The Northeast Cave Conservancy has quarterly meetings to discuss cave acquisitions, fundraising, cave management, and other good stuff. The Schoharie region contributes more than its share of conservation-minded cavers, and it�s a central location for everyone else, so most meetings are in within half an hour of Clarksville. That means a long three-hour drive to every meeting for the New Jersey people (me, Joe Levinson and Vince Kappler) and an even longer drive for the Vermont contingent.
Vermont�s been getting a real active caving community the past couple years. They might be holding a NSS Convention up there in the next couple years. In the meantime, they wouldn�t mind hosting a NCC meeting for practice.
Having an even longer drive to go to a three-hour meeting wouldn�t be something I�d traditionally enjoy, but in thise case there was going to be a field trip lined up. It�s a good idea. You�ve got 20 cavers in a room together, who have all given up a day to further cave conservation. Might as well get them underground for part of that time.
Southern Vermont College was lined up as the meeting spot. We got the meeting room in an even barter for a cleanup of Everett�s Cave, the college�s local 350-foot contribution to speleology.
Officialy, Everett�s Cave is closed. Call and ask to go in the cave, they�ll say no. But the cave in on a college property, there�s very little else to do in the immediate vicinity, and campus maps point out the cave just like they do the computer lab. So there�s no question about how there might be some excess travel in there.
Vince, Joe and I got to the college at 9:00, which was a full hour earlier than the official meet time. (The NCC meeting was slated for 12:00, giving us two hours of cleanup time.)
The college is mostly housed in one building, a giant stone mansion converted into classrooms and administrative offices. It�s at the base of a steep cliff: stairs and a series of carved waterfalls were built up the slope into the woods.
The building was formerly the summer residence of the Everetts, the heir to the Mason Jar fortune. There�s a lot of money if you think up of something like a Mason Jar. Don�t know why they didn�t name it after themselves; at least they�ve got a marble cave bearing the family name.
The mansion was converted from a residence into a monestary in the �50s. A couple decades later, St. Joseph�s College relocated into the building, changing their name to a more secular title despite mving into a building with stained glass on half the windows.
The building is full of Italian marble on the fireplaces, which I thought was incredibly stupid. The land is sitting on a huge block of New England marble. Why no use the local stuff? Shipping charges for hauling tons and tons of marble halfway around the world have got to be more expensive than giving a local a pickaxe and a wheelbarrow.
My mushmeaded imagination couldn�t help but see this magnificent college structure as a video game level. Video game architecture tends for giant, dramatic structures - construction materials are free in video game world. The mansion has lots of balconies and parapet: just the place where medkits and extra ammo would be hidden. The big non-operational gates would all belocked at the start; you�d have to kill guard or open treasure chests to get the keys. And what video game with a mansion level wouldn�t also do well with a cave level?
Vince, Joe and I were here early, so we�d scout out the cave before anyone else. We looked at the campus map, and headed off in our street clothes. We followed the path past a few icy puddles. The ground rose dramaticaly on our left. Several side paths led off, but none of the looked like what we were looking for. We walked to a mini-clearing near the backs of some houses. Cutting through backyards wasn�t on the map. We probably overshot it.
I began bushwhacking back, walking parallell to the trail but high up on the hill. It�d just be hit or miss if I found the cave this way, but I�d try it. Turned out to be a miss, unless I was looking for thorns.
Just after we got back to the cars, the first of the other attendees began pulling into SVC. We suited up and talked to Peter Youngbaer, who had been to the cave before. We�d follow him this time.
That clearing by the houses� backyards was on the right path. An undefined path led from there, curving on the side of the mountain in beeline to the cave. Aha.
The cave entrance had a tiny bit of spraypaint visible, or was that just moss? Vermont cavers had done cleanup trips to this cave before, so there wasn�t much evidece of college life left. Beer cans, broken bottles, spray paint, all of that was taken care of. What was left was ... well, we�d find out.
A small bit of hands and knees crawl led into a marble junction room, which was cranked to 10 on the Impressive scale. Flowstone coats the walls, creating massive rippling effects. How come Vermont�s dinky caves get this treatment? In New Jersey�s caves the only shimmering is probably a diesel spill.
The scenic wall was hung with bad pieces of rope, from the colleges students� attempts to make handholds to climb the wall. (There�s nothing up top, but from some angles the passage looks like it goes.) The rope was left, under the theory that if removed, the bad rope would only be replaced by worse rope.
The trunk of the cave (otherwise known as dead end in a non-northeastern cave) turned to the left, up a small canyon passage into a few rooms with shallow pools of mudy water.
These rooms were inundated with thick wooden branches, brought in to bridge the pools. It was inventive technology for a non-engineering college. Stone age technology, granted, but a good idea using materials at hand. The problem comes with the wood slowly rotting away; wet caves can handle a bit of debris naturaly, but giant branches like this could never get washed in a little cave naturally.
I got as far as a room with a particularly deep pool of water leading into ... I didn�t know. The ceiling dropped down at just the right spot, so I�d have to do a full duck-under at what could very well be an endless sump. Dying from cave diving wouldn�t surprise a lot of people, but finding a way to do it in Vermont might.
This final chamber (judged final by myself, since I wasn�t going any further) had some older logs in it, half-buried in the rising mud. It�d be a pain to haul each one of these out, but there was no need for that, since we had 20 people looking to get their hands busy.
I fed them out one by one. At first it was carefully threading the opening of the chamber with the thick piece of wood. As that got cumbersome, I just started chucking them in the hole like javelins into a wood chipper. I aimed away from the cleanup crew - plus, it�s not like I�m any good with a javelin, so I�d be missing them even if I was aiming.
The logs got bucket-brigaded out of the chambers and out of the cave quickly. By the time I had crawled out of my chamber, the logs in the adjacent room were on their way out. A big job was knocked off very quick, thanks to teamwork.
One guy was kneeling down against a patch of ground, with a contractor bag open. There were very small chunks of broken glass, brown and green. They had been worked into the mud and the gravel, where they might not cut anyone but all the same exist as foreign matter. He was picking them out one by one, and tossing them in the thick contractor bag. This is the sort of cleanup that you wouldn�t bother doing on the surface.
This cave was in good shape to begin with, and now it was in better shape. The cave suddenly seemed a lot more empty, so I figured to make my retreat. The daylight illuminated some more garbage mashed into the mud: bits of cloth, bits of broken glass in corners. I pulled them out, dumped them into an empty spackle bucket at the base, and went back to find more. Didn�t have much luck, but I puled out some more pieces of wood. (Disposing of wood outside a cave usualy involves heaving the damn stuff as far from the entrance as you can. With the big branches, I imagine the scene looked like caber tossing.)
Back down at the mansion, lunch was waiting for us. We changed back into clothes appropriate for a Mason Jar kingpin and went inside to pig out. And then talk caves.
The meeting normally seems a bit of the frustrating side, since the whole point is cave conservation and all we�re doing is talking about stuff we�ve done in the past and what we�d like to do in the future. But this meeting had a field trip attached; I can say I did more at the meeting than just keep a seat warm.
The next NCC meeting�s scheduled for Clarksville Cave on June 4th. The meeting�s 1:00-4:00, and the cleanup is beforehand from 9:00-1:00. As usual, all are welcome. Maybe we�ll have a few more takers this time around.