by xcaverx » May 21, 2008 5:54 pm
Thanks, Scott. Hope to see you there. Here's news about some horizontal caves, etc. at SERA VAR in Bristol, Tennessee:
Our Saturday night musical offerings are the Jugbusters (OTR 2007) and Dave Foster's Soulgrass. Dave was a charter member of Mountain Empire Grotto before he went on to Horse Cave and the ACCA. Yes, we have free beer. We also have a new liquor store about one mile from the campground -- sorry, no free liquor. The campground is of epic, TAG-size proportions, a bicycle would be a handy thing to bring along.
We have three more vendors to add to our list: The NSS Bookstore, Crystal Creations, and the ACCA. I learned more about Terry Ragon's new venture, the Maxwell Mountain Trading Post. He offers traditional bows and arrows, stone knives, lances, mandalas, leather shields, and other replicas of Native American craft.
I've described several featured vertical cave trips. We have plenty of horizontal caves that will interest you, including Worley (Morrell), which is over five miles, Carter County Saltpeter with big rimstone dams, a deep pool near the end, and a passage I was shown just last December that goes off the Laurie Adams map. There's Grindstaff, a complex cave that's currently the largest cave of record in Carter County.
A few weeks ago Gary Fielden and I got permission to take visitors to the Cook caves, guided trips only. There's Bull Cave, little Big Arm Branch Cave, and Wind Cave (aka Foster's Pit), also The Death Sink and a couple of other digs that would have very limited appeal to most people. According to dye trace, these caves drain into Worley. Fosters is a vertical maze of less than 2000 surveyed feet but don't let the limited size fool you -- this is a fascinating cave. It has a 38-foot entrance pit, but most of the rest is climbable without gear, except for the 40-foot descent into the deepest part -- I think we called it Cold Storage or something like that. Bull is a cool horizontal cave with a big entrance and some interesting climbs; it takes so much water from Big Arm Branch that the whole cave sometimes fills up and spills into the Cook backyard.
Hall Bottom No. 1 (Lathams Cave) is a nice, easy stream cave that ends (we think) at a deep sump. There is a crack in the rock across the pool, though, and we know that one person has claimed to swim across to find going passage -- not that I recommend trying.
Perkins you know about -- 10+ miles of big, mazey horizontal cave. Cribb is at the bottom of the mountain from Perkins, it's a mostly dry maze -- about 8000 feet in the Collings survey?
Grays near Lebanon, Virginia, is a nice caver's cave with lots of interesting diversions. My favorite part was a traverse on a tricky little ledge about 10 feet over deep water, through a pretty flowstone canyon.
Thomas No. 1 was my first survey cave. It's a maze with several climbing challenges and some new passage that we haven't put on the map yet (hint -- near the pit). Red Wolf is a tight horizontal cave that I think of as a training ground for Corkscrew, lots of crawls and climbs and tight places.
Marion Quarry Cave -- a pretty, gnarly cave with two entrances and about four levels, a couple of streams. It's somewhat strenuous, somewhat dangerous; we had more accidents there than any cave we've surveyed. The quarry cut through the Silver Bullet end of the cave and you can see a tiny, unexplored entrance on the far side of the quarry. You might also find blasted flowstone debris in the quarry rubble. Recently designated a Virginia significant cave.
Please distribute. I look forward to showing you through Perkins.
Thanks,
--robbie