Beyond Mammoth Cave Page 7

  My own arrogant attitude pissed off those old veterans. A few patronized me, and some even enjoyed my company, but most seemed basically intolerant. I could visualize the vectors of a collision course between the CRF and me. A poster on the wall of the CRF Field Station said it all: “Those of you who think you know it all are annoying to those of us who do.”

  Trip after trip, party and expedition leaders told me I was screwing up. If I did not straighten up my act, they said they would throw me out.

  This was just prejudice, I thought. They resented someone with my energy, understanding, and desire. I rocked the boat, and they did not like boat rockers.

  It was a bittersweet pill. Although I admired the CRF’s organization and liked most of the people, I could not stand their lock on leadership to which I was so capable of contributing. Where was their sense of appreciation? I slowly withdrew to the security of my own project a mile to the east.

  On 3 April 1976, I led a group of cavers to look at holes along the northeast corner of Eudora Ridge, while Jim Currens took a group to search for cave entrances in some of the still unchecked valleys surrounding Toohey Ridge.

  Eudora Ridge is another broad expanse of sandstone just to the northeast of, and almost adjoining, Toohey Ridge. Eudora Ridge was in our new search area, and we found caves there to explore. Jim’s group walked the valleys and climbed up each hollow on the flank of Eudora Ridge looking for holes that water flowed into during rains.

  A stranger emerged from the undergrowth, startling Jim and his companions. “Hey! What are you guys up to?”

  Had they trespassed? Jim usually made great efforts not to. They must not have noticed they had crossed from one farm to the next. He answered in his most professional tone, “I’m Jim Currens. We are cave explorers looking for caves around here.” He added, “I apologize. We didn’t know we’d crossed onto your property.”

  The stranger looked over the ragtag group he had stumbled upon. Satisfied with Jim’s story, the stranger continued, “No problem. I just wanted to make sure you guys weren’t hunting or something. We’ve had a lot of problems with hunters.” The stranger stretched his arm out to shake hands with Jim. “I’m Bill Downey.”

  Jim clasped his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “I own the farm up the hill.” Downey pointed behind him with a nod of his head. “I know where a few holes are you might like to look at. Why don’t you guys come with me and meet my partner, Jerry Roppel? All of us are camped up on the ridge.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Downey turned up the hill and led the way through the woods. After walking up an old road, they emerged into an open field. Across it was a small mobile home and a bonfire. A half dozen people were cooking hot dogs on sticks.

  Bill Downey was from Louisville. His open and outgoing style disarmed people. He and Jerry Roppel, from Bowling Green, thirty miles to the south, owned this farm, a weekend retreat where they could hunt or just escape the pressures of work and city.

  After an hour of socializing, the entire group squeezed into the back of a pickup truck. They sat among coolers of beer and empty oil cans. The battered Chevy truck pitched along an overgrown and rutted road that meandered along the bottom of the valley. The passengers in the back clung to the sides to keep from being bounced out. Roppel soon pulled into a pasture past an abandoned log homestead where cattle grazed by a small pond. Sinkholes dotted the bottom of the narrow valley. Roppel stopped at the edge of the woods below a shallow draw in the flank of Eudora Ridge.

  “You boys come take a look at this. Found it fencing the other day.”

  They scrambled after Roppel up the draw, through low-hanging branches that made walking difficult. They crawled under a new strand of barbed wire and felt a blast of cold air. A narrow gully coming down from the top of the hill disappeared into a three-foot hole in the side of the draw. The gale blew out from its unknown depths.

  Jim had not seen anything like this in two years. Real cave! This was not just one of the dozens of moss-lined holes we were accustomed to seeing, but a cave that still took lots of water and blew lots of air. He crouched, straining his eyes as he peered into the dark. He tossed a stone through the low opening. Silence, then a faint echoing clatter from below. A pit! They might be able to squeeze through the eight-inch constriction beyond the initial opening, but they had no ropes or lights. They would have to get some gear and return.

  That evening, Jim told me about the new discovery, Roppel Cave. I ached with envy. All this work, and I had missed the big moment! They had even decided upon the name!

  The next morning, we gathered Jim’s tools together and all the vertical equipment we could find. Our plan was to send a small party ahead to rig the pit inside the entrance. The rest would check some other leads on the surface. Herb Scott, a jovial, round-faced caver from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, was eager to lead the party checking the pit. This was fine with me. If Herb succeeded, he would be sucked in to our caving for life. If the hole did not go, I would not be there to suffer the disappointment of yet another defeat.

  Jim Currens, Steve Stewart, and I fanned out to search for Isenberg Cave. This was another on our list. Local folklore painted a picture of grand cave, but nobody could tell us where it was. Two hours of bushwhacking resulted in nothing but shredded clothing. Anyway, my mind was back with the others. Suddenly, Herb Scott’s party emerged from the brambles.

  “Herb, didn’t the cave go?” I asked apprehensively.

  “Too small to squeeze into,” he said. “Tried hammering. Rock’s too hard to break. Damn near busted our hands trying, but it just won’t give. Any ideas?” They had rigged a rope to descend the drop found yesterday, but nobody could fit under the first low opening into whatever lay beyond.

  Jim smiled, and with a twinkling eye responded, “I have some `instant cave’ back at the fieldhouse.”

  We returned quickly to Roppel Cave. Jim removed a bag of white powder and a small plastic bottle of rose-colored liquid from his pack. These were the two components of his “instant cave.” Separate, they were harmless; together, they were an explosive. After biting the top off the plastic bottle, he squeezed the liquid into the plastic bag of white powder and kneaded the mixture together like cookie dough. Herb Scott, meanwhile, pulled out the rope they had rigged earlier, coiled it, and stashed it behind a large tree. I had heard tales of expert blasting opening the way in nearby Jesse James Cave, which was where Jim had learned this skill. Jim’s precautions impressed us all.

  Jim carefully packed the explosive mixture between the problem ledge and the cliff face, using mud and rocks to tamp the charge. From his pocket he pulled a blasting cap with two protruding wires. Energized, it would detonate the primary explosive. Meanwhile, we payed out a roll of silver-colored wire to reach a battery Jim had placed behind a large tree.

  “Borden, bite off the insulation from the far end of your wires. Then twist them together,” Jim instructed.

  As I obeyed, he explained that this would guard against latent static electricity prematurely detonating the explosive he was about to wire.

  “Done?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Are you positive?”

  “Yes!” I shouted. Suspicious, untrusting son of a bitch, I thought.

  Jim completed the wiring of the charge by twisting the wire to the blasting cap leads. He was careful not to let the two exposed leads touch each other. Done, he climbed out to join us. We all ducked behind trees for cover.

  Jim authoritatively surveyed the scene. Once satisfied that all was well, he shouted, “Fire in the hole!”

  He touched the exposed ends of the blasting wire to the battery terminals. A burst of white smoke shot from the opening. We hunkered down.

  Crack!

  Rocks ripped through the leaves around us. Seconds later, silence returned, smoke blowing away in the wind.

  Our ears rang. We eagerly ran over the sharp, freshly shattered rocks. The ledge was gone, turned to rubble and dust. We c
leaned away the loose rock and admired our fine entrance to Roppel Cave.

  We re-rigged the pit, lowering the end of the rope into the drop. Herb Scott clipped onto the rope, and after testing it with a stout tug, he rappelled into the cave.

  “Take a good look around and let us know what you see.” We would wait until we were sure the cave went somewhere.

  From below, Herb shouted, “Off rope!”

  Herb was in a complex cluster of six or seven vertical shafts about thirty feet high and ten feet in diameter. Leaves and branches littered the floor. The way to continue was not obvious. If he stood very still, he could hear the faint thunder of a distant waterfall. Dark holes high on the wall hinted at passages but were unreachable. Herb knew about the necessity of reaching that water if Roppel Cave was going to amount to anything. Flowing water is a better indicator of going cave than dry leads. Some holes that looked promising turned out to be blind alcoves or cracks too narrow for cavers. Air blew from all the cracks, but there was no way through. These shafts were alive; they carried lots of water to somewhere. Something must go.

  “Send Rod down,” yelled Herb. “So far, I haven’t found anything. I do hear a waterfall and I need some help here.”

  Rod Metcalfe, from Lexington, Kentucky, was a geology student. A new recruit, he had provided strong help on a number of trips.

  Rod and Herb rechecked everything, looking under ledges and behind boulders for the elusive way on. Under one small ledge just fifteen feet from the base of the rope, they saw a crawlway, overlooked at first because it was so tiny. Herb peered into it and felt a breeze blowing in his face. He could see ten feet into a slightly larger canyon. Cave.

  Herb jammed his body into the small hole, grunting as he inched forward. The walls were lined with lumpy calcite deposits with sharp edges—popcorn—that grabbed and tore his clothes. He stopped as his chest got hung up on a constriction. The passage was too small. He wiggled back out, stripped off his shirt, and forced his exposed torso through the chest compressor, leaving bits of ripped skin behind.

  “Ouch! That’s a real booger!” he gasped. “Rod, come on through. I see a narrow canyon ahead . . . might need your help.”

  Rod was smaller, but he still had trouble forcing himself over the sharp mound of popcorn. They belly-crawled along the tight, body-sized tube over a deep, narrow canyon. Thirty feet farther on, they peered down into a lower-level room. Ahead of them at the same level, they heard the sounds of water. Fifty feet farther, they were over a larger, deeper hole. They heard the shower of the waterfall directly below them, too far to see. They returned to get more help and a rope.

  After we listened to the twosome’s animated report coming up from the bottom of the entrance drop, we knew we were onto something. I grabbed the two rolled-up sections of thirty-foot-long cable ladder to take with me as I rappelled down the rope. Cable ladders were the mainstay of our vertical caving in the many short vertical shafts on Toohey Ridge. Constructed of aircraft cable with quarter-inch-diameter aluminum rungs six inches wide every twelve inches, they are fast and convenient and often make climbing gear unnecessary. Unfortunately, they are not as strong as rope and should be used with a safety line, and they can be awkward, if not dangerous, in some climbing conditions.

  We snap-linked the two ladder sections together and unrolled them into the first hole. A jutting horn of rock provided a place to rig the ladders. I could not see the bottom and there were no rocks to toss, so I had no idea how deep the pit was. I tied a safety line around my middle. Rod jammed his hips into the canyon and looped the other end of the safety line around his back. With my feet in the ladder rungs, I squeezed through the canyon and into open space where I could begin climbing down. As I descended the ladder, Rod slowly fed out the rope. If I slipped, he would catch me.

  I counted thirty rungs, then stepped onto the cobble-covered floor.

  “Off belay!” I shouted.

  “Belay . . . off!”

  I untied and stood among the tangled heap of the excess thirty-five feet of cable ladder. The room was a bell-shaped vertical shaft floored with sandstone cobbles, broken rock, and more storm debris. Water dripped into a pool at the far end and flowed out beneath a ledge beside me. I had climbed down from its highest point, twenty-five feet above my head.

  “Anything there?” came an impatient shout from above. Two hopeful faces were crammed into the space, staring down.

  I crawled through the stream under the ledge. “Checking.”

  I squeezed on my belly on the gravel floor of the stream into another much larger vertical shaft with a ceiling forty feet above my head. Above, I could see the shadow of a canyon snaking across the ceiling, apparently the one from which Herb and Rod had seen the waterfall. Just in front of me was a jagged gash in the floor. Another pit! I scooped up rocks and tossed them through the hole. Whoomph! The crash echoed up seconds later. The echoes confirmed that the pit below was large. I threw in rock after rock, pleased at every crash. Any kid who has smashed pop bottles knows the feeling.

  Several minutes later, muffled voices announced the arrival of Jim, Herb, and Rod at the lip of the pit.

  They had heard my racket and shouts and knew I had found something. We sat gleefully on the edge of the pit, feet dangling into the abyss. Every loose rock we could find whistled down the pit.

  “Wow! This monster is huge!” I said.

  “I can only see the one wall here.” Jim pointed to one side. “Everything else is out of sight. It must be at least seventy-five feet across!” His voice echoed in the open space.

  Jim’s broad grin reflected my feelings. Would this lead into Toohey Ridge? This had to be the way; it felt so right. But we were out of rope and time. We had burned the day getting this far. We began making plans for the next weekend.

  First things first. In order to get out, we had to face the ladder climb, the narrow canyon, and the Chest Compressor. And we found that rerolling the ladders in the narrow confines of the canyon above the drop was impossible—another disadvantage of ladders. With one person pulling the ladder up and the other three stationed along the canyon, we threaded the ladders out to the shafts at the entrance where I rolled them up.

  We climbed up the rope to the surface, where the wind snuffed out the flames of our carbide lamps. Three hours after throwing the last rock down the new pit, our happy, tired party walked back to the waiting vehicles under a beautiful full moon. On 4 April 1976, we had found a cave.

  4

  A Way In

  Jim Borden and Jim Currens Find a Cave

  The week following the discovery of Roppel Cave crawled by. Wondering what was down that pit became an obsession for me.

  On Friday evening, I paced, watching for headlights to appear on the rutted road leading to our fieldhouse. My excitement spilled over into impatience and fear that no one would show up. After what seemed an eternity, Jim Currens arrived. He had recruited a large crew of cavers for the weekend, all interested in the promise of Roppel Cave. The excitement was contagious. Far into the night, we drew up our plans. We would survey what we had found the previous week, rig the new drop, and continue exploring beyond.

  Jim and Herb Scott would spearhead our advance. Jim brought explosives to enlarge the Chest Compressor as well as the tight ladder drop beyond it; then they would rig the drops. My job was to survey the route from the entrance with the remainder of the party. A sensible plan.

  However, it turned out more like “The Three Stooges Go Caving.” After Jim blasted open the hole at the top of the ladder drop, I ordered the survey crew through the former Chest Compressor before Jim and Herb could repack their tools and gear and head toward the big drop.

  “You idiot! We need to get past you,” railed Jim.

  “If you hadn’t been so damn slow, we wouldn’t be ahead!” I shouted. “What did you expect us to do—wait around for you guys to get ready?”

  After the exchange of insults, my survey crew squeezed down into the canyon, and the riggin
g team crawled over us, their knees digging into our backs. They rigged and descended the ladders, and we resumed the survey.

  When we reached the rigging team at the new pit, Jim was hammering a drill bit into the rock to place anchors. Two artificial anchors would be necessary, since there were no natural tie-off points. He had already driven one Rawl stud—a steel bolt slightly larger than the receiving hole—into the first hole; then he placed a hanger over it for rigging, using a tiny crescent wrench to snug down a nut to hold the hanger on. We threaded our rope through a carabiner hooked to the hanger.

  Jim moved swiftly to place the second bolt as we uncoiled the one-hundred-foot length of nylon rope and lowered it into the pit. These were Jim’s bolts; he would go first.

  He rappelled through the narrow rift just below the anchored tie-off. “Yahooo!” He celebrated his gliding descent into a very large shaft. On the bottom, seventy feet below, he unclipped himself from the rope.

  “Off rope!” echoed from below.

  I rigged to descend while Jim checked for leads. Herb would follow me with the survey gear.

  Shortly, Jim bellowed, “Borden! Come on down!”

  “On my way!” I yelled. “On rappel!”

  As I slid down the rope, I saw that this was an immense, flat-floored room, by far the largest we had yet found. A waterfall thundered into a large pool. Water ran out a small passage on the opposite side of the room. Jim’s light flashed from within a large side canyon fifty feet across the room.

  Jim met me as my feet touched the bottom. I said, “What’s over—?”

  “There,” Jim pointed at a black void, seeming to know what I was going to ask, “a bunch of tall shafts. I didn’t follow them out, but they look good.”