PAKAW PUK

Herbert Daniel Gebauer - 06/01/2018

The deepest known cave of Mizoram. A spacious triangular cave entrance at the side of the road gives access to a narrow and steeply ascending rift which eventually pops out in a small and inconspicuous top entrance some 170 m higher up. SITUATION: Above the right (eastern) bank of the river Tlawng and some 5 m to the right hand side (east) of the road from Aizawl (29 km away) via Sairang (9 km from the cave) and North Kawnpui to Kolasib. The north facing cave entrance, however, is easier seen from a passing vehicle when approaching from the Kolasib side. The bridge crossing the river lies some two or three hundred metres further north (towards Kolasib). CAVE DESCRIPTION: A trickle of water (circa 0.05l/sec in the dry season on 2001.04.20) issues from the lower cave entrance (up to 4.5 m wide and some 6 m high). The lower entrance is the main one and gives access to a rift cave which offers a series of sportive climbs which include chimneying in tight slippery cracks and the negotiatio of neck deep water. The more or less north-south trending rift leans by about 85° to the east and leads, some 170 m higher up, to a small and inconspicuous daylight window. The top entrance lies in the jungle, is virtually impossible to find —except from inside the cave— and offers (more likely: would offer) a fairly easy abseiling trip through the vertical cave. SPELEOLOGY: By far most of the cave's volume came into being when the western rock mass of a more or less north-south running fault was uplifted by a few centimetres. The inception rift is clearly seen in the cave floor and is suspected to constitute one rift out of a rift cluster controlling this section of the Tlawng valley. Quite remarkable is that the rock mass lying towards the valley side —the one that could be expected to have sliddened down— is actually the higher one. Gravitational mass wasting, however, is not entirely absent: The volume of the entrance area is too spacious to have developed without boulders fallng (sliding, rolling) away. These few tens of cubic metres were flushed away (some mechanical mass wasting). Abrasional processes chemical solution (?) contributed almost nothing to the cave's volume.