My first cave was a long hike through a field away from the road, to a small hole surrounded by trees. There was crawling passage, a hairpin turn, some more crawling, then an enormous room with a massive forty foot stalagmite. A little dead end went off of there.
My second cave was right by the road, a huge crack on the bottom of overhanging rock. It had multiple entrances and a good deal of trash inside. There were some puddles, which rose by a foot while we were inside. That made the grownups herd the kids outside quickly for some reason. I figured all caves had tides like that.
This was a day trip, so the caves had to be in eastern Pennsylvania. I had no idea what their names were. I liked caving from that first taste, but I didn't do it again for a dozen years.
I described the caves to some grotto people at my first grotto meeting, and Barclay Foord was able to name them. I promptly forgot those names. I asked other grotto members about these caves periodically, and always got a list of forgettable names. But one name that stuck with me was Dreibelbis.
Allen Rush had made some contacts with Pennsylvania cavers, and had a day of caving planned with them. Dreibelbis was on the agenda, and I was invited along. I'd be going back.
Josh Holden, Jeralin Molinaro and I went to Virginville, PA, one Sunday, and met Mike Mostardi and the other locals. We had the possibility of knocking off six or seven caves today, so we got moving quickly.
Dreibelbis wasn't our first cave: that was reserved for Dragon Cave. The NNJG apparently had a Christmas party in Dragon Cave a couple decades ago, but the cave was gated now, and the entrance policy was a little tighter.
We got to Dragon Cave by driving onto an alfalfa field. I'd never seen an alfalfa crop. It's rather puny, and not only where we ran it over. We parked mere feet from the entrance, a luxury I'd like to have on every trip.
The Dragon entrance was a dirt pit that narrows down to a small length of pipe two feet across. It was only installed a year or two ago, so the pipe could be gated. This opened into a medium-sized room and a sharp turn to more passage.
No one in our group could believe we were underground so quickly into the day. It was only 9:30 A.M. On most trips we're lucky to be underground before noon.
We came out into the biggest room in the cave, and a huge surprise for me. Right against the left wall was the reason Dragon Cave was called so: an enormous stalagmite that looked like a dragon's tooth. It was the formation I had remembered. My first cave wasn't Dreibelbis, it was this one.
We drove instead of walked to the entrance. The entrance had a pipe instead of 100% rock. Those and fifteen years had convinced me to not consider if this was the cave I was hoping to find. I must never have heard the name of the cave before, because who'd forget a name like Dragon?
The stalagmite was listed on the map as only eight feet tall. However, that doesn't include the 12 foot base, or the eight feet of hill that you stand on the slope of to see the formation. So my fifth grade eyes weren't too far off the mark. (For the NNJG Christmas party, lights were wrapped around this big stalagmite like a Christmas tree.)
The passage off the big room was still there, and was just as much of a dead end as it was 16 years ago. I remember being disappointed that the cave just abruptly ended there, as if caves weren't allowed to do that.
I asked Mike Mostardi if his grotto was leading trips here fifteen or so years ago. He said he was leading trips here himself back then. So I might have been caving with the guy who first got me into caving. Neither of our memories could recall for sure. We had several other caves to hit, so we moved on. Dreibelbis was second, whose map looks like a metastasized pound sign. Lots of comically skinny passages at right angles to each other. Allen and I combined our packs for Dreibelbis, and passed the bag back and forth in the cave.
You sneak across a small soybean field to reach the quarry with Dreibelbis. I'd never seen a soybean crop. Even in plant form it was boring. The overgrowth and manmade look of the entrance feels like a Mayan tomb. A pipe gate was installed, like with Dragon, only this one was incredibly hard to open. Only an arm of the exact right length could reach the lock. Amos, one of the Pennsylvania cavers, has an open invite for future Dreibelbis trips simply by having a Cinderella arm.
The cave instantly gives you options of left, straight, and right, all of which are unpleasantly tight. I went straight, because it seemed the biggest. It dropped down in steps, me tossing the bag down in front of me one drop at a time. Near the bottom, I got the inevitable shout that we weren't going straight, so come back up.
Coming up a Dreibelbis passage is much more difficult that going down. The walls are slick and polished, so only locking an arm or leg at the exact right angle will give you any purchase. Dragging three liters of water, a pound of food, a Maglite, and a plastic toolbox of spare gear didn't help matters.
I came back into the intersection and followed the group down the right tunnel, a downward crawl. This led to a series of lefts, which eventually connected right back to the straight passage I abandoned. So I got to do the climb again. Only this time Allen was stuck holding the bag. Onyx Cave was our third, and an ex-commercial cave to boot. The entrance is a bunker with two steel doors under vintage plastic letters spelling out ONYX CAVE. It looks like NORAD. The lighting inside still works, but we didn't use it.
Raccoons have taken over the cave. Paw prints could be found all through the mud, and scat was EVERYWHERE. Little beetles and centipedes crawled through it. Some of it had little brown mushrooms growing from it, and one or two impressive piles had white mushrooms sprouting over an inch high. These turds were the basis of their own ecosystems.
The fourth and fifth caves were Eckerd and Frazer, little nubbins of caves a couple feet away from Onyx which counted as separate caves. Anything that leads to me going in multiple new caves with a minimum of changing into and out of a muddy cave suit is inherently good.
Shauffer's Cave was permanently closed, but we were close to it, so we stopped by the gated entrance. Some drunken idiot fell off a rock outside the entrance and got hurt, and so the cave got locked up. It was like lowering the crime rate by going to a crime scene and condemning the house next door.
As soon as I got to the entrance, I knew this was my second cave. The big overhanging slab of rock, the multiple cracks at ground level, the closeness to the road. Two massive iron triangles blocked all entry now, but I was inside that cave two decades ago. And I was being shown it by the person who might have shown it to me then.
After dinner at a Kutztown brew pub with Dutch potatoes (French fries cut like really thick potato chips) we bid farewell to the Pennsylvania cavers. I thanked Mike for getting me into caving, possibly. Our last two caves were Gambler's Den and Durham. We could have done a seven cave day, but we couldn't find Gambler's Den in the cliff that housed it. Twilight was stealing all the sun away, and the overgrowth of trees made the cliff interior dark as midnight. Allen poked around looking for it, while Josh, Jeralin and I cowered at the poison ivy.
Allen couldn't find it (the rest of us weren't any help at all) so we skipped it and went to Durham. We'd have to settle for six caves in a day. Durham is an amphitheater cave. You walked several paces into it before you realized you�ve found it. The amphitheater was the size of a concert hall, a big one.
A rope hanging from the left side of the amphitheater led to one of the three entrances to the second part of Durham Cave, the small crawly section. The rope looked questionable, so we went in a different entrance.
Despite a detailed map, it was incredibly hard to figure out where we were. We eventually got to the rope, which was still questionable, so we went out the third entrance.
My quest to revisit Dragon and Shauffer's is done. I thank Allen for letting me see my first trip with new eyes, and Mike again for starting me on what's a major part of my life now. Maybe.