I'm not a caver but I do a lot of diving off the Northern California coast.
I heard of this board from somebody and though this would be a good place to start. Has anybody on this board heard of this place:
Hall City Cave.
A friend of mine just bought some property up in Trinity County, California, in a place called Hay Fork. He told me about a cave up in the area just out of Wildwood off hwy 36 called Hall City Cave.
From what he told me the cave is about a 0.3 mi hike up a hill and the entrance to the cave is at the base of a limestone shelf on the side of a mountain. The cave goes in about 200 yards, begins to slope down and ends at a pool of water. Local lore says that during the gold rush years a group of robbers threw a few bags of stolen gold into the water to hide it, but little did they know that the cave was quite deep and they had no way to recover it. Indian lore has it that the site was also used as an ancient indian burial and spiritual site.
About a year ago my friend told me that a group of exploration divers did a dive in that underwater cavern and never found any bags of gold or indian bones, but they never reached the bottom either. They reached their MOD at 270 feet and had to turn around.
If this place is everything they tell me it is then we have one hell of a fresh water cave dive right here in our back yard.
There are a lot of gold prospectors that move up to that area to actually make a living mining and dredging for gold. Many of them have utilized scuba gear or hookah to get down in the holes in the streams, but a dive like the Hall City Cave is way out of reach for anybody living up there. That takes a lot of special training and equipment.
Have any of you ever heard of this place or possibly know the team that did the exploration into Hall City Cave?
