Tennessee Caving Expedition
We arrived in Nashville and after sampling a traditional US breakfast at a 24hr Waffle House we headed for Crossville. Luckily we had been given a free upgrade by the hire car company and Olly rode up to the hotel with a minivan rather than the Ford Fiesta we ordered. This was fortunate as I wasn’t sure how we were going to fit 5 people with luggage in a Ford Fiesta.
On reaching our Airbnb half the group headed back in the direction of Nashville for a caving trip that Paul had pre-arranged. The rest of us were left to battle through a group shop at Walmart and to deep clean the Airbnb which wasn’t in a great condition. We actually spent the following morning doing a further deep clean and taping up holes in the attic ceiling so we could sleep people upstairs.
We then headed to Mountain Eye, the cave we would be spending the expedition pushing and surveying. Paul gave us a guided tour of the walk to the cave, the river crossing point (the river was extremely low at ankle depth) and the entrance series of the cave. On the walk back to the car we could hear a lot of gun shots, we shrugged this off as being normal for America and weren’t too concerned that these were getting louder the closer to the car we got. We only became concerned when a ricochet hit the metal sign 20m away from us and the cars. On ducking behind the cars for cover we must have made such a commotion that whoever was firing on the other side of the riverbank realised we were there and stopped.
The following morning we returned to the cave to find that the significant rainfall we had overnight had caused the ankle depth river to rise to waist depth. Paul had been adamant that the cave didn’t flood and that the river would never rise over waist deep... After checking to see if the river was wade-able and having second thoughts we decided to walk upstream, across the bridge and back to the cave along the opposite bank to see if this route was even possible. After some slipping and sliding we made it to the crossing point on the opposite bank, although many of us didn’t recognise it has the river had risen another 6 feet in the hour detour. By this point I had major reservations about going in the cave, but we nipped in to check if the river had affected the entrance series. It had! The previously dry entrance chamber now contained a 6 foot deep lake which was rising 2 inches an hour. We made a rapid slippery steep retreat back to the cars via the steep riverbank. This was a rather exciting day and was made more exciting when Ruth noticed a snake close to where we were scrabbling up the bank, this was a bad day for Sam to have forgotten his wellies, but luckily the sandals Leo had lent him were fairly sturdy.
After the water had receded Olly, Rich, and I had a couple of trips into the other entrance to the system, Cobb Creek. Our mission was to try and find a lower entrance which would bypass the pitches at this end of the system. This section of the cave has a large chamber with relic saltpeter workings from the Civil War. We did nearly a kilometre of surveying but failed to find a new entrance or any unsurveyed “virgin” passage. At one point whilst inserting ourselves sideways in a very narrow sand filled tube we thought we must be there first people here but were disappointed to see a direction arrow scratched onto the wall, I have no idea why someone else had been in there.
One of the other aims of the expedition was to try and join another cave system named Hyperborean to Mountain Eye. There are rumours that a through trip had already been made, Rich had previously found what we thought must be the entrance which matched the sparse 1970s description.
Ruth, Leo, Sam, and I went back to survey it and were actually quite excited when we found no evidence of previous survey stations. Hyperborean is a UK style cave with lots of crawling over cobbles. It also is where the Cobb Creek river sinks and parts of it look to flood to the roof. However with Sam making check trips back to the surface to check for rain we surveyed a good few 100ms. One crawl led us to a chamber with a warm waterfall, which was likely coming in from the river bed above, however it was too wet to continue through the slot in the floor. Sam spotted a matching crawl way headed in the opposite direction and we followed this for a good few hundred metres, following a strong draft.
We remained excited until Leo discovered some bang wire (wire left from explosives used to enlarge caves) and a rat’s nest containing pieces of old style surveying measuring tape, slightly defeated we headed out for the day. A few days later we returned to continue the survey as the lure of larger passage and the strong draft tempted us. We followed Leo’s lead, surveying an actually quite nice chamber before finding an in situ rope leading up with a dropped survey tape at the bottom, then following the draft through a convoluted boulder choke and we made it to the larger stuff! This was actually also crawling in a shale layer with a dodgy looking ceiling, we named this Chicken Little Passage. Finally we reached standing room and followed the sinuous passage, we were nearing the end of the PDA battery life when Leo popped in view below us. Through an unlikely low crawl he found some pretty stuff before reaching a huge bore hole passage.
We returned with two teams for “bore hole day” we were excited as this was looked like the passage into Mountain Eye. Unfortunately team South borehole soon discovered the borehole ended after 40m in 5 small ways on, most of which lead to either tiny crawling passage or unstable looking boulder choke. We then found a slot in the wall and were super excited when Sam called out that there was a fresh survey station, We made the connection! Turns out we hadn’t but that the North borehole team were inadvertently on our patch, although they were pleased to see us as we provided a quicker way out bypassing a large rat mum and baby that they had crawled past. The end boulder choke turned out to be a tantalising 200m away from Mountain Eye once we put the surveys together.
One of the more interesting leads left was a small hole in the floor with a 6m drop below onto cobbles. We returned with a bolting kit and light weight rope. The hole was very small but Nick and I just about managed to squeeze through. We followed a muddy stream way for some way when Clinton suddenly appeared behind us. We all were a little confused about how he had got to us without descending the pitch. On the way out Clinton commented on how surprised he was that the Americans had pushed such an unpleasant cave.
Returning via Clinton’s new route Dave, Ian and I surveyed another 300m of passage which actually had some very nice formations. We also managed to keep popping up into Pete and Fleur’s survey area killing off their leads.
Meanwhile Olly had spent quite a few trips following Paul, at speed, from the Lott Dean entrance through fun bits off passage such as the Wanker Yanker (named due to the numerous sharp bits of rock yanking your clothing) and Buff River (named as you had to wear a buff to keep the flies out of your mouth).
We also did some tourist caving in the area including secret cave, a large well decorated chamber below a short pitch. This was my first experience abseiling on US rope, it was so thick and inflexible that our European style descenders would not work without some slightly dodgy advanced rigging techniques.
We also visited Blue Spring cave, this is a very long dry system, there is a comprehensive survey of this cave, so comprehensive in fact that the survey comes as 200+ A4 sheets in their own special survey bag. This added a puzzle / escape room like element to caving, every so often we would have to sit down and lay out the survey sheets on a large boulder to work out where we were and where we were going.
We spotted some interesting chert formations in one area of the cave which actually looked like tree roots.
Near these I tried to take a shortcut to avoid a climb, it was very small but I had seen Ian do it and thought I must fit. Obviously I underestimated the size of my arse and became wedged, luckily the others were on hand to give me a bit of a shove.
Aside from caving we participated in some traditional American activities such as; eating catfish, BBQs, roaming around Walmart, drinking light larger, smoking cigars, eating large volumes of ice-cream and of course, shooting guns. One of the US divers was super kind and invited us over to his parent’s house to shoot guns. After mentioning they weren’t really gun people they produced numerous handguns, revolvers, shot guns rifles and two AR15s (automatic rifles).
The next 5 hours was spent sending a barrage of bullets into the trees. The finally was shooting a tub of explosives from a safe distance with a automatic rifle.
After three weeks we said goodbye to everyone at Nashville airport and Paul, Olly and I headed to Kentucky for some tourist caving.