Beyond Mammoth Cave Read online

  Then we started into the crawls of Crump Spring Cave, and it seemed that our trip was doomed from the start. Both our primary lights flickered and failed. Joe cut his hand trying to open a stubborn carbide lamp, and my cave pack zipper closure failed, resulting in the pack repeatedly spilling its contents. Delays plagued us at every turn. In four hours, we had gone a distance that should have taken an hour. We had barely begun and were already routed. Six hours after entering the cave, we emerged in the hot late-afternoon June sun, defeated. That cave could injure and frustrate.

  A couple of hours later, after a hot meal in Cave City, we drove north on the interstate back towards Fisher Ridge. To the west in the dull haze beneath the sinking sun, I saw the outlines of a broad ridge paralleling the highway.

  “Joe, what ridge is that over there?”

  He squinted in the direction I was pointing. Thinking for a second, he answered, “I think that’s Toohey Ridge.”

  “Any cave under it?”

  “I don’t know of any.”

  “Do you think there might be some decent cave there somewhere?”

  He paused, then answered thoughtfully, “It has a lot of potential. Ought to be a big cave under there.”

  “Has anybody looked?”

  He shrugged, “Not that I know of. Who would look? There isn’t anybody else who could look.”

  “Why haven’t you looked?” I said.

  “No time.”

  I pondered his answer. Incredible. A major ridge right under our noses and untouched by cavers. “Joe, I’m going to find cave beneath Toohey Ridge.”

  “Sure, go for it!” he said with a smile.

  Would it be a big cave? A cave system, maybe? At that moment, I decided I would lead the search for the undiscovered Toohey Ridge Cave System.

  3

  Beginnings

  Jim Borden Discovers the Search for a Long Cave Is Not Easy

  Wind shook and rain pelted my car as I vainly tried to sleep, my body stiff from being crammed into the front seat. Hours ago I had been routed from where I was sleeping on a picnic table beneath the shelter of a pavilion next to my car. I peered into the gloom of this fierce December storm. Silhouettes of looming tombstones surrounded me. Were the dead watching me? I shivered back down on the cramped seat as another blast of chilly wind shook the car. Who could sleep through this?

  If anyone had noticed, it must have seemed an eerie scene. Every morning and every night, my yellow Datsun was parked in the Monroe Cemetery on the southwest end of Toohey Ridge. The curious would have thought that cavers were pretty strange people. (It’s true.) Most of the rural residents had met this kid from Washington, D.C., who asked them if they knew of any caves in the area. They surely would think that anyone who would sleep in a cemetery lacked common sense.

  In my exhaustion, I slowly drifted off to sleep, the driving rain creating a backdrop for vivid and violent dreams.

  I awoke to a pitifully wet and gloomy dawn under a blanket of dense fog. It was New Year’s Day, the beginning of the seventh day of my solo hiking and cave-probing expedition on the surface of Toohey Ridge. This was my second search for the cave system beneath the ridge. Earlier in the summer, I had spent a day exploring the lay of the land, learning what I could about the known caves and the folklore about them. During this past week, I had interviewed more than twenty residents who owned cave-promising tracts of land. I had walked miles of rocky, steep ridge sides, cramming my body into any hole that might lead to cave. The weather was terrible; the conditions appalling. Days of relentless rain had turned the hillsides into muck. It was always cold and gloomy, the fog hanging for days at a time, cutting into me like an icy knife. My diet of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches did little to relieve the cold. This was not fun, but it was necessary. Finding caves was tough work that one had to undertake like a detective.

  I kept detailed notes on everything I found. I had accomplished a lot, and my topographic map was covered with little pencil dots with names and descriptive information crammed into the margins. But I was slowly realizing that discovering the Toohey Ridge Cave System would be a difficult task. No hole I found led to real cave or even showed much promise of doing so. I found mostly isolated pits leading apparently nowhere. Also, I never found the hoped-for blast of air associated with big cave.

  Unlike the other major cave-bearing ridges (Flint Ridge, Mammoth Cave Ridge, Joppa Ridge), Toohey Ridge lacked a historically known cave to start cavers on the way toward major discoveries. In Joppa Ridge, it was Proctor Cave; in Flint Ridge, Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave. Toohey Ridge had nothing and so had largely been ignored by cavers. Early in the century, locals had searched diligently for a cave to commercialize but had found nothing. I had learned quickly that I was not the first to be thwarted.

  It was the end of the week and time to head home.

  My optimism dashed, I finally realized that I needed help. It was time to find a partner. Frustrated but not discouraged, I returned to Potomac, Maryland, and brooded about the future.

  A month or so later, a copy of the NSS Bulletin arrived. Flipping through the pages, I came across an article about a Kentucky cave. Jim Currens, the author, had written an interesting scientific description of a small cave in Rockcastle County, south of Lexington in central Kentucky. It was not the article that intrigued me, however. Here was someone, a competent caver unknown to me, who lived near the Mammoth Cave area. And from the looks of his expertly drawn map accompanying the article, he was an accomplished cartographer. Being “unknown” could be important: cavers were usually well-known because they were involved in a major cave-mapping project. The caving network is tight. A well-known caver would be preoccupied and have too little time to become involved in something new. But maybe I could interest Jim Currens in Toohey Ridge.

  I wrote him a carefully worded letter offering him a piece of the action, what I thought could be a real lifetime adventure. Without revealing too much information, but still presenting enough where he would not summarily reject my request, I offered him a chance to help discover and explore one of the longest caves in the world, the Toohey Ridge Cave System. My statements were bold, the vision farsighted. Could he see it, too?

  I paused over the finished letter, contemplating its effect. I did not count on receiving a response. After all, this was a letter out of the blue from a complete stranger. I had omitted my age, thinking being seventeen would not work to my advantage. Better let that ride.

  I sealed the letter and mailed it.

  Six weeks later, in March 1975, I tapped on the door of a house trailer on the north side of Lexington. I had never been lost in confusing cave passages, but I was lost in this maze of a mobile home park. Obscurely marked addresses and the random layout of the roads baffled me. I was not even sure I had the right trailer number. The lights from the adjacent drive-in movie theater cast gloomy shadows as I stood patiently waiting on the metal steps. I wondered what kind of person this Jim Currens would be as the muffled screams from the violent movie bounced through the trailer park. After an eternity (fifteen seconds), the door was opened by a tall man with thick, plastic-rimmed glasses and a closely cropped mustache. This was Jim Currens. We shook hands as he smiled and invited me in. His wife, Deb, greeted me. Their home was comfortable and well kept.

  I had driven from Maryland with a caving buddy, Bob Hummer. The three of us spent the next several hours poring over maps spread on the living room floor while Deb continued with her sewing. We talked geology, hydrology, and any other “-ology” that supported our conviction that there was an enormous cave beneath Toohey Ridge. Jim had also once looked at Toohey Ridge as a prospect for finding big cave, eventually abandoning the idea with the assumption that someone had surely already staked out this claim. I assured Jim that I had heard from good authority that we were probably the first to give Toohey Ridge a serious look. The discussion went deep into the night.

  “Look at this anticlinal structure here,” Jim said. “Big passages should f
orm along this.” He pointed to Monroe Sink, an especially large sinkhole nearly three-quarters of a mile in diameter, on a map showing the geology of the area. “The sandstone was thinner here because of the anticline and provided a quick route for the water to form lots of cave.”

  I nodded in agreement and offered my own argument for big cave. “All the water that formed Mammoth Cave from the sinkhole plain,” I pointed to the west, “had to flow through Toohey Ridge!” I slammed my fist on the map for emphasis.

  “Flint Ridge, too!” Jim added. “The main Salts Cave trunk points like an arrow directly towards the anticlinal structure at Monroe Sink.” His finger swooped from the approximate end of Salts Cave to the northwest, past its entrance, and far to the southeast to where it would obviously have to run through Toohey Ridge.

  Our determination grew and our confidence swelled at each fact we tossed at each other. There was a giant cave in Toohey Ridge; we were sure of it. And we would find it!

  Jim Currens was a professional geologist working for the state. His job was to measure and inventory coal reserves in coal-rich eastern Kentucky. He had been caving for several years with the Blue Grass Grotto of the NSS based in Lexington. He had gained project experience in the seven-mile labyrinth of James Cave in the knobs south of Mammoth Cave National Park. He, like me, had bumped around for several years looking for the “right” project. This search was the common thread that was bringing us together.

  The next morning over breakfast, we rehashed the details on some of the leads I had found during that wet Christmas week when I had camped in the cemetery on Toohey Ridge. Many did not continue, but a few seemed promising enough to need a second look. Bob Hummer and I planned to be on Toohey Ridge the whole of the following week. Jim had to work but would be able to make it down on Friday. I knew how important it was to get Jim on the hook, so we told him that Bob and I would continue our ridge walking to find other promising leads, saving the best ones for Jim’s arrival.

  Toohey Ridge is typical of the broad, sandstone-capped ridges of the Mammoth Cave Plateau. About four miles long, oriented north-south, it broadens from a half-mile to about a mile in width at its south end. Several large hollows cut into its flanks, making the ridge look like the outlines of a giant mitten. The sandstone crest of the ridge rises about two hundred feet above the surrounding valleys. Hydrologically, Toohey Ridge lies between Mammoth Cave National Park to the west and the sinkhole plain on the southeast. The sinkhole plain has been recognized as the principal water source contributing to the development of Mammoth Cave. All that water from the sinkhole plain flowed underground beneath Toohey Ridge on its way to Mammoth Cave and just had to have created a big cave system like Mammoth Cave.

  The old-timers realized the potential of Toohey Ridge. Over the years, they had done what we were now doing, albeit using cruder equipment. However, their determination undoubtedly matched ours if the remains of makeshift ladders of cedar poles and tailings of dogged excavations were any clue. In the years preceding the arrival of us “modern cavers,” only a handful of real caves had been found on Toohey Ridge, one of them exceeding a thousand feet in length. All ended in narrow slits or ancient collapses of sandstone or limestone breakdown. The system that must be there had not been found.

  At the appointed meeting time at the Monroe Family Cemetery on Friday, Bob and I waited impatiently, looking at our watches every few minutes. Jim was late. I did not know Jim well and still was not confident he would come. The day was sunny and pleasant, and I was eager to get going. I gazed at the tombstones surrounding the pavilion where we waited. In the bright sunshine, they looked far less foreboding than they had that rainy December night. Maybe this was an omen of good luck.

  After another fifteen minutes, my impatience led to discussion about leaving without him, but then I heard the high-pitched whine of Jim’s dark blue Volkswagen Beetle as it came speeding down the road.

  “Sorry I was late. Got a later start than I wanted.” Jim smiled. “And you can’t speed in these things,” he said, gesturing towards his car.

  “No problem. I was a little worried you wouldn’t show.”

  Jim frowned. “I told you I’d be here.”

  I smiled, trying to diffuse his obvious annoyance. “Oh, I just worry.”

  “So, what’s up?” Jim pointed at the map roll on the picnic table beneath the pavilion.

  I unrolled the map and placed rocks on the corners to keep it flat. I had made notes in the margin of the caves Bob and I had checked. All of them had ended quickly. As I had promised, we had saved the more promising leads for Jim. I pointed to them on the map.

  We started out, Bob and I leading the way with Jim following in his Beetle. We drove from lead to lead along the narrow, winding roads that zigzagged across Toohey Ridge. First we checked an open pit on the top of the ridge called Buzzard Pit. From above, it looked like a window into large passage twenty feet below. However, once descended on cable ladders, we found only cul-de-sacs off a circular room. We then drove to the north edge of Toohey Ridge to check a cave whose owner had reported that the entrance led to two levels of passageways. Our imagination had painted a glowing picture, but once there, we found little. Yes, there were two levels (by some stretch of imagination), but the cave went a total of only thirty feet before the ceiling closed down. The remainder of the afternoon went this way, lead after lead ending as abruptly as the others. Our results discouraged us.

  By five o’clock, we had checked the last lead off my list. What a bust! In the remaining daylight, I showed Jim some of the other leads I had checked the previous year. These did not have a definitive end; exploration had stopped at blowing breakdown collapses or low digs. The caves might go, but significant effort would be required. As we reevaluated each obstacle, Jim nodded in agreement that I had come to the correct conclusion.

  Jim was most fascinated by a cave nestled in a small hollow at the bottom of a large valley. By far, this was the most promising of all the caves we had visited that day. Jakes Cave— as it was locally called—blew a lot of air and looked as though it could lead into a broad section of Toohey Ridge. Unfortunately, a hundred feet inside, a pile of rocks extended from floor to ceiling with wind whistling through the remaining voids. We were blocked again, but possibilities existed for working through the massive collapse. If we were successful, we thought we would be into what we were now both calling the Toohey Ridge Cave System!

  Jim Currens and I would return with tools to begin what would obviously be an extended project. We were in this for the long haul.

  Six months later, the cave roof shuddered and groaned as I rammed the heavy, six-foot steel bar into the choked jumble of sandstone boulders that threatened to fall at any moment.

  “This must have been what it was like at Q87,” I said. Q87 was a frustrating sandstone choke that thwarted efforts for years in connecting the Flint Ridge Cave System with Mammoth Cave. Explorers in Flint Ridge had also rammed steel pipes into a collapse much like this one, hoping to open a way to climb up into Mammoth Cave. The cool air teased them about what lay beyond; repeated attempts were unsuccessful.

  Straining, I wiggled and pried the bar in an effort to dislodge a few more sandstone boulders. What were our prospects for success?

  “All I know is, this is pretty scary,” Jim remarked from behind me. The ceiling groaned again. We heard the dull sound of rocks shifting and rolling far overhead. Intriguing.

  I continued tugging at the heavy bar. Rocks began to fall from the hole I was digging upward. An avalanche! I recoiled, fearing the worst. Unfortunately, the only way to dig was straight up into the foreboding pile. Our engineering plan was to lie on our backs in the cold, damp sand—one at a time because the passage was so small—with our faces immediately below the jammed sandstone boulders. We would eat rocks if the pile shifted unexpectedly. In the nick of time, before the rocks did fall, we were to scoot out of the way. We did this work in shifts.

  I pulled my head out just as dark sandst
one boulders rained down into our sheltered crawlway. Exhausted now from hours of moving rock, we rested briefly beneath the cold, gray, flat limestone ceiling. A cool breeze refreshed us. This was hard work!

  We were in Jakes Cave. We had returned trip after trip, our progress thwarted at this funnel of loose rock. Nevertheless, we were still brimming with optimism. The cave’s gaping, arched entrance, six feet high and thirty feet wide, promised good things ahead.

  Over the past several months, Jim and I had dug with great determination. We lugged in piles of Jim’s tools: sledgehammers, stone chisels, picks, and longbars. By moving rock, we worked our way farther into the cave beneath ledges and well into the collapse zone. After maybe fifty feet, the ledges gave out, and we squirmed into a low room with a ceiling composed of a single large block that had peeled from the ceiling. At one end, the strong breeze blew from an upward-leading chute filled with grapefruit-sized sandstone rocks. We removed these rocks easily, but the supply seemed inexhaustible. At the end of each trip, we cleared a large cavity in the rock pile, apparently stabilizing it. The pile always resettled between trips, so each time we returned we faced the same situation over again. We took turns prying and hammering at the blockage. To show for our labor, we had only our carefully placed spoil piles, thousands of pounds of rock crammed into every niche we could find. Slowly, but surely, the room was filling up.

  Two months after that first trip in March with Jim, after graduation from high school in May 1975, I moved to Lexington to attend classes at the University of Kentucky. I declared a major in geology, a fitting profession for a caver, I told myself. All my caving buddies were studying geology at various universities. I told my parents how important it was to become acquainted with the campus environment, and summer school would be a good head start. I did not tell my parents that taking summer classes was one way to move to Kentucky as soon as possible to continue the search for the Toohey Ridge Cave System unimpeded by a six-hundred-mile drive. My Datsun loaded to the roof with all my belongings, I headed off to school.