4/15/00
No one needs to worry about me going clinically insane and starting a cult. I fully expect the insanity part, but I doubt I'd be able to lead a large group of people, even if I was a self-deluded Messiah. It's not so much that I can't lead, but that in any given group, there's people who want to lead a whole lot more than me. And with me not wanting to lead, I don't feel threatened by them, so I let them do it. I'm perfectly OK with this. But having the entire trip being led by the one guy who by definition doesn't know what he's doing didn't ring promising with me.
All I had heard from Bone-Norman was Devil's Pinch, Devil's Pinch, Devil's Pinch. One spot so tight the big cavers had to turn away and leave. People had to take their shirts off and eke through. Some guys even used lubricants and plastic bags.
The trip down to West Virginia was marred by an hour long dead halt right as we crossed the PA border. After intimately knowing the idle speeds of the cars in our entourage, we came to the source of the back-up: one guy with a pushbroom. Half a mile later there were five or six guys, but they weren't doing anything. The only working guy was this one with a pushbroom. We were hoping for mangled cars soaked in blood. We got no satisfaction from that hour.
Right after all that sitting, we pulled into a Burger King to sit some more. A little car-swapping was done, and I was riding the rest of the way with Scott Sedlock. Downside of this was neither of us knew where the campground was. Luckily Scott had memorized the route to West Virginia and, using recalled conversations and a few maps from a motel, was able to find the campground. As we got out of the car, a rooster was crowing.
Mark and Robert's tents were in Scott's car, so they were crashing for the night on the seats of Andrew Foord's giant Suburban. My tent was in the Suburban somewhere, so I just crashed in Scott's back seat for two hours.
My contacts were feeling like fiberglass in the morning, so I used my glasses, which I didn't forget to bring this time (item I did forget to bring on this trip: towel). I wondered what caving with glasses would be like. I figured a bit of fog on the lenses, a little mud, but hopefully it wouldn't be a hindrance.
A mere six hours later, we were at the quarry entrance (average time for a cave ten minutes away, considering cavers' speed). The entrance was a big well lit chamber, with a shaft of light going many feet into the cave. I was happy to conserve my battery for those seconds. There's no shame in being a light leech off the sun.
I was the leader for this, technically. Half of the crew had been in Bone-Norman before, so they had an instant familiarity with it. Plus, most everyone else could cave me out of a paper bag. There was one new guy, Mark Marussich's friend Dave, but he was a Marine and did the whole trip like a barbell with no weight on it.
The opening rooms of Bone-Norman were Star Trek caves, Mark Stover said, and that they were. Big sandy rooms with plenty of standing space, just what a cheesy phaser battle would take place in. The walls even looked like cheap plaster.
That didn't last. It immediately turned into a series of small crawls. After a crawl you'd stand or bear walk over a bit, and there'd be another crawl. Completely dry, as well. That's why this part of the cave was Bone. I've heard that most caves in the west have these dry sections. First time I've ever seen dirt in a non-liquid form underground.
Bone-Norman's a decent cave to try leading in, since most of it's a straight line. Having said that, I got myself lost several times. I didn't want to lead the world's slowest trip, so I went through most of the passages as quickly as I could, light mostly pointing toward the floor. No one thinks to put the directional markers on the floor.
When we reached the Pinch (never mind the tapering crawl I found that shrunk to three inches that I prayed wasn't the Pinch) it wasn't that bad. Mark had been through it before, so he went first. Peter and I were the questionable ones, so the two of us went second and third. If there was going to be a problem with us getting through, we might as well not be the last in line.
A thin vertical crack ran down and just to the left of the Pinch. There was a lot of space here, except for the part where it collapsed to nothing. I stuck myself in, got a foot on a ledge, and got solidly wedged in there. Peter gave my free foot a bulldozer shove, and I moved a good inch or two. From there I could wriggle my way through (although it took a few minutes, and I never got a big lungful of air in that time).
What made it so easy was that we were all psyched for it. We were fresh in the cave, full of energy and ready to defy this bastard chunk of rock. Peter got his favor returned and got some foot shoves to make it through; the rest of the group was also able to clear this hurdle.
What you don't hear about the Pinch is the several hundred feet of belly crawl right after it. Nothing technically tricky; it's just exhausting, especially following the Pinch. No space for a rest stop, not even space to sit up, just a crawl. I had heartburn from breakfast at Shoney's (go figure) and I couldn't sit up to alleviate it for half an hour.
Unlike the Pinch, this stuff doesn't make for any sort of decent story, just a drudgery that people would fall asleep listening to. And hence why I won't go into it any more than I'm doing now.
Imagine going it the other way, the Shake and Bake route. Imagine several hours of wet, normal cave, and then the unending crawl. It gets smaller and smaller, and just doesn't stop, and when it finally does, it's at the damn Pinch. If you're too big, you've got the return crawl and several more hours of wet cave to go back out of. That thought got me through the crawling; whoever did the Shake and Bake had it much worse than us.
I cheerfully blew right by each and every guide arrow without noticing them. They were all on walls invisible to a guy with a Petzl pointed down so he won't break an ankle. I did catch most all of the flagging tape, but the tape doesn't necessarily indicate the path we'd be wanting to go on. (You could make the same argument for the arrows burned with carbide flames, I guess, but it takes intentional malevolence to burn an arrow in a cave pointing the wrong direction.) Having a team of experienced cavers with you is a very comfy safety net.
Some time around here I officially wore out my first piece of caving gear. My pinkie shot right out of my glove. It came about less through continual wear on the gloves and more through the gloves rotting in a moist unwashed tub. But the crucial breaking point was in the cave, so that's my first pair of gloves to tack to a wall a la Wesley Snipes in Major League.
My creative karma kicked in halfway through the trip. Mark Marussich found a rock to lie underneath so the people walking by couldn't see him. He'd then, in as loud a voice as he could, say "Whassssupppp!"
I had heard three or four of these thanks to the cave's acoustics, but I thought it was the usual round of Whassuping. As I was walking into Mark's trap, I slipped and fell ass first on the ground. It flushed Mark out of his bunker in surprise. I got out of the ambush, but made sure that the one time I slipped I had the undivided attention of the entire group.
Mark Stover and Robert Monczka knew which passage to take up to reach the Great White Way, the pretty part of the cave. They said groups routinely went through the cave without knowing how to get there, the one bit of formation in there.
OK, 'bit' is an understatement. Thousands and thousands of feet of walking passage covered in literal tons of gypsum. Some parts looked like concrete walls with mortar, some looked like alien sewers, some looked like overflowing glue bottles. You could push a baby carriage through most of it. Even at our rushed pace, it took five or ten minutes just to go through it all.
After checking out the hundreds of minute gypsum curls at the end of a crawl, we sat at the end of the Way and practically fell asleep. Nap time in a cave. It wasn't planned by anyone, it just happened. Three of us had spent nights in the back seats of cars, so we could sleep anywhere.
The trip out of the Great White Way was just as pretty, but went a little quicker. I think that's always the way.
Stupidest moment for me: the stream had a big breakdown pile on it, with possibilities to the downward left and upward right. I figured sticking to the stream was the safest bet, so I went down and left. It quickly turned into a belly crawl through the stream.
If you ever want to go from zero to wiped in six seconds, try a water crawl when you're playing catch up. Your pack instantly gains twenty pounds of water weight, you can't angle your helmet to see anything useful, cold water's rushing against you, and you're still stuck in speed caving mode. The pockmarked floor kept catching at my bag and my boots.
The most frustrating part was that everyone else made it through this just fine. I could see their lights slowly getting dimmer in front of me. The crawl ended safely, but I had no idea how long I'd be under there.
"Yo! Did anyone else go through this water crawl?" I shouted to the lights.
Peter turned around and headed back my way. He wondered what water crawl I was talking about, since everyone else went over a rock and had a grand time doing it. "What are you doing down there?" I didn't have an answer.
Creative karma note: if the water level wasn't as low as it was, I probably would have had problems breathing through the crawl. I probably also would have realized this wasn't the way and turned around before dipping a toe in it.
Just like after the Pinch, after my crawl came technically non-challenging exhaustion. I was looking for easy walking passage, maybe ankle deep water. What I got was duck walking through knee deep water. The one time I'm looking for those deep pockmarks so I could move without a backbone like a question mark, and I can't find any.
I had wasted a lot of time with the crawl and I wanted to make it up. All I did was tire myself unduly. The second the ceiling raised and I could stand, my right leg found a waist deep pockmark. Creative karma.
My glasses were fine for the trip. A bit muddy, but a quick polish from a polypro shirt and they were fine. I'll probably go back to contacts, but if they ever start feeling like rock salt again, I'll know glasses are a safe option.
I don't know how much I learned about trip leading, but that's the fault of me, not the trip. With most of the trip being a straight line following stream passage, a leader doesn't become crucial among a cluster of experts. I've got a better understanding of the guys who take point and have their lights be the first ones through the darkness. However much I learned, it's 100% less than if I didn't go at all.
Happy end note: the return trip was the first time I came back from West Virginia without a major catastrophe (car crash, speeding ticket, flat tire, two hour detour, items falling off the roof rack and getting run over by a truck, etc.) Just eight hours of blissful non-disaster.