This is a GREAT thread! Many heartfelt thanks to Jeff, Andy etc for your honest admissions. I’ll get to mine soon enuf.
For 5 decades we Florida cavers have known that Warrens is a great cave, and now some undeniably tough TAG cavers come along and it whips ‘em and they admit it. Now that’s true and honest grit! I have been caving with Andy, and he’s good, as good as ALMOST any caver I’ve caved with (he’s too young to be as good as ANY caver I’ve caved with). I have never caved with young Jeff, but I hear he’s pretty good, too, and I certainly don’t doubt it. TAG cavers are tough, even their men (you have heard of TWAT, haven’t you? TAG Women Are Tough – Go Mo! I luv ya! Can I be the Token Penis on the next trip?)
Now, howdja like ta hear a livelong Florida caver’s perspective of Paul’s Palsys? Well, I’ll tell you anyway. But first let me ROTFALMAO for awhile.
Warrens Cave was a frat/sorority/vandal/party hangout for years until Bill Oldacre came along. He and owner Mr. Cox struck a bargain and the cave was gated by the FSS after a frat dude took his sorority girlfriend across the Historic Section’s upper level Suicide Pass and didn’t make it. She fell on top of him and went on to have kids and a life, and he has spent his subsequent life in bed paralyzed from the neck down. Even the Historic Section has real dangers for the spelunker. Bill’s accomplishments were rewarded with the SCCi’s very first Stewardship Award, and he continues to manage the property for the NSS to this day. Thank you, Bill – you are the real hero of this story.
Anyway, for many years only the Historic Section was known. It ranges up to 60ft in height and 8 or 10 ft across, has a few side passages that spelunkers think are fine places for campfires and headaches. It has some wonderful climb-ups and –downs and –acrosses for orangs like me. This few-hundred-foot section of the cave ends at the Cashew Squeeze and the Wind Tunnel where the wind comes howling out during dropping barometric pressures. I forget who chiseled it open (Bill O?), but beyond lay 4+ miles of additional passage.
The Cashew Squeeze is only about 40 or 50 ft long, but in those days it was a corkscrew of a nasty passage. You literally had to spiral your way through sharp, recently knapped chert nodules imbedded in the limestone – not your friendly, crumbly, black rounded garden variety TAG chert, but instead angular razor rock suitable for making arrowheads and butchering deer. It took most people 10 – 15 minutes to get through it their first 10 or 20 times. Phil W mentioned Paul Smith – I once saw Paul go though it in less than a minute! Yow! Sometime later Bill O was afraid that if an unconscious person had to be rescued from the far side, the victim’s collarbone and a femur would have to be deliberately broken to get him through the Cashew. Ouch! So Bill sledged his way slowly through the Cashew over the years and now a newbie can negotiate it in a minute or so. I have never been through a TAG or Mexican squeeze that was as hard as the original Cashew.
Gerald Moni, one of TAG’s new cavers, was very active in the exploration and survey of the booty beyond the Cashew back in the 1960s, and even got a bypass named after himself – Moni’s Misery. Some guys have all the luck!
Once past the Cashew you monkey your way though a minor maze of more joint-controlled passages covered with black goethite that eventually lead to the Second Squeeze, which isn’t much of a squeeze and not worthy of further discussion. Then comes the endless sand-floored passages (Sand Room etc) that comprise a true maze and go on and on, plus the “voids” in the upper level Eocene-aged phosphatic sandy clay Hawthorne Formation that lies just above the limestone. Before Bill enlarged the Cashew, we called it the “longest and hardest squeeze leading to a major cave in the US.” But our TAG brethren and sistren would just politely smile and yawn. All we Floridians could do was sulk.
So for the next several decades the Pit was essentially the back of the cave. Then the 600ft long Agony Avenue was discovered. More beautifully pure, knapping quality chert with very few inclusions had to be busted to press forward. Keith Silas and I were led through that passage by Bob Nabell, the fellow who doggedly persevered in the successful effort to map Warrens (and deserves the Lew Bicking Award for his efforts to map that cave, IMO). Keith and I can proudly claim that we have surveyed passage beyond the Thank God Room with Bob. Ours may have been only the third or fourth round trip though the Agony.
This was before it became known as Agony Avenue. We had to attach our packs to our boots and hope to god that the last person in wouldn’t get his pack hung up. We cracked jokes about corking. In my pack was a gallon of water, and that water disappeared within a few minutes of reaching the Thank God Room. There was a half-full gallon jug of water previously placed in the TG Room for emergencies, but after smelling it we decided that we weren’t having an emergency just yet.
For years after I would tell my TAG friends about the AA, and again they would smile politely.
Heh, heh, heh, revenge is a dish best served cold. Paul, all us long-suffering Florida cavers owe you a big one, buddy! If I’m around and you want a beer, your money’s no good.
Just ahead of us three were Frank Spirek and two other young bucks whose names I forget. They mapped a lot more that day than the three of us did. Bob was a real sport to put up with Keith and me – he ought to get some kind of an award for that, too.
I have been back to my beloved Warrens Cave many times since, including the pit a time or two, but I will never go through Agony Avenue again. TAG’s Byers Cave is a piece of cake comparatively, unless there’s some stuff in there y’all know about that I can’t even imagine.
So if any others are naive enough to want to go for it, there is more booty back there. And laugh at me or get pompous if you want, but if you go, please take the following advice seriously:
Eat three good meals the day before and a hearty breakfast the day of. Take high energy food with you. Drink a gallon of water on your way to the pit, another gallon from the pit to the entrance, and a third gallon in the Thank God Room and beyond. Water is most important. Leave behind some of your water in the emergency jug if you have any left over. Drink absolutely no ethanol for at least one day prior to your expedition. Leave your helmet at the entrance to Agony Avenue and pick it up on your way out – you won’t need it in the Agony and it will hinder your movements through it. Take only mini-mags for backup lighting – they are small and lightweight. Do not take a pack – if items won’t fit into your pockets then don’t take them at all (except for the water). Be trim and healthy and in excellent physical and mental shape, and go with no more than two others of like kind (three if they’re like Adam Scherer, Cory Bresalier, Sullivan Beck or Eric Amsbury). Do not take camera equipment on your first trip. And take your survey instruments because very few people who have been there will ever go back there again!
But if you wanna hear a really tough story about connecting two underwater caves together, get Woody Jasper to relate his connection of Telford Spring Cave and Luraville Cave.
Oh, and there’s no such thing as Luminary Pit, Andy. I know. I’ve spent three days on three separate vacations looking for it, and it just isn’t there. It isn’t. I don’t care what anybody says, Luminary Pit is a BIG LIE!