[trip] VPI Picnic / Newberry Cave

I spent this past weekend in Bland County VA with the VPI Cave Club for their annual Picnic weekend. Their campsite is in a beautiful karst valley, apparently filled with vertical caves. The VPI folks know how to throw an event - there was lots of good food and drink, plenty of great people, and an enormous bonfire roaring all weekend.

I went on a trip led by John Deighan into Newberry Cave. A small party went in before us and rigged the cave, then our party of 5 followed shortly after. The entrance to Newberry is a vertical crevice, at first about a foot wide then opening up a bit towards the bottom. It's about a 60' rappel down the crevice into a small entrance room.

From the entrance, we followed a stair-stepped passage down, then crossed a ledge with a bit of exposure, to a second rappel - this one only about 30'. A cable ladder was rigged here for the ascent back out. Just below this nuisance drop was a beautiful 180' pit, Bill's rappel. We dropped it to the room below, then followed some twisting passage down, eventually taking us to the bottom of triple wells - an amazing 220' perfectly-vertical pit.

From here, we headed back up and followed the "devil's staircase", a series of winding hand climbs that brings you back above the 180' drop without ascending rope. Two spots were a bit hairy, but everyone made it up without incident. We derigged the big drop, then ascended the 30' one - some of us opting to frog it out rather than deal with a cable ladder. After derigging, we took a slightly different path back, which brought us up to within 25' of the entrance slot. We handclimbed/chimneyed up the remainder of the entrance crevice with ascender backup.

We arrived at the surface to sunny weather and had just a 2 minute hike back to the campsite where dinner was just about ready. It was an enjoyable cave trip, a beautiful cave, and an all-around excellent weekend.



The author picnic-ing with VPI's cutest girl

See also photos by Richard Cobb

Rappelling At Iron Furnace

WVUSG went rappelling near the Iron Furnace at Coopers Rock on Thursday evening. Brian rigged a static line for rappellers, and Cara rigged a top rope for climbers. It turns out that the Iron Furnace really is as creepy as people say...



Jessica Morning frogging up the cliff. Photo by Brian Masney.

See also: more photos by Brian Masney and by Dave Olsen.

Rappelling at Army Rock

Ryan, Brian, Rich, Jill, Jason (fireman-Jason, not Jason-Jason), and I went rappelling at Army Rock this evening. Army Rock is much quicker to get to and from than Cheat View (if you're in Morgantown), but it's only about 60' high. I got some practice in with 5 bars of my 6-bar rack (eh) and with a foot ascender (awesome!).

Time to pack for a weekend at the Bat Ranch.

[trip] YTR / Bone-Norman

This past weekend was my first Young Timers' Reunion, and I had a really great time. Friday afternoon's weather was 72° and sunny, but as soon as Ryan Ellers, John Cunningham and I met up, the sky turned black and rain started pouring down. Mother nature didn't let up on us the entire drive down to Greenbriar County; the combination of foul weather and several stops along the way (including almost getting lost in the Tamarack parking lot) kept us from arriving at the campground until about 9:30pm. That night remained damp and dreary, but a nice fire kept everyone warm.

Saturday morning we woke up to a beautiful clear sky and sunshine, definitely a welcome sight after the previous evening's crappy weather. At around 10am, David C. of the VPI Grotto (and without shoes) led a large group of 15 ("no wait, how many people do we have?") cavers from WVU, VPI, JMU, and Maryland on a through-trip of the Bone-Norman Cave system.



The entrance to Bone Cave is on the face of this old quarry, obscured by trees. Note me in the bottom right for scale, and several other cave passages higher up along the limestone face.

The entrance to the Bone Cave side is at the ground level of an old, large limestone quarry. The first part of the cave is mostly large walking passage, then consists of a series of alternating low phreatic tunnels and smaller rooms. The Bone side is dry. Really, really dry. Its floor consists entirely of fine dust, so deep that it feels like you're walking on a beach. As you can probably imagine, with 15 people trudging through dust like this, and with wind whipping through the smaller tunnels, it wasn't long before everyone had filled their mouths, noses and eyes with cave grit.



Carrie Blankenship of VPI models her sweet new Howie's Harnesses cave pack in some Bone Cave canyon passage.

Eventually, Bone gets lower and lower, until you spend a lot of time on your belly. We made it to The Devil's Pinch, and everyone squeezed through the 7" slot without incident. After a bit more crawling, then down a large dusty slide, everyone dove headfirst through a slot 4' off the floor (except for a couple crazies who went feet-first).

From here, we headed left down a few dusty corridors and finally came to some deep, damp canyon passage - Norman Cave. This side definitely has a different character than does the Bone side - the former still feels live while the latter is dead and "bone dry". Our group got split in two after a bit of miscommunication, but with some sharp thinking and teamwork, everyone was quickly reunited and headed back on our way.

We generally followed a decent-sized meandering stream through the Norman side. Our path continually crossed back and forth over the stream, which occasionally ducked underground, leading us over a lot of extremely slippery silt banks and some very wide rooms. We next spent a lot of time climbing over a very long stretch of breakdown, which necessitated several rest stops. After more breakdown than I cared for, we headed into the stream for a very cool, very long watercourse. The ceiling was of stoop-height for a large part of it, and the swift water has cut some great potholes throughout the course - some were easily waist deep, thus making this an official "wet cave". The banks of the stream for a large part of this water passage are formed entirely of flowstone, and there are many sections where the limestone has been corroded to the density of a giant Swiss cheese.

Finally the watercourse leads you to a roaring waterfall that crashes down through the ceiling probably 40' or more. It's quite a sight, and was a treat after trudging through the not-quite-high-enough stream passage for so long. From there, a nuisance climb led to a waiting room, which led to a nuisance climb, which led to.. a real nuisance climb. I was the last one up, and I'm glad there was no one below to see my ungraceful ascent.

From here, we climbed up to an absolutely enormous room, floored by a massive breakdown hill. Some large, dead columns stared down from the top of this humbling room. Starting to really feel tired, I trudged up the underground hillside until I finally saw a tree root jutting up from the ground. I pondered this for entirely too long until a dim light bulb lit, and I quickly looked up to see a speck of moonlight at the very top of the room. Everyone bolted for the exit, hopped out of the mole-hole and we were greeted with a beautiful, clear, night sky full of stars - an excellent ending to an excellent cave trip.

I believe we made it back to camp around 9pm. In contrast to the previous night, Saturday night was excellent - warm weather, a clear sky, live guitar with upright bass, and lots of great people. Door prizes were handed out to everyone - I walked away with a VAR hat and a roll of primo duct tape. Most importantly, WVU spanked JMU and VPI by number of attendees, winning the trophy for a 2nd year in a row.

So, in not nearly as many words, YTR was excellent - thanks to everyone who made it great (you know who you are).

All photos by Brian Masney

WVGES

I visited the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey (WVGES) at Mont Chateau today. I picked up an electronic copy of the 1923 Geological Survey of Tucker County, which consists of a PDF scan of the survey's text (550 pages, unfortunately scanned as images so you're not able to search it), and scans of the geologic and topographic maps (scanned 400dpi and broken up into two giant .tif files each). They actually still have some dusty, mildewed original paper copies of Tucker County, but it's one of the last ones left. They told me that someone is currently converting W.E. Davies Caverns of West Virginia to electronic format, and of all their publications, that book has been their Freebird.



Tiny detail view of the 1921 Tucker County geological map by the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey

Edit - Doug McCarty points out that the geological maps are available from the WV GIS Tech Center and from the PSC Grotto. They're compressed as MrSID files, a proprietary format that I can't view, but you probably can. I don't know of any other source for the text of the survey except from the CD that I purchased.

[trip] Tucker Co. Mar. 25, 2006

Brian Masney, Doug McCarty and I surveyed in the back of M*R cave this Saturday. We were in cave by 10am, and took probably close to 2 hours to get back to the end of the survey. We surveyed past the farthest point I'd previously been back in, past the end of the 1955 survey, and stayed close to the floor for longer straight shots rather than high and dry. The cave amazingly opened up into tall, 4' wide passage for probably 175' - a big relief after spending most of the day on our bellies in the water. We surveyed 420' of passage, then conveniently hit some low passage that inspired us to call it a day. Doug booked it out and had already changed clothes by the time Brian and I made it out of the cave around 9pm!



Doug McCarty sketching, photo by Brian Masney

Alternate trip report: Doug McCarty (includes excellent working lineplot of M*R)

Rainy Vertical Practice

The weather has been beautiful the last 4 days, but this morning it rained and rained. Naturally, we decided that it'd be a great day for vertical practice. Some fellow crazies met up at 9am in Fairmont and went to some great property near Valley Falls.

Doug McCarty placed a couple bolts and rigged a rebelay and a redirect. We spent 3 or 4 hours practicing in the rain. I definitely didn't perfect the technique, but I know enough now to practice on my own.

[trip] Sharps Cave

The Mon Grotto took an enjoyable trip to Sharps Cave Sat. Feb 25, 2006. Three ladies from the Parkersburg Area Grotto joined us, as well as a few beginners - two were students from my high school alma mater.

Brian and I got there early and went looking for Pinnacle Cave. Since I forgot to bring the coordinates with me, we went from my memory... in other words, we couldn't find it. We followed the limestone outcrops along the ridge for a bit and found several interesting spots that could use some digging.

Our group of 12 cavers suited up, descended the entrance slot, and met up in the first big room. Brian brought three slave flash units, so we spent a lot of time setting up and taking photos in this cave. We took some more photos in Halloween Hall, then headed over the breakdown area to the left and went to the mud sculpture room where we rested for a bit.



A nice group photo in the entrance room



Checking out the mud sculptures

Afterwards, we headed below to the stream passage and walked upstream to the double waterfall, which was moving a good bit of water. We took some more photos, and a few people went up the lefthand stream tunnel to check it out. The group headed back downstream, and eventually back to Halloween Hall... for some more photos.



Climbing Sharps waterfall

Since it was still early, we decided to check out the other half of the cave. We dropped down into the canyon passage to the right of Halloween Hall. This passage is an abandoned stream passage, but shortly exposes in a few small pits where the active stream is flowing directly beneath it. The stream flows from here, under the canyon passage, and eventually reappears as the top stream at the waterfall. Moving forward, you are eventually walking in the stream, but it's mostly dry travel.

After about 15 minutes, the passage opens up into a large room, Catfish Hall. As I cleared the breakdown and looked up into it, I saw a dozen lights pointed at me - I was completely surprised and couldn't figure out how our entire party had passed me and was now staring at me from the next room. It turned out to be the Pittsburgh Grotto, 11 strong, waiting there to surprise us! We mingled for a few minutes, then couldn't turn down the chance for another photo.



We're a happy family - Mon Grotto, Pittsburgh Grotto meet underground

The Pittsburgh group headed back the way we'd just come, and some of our party headed out of the cave. The rest went forward, over some more very large breakdown, to find another impressively-sized room, the Z Room. Brian and I stayed here to take some more photos, while Doug and the remainder of the group explored for a bit beyond.



Lighting up the last big room

We headed back out, exited the cave to find daylight and very nice weather waiting for us.

All photos by Brian Masney

Alternate trip report: Doug McCarty, Additional photos: Mon Grotto Sharps page

[trip] Ridge Walking Rt. 7

The roads were pretty slick yesterday morning; after sliding off Rt. 7 (between Dellslow and Masontown) several times, I decided that it was probably not the best idea to drive all the way to Parsons for the Tucker County Survey. I turned my car around at a pull-off and noticed what looked like a cave on the side of the road. Since I was pretty close to Maiden Run Cave, and I was itching to do something caving-related, I decided that it was the perfect opportunity and location to do a bit of ridge walking along Rt. 7.

I checked out the shelter cave, which had a good bit of water coming down from inside. It turns out that it has a tiny bit of solutionally-formed pseudo-cave moving water visible from the underside. A stream also flows over the top and down.



Limestone shelter cave from the road

Following the stream up from this shelter cave took me to a real FRO cave. It didn't seem to move air, but there's a good bit of water flowing out and the small cave passage definitely goes back into the hillside. Unfortunately, the caver-sized passage goes back less than a body-length.



FRO cave with glove for size reference

The next drainage valley over was also very interesting. Here I found some small cave passage which connects to a 3' deep limestone sinkhole. The small passage at the bottom of the sinkhole appears to go back into the hillside also. I moved some of the fluted limestone breakdown, like the kind you find at the bottom of a dome-pit, but it'd take some tools to clean it out enough to get a good idea of what's below and beyond.



Sinkhole with glove for size reference



Small cave passage down the hill from sinkhole

I also walked along the road for a bit just checking out the outcrops for geologically interesting features.



Limestone crossbedding seen from the road

Much more photos with individual descriptions are available at: http://gl1tch.com/gallery/WalkingRt7

All in all, it was enjoyable and interesting considering that I didn't walk more than half a mile. I wish I had a copy of the North Central West Virginia WVASS bulletin to compare with.

[gear] WVU Student Grotto Shirts

The WVU Student Grotto shirts, designed by John Tudek, came in and look really good. They're $15, cotton, and come in any colour you like (as long as you like WVU gold).



Yes, he's really using Woodburn Hall as a rig point, but at least he didn't bolt it

[trip] Simmons-Mingo Cave

Last Saturday I drove down to the Elk River Valley and met up with the WVU Student Grotto to hit Simmons-Mingo Cave. Most of them had camped out at Oildrum Falls the night before.

Brian and Jason squeezed their way into the Oildrum Falls entrance, a very narrow tunnel with a stream flowing through part, and decided it was not worth rigging and dropping. We trudged up the Dry Branch a bit and peeked into the Stan's Blowing Rock entrance, which requires vert gear. After first thinking it'd been filled in, we crawled down the Zarathustra... Zurothoarsty... Zerostoaster... the other entrance.

The entrance tunnel goes down and to the left, then down a slot to a small muddy room, then down a 15' molehole which has a handline rigged. You come out on a large breakdown slope which takes you down to Edigar's Dome, an impressive 90' dome-pit that drops from the passage above at the Stan's Blowing entrance. Another smaller dome-pit faces it on the opposite side - this room had lots of bats clustered close together along crevices in the ceiling.



Edigar's Dome, as seen on the NSS 2000 Convention Guidebook

We followed the passage up to the top level, then down a narrow slot in the floor. A narrow phreatic tube goes forward for a ways, but we turned left into a very large and long paleo-passage. We followed it to its end, down some breakdown and back up into a room with very strong airflow but no leads out. Backtracking, we dropped down a hole in the floor to a smaller tunnel. There's a hole in the floor here with an old, twisted strand rope etrier rigged. We put some backup lines in place and climbed down.

This lower level contains a steep muddy bank which opens up to a very large room containing the underground Elk River - called the Canadian River here - this was an impressive sight. We travelled upstream, crossing the icy water too many times, for a bit. The roof lowers and the water sumps out, so we didn't travel far. Going back to the right we followed the river to where the Oildrum Falls stream comes pouring out of the ceiling as a 35' waterfall. The water started getting deeper at this end, it sumps and connects to My Cave here, so we headed back.

Going back up the etrier was quite a pain. It's an unforgiving rock crotch with nowhere to put your feet - it probably didn't help that I tried to do it with a pack strapped to my back. The climb back out the entrance passage was tiring as well, but everyone made it out in short time. We were probably in cave less than 4 hours. Since the weather was not on our side, everyone packed up camp and headed to Mama's Kitchen for some dinner.



Me climbing back up the etrier. Photo by Brian Masney

Know Your NADs

Are those GPS coordinates NAD27? NAD83? WGS84?? What I'm talking about is the "datum", or ellipse model used to approximate the shape of the earth - it's not a sphere because it bulges around the equator. Coordinates for the same location, but using a different datum, will have different values.

Way back in 1866, somebody started in Kansas and manually surveyed across the continent. The government used that data back in 1927 to come up with a model of the earth's shape, NAD27 for North American Datum 1927, and that's what the USGS used for all their maps. Believe it or not, manually surveying the planet back in 1866 turned out to not be exactly correct, so in the 80's they used all that Star Wars technology to make a new model of the earth, NAD83. This model was expanded to work for the entire planet instead of just our continent, that's called WGS84.

I use WGS84 because that's what Google Maps uses, and it's probably what most GPS devices default to. However, all the old USGS maps use NAD27. My GPS stores waypoints in some agnostic format so all I have to do is switch the datum it's using and all my points are magically converted for me.

As chance would have it, WV's location happens to fall so that both NAD27 and NAD83/WGS84 are pretty close together - within tens of meters. They're almost the same near TAG, but 300 meters off towards the West coast, as seen below.



The difference between NAD27 and NAD83 coordinates by location

[trip] Bonner Cave #1

Tucker County Survey took an off-week trip to check out the Bonner Caves. Brian Masney and Aaron Bird worked an above-ground survey, while myself, Josh and Kevin Keplinger pushed Bonner Cave #1.

Bonner #1 is a smallish sink on the side of the hill, surrounded by briars, but not difficult to find. There are several good rigging trees lining the opening to the sink. The entrance is a very steep drop - if not vertical, then pretty close. We needed ascenders to get back out, and kicked ouselves for not ascending in full vert gear. The view back out the side of the hill is quite beautiful, with just a bit of water dripping down from the entrance.

The the entrance room continues sloping down. The floor is lots of small breakdown and large animal bones, however it does not stink like Bonner #2 (Josh and Aaron dropped this carcass-filled pit first and recommended that we not follow). This entrance room slope goes down to a slot in the floor where the wind whips out furiously - Josh's hair was literally blowing. This slot drops about 7 feet onto some sloping breakdown which continues down a few more feet to rubble and more large bones. The slot can be hand-climbed, but a rappelling rack definitely helped here too. It should be noted that this room and the entrance room contain the largest spiders that I've ever seen in my life.

The cave at this point is about 25' tall canyon passage with some shelves at about head-height and up towards the ceiling. A small stream appears here from beneath the slot and under the breakdown, and it more or less stays with the main passage the entire cave length. The existing maps says that there's an upper level to the cave, but it doesn't look like you could travel it here at the beginning of the cave, at least not a human (hint: this is what writers call "foreshadowing"). It winds for a bit, but generally follows the same straight path set out from the start.

After a few hundred feet of walking, a large 25' - 30' dome is encountered. A small stream pours out of the top, from the direction of Bonner Garbage Cave. It looks like a bolt climb or scaling pole would be necessary to reach passage at this level. Several interesting scratch marks were noted on the wall here, looking not unlike the claws of some animal...

The walking passage continues, from this point frequently interrupted by breakdown blocks in the passage which must be scaled over or snuck around, but movement is still easy. The cave then does a short zig-zag. In this zig-zag, there's a layer of white calcite crystals on the wall - not nearly as pretty as Cave Mountain, but cool to see. The water flows underneath the floor by about two or three feet, and is occasionally visible. There's a nice resting spot, a shelf table, a couple hundred feet ahead. There's also a side lead ahead and to the left, but the water and air continue forward, so we did as well. According to the map, which I didn't see until after we'd exited the cave, there's a traversable upper passage somewhere along this point - we did not notice it.

Here, the walking passage gets constricted and the water passage gets crawlable. This was the first time we really got wet in the cave. It's hands-and-knees at first, but eventually becomes a chest-in-the-water crawl. The water is only an inch or two deep, but it's just enough to be a pain. At this point, Kevin wisely chose to wait for Josh and I back at the resting area.

We crawled forward, scooting across the Tucker County asphalt, observing lots of white soda straws and small formations up towards the ceiling, and wishing it were big enough for us to stay out of the water. There's a kneeling point where we believe the final survey station, some orange tape, is placed. The ceiling here is filled with formations, including a 3' long soda straw. From here, the floor is too low to continue crawling, but the middle tube - about 10" by 10" with side, top, and bottom slots - is big enough to continue. Movement is very constricted, and is made especially annoying by how rough the sides of the passage are. We both eventually had to ditch our packs to keep going. Josh was 30' - 40' ahead of me, and we were both concerned that we'd have to try and back out of this tube. I waited at a "convenient" spot, he rounded a bend to where the passage gets a bit wider with some more soda straws, but continues as a nasty tube crawl. The wind in this constricted passage is incredibly strong, visibly blowing the orange survey tape around.

We managed to get turned around, eventually went back to meet Kevin, and headed back out. At the big dome, Josh and I examined the claw marks on the wall, speculating about what sort of animal would make them. As we headed forward to leave, I shined my lamp out towards the canyon ceiling, and Kevin shouted "Look at those eyes!" Two pair of glowing yellow eyes, moving around up above, were watching us. Raccoons! While the Keplingers are the kind of folks that hunt 'coon with their bare hands, I was just a bit nervous thinking about how my accident report was going to sound..."150lb City-boy Caver Mauled By Rabid Cave Coons". Apparently these raccoons were well-fed at the time, because they chose not to attack us as we briskly jogged the rest of the canyon passage back to the slot. I kept my light pointed towards the ceiling just in case.

We used hand ascenders to climb back up the slot, then each slowly and un-gracefully climbed back up the wet sinkhole entrance. We probably spent only 3 hours in cave. Josh and I walked around the area afterwards, finding a very small sinkhole that didn't move air on the far side of the hill, and a tiny resurgance with no cave passage on the bottom of that hillside.

[trip] Virgin Druid on New Years Eve!

Saturday, New Years Eve 2005, just 364 days after virgin cave was entered at New Years Day Cave, I got the honor of breaking into virgin cave (my first ever) at the downstream dig! The new cave (edit: officially named "Hero Hole") is obstructed upstream after about 200', but considering the strong wind and the much better limestone than the upstream (NYDC) side, we know there's lots more cave to find. This cave, and New Years Day Cave, are presumed to be the downstream and upstream arms of Druid Cave.



Aaron, smiling at another successful speleo-project - photo by Brian Masney

[trip] Cave Mountain

Friday, 2005-12-30, the Mon Grotto woke up painfully early to visit Cave Mountain, in Pendleton County.

Everyone gradually arrived at Seneca Rocks, then milled around for a bit waiting for our trip leader to arrive. Since Rocky Parsons and Aaron Bird both had a good idea where the cave was, and since the leader was quite late, our caravan set out over the twisty mountain roads to locate the cave. We made it to the parking area no problem, though the cliff up on the mountain looked like it was miles away! The hike turned out to be enjoyable one - there was a well-kept trail the entire way up with a spectacular view of the valley.



The beautiful view from our hike up the mountain

The cave was literally at the top of the mountain! We suited up and headed through the entrance gate (Cave Mountain Cave is closed during the summer as a bat nursery). Because of the steep strike of the limestone, most of the passage and rooms had diagonal walls, giving the cave a bit of an amusement park funhouse feel. You can tell that at one time, the cave had a good bit of nice formations, but it's had a lot of traffic over the last 150 years (it was once mined for saltpeter), and it now looks very worn. It's also a very dry cave - I was able to wear my cave suit the next day without washing it!

Most of the passage is large walking passage and nice-sized rooms. We climbed down to a lower level, and Aaron rigged up a field harness, belay line, and hand line on the spot to help people down a climb. In the lower and upper levels, many bands of limestone were completely covered in fossils of shells and large crinoids; I kept Aaron and Rocky busy with geology questions the entire trip.



Fossils cover the walls in Cave Mountain

We finally headed back to the upper level in search of an alleged "crystal wall" which we had some scribbled directions to. The group probably looked like a bunch of lost tourists, but we found it after more debate than should have been necessary... and it turns out that the crystal wall was actually pretty impressive. It was probably an 8' high layer of dogtooth spar, in one spot completely covering the sides and top of an archway you could walk under.



The much-hyped crystal wall

We left the cave, hiked back down the mountain, and were all on our respective ways home before dark.

Alternate trip reports: Doug McCarty

Photos: Mine, Doug McCarty