by Beyond Mammoth Cave- A Tale of Obsession in the World's Longest Cave (epub)
Silence.
Their levity was maddening. “Christ! Just tell me what you guys found!” I wasn’t interested in fooling around.
Jim began, “Well, we just spent eight hours walking beneath Toohey Ridge . . .”
They spun their electrifying tale as John Barnes and I stood there wide-eyed, almost in disbelief.
Surely this was the big advance we had been seeking for so long. Indeed, if this breakthrough into Toohey Ridge only partially approached our grand expectations, there would be miles of new cave to survey. We weren’t in Roppel Cave anymore; we were in the Toohey Ridge Cave System! We had at last broken the shackles that confined us to the drain system that had bound Roppel Cave for the first two years of its survey.
But, where were we? This lack of knowledge was killing me. Usually, a party comes back with a book full of survey data. But Jim and Bill had not surveyed; they never intended to. The need to find something—anything—had superseded our normal policy of survey-as-you-go.
They had explored through much difficult passageway before finally reaching the borehole. The effort required to survey what they had traversed would be time consuming at best, painfully difficult at worst.
I made Jim retell the tale of his and Bill’s trip no less than a dozen times during the next week. I was hungry for detail, wanting to experience each section of passage as they had. As the days passed, Jim began to trim his estimate of the distance from S64 to the new trunk—now called Arlie Way, after a hospitable and helpful local landowner—down to around a thousand feet. Being super-conservative was a natural balance to the usual tendency of cavers to overestimate distances within caves.
I was subdued. After all the effort I had made, I had missed the trip of a lifetime. Still, I shared in the ecstasy of the discovery, the feeling of victory after the pounding frustration we all had experienced.
Dutifully, I volunteered to lead the first trip to survey beyond S64 toward the new discoveries. Jim was unable to go, but I had no trouble talking Ron Gariepy into the trip. This would be the most difficult stretch of survey on the route to Arlie Way. It was my self-imposed penance for not being on the discovery trip.
To ensure accuracy of our maps, survey teams in Roppel Cave took two sets of readings—foresights and backsights. With teams of three or more, this was easy. The compass reader could have a target ahead and behind—a lighted survey station—and only had to turn around to get the necessary sets of bearing and slope angle readings. A two-person survey required a more imaginative approach to accomplish this. The instruments were either passed back and forth, or the team surveyed with only one set of readings and completed the backsights on the return trip. On this day, Ron and I would have to do both.
We struggled with the survey through the tight drain series below S64. The difficulties of surveying in narrow passage cannot be overstated. Reading the compass with any degree of accuracy often involves unimaginable contortions. Getting one’s head over the survey point is critical to being properly aligned along the survey in order to get accurate compass readings. The taped distances between the survey shots were so short in the sinuous passage that a stretch of the arm was all that was needed to pass the survey instruments back and forth to get both sets of readings.
It took three hours of energy-draining effort to reach the first large room discovered by Jim and Bill. Ron and I called it the Boundary Dome, on the boundary between the tiny canyons and belly-crawls of Roppel Cave and the grand walkways of the Toohey Ridge Cave System. This would later become a key landmark on the trade route in Roppel Cave, a route to be later traversed by nearly every survey party.
Ten hours into the trip, I marked with soot “S118” on a large slab of rock at the junction with the low, crouching tube that led into Arlie Way. Ron Gariepy and I had surveyed nearly eleven hundred feet but were still a long way from our objective. We were out of time. Certainly, it would be a lot farther to Arlie Way than Jim Currens’s estimated thousand feet.
Ron and I had to see for ourselves the new passages beneath Toohey Ridge. We crouched through the long, low tube between us and Arlie Way, its beauty rejuvenating us.
Fifteen minutes later, I stood in Arlie Way, savoring the elation that Jim and Bill must had felt just a week before. Footprints led off in two directions, the only blemish on what was otherwise a smooth sea. I glowed.
“Christ, Ron, look at this!”
He stood beside me taking in the immensity of it all.
I looked one direction, then the other. Why hadn’t I found this big cave?
I ran off to the left with Ron following close behind. We did not stop until we reached the muddy place where Bill had been stopped by Jim a week before. Bill was right: this windy portal ought to lead somewhere.
But not today.
We retraced the narrow track that Bill and Jim had followed. We stood in the large junction room with the big boulders, peered over the edge of the pit from the narrow ledge Bill had found, and explored a little farther in the big passage. I also climbed down the floor canyon below Arlie Way and walked five hundred feet to a junction of five passages before returning.
The following weekend, Jim Currens, John Barnes, and I continued the survey from S118 through Hobbit Trail (“‘Cause you’d have to be a three-foot-tall Hobbit to walk through it!”) into Arlie Way. On one spectacular survey trip, we charted all the cave that Jim and Bill Walter had explored. We finally closed the S Survey at station S163 at the south end of Arlie Way, marking the last station with red flagging tape at the edge of the wet passage that had challenged each of us. Our book was filled with numbers that totaled a mile, and we were shot. On this one trip, we had increased the surveyed length of Roppel Cave by over a third. The rigors of the other two-thirds were rapidly fading into a distant memory.
Survey parties began to pour in as we enjoyed an unprecedented surge of cavers. To be sure, many were rainy-day friends, there for only a few trips to skim off the cream of new discoveries. But a few would become valued leaders in the project, cavers to whom we could pass the baton of leadership. These individuals were the heart and soul of an enduring project. We had to let natural leaders lead, and we could spot natural leaders by their followers.
In just a matter of weeks, the cave had ranged across the northern lobe of Toohey Ridge through a series of spectacular elliptical tubes and large canyons. Wonderful cave never ceased to amaze us. One such passage began as a suspected cutaround but shortly blossomed into a beautiful passage festooned with gypsum and dripstone formations that defied the imagination. As the passage opened up and it was clear that this was not just a cutaround, the lead caver dropped the survey tape and took off, the cave too spectacular to believe. A thousand feet later, the caver was retrieved and the party retreated to continue the survey in the new find, finishing with another four thousand feet to add to the map. This passage, named Yahoo Avenue, shot off on its own to the west, leading far away from the main part of Roppel Cave.
By the end of September, Roppel Cave had grown from a length of 2.7 miles to over 5 miles.
After the intoxication of the discoveries had subsided, the slow and methodical plodders climbed to the forefront of new exploration. While everyone else was catching their breath after September’s flurry of activity, Ron Gariepy and his longtime caving companion, Bill Eidson, started their own special style of poking. For them, nothing was sacred. They were nonconformists and did not hold to the notion that information is reliable and to be believed without question. If they decided they wanted to check out a passage for leads, they would do so, fully and completely, even if it had been reported that there were no leads. Being non-mainstream project cavers by choice, they did not have the benefit of the accrued knowledge that had been gathered. For them, caving with each other was an ideal situation. Alone and in the cave, there were no distractions. Theirs was caving for the joy of it—the pure adventure experience. They were not model project cavers, but their participation and efforts were as valued as any. T
hey were fun to cave with, and I made a point to encourage them as much as possible. Friends and contributors to the project were not to be squandered.
Bill Eidson, like Ron Gariepy, was quiet and unassuming. Tall and neat, he contrasted strikingly to Ron in caving style. Ron, the mathematician, reveled in the topological relationships of the cave. He could lose himself—as he could in mathematics—in the vastness of the cave. Bill, the engineer, was analytical, yearning to decipher and understand everything about the cave. Together they made the complete caving party. I called the two of them the CKKC’s “Lone Runners.”
Their approach was not for everybody, however.
One of the first areas selected by the plodders Bill and Ron was an area known as the Rift, located at the end of Yahoo Avenue. Yahoo Avenue led four thousand feet to terminate under a valley far away from the rest of Roppel Cave. There was wind, and enormous canyons led downward. Here was an area crying to be explored. Surely, great discoveries must await.
Bill and Ron loved a challenge, especially when the prospects of discovery seemed bright. Armed with ropes, pitons, bolts, and chocks, along with their normal complement of climbing gear, they made their way through Yahoo Avenue, dragging a terribly misinformed and apprehensive John Barnes behind them.
Hours earlier, John had watched them suspiciously while Bill took a tangled mass of climbing gear from the trunk of his car. The shiny aluminum hardware glistened under the bright sun, catching John’s attention.
“Hey, what’s all that stuff?” he asked.
Bill looked over at John. “Oh, this is just the climbing gear. The rest of my vertical gear is in my other pack.”
Bill motioned to the plump red pack lying against the tree in front of the fieldhouse.
“What do we need all that stuff for? All I brought is my rappel gear and prussiks.”
Ron said nothing but continued putting cans of food and equipment in his pack, careful not to let on that he was eavesdropping. He had experienced this scenario before and knew the next scenes almost by heart. Bill would be the straight man.
“You never know what we might find; we want to be ready for anything.” Bill pulled out something that most accurately could be described as a railroad spike from his pile of gear. “John, this is a piton.” He handed it to John for his inspection. “If there are no natural anchors, we can hammer this into a crack in the wall and clip into it.”
John examined the piton, inspecting the eye-hole in one end. If density and mass meant strength, it was probably safe.
“This is a chock.” Bill held up a hexagonal nut-like piece of metal threaded with a loop of nylon rope. “This can be wedged in a tapered crack. Between all this stuff,” he motioned toward the pile, “we can improvise any kind of rope anchor.”
John handed the piton back to Bill. “Okay, I guess. But I’ve never worked with this kind of stuff.”
Ron and Bill rolled their eyes. They knew it might be a long trip.
Hours later, deep in the cave at the Rift, Bill was hammering the four-inch-long piton into a crack. He was leaning wildly out over the abyss, long swings of the hammer testing his balance as Ron carefully belayed him.
Bang . . . bang . . . bang . . . The deafening hammer blows reverberated from the depths as the piton slowly sank into the wall.
Ron and Bill had first tried to rig to a large, secure-looking rock on the floor beside the pit. As Ron was uncoiling the one-hundred-foot rope, Bill had pushed on the rock with his foot to test its strength. Abruptly, it teetered over the edge and fell into the pit. The rock ricocheted off the walls with deafening crashes on its long trip to the bottom, finally ending in a loud whump!
“Oops!” muttered Bill. “I guess that wasn’t such a good spot to rig.”
Now, John watched warily as Bill ran his hands along the wall, looking for a suitable crack. The next choice was the piton.
The telltale ping! indicated that the piton was solidly placed, and with a couple of extra swings for good measure, Bill ceased hammering. One inch of the piton was visible—it was probably a safe placement. Bill finished uncoiling the rope, clipped it into the piton with a carabiner, and tied the far end around a second large boulder in the passage a few feet away, a backup anchor just in case.
Thirty minutes later, John, Bill, and Ron leaned out over a ledge and peered down another pitch. Their small, four-foot-square ledge was continuously pummeled by a shower of water issuing from somewhere high above the rope tie-off forty feet above their heads.
“Well, Ron, what do you think?” Bill asked. “Do we have enough rope?”
Hanging onto the rope, Ron leaned far out over the pit, straining to pick out any features in the gloom below. The din of falling water dashed any hopes of determining depths by the usual method. If they tossed rocks and counted until they heard the crash, they could usually estimate the depth, but with the deafening roar of water and no loose rocks of any size, there was no way to do that.
“I don’t know,” answered Ron. “It’s pretty far.”
They tried a different technique: they tied a heavy object, a hammer, to the end of the rope and slowly lowered it, trying to sense when the weight reached the floor. But they couldn’t tell; the rope rubbed against too many spots.
John sat despondently, listening to the exchange of seasoned cavers.
Bill said finally, “I think we probably have enough rope. If we wrap it around this boulder, I think we can stay out of most of the water.” He made a loop in the rope and draped it over the boulder—a half-hitch.
John’s apprehension now gave way to near terror. “You’re not going to rappel off that shit are you?” He pointed to the boulder with the half-hitch. It looked like it was just stuck in the mud.
“Sure, why not?” Bill replied. “The rope is still tied to the piton. This is just a rebelay to move the rope. Anyway, look at this.” He flipped the free end of the rope in demonstration. “There is no way this can come off.”
“Will the rock hold?”
“Sure!” Bill gave it a dramatic kick for added emphasis.
John’s sober expression did not change. Watching Bill for the last couple hours had taken its toll, and he was skeptical. He had little experience in elaborate forms of rigging and absolutely no experience in rock-climbing techniques; Bill and Ron were well versed in both.
“I don’t like the looks of this,” said John.
Ron and Bill stared at John. A proclamation was coming.
“I’m not going down there,” John announced. “I think this is unsafe . . . and so are you guys.”
No hesitation. “Okay, we’ll see you later.” Bill clipped into the rope and rappelled into the unknown pit.
Ron and Bill played the scene flawlessly, Ron picking up right where Bill had left off. “We’ll be back in a few hours. You can wait here.”
This was not the answer that John had expected.
Smoothly, Ron continued, “We understand how you feel. We don’t expect you to go down if you don’t want to. But don’t expect us not to.”
Aghast, John watched as Ron backed off the ledge and rappelled out of sight.
The two seasoned cavers glided down to the bottom of the waterfall. Six feet of rope lay at the bottom—barely sufficient! They walked along five hundred feet of indeterminately high canyon fifteen feet wide, stopping where a wall of broken rock led up into the darkness. Enough. Although Ron and Bill could be perceived as unfeeling tyrants, they were not going to leave John up there too long.
They pulled out the survey gear and measured the new passage back to the base of the rope. Four hours later, they tied into the survey station at the top of the rope.
John Barnes was chilled and angry and said little as he watched them pack up the remaining gear. He had sat for six hours on his perch, midway on the wall of an enormous canyon, unwilling to go up or down by himself. His spirit was broken, and he would not return to Roppel Cave. Later, he would write in the grotto newsletter about “unsafe” cavers in Ropp
el Cave.
Ron Gariepy and Bill Eidson returned to the Rift many times. They descended numerous pits, made climbs into upper-level passageways, and fashioned daunting pendulums across wide gaps. The twosome untangled a baffling series of tall canyons, pits, and boreholes, filling in the northwest flank of Toohey Ridge with cave. However, the “big” discovery eluded them. They turned their attention to other parts of the cave, using their usual approach of poking anything and everything—discover and assimilate.
In August 1979, the pair sat eating smashed candy bars at a large junction in Arlie Way where the lead that Jim Currens had saved for me led off to the north. This was called Symmetric Junction, since all directions looked the same. Three hours earlier, they had entered the Roppel Entrance with nothing particular in mind to do; they would just see how things played out. Of late, most of the big cave known in Roppel had been surveyed. Roppel Cave was a little over eight miles long now. The best lead known was Black River, a wet stream passage that flowed north from a complex of canyons. Bill and I had discovered Black River six months earlier off Pleiades Junction in Lower-Level Arlie Way—the room with five passages I had found below Arlie Way on my first trip. Later, Tommy Shifflett and I had pushed a tall canyon with the Black River running in its bottom to a point where the main stream disappeared under a ledge. I had looked under the ledge at the lead. Mudbanks rose to the ceiling with muddy, deep water flowing between them. Yech, I thought, probably a sump.
At Symmetric Junction, Bill asked Ron, “Do you know where that goes?” He was pointing at the broad, elliptical tube with a splendidly flat ceiling and floor.
“No, not really. I think Borden said that it got low or something.”
“Why don’t we take a look?” Bill asked.
Ron was easy-going. “Sure, let’s go.” They crouched their way north. The passage was perfectly consistent, five feet high and thirty feet wide, with a smooth, flat floor. They passed labeled Y stations from a survey made the previous year. On that trip, Pete Crecelius, Bill Walter, and I had put in a thousand feet of Y Survey, ending at a breakdown pile. I had crawled a few hundred feet farther to a pool of water. It was late, I was tired, and I said it looked like it might fill. Since the passage had so much crouching in it, we named it the North Crouchway.