Warsaw Caves: Canada

[IowaCaveDiver]

I was up north of Toronto visiting my girlfriend's family this past month and for a touristy day excursion we stopped to visit the "Warsaw Caves" near the town of Peterborough. There are 7 dry caves, several actually have ice or frost on sections of rock. The caves are numbered 1 through 7 and supposedly they are all connected... 1 leads to 2, 2 to 3 and so on... what really sparked my curiousity was cave 7. 7 claims to have an underground river that dissapears into the earth and you can actually see the river flowing out of the ground a short distance down a trail from cave 7. I kick my self for actually having all my dive gear with us in canada and having left it at the relatives house... all I wanted was a mask and a dive light to peek under some large boulders in the water. Does anyone know much about these caves? Are they divable? It seems if they were the visability may be good since it is all carved naturally out of the limestone like many of the caves here in Florida.
Unfortunatly we only had about 2 hours to play around when we visited. We spent a good deal of time in cave 1... I did the furthest penetration and I gained a huge respect for dry cavers... holy crap that sucked! It didn't help that I was very unprepared... shorts, tshirt, hand held backup light and believe it or not my DUI rock boots (I was wearing flip flops when we decided to detour and visit this site). I was actually following a line and was told that I could make it through to cave 2, however I'm a 6' 240lb guy and it was no easy task dragging my big butt through those cracks and over the frozen boulders... I "turned the crawl" after I went a few hundred feet past my family and emergered a short time later bleeding heavily from the elbows. I kept saying... lets stick a garden hose down here and come back with dive gear in a few days!

-Matt

[Arnold Mesiser]

You should have Pmed me before you came up( I live about 3.5 hrs north of there )_ I could have gotten you into a lot better cave... and cave dives.Warsaw is not even remotely diveable and is a poor example of caves in our area.We generally take the new cavers there to get them used to crawling.

I will post a couple maps from a project I am redrawing.BTW there is a "rumored" super long cave there-no one I know in science has seen any data to show this as true and the group claiming the distance was banned from caving there due to doing things beyond park rules.(so I have been told)

[Arnold Mesiser]

As for caving here- we all normally wear caving suits even in the summer as under ground temps are in the 50's F -of course colder in the winter if you can get past the ice.Warsaw is good practice for some of our long caves - a few have belly crawls that are up to a km long.MANY of our caves are low bedding planes due to being such young karst but a few have walking passage.Our limestone or dolostone is WAY WAY harder than Floridian so don't expect similar results.


See if Forrest will let you in the sump forum-I made a post on Ontario

[DogDiver]

There are a few sea caves in the Georgian Bay near Tobermory I dove years ago. Any Canadian divers find more? There is suppused to be a sink area in the Saginaw Bay in Lake Huron that has some leads also. Dove the great lakes for 36 years prior to moving to cave country. Safe diving. Ken

[Arnold Mesiser]

The sinkholes in Saginaw are filled with glacial debris and are not penetrable..same with the deep submerged ones near Thunder bay .The water percolates through he fill.

The sea caves in the Bruce are nice but very small other than Pablo's hangover which the odd charter use to run to In Tobermory.There is also something called " The grotto " In Tobermory that the boats run charters to but it is at best a cavern/land bridge.

There are cave dives here but we do not generally post much information (particularly identifying information as most systems are either on private property (with hard won access) or on Parks Canada land where caving is not allowed without permit .Most are well above recreational cave diving in conditions so more reasons to not let on where they are etc.Most of our caves and the biology/geology/critters etc could not handle lots of traffic anyhow.

There have been cave dives here since 1985-most are sidemount/low vis/fast current

for the OP...I will post a couple maps in the sump forum re Warsaw. Normally we do not post maps or data online for conservation/landowner reasons but Warsaw is a Conservation area that promotes caving so nothing detrimental should come of it.

[Arnold Mesiser]

To those interested PM me your email I can send you a good PDF on some sinkholes in Michigan