by Beyond Mammoth Cave- A Tale of Obsession in the World's Longest Cave (epub)
The best of the lot of these holes was one I had found while walking outdoors along the base of Dry Valley the day of the discovery of Roppel Cave, 3 April 1976. At that time, a small spring flowed into a low entrance blowing cold air. I shooed away cows cooling themselves in the breeze and excitedly squeezed over sharp rocks into the opening, elbows digging deep into liquefied cow manure. After a few feet I was able to sit up in a room, but the stream flowed into a four-inch-high, gravel-floored crawlway. No way. I called it Dry Valley Cave. As a rule, natural entrances to large caves in the Mammoth Cave area are associated with perennial springs. These springs usually emerge a few feet from the cave entrance and flow into the cave, keeping its entrance clean of silt and debris. Dry Valley Cave was true to type.
One day, I noticed on the most recent Roppel Cave map that upper levels recently explored and surveyed above Pirates Pot, a beautiful vertical shaft near Black River, wandered to within a couple hundred feet of a sinkhole. The cave was high and the sinkhole deep; they might be related. After further studying the map, I realized that this was not just any sinkhole—it was Dry Valley Cave.
But Dry Valley Cave was a dig, and my cave-digging days were ancient history. Knowing that Jim Currens was manic these days in his quest to open another route into the main part of the cave, I was happy to pass on to him what I knew about the spring-fed entrance.
Jim wasted little time. He was soon crawling through cow manure into the low entrance, flashlight in hand. As the airflow teased him, Jim started digging out the four-inch-high crawl; he soon pulled fist-sized rocks out of the wet gravel. In just one hour’s work, he extended the cave four feet. However, as he lay on his belly, peering through the opening ahead of him, he could see that the low passage continued at least twenty feet. This was not going to be easy digging. Dry Valley Cave was put back on the shelf, at least for the time being.
The next month, Pete Crecelius, Bill Walter, and I headed into Roppel Cave to survey in the upper levels above Pirates Pot. Several interesting leads had been found that we all wanted to check. We followed the now-familiar interleaved canyons of the Black River complex to the lip of Pirates Pot. Across from our perch and at the same level, a glistening stream of water arced like a silver ribbon from a clean-washed canyon, crashing twenty feet into a sea of spray directly below us. Wow! We chimneyed directly up the canyon to a point where we could traverse across the pit on a series of wide ledges above the floor forty feet below. Once across, we slid back down to the canyon floor and walked sideways upstream in the narrow passage. We squeezed around the tight bends, feet sloshing through the clear, six-inch-deep water. After six hundred feet of water-scalloped canyon, we chimneyed up toward one of several holes leading into blackness. Up between the wide walls, we followed the ledges. Thirty feet above the level of the stream, we hauled ourselves into a sandy elliptical tube. Its floor was incised by a deep, meandering canyon carrying the stream between the walls of the twenty-five-foot-wide passage.
This elliptical tube had been named Kangaroo Trail because of the required leaps across the wide canyon in the floor. For long-legged and non-acrophobic cavers, the leaps were exhilarating. Bill, Pete, and I hooted with delight each time we hurdled across one of the many chasms.
Fifteen hundred feet east along Kangaroo Trail, the broad tube forked into two slightly smaller tubes. We took the left branch and rapidly moved to Station C21. From there we continued the C Survey to Station C59 at the edge of a pile of wet limestone that blocked the passage. Returning back toward the junction with Kangaroo Trail, we checked the leads we had turned up. Most were small and went only a few feet; however, Pete checked a body-sized tube at Station C3 and after forty feet emerged into the base of a large dome with dry, fluffy sand on the floor. The waterflow that had formed it was long gone, and now the walls sparkled with fine gypsum crystals. It was a breathtaking sight. Pete named it Sand Dome.
A short climb up the east wall took him to a high canyon going three directions. He turned to the right, following the stiff breeze. After three hundred feet, the canyon forked. The air whipped up the narrowing left branch. Pete forced himself forty feet farther, but because he was alone, he was reluctant to continue jamming his body through the narrow crack. Rusty tin cans and sticks lay scattered on the floor, washed in from the surface during heavy rains by the small stream in which he was now crawling. He shouted into the passage, listening for an echo that would indicate larger space ahead. There was no such echo, but an opening to the surface had to be there.
Pete backed out and returned to his waiting party.
After hearing about the rusty tin cans and sticks, Jim Currens took a party in the next month to map the passage. They could squeeze no farther along the narrow canyon than Pete had, but they completed the survey.
At home in Lexington the following day, Jim held the enlarged topographic map against his living room window and overlaid it with an updated map of Roppel Cave at the same scale. The bright sunshine backlighted the contour lines of the topographic map, making it easy to see the interrelationship between the cave and the surface features. As Jim studied the map, a broad smile spread across his face. Pete’s rusty can lead was heading directly for Dry Valley Cave, only 150 feet away. The tin cans and sticks must have been washed in by the stream that flowed into the entrance of Dry Valley Cave. With all that trash—it had to connect!
Dave Weller, a caver from nearby Louisville, Kentucky, came to Roppel Cave on an invitation from Bill Walter. Dave’s first trip into Roppel had been with Bill and me in March 1979, six months after the discovery of Arlie Way. Dave was six feet tall and two hundred pounds and carried a heavy steel ammo can as his cave pack. I had cringed when I saw that army-green metal box.
“Why?” I cried, pleading with Dave not to take the damned thing into the cave. I held up a spare canvas pack, offering it to him.
“My stuff stays dry and doesn’t get smashed,” he answered, rejecting my offer.
“But how can you stand to carry that heavy thing?”
“Oh, it’s not too bad.”
“But . . . you’ve never been in Roppel Cave before.” I imagined how awful it would be carrying that bulky, unyielding box in small passages. He would be sorry.
Dave took his armored box.
He derived one advantage from his ammo can: it was stuffed so full that there was no room for community gear. Bill and I were stuck carrying all the survey equipment.
Two hours into the trip, the interminable clunk! . . . clunk! . . . clunk! wore on my nerves like fingernails scraping a blackboard. I bit my lip, resisting the urge to scream, “I told you so!” Dave was having a bad time moving that rectangular, heavy metal monstrosity through the non-rectangular S Survey passage. Sweat poured off him in rivers. No, I did not need to humiliate him further.
He doggedly continued without complaint. At Arlie Way, we took an extra-long break to allow him to cool down and regain his strength.
Dave was a slow caver, but the three of us had a fine trip surveying through spectacular canyons and domes, closing a large loop of Arlie Way.
Then came that mind-numbing clunk! . . . clunk! . . . clunk! over and over again on our agonizingly slow trip back to the surface. The return through the S Survey took over four hours. Dave was as tired as anyone I have ever seen emerge from the Roppel Entrance pit. He unclipped from the rope and collapsed, sound asleep.
I would have bet a million dollars that we had seen the last of Dave Weller.
I was wrong.
Dave did return for another go. I was horrified, though, when he again produced his ammo can. Why hadn’t he jettisoned it? No matter, he was not going with me on this particular trip, so I would not have to endure it. The box sported a smashed-in corner that hadn’t been there the first time I had seen it—a Roppel scar, I assumed.
Dave again had a desperate trip. He was even more exhausted than he had been his first time. Bill Walter and Pete Crecelius dragged him three miles to the distant end of Walter Way, Arli
e Way’s most significant side passage. But they had a splendid time, coming out with a book full of survey data.
Dave had fallen in love with the cave, even though he found it to be very difficult. He hated the S Survey. He had already begun to suggest seriously that we should begin to dig a second entrance. Anywhere.
Jim Currens recruited Dave to help on the Dry Valley Dig Project, and Dave turned out to be the paragon of a cave digger. He was persistent and methodical, and his every action was carefully planned. He was a self-taught engineer, masterfully using any tool he could find to its maximal advantage. He had already earned his reputation as a cave digger by helping to excavate a back entrance to a large cave system southwest of Louisville. Moreover, he was sufficiently motivated to seek a solution to his problems in the S Survey (although, in my opinion, just buying a new cave pack would have made all the difference in the world).
On his first trip to Dry Valley Cave with Jim, Dave agreed that it would be a long dig, a major effort.
“We’ll have to start digging here,” he said, pointing to a spot six feet outside the drip line of the entrance, “and dig our way into the cave all the way to the low spot.”
“Why do we have to start digging out here?” Jim asked incredulously.
Dave explained matter-of-factly. “For a horizontal cave dig, your work area at the headwall of the dig has to have plenty of room. Otherwise, our progress will stall when it gets too difficult to drag out our tailings. I want to have at least four feet of headroom the entire way. It has to be high enough for a wheelbarrow. We’ll need to start trenching back here to do that.”
“Okay.” But Jim was not convinced. A wheelbarrow! He had envisioned beginning immediately at the end of his original dig. If the advance slowed, the diggers could fade. That was the common wisdom of us rainy-day diggers. Dave’s way would take several days of digging before they even made an inch of forward progress. Impractical!
For the remainder of the day, they hurled shovelfuls of dirt, rock, and cow manure out of a growing trench leading toward the low entrance. At some invisible point, the dig changed from a Jim Currens project to one managed and owned by Dave Weller. Jim may not have noticed this transfer at first, but as the dig progressed, it became apparent that Dave—and only Dave—had the determination to carry the tunnel through to its successful completion. Jim deferred. The final result was what counted. Jim became Dave’s assistant.
As the dig progressed, I remained skeptical. Sure, Pete Crecelius’s rusty can canyon was close to Dry Valley Cave, but it was still over 150 feet and at least one level below; it might as well have been a mile! To link the two would take a lot of luck.
“No problem,” Dave assured me. “We’ll just work harder and use more explosives. You may have to help,” he added, aware of my hatred of digging.
Dave had already acquired dynamite, primer cord, spools of fuse, and many varieties of blasting caps.
“This dig may take awhile,” I said.
“It’ll take a long time,” he agreed.
Thereafter, I supported Dave. We soon became close friends. His contributions to the CKKC went far beyond digging his way into Roppel Cave. His counsel, enthusiasm, and hard work became indispensable to the functioning of the coalition.
The Roppel cavers steadfastly continued caving through the S Survey while Dave Weller tunneled through the dirt and rock that filled Dry Valley Cave. The exploration of Lower Elysian Way was in full swing while Dave wheeled out load after load of debris to dump on the growing pile. After a few months, we could walk in a four-foot-high passage to the back of the first room—a distance of about thirty feet. At this point, the ceiling dipped and the tunnel floor was ten feet below the entrance. Here, Dave began trenching a two-foot-high tunnel through the nearly filled passage. Digging was difficult. The fill was ancient and well consolidated and the passage narrow. Crowbars and hammers were necessary for prying up the resilient surface. Complicating the affair were rocks distributed through the silt like lumps in gravy. Many of these rocks would not yield, even to the crushing blows of a ten-pound sledgehammer. Stymied, the digging crew would be forced to return to the surface.
Dave’s solution was to walk up the hill to his van jammed full with equipment. He took dynamite from a case, a blasting cap from the glove box, and a spool of fuse from under the back seat. At forty-seconds-per-foot burn, three feet of fuse was usual. He slid the fuse into the open end of the cylindrical blasting cap, then crimped the end tight around the fuse with his teeth. After jamming a large nail into the end of the dynamite stick to make a hole about six inches deep, he inserted the blasting cap and fuse. He pulled the free end of the fuse down along the stick of dynamite, securing it with black electrician’s tape so the fuse could not be yanked out accidentally. The explosive charge was then placed over the obstruction. He packed the charge with rocks and mud, sculpting the mound to maximize explosive force in the proper direction. The fuse was lighted with either a match or cigarette lighter. Cavers love to light the fuse on explosives, and Dave used this attraction to recruit helpers. It lured me! Nothing was more satisfying than the loud whump! that sounded after several anxious minutes. We would grimace, bracing ourselves for the inevitable concussion, then, after the billowing plumes of white smoke billowed from the cave, we would rush excitedly into the dig to assess the damage.
For removing the excavated dirt in this lower section, Dave fashioned a sled that looked like a portable mortar box, like the ones used in mixing small amounts of concrete in building construction. Long pieces of rope served as a harness to drag the trough both in and out of the dig. The full sled was dumped into buckets in the entrance room that were then hauled to the surface. As the dig progressed, the debris was moved out of the cave in stages, which required one person at each station.
One digger scooped at the headwall; a second behind the first would load the sled; a third would haul the sled to the entrance room and transfer the load; and a fourth would haul the buckets to the surface. Ideally, an additional one or two people would be available for relief, making an effective digging complement of six. Usually, though, Dave would have only one helper, and occasionally he worked alone.
Progress was painfully slow. Many of us helped from time to time, but Dave returned most weekends. I called him nearly every Sunday evening to see how things had gone. He would report that they had made six inches, or that they had spent their effort enlarging the entrance room. I was always disappointed, hoping for a breakthrough or at least a sudden burst of six feet with the expectation of easier going ahead. But it was not to be. At least I maintained an upbeat cheeriness on the phone and helped whenever I had the chance on a caving weekend.
Dave’s large dynamite supply amused many of us during our off-caving days. In exchange for our unconditional help on his dig, Dave tolerated this blatant waste of explosives. We experimented with turning logs into missiles. Similar to putting a small can over a firecracker, we placed a log vertically over a shallow hole containing a stick of dynamite. The task was not as easy as it would seem. In most cases, the log would detonate and blast wood shrapnel from the launch area. Only once were we successful in our efforts. The sight was spectacular as the slender log shot off into the sky, gently turning end-over-end as it rapidly gained altitude. In three seconds, the log reached apogee and began its downward descent. Two cavers, awakened by the loud report, sat bolt upright in the back of their truck, puzzled by the upward-gazing faces. The spectators suddenly scattered; apparently something dangerous was falling from the sky. The two shrank into the corner of their truck. The ripping sound of shredding leaves and snapping branches announced the imminent impact.
Out in the field, we watched with horror as the missile concluded the last few feet of its descent.
Thud!
The five-pound log had struck the ground just fifteen feet from their truck.
The hooligans never confessed.
Another time, Pete Crecelius slid a short-fused blasting cap be
neath my bunk. A party was going on, and I was struggling to sleep. The sound of a sputtering fuse sent me running out into the main room with no clothing on, only my sleeping bag wrapped around me. Howls of laughter from the pranksters increased my indignation as the blasting cap exploded in the next room.
Our practical joking was frequent and was a diversion from the rigors of the long cave trips. Most of us never took the pranks too seriously, yet no one would let another get away with anything without retaliation. I had vowed that Pete’s mischievous deed would be paid back with interest.
Often, when we had a big crowd, Pete slept in his tent instead of in the packed fieldhouse. On one occasion, while he was in the cave, three of us carried his tent up to the gently pitched roof of the building. We put a lamp inside to make the nylon dome glow an eerie blue and decorated the outside with blinking Christmas lights. It was a sight to behold—you could see the “blue moon” from all over Toohey Ridge! Several of our neighbors came by to investigate the spectacle.
The next morning, Pete was not to be found. After a short search, we found him sound asleep in his tent on the roof.
When he climbed down from his perch, he commented, “Well, the tent was easy to find; too bad my keys weren’t. They were back on the ground beneath where I pitched my tent!”
I guess we were even.
Meanwhile, Dave Weller methodically continued toward a goal still over one hundred feet away.
During the coming months, discoveries were dramatic. Survey parties poured through the fast and easy Brucker Connection in Roppel Cave, and the horrors of the North Crouchway became a dim memory. The abrupt end of Lower Elysian Way at the Watergate was certainly an enigma, but for now, we did not care. We were exploring the many leads along the vast length of the passage. The Watergate could wait.