[trip] Cass Cave

Brian Masney, Mary Schmidt, Jason Thomas, and Dave Riggs took a trip into Cass Cave, one of WV's most amazing (and infamous) vertical caves. We met Saturday night and spent a chilly night camping at Oildrum Falls. In the morning, we grabbed some breakfast at Snowshoe, then headed to Cass. We packed up a ton of photography gear, and a large "emergency pack" in case a sudden weather change caused an extended trip. We hiked up the valley to the cave entrance, geared up, and headed in cave around 11:30am.

Brian and Jason headed in first to haul gear and rig the drop. Mary and I followed with the remainder of the gear. The entrance passage was relatively dry, but we still managed to get our arms and legs wet in the stream crawl. We met back up at the climb to the belay loft, passed our gear up to the top, and climbed into the windy upper passage. Brian chimneyed out and picked the two best of the available four bolts, and backed up with a safety traverse line back on solid ground. To get one rope, one must slide out across a slick ledge for about 8', and then shimmy down into a narrow canyon where the bolts will keep rappellers safely out of the spray from Suicide Falls.

The 180' rappel takes you down about 30' against walls and ledges, then it's a free rappel into a huge room... Suicide Falls crashes down on one side, the other overlooks a giant mountain of breakdown with an enormous boulder wedged between both walls, frozen in mid-tumble. After you climb the breakdown pile, the enormous borehole passage stretches as far forward as you can possibly see. We set up the gear for some photography of this amazing passage.

Brian, while incredibly skilled in photography, is not nearly as well known for his electronics skills... and for good reason. Brian constructed several flash guns using radio shack parts, duct tape, and cardboard. He handed these fine units out to his unwitting sherpas and sent us all out into the borehole passage to try and light it up. As I screwed my first flashbulb into the untested flash gun, I heard a loud pop, my vision went completely white, and felt a sharp pain in my ungloved fingers as they were singed by the magnesium flashbulb. Brian helpfully recommended that I "make sure that I'm not pressing the button" on the gun, and then suggested that I contribute to the photo by screwing the next bulb in on the count of "three" (to which I very politely replied "NO.") I made him screw the next bulb in, and it worked correctly, giving me a false sense of security. I tried another and was rewarded with yet another pop and the stench of melted neoprene glove.

We headed further on into the cave to check out some amazing rimstone dams and the birdbath formation, as well as lots of great bacon and flowstone on the walls. A lower passage leads to a pristine lake surrounded by formations, which we didn't go near for fear of messing it up with our filthy boots.

Cass Cave "big room", photo by Brian Masney.