also used a chainsaw to collect three large basal ice blocks from the canyon walls…and nabbed a layer of clear, frozen runoff for whiskey drinking… all total, we probably carried back about 140 pounds of ice.