We�re an hour or so behind the rest of the group. Theoretically, all 15 or so of us were going to split up into two equal groups. Allen�s crew would go to Frustration Pit and Corker Hill, adjacent caves he�d never been to before. My contingent would do Carnegie, which I had never done before, and then Hershey-Coy or Peiper.
After arriving from all parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania and meeting up at a Pharo�s Truck Stop in central PA, we went to the parking site for Carnegie. A playground had recently been built there, but it was vacant since it was January outside.
Carnegie is a wet muddy cave, from what I know. You get a good soaking going through, which leads to problems when your clothes turn to ice as you�re walking back to the cars. And then you�ve got to put those frozen clothes back on every time you want to do another cave that weekend. A quick show of hands revealed that every carload of people wanted to do the relatively-dry Frustration and Corker, aside from my car, which wanted to do Frustration and Corker but was obligated to lead my half of the trip (or fifth, as the math worked out).
So nobody did Carnegie. A majority of cars drove to Frustration, while I, Tom Cavanaugh and Steve Sanbeg went in Tom�s station wagon. We skipped Carnegie, too, deciding to drive to the Peiper site.
Long story short, we didn�t reach the Peiper site, but got really really close. Then we decided to join the Frustration trip.
Frustration might have been named by the treacherous dirt road leading there. It kissed Tom�s undercarriage a few times before we came to a series of giant icy puddles. The whole car could get glued in there, so Tom pulled off to the side.
And that�s where we found the pile of bones. It looked like some hunters had slaughtered a deer, and these were the parts they left for the vultures. For the first time that day, I was glad it was cold: caracasses don�t smell in the cold.
We suited up by the bones, then walked the rest of the way down the icy dirt road to the other cars. There were some regular sedans in the mix, so maybe we would have been OK crossing those puddles.
These other cars had their own carcasses to deal with. It started with random puffs of brown fur, then some small disembodied legs, and then a head with distinctively long ears. Someone had ripped apart a rabbit like a head of lettuce. Whoever -or whatever - did this was more interested in the kill than food: it looked like the whole rabbit was here. Maybe more than one: there seemed to be more than four legs.
Finding Frustration and Corker was much easier this second time around for me. All the greenery that interfered that first time had gone south for the winter.
Frustration has three entrances, and all of them lend themselves to the name. All three are tiny vertical crevices I could just barely wriggle down. Tom couldn�t make it down the first entrance, so he went a few feet over to a second shaft and got in that way.
Inside the cave were Don King formations: animal feces covered with fungus growing straight up. There was also some fresh scat without any fungus on it yet. Great; we found the lair of whatever the hell�s killing all the wildlife. I began listening for any growling or hissing from dark corners.
We met up with a sizable chunk of the group in Frustration: it�s not that big of a cave. There�s a crawl down to a small lower level. I exhausted myself for ten minutes trying to get down the crawl with my pack on. In my defense, after a minute or two of struggling, I decided to take the pack off; the rest of the time was spent trying to crawl backwards and uphill with my pack still jamming me.
I met Francois and Matt Langbien down at the bottom. At this level was a pile of bones from what was probably a rabbit. These were picked clean. At this point Francois grabbed my legs and yelled "The creature! The creature�s in here!" He was in a prank-happy mood.
I spent another ten minutes trying to get out of this bottom level. Yep, my pack was back on. I had naturally found the one spot to get wedged in where I couldn�t 1. back up, 2. move forward, or 3. get enough leverage to get my pack off a shoulder. I had plenty of energy going into the lower level, but after an exhuastive 10 minutes of struggling, I got myself free, sat down, and broke out in a cold sweat.
While I was recuperating, Francois followed me out. He saw the opportunity for a little surprise on Matt: blocking most of the passage with a big flat rock. Sure enough, Matt comes to the now-tiny passage, sees something that would surely have held me up a while, and tries to wriggle his way around it. At a certain point Francois just removed the rock. Matt spent the rest of the weekend loudly plotting some sort of appropriate revenge.
Just a few feet from Frustration (but not connecting, as far as we know) is Corker Hill, a cave Amos Mincin has adopted as a personal project. He�s working on a dig in a corner of Corker. Several of us poked our heads into that corner of the cave, and honestly, didn�t see all that much we�d be bringing shovels and buckets in for. But we�ll be happy to be wrong.
One tight squeeze in Corker required you to worm your way up a slope without use of your arms or legs. The reward for this effort, after climbing a few stories� worth of narrow passage and seeing a couple pretties, was to then worm yourself down and out of the squeeze. Cois tried a through trip as an alternative, taking a small passage out of an upper level, and fighting a nasty brittle canyon passage he had to lower himself down 25 or 30 feet of. Anyone who saw what Cois had to deal with opted for the reverse squeeze in a heartbeat.
I spent an equal amount of time in both caves, largely because they were much warmer than outside. I eventually came out of the toasty Corker, and heard that Steve was hurt. His knee had twisted out while he was standing by the entrance, not even putting a lot of weight on it. He had been able to get out on his own; if it happened deeper in the cave, Steve could have been in some trouble.
I ran back to the station wagon; I didn�t want to find Steve in agony, waiting for me to hurry up. Steve and Tom were at the car, as I thought, but Steve wasn�t in pain. He was limping, but it wasn�t anything for an emergency room yet. Phew.
We talked about finding a hospital, but Steve was feeling progressively better about the knee. He�d be sitting out the caving on Sunday, but would otherwise be OK. So we drove on, to Ed Sira�s house.
This weekend was built around visiting Ed and Geri. We had done it last year, visiting his freshly-built house in Hanover, and it was a great base camp for central PA caves. Last year we left Friday night to meet up at Ed�s house, most of us getting there around midnight. This year we�d be more polite: meet Saturday morning, cave all day, then meet with Ed and Geri for dinner. We�d be dirty, but no one would be turning into a pumpkin.
The only place that would take a reservation for 17 people on a Saturday night was the Chinese buffet. The damage that 17 hungry cavers can do at a buffet is considerable. They�re lucky we didn�t eat the steam trays.
We retreated back to Ed�s house, where most of us filed down to his finished basement. We played a few rounds of Uno. Then we remembered we were grownups, so we switched to poker (although we were playing with Monopoly money).
Sunday morning we hit the Little Schoolhouse for breakfast, a local diner that used to be a one-room brick schoolhouse. Last year we displaced most of the usual Sunday morning clientele. We wised up this time, got there early, and were out the door by the time the church groups came at their regular times.
Allen had two caves slated for today: Mummau and Stoverdale #2. Mummau was a cinch to get to. It�s literally right on the side of the road leading to the owner�s house. There�s a red metal box around the entrance, I think mostly so people don�t inadvertently park on the entrance.
Mummau was not a cinch to get into, however. The red box was around the entrance as the top part of a gate. John Rosenfeld, Allen�s local caving contact from York grotto, had the key to get in.
Or so John thought. Someone else had switched locks, however, and neglected to tell the rest of York Grotto. So all the �official� keys to Mummau were now useless.
Dumb luck strikes. The property owner came back from church just as we were staring at the new lock. Whever had swapped the locks and told no one in York Grotto had the forethought to give the property owner a copy of the new key. So we got in. And John had something to bring up at the next York Grotto meeting.
Unlike the preparations for Saturday, it seemed prudent to split us up into two groups for Mummau. This was only 700 feet long, and we didn�t want to damage any of these crystals. I was in the second group, so I stood around the box for an hour while the first half of the group jumped in.
The property owner�s black lab was running around, a big friendly dog who we were accidentally getting filthy. Every time he rubbed against one of us and our dirty coveralls, he turned into a chocolate lab.
We stood wondering just how good these crystals were. This was a 700 foot cave. Give them five or ten minutes to reach the spot, and the rest of the time is staring at crystals. Exactly what was taking an hour to look at?
After that hour, people came out. Allen was still underground, ready to point us in the right direction.
Inside Mummau was a tight breakdown passage leading to a wet belly crawl. This crawl had a slick layer of mud on it, and lubricated the crawl nicely. Usually, that slick layer of mud is reserved for boulders and handholds and all the other spots where it�s anything but useful.
Allen was at the end of the crawl, and pointed us to the correct crawl, warning us to take our helmets off and move very, very carefully. One clumsy spasm and who knows how many years of crystalization would shatter and die.
Up the small crawl were dozens of fragile Koosh balls. They were clustered on the ceiling of a passage three feet high, like an upside down coral reef. I sat and stared at them for a good five or ten minutes. That first crew waiting by the cars wouldn�t be wondering why we were taking so long; they�d understand why, and would hope we�d leave before dark.
I was trying to get the maximum appreciation out of the small patch of crystals I was looking at, not realizing there were rooms and rooms of them to go. I followed the group through the crawl, into a few big rooms with plain ceilings we dared to stand up in. Off in a corner, was the biggest crystal in the cave, the size of a lawn gnome.
Cameras came out, and Amos tried to get the best shots of these. It�s tough to show size and perspective in these shots. Do you hold up a pencil in every shot for comparison�s sake?
We eventually felt guilty for taking so long while half our crew was politely waiting in January, so we crawled out of the passage, put our helmets back on, and crawled out.
Our final cave was Stoverdale #2. We drove through new high-priced housing, then a huge plot of ground where the next phase of that development was going, and then the low-priced rural housing that used to look out over undeveloped land but would soon have very ritzy neighbors. The development site had several Porta Potties sitting around, which our cars took liberal advantage of.
Getting to the Stoverdale entrance involved climbing down a steep cliff face carved from a river. You had to hang onto some of the trees so you didn�t roll all the way down and splash in the water.
The Stoverdale #2 entrance did not look promising. It started as a small round passage in the cliff face, and got smaller from there. Your feet were still in daylight, while you got into passage where you had to fold your shoulders together to to make it through. After a body length or two of this, it opened up.
A nasty bit of canyon pasage led down to the left. We were on top of the canyon, which was too small to climb into but too big to ignore. You had to crab walk over it.
This led to a small room with a deep clear pool. There wasn�t a big volume of water, but it was in a canyon slot, so it was 11 or 12 feet deep. There were steep walls leading down to the water�s edge, so the closer you got to the water, the better your chances were of going into this mini Sarlacc pit.
At this point, 150 feet in, the cave was over. Nothing else to see here, kids. More and more of us entered this room, looking out over the pool, hoping and hoping someone would fall in.
Amos had been taking a few photographs (God know of what in this unphotogenic cave) when he knocked his yellow camera case over the lip. It was a waterproof box, but it was open: if it hit the water, it�d sink 12 feet. The box slid down the lip, hit a bit of friction, and came to a rest just inches from the water�s edge. It was safe, but how could it be retrieved?
Amos clung to a hold with his hands, lowered his body down the precipice, and reached the box with his feet. He hooked it under a foot, lifted it to his hand, and passed it up to one of us up top. Amos climbed out, dry.
Matt, on the other hand, got wet. (Cois has nothing to do with this, although Matt will eagerly listen to any evidence to the contrary.) Matt was one of the last to make it down to the pool room, tried to get close for a good look at the water, and slid in. Matt picked the one spot where there was a rock lip at the edge of the pool, so he only got his shoes wet. But it shook up the water, muddying a pool with boot mud from three previous Pennsylvania caves.
That pool that probably hadn�t seen ripples since the last time the Beast of Frustration Pit went inside for a bath. We never did find out the story behind all those bloody body parts. It was probably bait set by the same hunters that slaughtered the deer. But I didn�t see any hunters. Maybe those were the bones off in the corner of Frustation. Or the scat.