by Beyond Mammoth Cave- A Tale of Obsession in the World's Longest Cave (epub)
Sweat poured off his nose as he ran, bent over, up the desert-like North Crouchway. His mood further darkened as he continued to sweat his way through the foot-high Kris Krawl and into the scary traverses of Death Canyon.
Everyone rested at the bottom of Death Canyon on the banks of the River Lethe at Station P7. Their plan was to survey upstream in the promising canyon for a couple of hours. Bill and Pete hoped that this route might connect to the downstream end of Black River. Such a linkup would provide a significant shortcut to this area of the cave. A bypass route would end the rigors of the North Crouchway, which was systematically destroying exhausted cavers during the long, bleary-eyed trips back to the surface in the small hours of the morning.
The three set sixteen N-series stations before quitting at a deep pool of water. Jim recalled from the map that it was still over a thousand feet to the surveyed end of Black River, probably too far to reach today. The passage was still big and a strong breeze led upstream, maybe to Arlie Way, but checking it out would have to wait.
They reversed their march and moved downstream through the River Lethe’s complex canyon. In less than an hour, they came out of a crouchway tube into the impressive junction with Elysian Way.
“Wow!” Pete said.
Two enormous passages plus the one they had entered through led off the junction room. To the right, a stream issued from a walking canyon in the wall and flowed into the northern, downstream branch of Elysian Way.
They christened this room the Grand Junction. And, indeed, it was grand.
Elysian Way lived up to its billing. It was huge! The threesome climbed up and down over breakdown mountains, picking their way along the continuation of the P Survey. The black rocks, walls, and ceiling swallowed the light from their carbide lamps, increasing the apparent size to more than it actually measured. The telltale white marks where the black coating had been scraped away by cavers’ feet kept them on track in the baffling maze of passages. Big leads beckoned in every direction at several levels. Bill followed the more obvious ones a few feet, unable to curb his voracious appetite for discovery. A minute or two later he would return, wide-eyed at the promise of these leads.
Jim remained somber and quiet, unmoved by what he was seeing around him. Everything was so black, so depressing. This was not the friendly, gypsum-encrusted elliptical tubes of Toohey Ridge but some of the most hostile lowest-level cave in the system. Most of the surfaces were damp, either clean-washed from fast moving water or, where the water stagnated, coated with a fine layer of wet silt. Flooding was total and frequent, a condition they had never before had to consider in their exploration of Roppel Cave.
Before long, the trio reached the last station, marked by the thundering waterfall at Station P88. It was getting late, and after setting just another eleven stations, Jim called it a day; he had had enough of this depressing passage and was ready to return to the surface.
Bill and Pete were not ready to head back, not yet anyway. They still felt fresh, and the vastness of Elysian Way invited them to continue.
“Jim, I think we want to look ahead a bit,” Bill said. “Do you want to come with us?”
“No, I’ll head out. I’ll wait for you at S139 at Hobbit Trail. You guys might want to push upstream in the River Lethe to Black River. That would be the first decent place where the routes would converge.”
Traveling alone in a cave is dangerous business, not to be done lightly. However, solo travel was common in Roppel Cave, an accepted part of our approach to exploration. Occasionally, someone would want to leave sooner than the remainder of his or her party. If this individual was competent and not overly tired and if the route out was safe, the experienced caver would be allowed to depart alone. If anything went wrong, the rest of the party would be along soon enough. The risk seemed small. However, if for any reason the individual was not comfortable traveling alone, the whole party would call it a day and head to the surface. In fact, only a handful knew the cave well enough to travel alone. All three on this trip were capable.
Pete considered the situation. What Jim proposed was probably at least three hours of solo caving through a relatively unhazardous route, except for the complexity and airy canyon straddles of Death Canyon between the River Lethe and the Kris Krawl. If Bill and Pete decided to try to complete a connection from upstream River Lethe to Black River, they would not be retracing most of the route Jim would be following. This increased the risk to an unacceptably high level. Pete shuddered as he thought of having to double back through the higher route to look for Jim if their connection attempt was successful and then they failed to find him waiting at S139 in Arlie Way at the beginning of Hobbit Trail.
Pete replied, “Okay, you start heading out, but we’ll probably come back out through the North Crouchway.” He did not want to give the impression that they were not confident in Jim’s ability to travel alone. “Besides, we wouldn’t have enough time to try the connection if we press on to the north. Getting as far north as we can is more important than finding a connection to Black River.”
“Okay, I’ll see you later,” Jim said as he turned to the south back toward the dry and friendly upper levels of Arlie Way.
Bill and Pete were now at their best—just the two of them and big cave to look at. They had not come this far to turn heels and head out without even a peek. They hurried north following the two sets of footprints that had been laid down ahead of them just a week ago.
After fifteen minutes, they stood at the pool where Don Coons and I had stopped, considering whether they really wanted to get their feet wet. Bill was finicky about dry feet. Wet feet made him cold. On trips where he knew that his feet would get wet, he sometimes encased them in orange Roman Meal bread bags held tight with rubber bands. He had told us before, “Roman Meal is the best because they make the thickest bags. Believe me, I know. I’ve tried them all.”
We would nod in agreement and chuckle as we imagined the Walter family wolfing down loaf after loaf of Roman Meal bread to keep Bill equipped with an adequate supply of these special bags.
Bill wasn’t wearing bread bags today.
Pete volunteered to go ahead to see if the water diminished or continued, as suspected, for a considerable distance. He stepped in up to his knees. The water looked deep in places, but he stayed on the bar side of the bends where water would typically be shallow.
A couple hundred feet after first stepping in the pool, Pete reached dry land. The water had not come up past mid-thigh level, and a brief look ahead revealed no additional pools, so Pete called back for Bill to come on through.
They resumed their rapid progress north. The passage continued as large as ever, a high canyon fifteen feet wide. Banks of mud along the walls formed a narrow gully ponded with water down the center. Footing was slick as they tried to stay out of the water. They passed an area of large leads that they ignored as they marched north.
After half a mile of virgin cave, the pools gradually became deeper and longer. They avoided one particularly nasty looking pool by stepping up into a higher and dryer cutaround. The two were finally halted at a ledge above what looked like a waist-deep pool, which may have been an extension of the one they had just avoided. It extended at least a hundred feet to the next corner. Bill smoked a sign on the wall marking their limit of exploration.
“This son of a bitch just doesn’t end, does it?” Bill marveled.
Pete let out a long breath, watching the steam as it was caught by the breeze and swiftly blown back the way they had come. “Boy, where does this thing go?”
The passage was more impressive now than it had been where Don and I had quit a week before.
Without pause, they walked rapidly back to Grand Junction and turned upstream, following the O Survey up the huge borehole. After just a few hundred feet, they lost the survey line. After another few minutes, they were pressing the first footprints in the soft mud. They restrained themselves this time, exploring only about fifteen hundred feet of virgin c
ave. Once again, they turned their backs on big, going cave with a strong breeze following the passage. They had overstayed their agreed time, and it was now urgent to join Jim Currens.
They found him sleeping comfortably at the entrance to Hobbit Trail, wrapped in a plastic garbage bag, the heat from his carbide lamp warming him. He had been waiting for them about an hour.
They left the cave.
Jim Currens still wanted to bind the CKKC to a policy of pushing the cave south. But after what many of us had seen to the north, there was no way we were going to quit the exploration of Elysian Way. Jim’s pleading and reasoning had not worked on us, but he was steadfast, adamantly determined not to return to Elysian Way.
Furthermore, he argued that any efforts in that direction would be a departure from the real goals of the CKKC. One way or another, he vowed, he would be doing the right thing: pushing cave that might lead south into the broadest section of Toohey Ridge. We all supported Jim in his desire to find cave to the south, but, so far as I was concerned, our efforts to follow the best leads would continue unabated. The hot leads, for now, were to the north.
As a result of Jim’s firm position, his influence on the direction of exploration of Roppel Cave by the Central Kentucky Karst Coalition began to wane. And I could see the beginnings of a rift due to our diverging priorities for exploration. This conflict was exacerbated by the growing number of active CKKC cavers in Roppel Cave, particularly by the existence of the D.C. contingent. Jim’s private caving club was changing into a diverse group of independent cavers who could not be controlled by edict alone.
Over the next several months, we relentlessly pushed toward the end of downstream Elysian Way, Lower Elysian Way. Members of every party that traveled the long route to the northwest marveled at what they found, for it was always grander than before.
Ron Gariepy and Bill Eidson had little trouble being convinced of the promise of Lower Elysian Way. “It’s endless,” I told them.
On 26 January 1980, on what proved to be one of my most difficult caving trips ever, Bill Eidson, Chet McInski, Ron Gariepy, and I made the long march through the cave to continue the survey beyond P143 in Lower Elysian Way. On a trip a few weeks before, Pete Crecelius had surveyed to the big pool where he and Bill Walter had stopped on 28 December. I would continue the main line to the northwest. I do not think any of us were prepared for what we found. At P143, Bill Eidson complained mightily when he saw how deep the pool really was. I was sure I had told him about it, but he called me a liar anyway. At his insistence, we found some higher passages that circumvented the long, deep pool. However, that was not the end of our problems. Beyond, enormous rimstone dams impounded a series of six-foot-deep pools extending for hundreds of feet. We managed to cling to the wall and crawl along ledges to avoid the worst of it. Often, when the ledges ran out, we made long leaps across the azure pools to the opposite side, looking for more ledges.
Although it was a large passage, we progressed at a snail’s pace. After several hundred feet of ledge traversing, we reached the other side of the watery obstacle. Ahead, we walked easily in wet gravel along a thirty-foot-high and eight-foot-wide passage. At P187, we called it quits. Bill and Chet were trashed; thoughts of the long trip to the surface drained away their enthusiasm. The passage continued ahead as big as ever. Ron and I could not resist. While the others began the long trip out, Ron and I slogged farther ahead into the unknown.
We walked thirty minutes, and I began to believe that Lower Elysian Way would continue forever. The wind was blowing, the passage was big, and it was heading directly toward the Green River, still many miles away. It seemed nothing could stop this passage. Ron and I stood contemplating the large, black passage in water to our knees, our boots ankle-deep in the underlying mud. It was a long way home, we were tired, and it was obvious we would not decipher the mystery of Lower Elysian Way today. I shouted into the unknown and listened to the echo. More big cave.
It was almost two miles back to Grand Junction, and Ron was fading fast. Because he did not know the way, I would sit and wait for him to catch up at each confusing spot. I usually was sleeping by the time he arrived. On and on we continued in this way, each stop becoming longer as the route became more complicated and we became more exhausted.
Hours and a dozen rest stops later, we finally reached the friendlier Arlie Way. I waited at the junction of Arlie Way, falling into a deep sleep before Ron arrived. An hour later, I woke up cold. Ron lay prone where he had collapsed in a stupor some time earlier.
After four more hours, we reached the base of the entrance pit. Sheets of ice covered the walls and coated the rope while snow blew from above, carried in by the cold blast. Our hands numb, we struggled out into the frigid January morning, our wet clothes frozen stiff from the bitter climb up the entrance pit.
Those trips to the end of Lower Elysian Way were tough! As I shivered in the long walk back to the fieldhouse, I was not certain I would ever find the strength to repeat the trip. I did not know if I even wanted to repeat it. But where did that passage go?
Don Coons and Sheri Engler could not resist the lure of Lower Elysian Way. On 16 February 1980, on a thirty-hour trip, the two of them led a survey party that finally reached an obstacle that marked the end of Lower Elysian Way. Two and a half miles beyond Grand Junction, the main route plunged through the Lost River Chert, one of the more insoluble layers of rock that retards downward cave development in the Mammoth Cave region. This plunging, in itself, would not be a problem except for the flowstone and rimstone that have modified the passages by enclosing pools of water. Chris Welsh describes this in his trip report:
We found the stream again. It plunged over a series of waterfalls! We were sure that we were going to cut through the chert layer and scoop a romping, stomping (swimming?), reintegrated trunk. We pushed ahead, downclimbing two waterfalls (tricky) and came to a seven-foot-high rimstone dam in an eight-foot-high passage with the water draining through an unseen hole. Upon climbing the rimstone dam, we peered over yet another with a perfectly circular pool of undetermined depth with a rimstone sliding board plunging straight down for ten feet to water level. Completely unclimbable. On the far side, another rimstone dam, this one with its top at water level, completed the landscape with, presumably, another pool beyond. Not wishing to swim for it, we backed off.
The obstacle, although intriguing, appeared too formidable for this trip. Chris Welsh named the obstacle the Watergate because of its deep pools and its apparent impenetrability. Above the beginning of the Watergate, Welsh saw a low passage continuing to the west. While crawling in, he was greeted by a cool breeze suggesting that the passage might provide a bypass to the watery obstacle below. He slid along fifty feet before turning around in the low passage.
The last major push trip to Lower Elysian Way was in May of 1980. Tom Brucker (on his first trip to Roppel Cave), Pete Crecelius, and I continued the survey beyond the Watergate in the upper-level crawl found by Chris Welsh. Enough time had passed so that I was ready again to solve the riddle of the passage. On the way to the Watergate, we traveled through a baffling tangle of crawls and cutarounds that made us feel lost. At times, we would find ourselves completely turned around and heading back toward the entrance. Our survey was in a long crawlway that we followed for nearly a thousand feet. We passed through gooey mud and one six-hundred-foot-long pool of water.
Our crawling ended at a small window thirty feet above the floor of an enormous vertical shaft. With our assistance and the aid of a daisy chain of tied-together pack straps, Pete Crecelius managed to climb to the bottom. We could see high, unreachable passages leading off. A large waterfall fell from the south side of the dome and drained underneath a ledge. Pete climbed down a pair of short waterfalls to find a deep blue pool at the bottom. He could see a submerged canyon leading off ten feet below the surface—the drain. This was base level, and everything was flooded. We set the last survey station of the P Survey, smoking P294 on the wall above the deep poo
l.
This trip was long but not nearly so long as Chris Welsh’s thirty-hour epic, thanks to a bypass we had discovered on our way in. In the crouching-height Hobbit Trail, heading for Elysian Way, Pete and I had discussed how terrible it was going to be traveling once again through the North Crouchway. The prospect of all that hot crawling and stooping made us gloomy.
On an impulse, we decided that we should attempt to find the supposed connection from the downstream end of Black River to the River Lethe. If we failed, our original objective would be out of reach. We would have to scrub our plans to penetrate beyond the Watergate. Instead, we would have to retrace our steps.
But if our search for a connection was successful, we would save many valuable hours of travel time. It was a gamble, and Tom Brucker certainly did not object. We walked out through the intricate canyons of the Black River Complex and waded through the waist-deep, inky water of Black River. Black River flowed through a tall, black-walled canyon with the pooled water for the last five hundred feet of explored cave. I recalled my negative assessment of the lead nearly two years ago. Today, I kept my reservations to myself. Why discourage my companions with my own fear of encountering a sump?
Soon, we were huddled on a mudbank looking at the deep water before us and eating candy bars as we discussed the prospects. It looked even wetter than I remembered. Pete and I argued about who should go first. I was taller, Pete said, and would get less wet; therefore I should lead. Maybe, but I still did not want to go first. I just was not in the mood to get drenched. We continued to argue. Tom Brucker listened without comment.