by Beyond Mammoth Cave- A Tale of Obsession in the World's Longest Cave (epub)
In the C Crawl, Ron and I pushed our packs ahead of us and pulled ourselves along on our bellies. The best approach for us was to roll our packs like a log as far as we could, then crawl up to them and gave them another good push. This rhythmic movement made the long crawl pass more quickly. Stopping to cool off occasionally, we could hear John scraping along behind us. No chance of him getting lost here. Inevitably, the gaps between us increased, and we moved through the crawl as three solitary individuals instead of as a party.
After four hours of traveling, we climbed Tinkle Shaft to weave through the maze of canyons and broken rock of the K Complex, finally reaching the end of the survey. The final survey station was marked with a small cairn of rocks with “K30” smoked on a flat piece of rock beside it. We lay in the dry sand looking at the recently opened dig extending into the darkness. That cool breeze suggested discoveries ahead.
This was why we went caving—the anticipation of discovery, the satisfaction of finding something we knew had to be there. I basked in my certainty that we were exploring in the longest cave in the world, that this was just the beginning of adventures that would last a lifetime. To be sure, a little over two miles is hardly the longest cave, but I just knew it was all here.
Ron dragged the survey tape behind him into the dig, building piles of rocks to use as survey stations. Surveying through the constrictions of this dug passage was difficult. Soon we were moving faster through the intricacies of the cave beyond the dig. At almost every station, we had to scout ahead to find the main route. The air took many more routes than we could. The survey went up, down, and through piles of rocks, a confusing series of twists and turns. I sketched quickly to keep the survey book up-to-date with drawings and descriptions of the many leads we checked. Occasionally, I instructed the rest of the party to slow the survey until I finished sketching. I was falling far behind the crew.
After several hours, we had traversed to the highest level of canyons we had found so far. Ron disappeared over a pile of rocks with the tape to set the next station.
An echoey word floated back to us: “W-o-www!”
Ron’s manner of speech is deadpan. He couples it with dry humor, a combination that makes caving with him most enjoyable, if sometimes puzzling. His voice characteristically conveys no emotion.
“What’s that, Ron?” I shouted.
An even more distant shout than before: “It’s really big!”
“Big?” This could mean anything. After all, this was Roppel Cave.
“Yeah, big!”
I dropped my survey book and scrambled up the slope to see what he had found. John Barnes was sitting at the last station, changing carbide. Below, I could see the faint yellow pool of Ron’s carbide lamp swallowed up by the gloom. I slid down the breakdown slope and stopped next to Ron. A fine elliptical tube opened before us. The passage was twenty feet high and thirty feet wide, shaped like a subway tunnel, with large pieces of rock on the floor. There were no footprints.
“Wow!”
We climbed back up the hill to the last survey station where John waited. Savoring the moment, we ate lunch, a feast of cold beans and wieners with a chocolate bar for dessert. Few cavers ever found cave like this. We speculated about where this passage might lead. More big passageways? An underground river?
We surveyed into the large passage. The survey line turned from the southeast to the northeast, aligned dead up the center of the ridge. We surged on in an adrenaline rush.
Two hours later, we stood, horrified, at K72, nine hundred feet beyond where we had eaten lunch. At our feet, the ceiling plunged into the sand floor. This was the absolute end of the passage! Upon examining the terminated passage, we recognized it as an ancient lift-tube that had carried water from a lower passage when these levels had been active with flowing water. Now the lift-tube was plugged solid with sand. Whatever passages lay beyond the lift-tube were buried beyond our reach.
How could this wonderful passage end? Our energies drained away.
It was a bittersweet defeat: great cave, but no go. We gathered our gear and headed out, checking for side leads. Maybe we missed something.
We squeezed into every hole we could find, but they all either filled with sand or became too small.
Eighteen hours after entering Roppel, our weary party dragged out with spirits badly beaten.
The 2 December trip on which we discovered the large, nine-hundred-foot dead-end passage, which we named Vivian Way, was a turning point for the project. Cavers’ enthusiasm vanished. Many of the “regulars” in Roppel Cave stayed away and offered only excuses. Over the next several months, the results of a series of unproductive trips painted a bleak outlook for the future of Roppel Cave.
Two parties revisited Vivian Way but failed to turn up anything except a few feet of survey and a miserable, long crawlway that dead-ended in a puzzling, round room, the epitome of our project. Frustration was bad; defeat was worse!
Another memorable trip was to leads at the far south end of the C Crawl, beyond the intersection with Tinkle Shaft. On an earlier trip, Bill Eidson, Don Coons, and I had surveyed nearly a thousand feet through foot-deep water and thigh-deep, oozing mud troughs. The C Crawl was no longer a dusty, dry tube once it passed below Tinkle Shaft. We found a new underground river and another complex of intriguing canyons and tubes. It held great promise, but it was so far away. I mounted a return with Jim Currens and Chuck Thomas, and our crew spent all day getting there. Jim railed at the difficulty of the trip in and was ready to head out before we barely got started with the survey. With cajoling, we did manage to set thirty survey stations in eight hundred feet of low belly-crawl before Jim mutinied. We were not even able to look at the new underground river and its leads. Perhaps this new area, Fishhook Canyon, was too far from the entrance for productive work. Six hours of crawling through mud and water to get out there was hard work. Without a willing party, I did not return to the watery passages of the C Crawl.
By spring 1978, we had surveyed a little less than three miles. Three lousy miles! Two years of effort and dozens of trips had yielded probably the most difficult series of passages ever put together in a single cave. A trip to the distant reaches of Roppel automatically became a twenty-hour ordeal. We were kidding ourselves. How could this be the beginning of the longest cave in the world? We were wearing down, and our will was draining away.
By summer, Jim Currens decided he had seen the writing on the wall. Ever practical and realistic, he wrote trip report notes detailing his coming abandonment of the project unless he could figure out a different approach. I lambasted him as a pessimist. My glowing optimism was diminishing, but it still shone.
Jim focused on the areas around the entrance. He told himself that if Roppel Cave was going to amount to something, two things had to happen: First, going cave had to be found relatively close to the entrance. Jim did not like long trips, and he frequently lectured that any breakthrough made along the cave’s frontier would prove too inefficient for exploration of miles of cave. Thus, a “promising” lead that took six hours of crawling deep inside the cave would not qualify as a good lead to him. Second, and most important, the going cave must be in Toohey Ridge, six hundred feet west of the Roppel Entrance. Up to now, we had no luck finding any leads with these constraints, so six hundred feet may as well have been six hundred miles.
Since the beginning of work in Roppel Cave, we had been puzzled by the discrepancy between the volume of air flowing through the entrance and the lesser volume of air that passed through Arrow Canyon. We were missing something. Despite diligent searching, we had found no clue to the missing airflow. Jim’s strategy was to check out methodically every nook and cranny in the Coalition Chasm complex for the elusive airflow. Where there was airflow, there had to be cave. We had already found several canyons that fanned out to the west beneath the valley towards Toohey Ridge. All had terminated, yet their presence suggested that other canyons might be there and success might still be possible. Find the
missing air, Jim insisted, and we find our way into Toohey Ridge. He was driven by this single goal.
Until this time, only one noteworthy lead had remained unchecked. John Hiett, from Lexington, had written a report about a trip on 8 May 1976 and described this lead as a popcorn-encrusted crawlway traversable for three hundred feet through some small shafts to a blowing breakdown collapse. Jim had searched for it a number of times but had failed to find it. I had seen it once but had forgotten it. Its location was poorly described and the area was highly complex, but this elusive passage in Hiett’s trip report tantalized us:
Exploring onward, two smaller shafts are reached. The third and presently final shaft drains to the OPPOSITE direction to the other two. The final point where the water drains is under some chert breakdown. It appears to be easily removable. This is a good lead; it blows air.
It blows air! That lead might be the key to Toohey Ridge! Jim was sure of it. Now, if he could only find it.
Bill Farr, a caver from Texas, had written Jim a few months earlier to arrange a trip into Roppel. He was going to be in the area and wanted to take advantage of the opportunity, so they made plans. Uncharacteristically, Jim promptly forgot them, and then Bill neglected to call to confirm, as agreed upon. One Saturday morning the phone rang. It was Bill, wondering where everybody was. Oops! In a flurry, Jim threw his gear into his car and raced down to the cave.
With nothing else in particular to do, Jim decided to poke around again in the high canyons and shafts of the Coalition Chasm complex to look for the elusive lead. The two cavers chimneyed up and down the ninety-foot-tall canyon on this impromptu trip, investigating every pocket and lead they could find. The height and breadth of the canyon were dramatic—passages that led off could be hidden anywhere. They spotted several black holes that they could not reach. The two studied them carefully, wondering if these holes were the source of the wind. Over several hours, Jim and Bill systematically checked every hole they could find and reach. Nothing.
Finally, Jim found the entrance to a small, popcorn-lined crawlway hidden in shadow in the wall of a large canyon. They had overlooked it on their first pass. The crawl was neatly tucked into a shallow recess in the wall. Bill and Jim crawled in the first few feet to a larger area where they could stand up. Footprints. This might be the lost lead.
After more crawling, they stood up in a small dome and inspected the pile of rocks that practically blocked the continuing canyon. This had to be the end of John Hiett’s exploration; the description matched perfectly. A small trickle stream lazily flowed beneath the pile of rocks, and a steady breeze flowed through an opening at the bottom of the pile. Jim peered beneath the rocks. It would take elbow grease to move enough rocks to get by. The two made the quick trip back to Coalition Chasm to pick up the digging tools that were routine for each trip taken to this part of the cave.
Twenty minutes later, they were back and beginning their attack on the pile of rocks that guarded the destination of the westward-trending stream. They soon cleared away enough debris for a caver to squeeze through between the top of the pile and the roof of the passage.
“Bill, you’re smaller than me. Take a look,” Jim said.
Bill looked dubiously at Jim but good-naturedly said, “Sure, I don’t get up this way often.”
Bill squeezed over the pile of rocks and down to the floor of a narrow canyon. Jim could hear grunts and the scraping of shifting rocks.
“I think it’s too tight!”
“What’s it like?” Jim asked.
Bill glanced around, then said, “Wait a minute. I see something here. Maybe it isn’t too tight. I’ll give it a shot.”
Bill groaned. The low ceiling pressed his body flat on the floor in a pool of cold water. He pushed with his feet, his belly dragging through the wet gravel. The passage was too low to turn his head to look in front of him, so with a measure of faith he continued his push through the squeeze. A protruding rock-horn fossil dug into his back and scraped past his hips as Bill advanced.
After six feet of this squirmway, he climbed to his feet in the narrow crack. It was big enough to stand—barely. A narrow lead continued.
“Jim! Come on through. It looks like it might go.”
Jim could barely make out Bill’s voice, muffled by the cavities among the rocks and the wet floor.
“Okay, I’m on my way,” he shouted back.
Indeed, Bill was smaller than Jim. Once over the rock pile and lying prone in the stream, Jim was wedged tight, both arms outstretched in front of him. He yelled through the crack ahead.
“I’m stuck!” He rested, panting in the constricted space.
“Not much I can do from here to help you,” Bill said.
Jim breathed deeply to regain composure. He forced himself to relax and slowly backed out of the squeeze.
“I’m back out!” shouted Jim.
“Want me to go ahead and check this lead out?” The open passage ahead tempted Bill.
Jim wasn’t going to miss this. “No. I’ll make it.”
Now Jim tried to figure out how to get through the obstacle. The geometry of the passage—a corner combined with a few strategically located rocks—meant that he would have to lie in the stream with one shoulder jammed under a low ledge. It was narrow, so he would have to put one arm forward and the other back in order to angle the shoulders and decrease the cross-section width of his body. Choosing which arm to put forward was all-important; once started, he couldn’t change his mind. If the choice was wrong, he would have to reverse and try again—unless he got stuck. After calculating his series of moves, Jim began his second attempt.
Jim could feel and hear his clothing shred as he shoved himself past the sharp popcorn protruding from one of the walls. He squeezed through the stream at the floor of the canyon. Sharp rocks jabbed into his chest, his muscles straining at the contortion. He made minute progress by digging the toes of his boots into the wet gravel. Jim squeezed past the spot where he had gotten stuck before, then, after a few more tenuous pushes, he was through.
“Damn!” he said. “I barely made it!” Sweat dripped from his brow.
“Looked like you were having trouble,” Bill said, smiling. He was lying on his belly on a gravel bank above the stream and had watched the struggle.
Jim was panting. “I am absolutely the largest person who can get through that squeeze.”
Resting, Jim watched the steam rise from their bodies and drift back towards the entrance. Although small, this lead looked promising: it had airflow, it headed west towards Toohey Ridge, and it was headed downstream. Other than a bit more room to move, what more could a caver want?
After cooling off, they pushed forward into unexplored cave with Bill in the lead. The passage alternated between slow walking and slower crawling. The walls twisted tortuously and bulged with popcorn that broke off in showers as they passed. The sluggish stream gradually incised deeper in the floor of the canyon. After about three hundred feet, Jim and Bill decided to turn back, saving this passage for the survey crew. Ahead, the passage continued, the stream still cutting deeper into the floor, air blowing from somewhere unknown. The compass showed that they still were heading generally westward. Wow! A real live, going lead.
Was this the way to Toohey Ridge?
6
Reunification
Bill Walter Returns to Lead the Way to the Big Cave
I listened to Jim Currens describe his push of the breakdown in the new lead off Coalition Chasm. Simple and to the point—“Borden . . . it goes.”
This was great news—a going lead so close to the entrance and heading downstream toward Toohey Ridge! Jim was sure that this lead was the key to the big break we were waiting for.
I went home to Maryland for the summer school break but planned to return to Kentucky over the Memorial Day weekend to cave in Roppel. My initial plans had been to return to the wet, distant passages of Fishhook Canyon; those leads had to go somewhere! Miraculously, I had succeeded in putting
together a willing (and able) crew. One of my recruits was Bill Walter, a caver unknown to me. Jim had introduced us briefly. Bill was small, wiry, and in his forties. Jim had assured me that his reputation as a caver in Tennessee was second to none. Still, I was dubious of new people. They could be a risk—especially if they were senior citizens.
After ten seconds of considering Jim’s account of his push of the lead near Coalition Chasm, his enthusiasm rubbed off on me. I decided that it was a superior alternative to Fishhook Canyon. I had been dreading that tough, wet, six-hour trip beyond the C Crawl: a hot crawl followed by cold water. I decided that I would have no trouble justifying a change in plans to the rest of my crew.
But what about this Bill Walter?
Bill’s first trip to Roppel Cave had been with Jim a few months earlier; they had gone to the end of Grim Trail. Bill had read the December 1977 NSS News, which had included a feature article about our work in Toohey Ridge. The article had been yet another fishing lure dangled by Jim and me to hook any prospective caver, for we had been losing cavers in droves and were desperate for new blood. Our passionate story emphasized our dedication and steadfastness in our efforts in what was surely destined to be a great cave. Our article worked on one person: Bill Walter read the story with interest and empathized with the determination and frustration we had been experiencing. He wrote Jim a letter offering his help, backed up with an impressive compendium of his caving history. He could sense that we might be on to something at Toohey Ridge and that we were looking for any help. As soon as Jim had read Bill’s offer, he dialed his phone number.
At the time, Jim had not yet given up on the main part of Roppel reached via Arrow Canyon. Beyond the junction with the C Crawl, Arrow Canyon continues a western trend. Eventually, the stream is lost into a lower level, and Arrow Canyon degenerates into a low and muddy crawlway: Grim Trail. We had surveyed through the goop for two trips, eventually halting at a small room. The way on was through a tight canyon, beyond which we could see a larger room. I had grunted and squeezed for an hour, digging on my side with the one free arm that was not uselessly pinned behind me. Through this constriction, the passage extended as before—a low crawlway. No breakthrough, but the cave still continued. Despite my urging, no one else in the party was willing to follow. So I wiggled back through the narrow slot, leaving the lead for another day.