Once upon a Cave in Fayette County

Alright folks, this proves to be my biggest blog yet, with thousands of pictures, hundreds of jokes, and a few little snippettes of information-or, it may just be an entertaing story of my trip to Casparis Cave.

We started out in Monroeville at my friend Doug's house. You'll get to see him in a few pictures later on (He occasionally comes up north and climbs on the wall at Slippery Rock with me.) His Uncle John was nice enough to let us use his 4WD Dodge Durango. It was a huge help to have, since we had to drive about 1.5 miles back on this old dirt road in Connellsville. Pretty sweet really, lots of little ravines, and mud puddles, and even a creek we got to cross. I would not attempt this in a little front wheel drive Honda Civic.

We used Doug's GPS to locate the mouth of the cave. Doug, his Dad, Sam (his sister), Kayla (Sam's friend from school), and I made the .5 mile hike from the car to the cave. The hike is pretty easy, most of it followed ATV trails or deer runs. You cold do some sweet rock climbing around here too if you wanted and had the equipemnt. Once we got to the entrance, we geared up for the trek in. That meant we took all of our dry clothes out of our bags, and stashed them up o a sheltered rock. You definitely want to take a spare set of dry clothes and shoes with you for this cave, especially if you are goin in cold weather. You cannot go in this cave without getting at least 67% soaked.

Sam was the first one ready. She thought she saw little fish in that little bit of water at the entrance...I don't know...that water was pretty darn cold. I was the last one to go into the cave. Doug's Dad was just ahead of me. He here goes into the abyss...I had to put my camera away and then scoot in after them. Let me just say, with even a small North Face day pack, that entrance was a tight squeeze. I think the funny thing to remember here is that the entire cave length has a stream flowing thru it. I would say for the first hundred feet or so, I did my darndest to keep the old piggly-wigglies dry. I think that is what made the entrance so much more "difficult"...I tried to chimney like 25' in with out any foot holds...that was darn near impossible.

One of the first things I noticed once I got in there were the cave crickets and the little cave/woodland creature I like to call a bat. There were tons of these little guys in the cave...a few even woke up to let us know to be quite, and quit shining our head lamps on them. "We are trying to sleep, and you would do well to not wake us up! Thank you very much!!" There was even one little guy (actully probably the biggest bat I saw) that screeched at me, and then seemed to watch me walk across the room. The thing that amazes me most about these bats, is not only that they can fly around in the cave, but that they can navigate through twisting passages no more than a foot wide. That would be like driving your car down an alley only 9" wider than your car, going 110 mph, with hair pin turns and obtacles all around.

There are three rooms. This is the smallest of the three "rooms." It is cool, becuase supposedly there are old writings and pictures on the wall. Doug is trying to deciper something (even though the camera didn't pick much up). Supposedly there are some very old dates carved into the stone. The odd thing is, some of the dates carved into the stone were from before the cave was opened up, or before, I imagine, European settlers made it this far west.

Of course after going at it for a while, we had to all take a water break. We did that in the "Big Room" The room wasn't extremely long or wide, but it was pretty tall. Getting to this room can be done one of two ways. You go through the "crawl" or the "squeeze". Going in Doug and I went through the squeez. This passage is definitely aptly named. It was tight! You had to keep you hips and shoulders all at the same level, and you feet together. At some points, I found it was barely tight enough for a helmet. I think it is much easier going to the "Big Room" in this way. However, coming back out of the cave, I would say it is easier coming through the crawl. From the "Big Room" it was pretty easy going. The "Stoop and Splash" is pretty much a guarantee that you will be very wet. It's worth it though, because when you get to the "Rain Room" there is a register to sign, and lots of formations to see. Here is some Cave Bacon...not technically accurate, but definitely, descriptively accurate. Of course, if the calcium solution runs down the wall, then you have a neat formation there too. I think these just look cool. They say it takes about 100 years for an inch of formation for stalactites (the hanging formations), and I would imagine it takes just as long if not longer for Cave Bacon. I think my favorite formations in the whole cave though were in the "Rain Room" and they were the giant stalagmites on the floor. The weird thing about these, is I don't remember seeing any stalagtites above them. The sad thing with some of these formations, was that it appeared that some careless people had been in the cave, and had broken off pieces of the formation. I am not sure if they wanted souvenirs or what, but they took hundreds of years of natural wonder that many people won't get to see now. That ticks me off! We ended up taking another brake in the "Rain Room". Here I am in all my glory, well, maybe not all my glory, but I think it is my better side. Note the shiny new "Hodag Proof" helmet. I bought it Saturday morning at Lowes for a whopping $6.92. I can assure, I had $6.92 worth of scratches on it when I got out. I think I will go custom graphics on this soon enough. Doug was nice enough to let me use some of his duck tape to keep my head lamp on my helmet. I think I will rig up something with industrial strength Velcro (yes, there is such a thing)so that I don't have to have all that duct tape all over the helmet. (Now, all I have to do is find a good picture of a Hodag!)
Doug takes a moment to enjoy the Rain Room as he impersonates some sort of raptor.

After going throug the "Rain Room", the stoop and splash followed. (I think, I am getting disoriented now that I can see daylight.) That was a low passage that involved crawling on the hands and knees, in a spiderman like position, in about 3-6" of water. After much crawling, we finally made it to the end-well, the water fall. That's Kayla in the white shirt and Doug trying to sneak behind the water. (Yea, I know the digi didn't do a good job, but the water was falling at 9.8 m/s^2, and there's no light). It's pretty cool. There is just a hole in the ceiling and all that water just coming thru it. The cave didn't go too much further back. This shows pretty much what the rest of the cave looked like. Well, it's hard to see the water from the rocks, but the "stream" just kept going back, only at this point, the water was extremely deep and moved very slowly. Since we were getting cold and wet, and running out of time, we didn't explore any further. Oh well, now I have a reason to go back. Check back later for more pics from Doug.