Worth squeezing in

We stopped on a road for taking photos of the scenery. While taking the photo, I noticed that there was a small hole by the road. It looked tight and steep, uncertain if one could go in. At the bottom of the hole there seemed to be a couple of boulders. I returned a couple of days later equipped with better clothing for exploration. It turned out to be a 30m x 18m beautiful stalactite cave! Proof that it does indeed sometimes pay off to peek into every hole! 

Entrance:

Me going in:

The cave is on the island Vis; I won't reveal the location to avoid tourists flooding in and disturbing the so far almost untouched and unbroken stalactites. As far as I could see, there was only one stalactite right at the entrance that had been broken, likely by some previous visitor.

Of course, the cave wasn't unknown, just unknown to tourists and outsiders. I asked two locals about the cave, both knew about it, their kids had been in the cave, etc. I also got to know the name: Propod, a shorthand for "breaking through", with "probity" meaning breaking through and "pod" meaning floor. Nice name!

I also did a quick scan. As it often happens, exploration succeeds but there are software issues. I was too eager to scan everything in one go, which was probably too much. The resulting model seemed to choke the software app on my iPhone, so due to crashes I didn't get quite the accuracy I would normally get. Plus being too hurried myself, I didn't perform the large scan with sufficient care, so some areas were left not fully covered. Oh well.

Here's a link the GLTF model. You can rotate the model on your own browser here. A screenshot of the model is below, followed by an automatically generated cave map. The high-res version of the map can be downloaded in PDF here.

Photos from the cave, starting with the rooms:

And then more about the stalactites:

I really liked the various roots hanging from the stalactites! And the cave is over 10 meters deep from the ground above it:

Can't quite pinpoint what this reminds me of:

Read more urban exploration stories from theurbanexplorer.net, and other underground stories from planetcaver.net. Read the full Planetskier series at planetskier.net, or all blog articles from Blogspot or TGR. Photos and text (c) 2024 by Jari Arkko. All rights reserved.