[trip] Barton Cave Beginner Trip

Doug McCarty, Brian Masney, John Tudek, John ?, and myself met at the Exxon on route 857 at 6pm for a beginner's trip into Barton Cave. We waited for half an hour, but the beginners never showed. We drove to the cave, geared up, and headed in. The cave takes about 45 minutes to get to from Morgantown, and is a 10 minute hike from the parking area. It's a very easy cave, horizontal, not too crawly, and mostly dry. It's formed in very sandy limestone or limey sandstone. We were back in Morgantown in time to get Mexican for dinner.

[trip] GVKS Survey

This weekend I managed to get on a GVKS survey team into a legendary closed cave. Brian Masney and I were on a survey team with Dwight Livingston; we were to find and survey a lead off a particular large room. We rigged and dropped the beautiful entrance drop around noon on Saturday and traveled about 4.5 hours into the cave, doing three more rappels on the way. Parts of the cave felt like going on a hike in the mountains, climbing steep hills or walking rocky trails in wide-open, massive passage. Of course, there were also plenty of squeezes and crawls, which were just as nasty as the borehole was spectacular. We spent a few hours investigating every lead we could find in the area, but couldn't find any that had not yet been surveyed. At least Brian got some awesome photos of the area. The trip out was exhausting but still enjoyable. We were above-ground at 1:30am.



Beautiful view of the entrance pit



Brian Masney models his new boots in some big passage south of the large room



Dave Riggs and shadow in another large room south of the large room

Photos by Brian Masney.