Confessions of a Teen-Aged Caver

 

My very first cave trip was made when I was an adolescent growing up in West Virginia. I was a Boy Scout and went to Scout camp in the summer; one year, we made a field trip to Organ Cave in Greenbrier County. Sad to say, I don’t remember a thing about the trip or cave. It has just been too many years, sixty at least. From descriptions on the internet, it is a pretty fabulous cave, but I have no memories. Of course, I was not a “caver” then, just a twelve-year-old kid in a cave for the very first time.

Nor can I remember my very first trip as a member of the Blue Grass Grotto (chapter of the National Speleological Society in Lexington, Kentucky), not even as to what cave it was. I joined the NSS and the BGG in 1967, at the age of fourteen, and began to attend the monthly meetings of the Grotto, held in the basement of the Funkhouser Biology building on the campus of the University of Kentucky. Every month, the Grotto sponsored a caving trip, led by one of the more experienced cavers of the group. Sometimes these were to some of the more significant caves of the Inner Bluegrass region, in the vicinity of Lexington, but at about the time I joined, the Sloans Valley Cave in Pulaski County, in southern Kentucky, had excited a great deal of attention and many grotto trips went to this cave. Sloans is a vast cave with more than twenty-five miles of passage, ranking it as the fourth longest cave in Kentucky, the twenty-third longest in the United States, and falling within the top one hundred of the world. I rather think that my first trip was probably to Sloans.

One particular Sloans trip, not my first but in late 1967 or early 1968 while I was still just a novice caver, stands out in my memory. The trip was led by Frank Reid, and there were about three other people on the trip in addition to me. We were going into the Garbage Pit entrance, which today is known as the Crockett entrance and is owned by the Rockcastle Karst Conservancy. We parked near the entrance and begin to get ready to go underground. I discovered, to my total mortification, that I had failed to pack my miner’s carbide lamp! I had a flashlight as backup, but this would be totally inadequate for a long underground trip. Frank came to my rescue, and handed me a Coleman gas lantern he had stashed in his vehicle. Although propane-fueled lamps are available today, back then this was the type that burned “white gasoline” as fuel.

I was grateful for the loaner, but soon discovered that caving with a Coleman lantern was not the best way to explore. For sure, generations of cave explorers had used kerosene and gas lanterns, but Colemans really do not appreciate the sort of rough handling that goes along with a trip that involves a lot of scrambling over breakdown and climbing up and down. The cloth mantle in the lamp tends to get torn and needs to be replaced fairly frequently under such conditions. Also, trying to drag along a hot lamp in a crawlway is pretty unpleasant. This was definitely a learning experience, and thereafter I always doublechecked my caving kit before embarking on a road trip to a cave.

As a newbie, I had a bad case of caving fever and was not content to go caving only once a month; I wanted to go every Saturday! The problem was, I was under sixteen and did not yet have a driver’s license. Here is where my mother stepped into the breach. Now, you would think that most mothers would be absolutely horrified at the idea of their child wanting to crawl around in a dark wet hole somewhere. If my mom had such thoughts, she kept them to herself and was always supportive of this insane passion I had for poking around underground. In those early days, she would drive me and a caving friend to a local cave. Sometimes, she would just drop us off somewhere near the entrance and meet us back hours later at a designated time. On a few occasions, she brought along a paperback book and would sit in the car and read until we came out of the cave. I am still so very appreciative of the time and trouble she underwent to encourage my various interests, from photography to model rocketry, but none more so than the support she gave to my pursuit of caving.

I still remember very clearly one particular trip, to Meece Cave in Jessamine County, off Catnip Hill Road. It was a bitterly cold winter day, a little snow on the ground, and she dropped us off near the entrance and left to run some errands. She had chains on her tires and was not terribly concerned about road conditions. My caving companion on that day was Steve Mandt, a friend from high school (I attended Tates Creek in Lexington). The cave was a rather nasty one. There was a dead cow inside the entrance, unpleasantly fragrant even in the cold temperature. The cave had a few hundred feet of walking passage that dropped to a stream passage, the stream then flowing through a low horizontal slot too small to follow. We discovered there was a bypass, a crawlway that formed a circular loop a few hundred feet long that intersected the stream where it came out into another bit of walking passage.

This loop was one of the tightest crawlways I have ever been in, the ceiling pressing against your back as you edged along over a smooth rock surface. I was rail thin at the time, nearly six feet tall and 125 pounds. Steve was a little heftier than me, and had a lot more trouble in the crawl. It was a relief to emerge into the stream passage continuation, although there was only a few hundred feet more left to the cave before the stream again plunged into a narrow slot, with no way to follow. I did poke into a tight little side passage, so tight that there was probably a real danger of getting stuck, and in fact when I had to back out of it, my shirt was pulled back over my face. It never occurred to me then, that if I had gotten stuck, I was far enough into the crawl that there was no way Steve could have gotten to me to help.

We exited the cave a little earlier than the time we were to rendezvous with my mom. I suppose we could have waited in the cave entrance where it was a little warmer, but the atmosphere reeked of rotting cow. Instead, we elected to start walking down the frozen surface of Catnip Hill Road, confident that my mom would arrive when she said she would and would intercept us on the road. In retrospect this probably was not the best plan. It was late afternoon and still daylight, but still very cold, and we were in wet coveralls. We walked along for about a half-hour and our clothing froze stiff. We were very glad when my mom showed up with a nice warm car.