"Good God, why?!"
That was the typical response. Most of the long time cavers had been to Hannacroix once, and once was enough.
If you haven't been there, here are the pluses of a Hannacroix trip. It's close enough to be a day trip. Merritts Cave is nearby, so you get two caves for one suiting up. It's mapped, there are no access problems, and there are even a couple formations to look at.
Here are the minuses. It's tiny. You're on your hands and knees for the whole cave. The cave's adjacent to a swamp, so the passages are drowning in swamp water.
And there's leeches.
I announced the meeting to the NNJG, and not many people took the bait. I announced it at a Central New Jersey Grotto meeting, and no one took the bait. There wasn't a Met meeting before the trip; that probably saved me from getting chopsticks thrown at me in disgust.
The only people who signed on the trip were local cavers who hadn't been there before: JoAnne Beliveau and Shital Shah. The three of us were the only people in the tri-state area willing to dare Hannacroix.
We met at the Sheraton in Mahwah to consolidate cars, and reached the Hannacroix area just in time for lunch. Then we had the usual rigmarole of an hour trying to find the cave location from local roads. This is normally the part of the trip where I'm in the back seat while Allen Rush or Scott Sala debates about just where we are. But they weren't here, so I had to be in the debate. It's no fun, but at the end of it is a cave, so it's got to be done.
We parked near some tennis courts and suited up. We talked with some locals who had been in those woods, and had heard rumors of a cave or two. I had photocopied a dozen copies of the Hannacroix map (still have eight of them), so I passed one to them. Whenever I can remember, I make extra copies of cave maps, and give them out liberally.
The cave was accessible through ATV trails that ran through the woods. JoAnne, Shital and I set off down the trails, which were full of puddles, which were full of frogs. Hopefully these frogs know how to hide when they hear an engine.
The trail turned into a jumble of intersecting paths, veering left. Did our directions count every little turn of this jumble, or do they treat it as one left turn? If it was a single left, then Hannacroix was a quarter mile to the left, and Merritts cave was ahead of us. If every little turn counted, then Hannacroix was in front of us. Either way, a big hunk of rock was a few hundred feet ahead, and it had openings.
Hannacroix has about eight entrances in a small space, so we couldn't tell which entrance we were going in, if this was even Hannacroix. It didn't feel like Hannacroix, but we couldn�t mathematically eliminate it yet. We couldn't check the Merritts map, because we had no Merritts map.
Wherever we were, it sure didn't feel like a traveled cave. The rocks were sharp and brittle and snagged on our nylon coveralls. All the passages were tight 90-degree angles. No signs of travel.
The passages played themselves out in a few feet, except for a narrow jagged crack to the left. I was closest, so I wormed through, fully expecting to have to backtrack. After having to tip vertically to get through, though, I came out into stream passage.
Light was visible from a second entrance. This was a through trip. My steps left footprints, which would only stick around until the next time it rained. All the same, this area felt untraveled, like I was the first person to visit in a good number of years.
JoAnne and then Shital shoehorned their way through the miserable squeeze. We followed the stream for ten easy feet before it turned back into meat grinder passage. We diverted into an upper room, which dead-ended without letting anyone stand up straight. I pushed the shrinking stream passage until I couldn't fit my body through any more.
All through the trip we debated about if this was Merritts Cave or Hannacroix Maze. The passages didn't match up to the Hannacroix map at all, so we knew it was Merritts, but so long as we hadn't seen Hannacroix as a separate entity, there still was that chance.
We popped out through Merritts second entrance. It had more spider webs on it than that temple in Raiders of the Lost Ark. We didn't want to destroy these nets coming out, but we did. Maybe cave spiders see cavers like tornadoes: destructive forces that make the local community rebuild their homes and livelihoods.
We found Hannacroix right where the directions said it would be, at the edge of a swamp. Cattails and stagnant water extended out for hundreds of feet, and at the base was 200 feet of Swiss cheese. It looked like Dagobah, only sunnier.
We picked the northernmost entrance to go into, and work our way south. JoAnne scared a frog that made a depth charge splash when it jumped in the water. The frogs are big in the swamp, and loud.
The entrance looked more like a port. There was no getting around us getting wet. At least the water was warm, thanks to all the sun the swamp got. I'm not used to cave water being the temperature of a heated pool.
We waded until the ceiling forced us to get on our hands and knees. We crawled through the warm water, gloves pulled to our sleeves on leech patrol. I didn't see any in the water, but I figured they were probably tiny. Only in the movies did you get the fat burrito-sized leeches.
I didn't see leeches, but I saw plenty of tadpoles. I never got to see tadpoles as a kid, only full-grown frogs and toads. For some reason I had always thought tadpoles were little, then grew into baby frogs, then got big. Switch steps #2 and #3. These were the size of gumballs, and the shape of gumballs, too. Big green balls with eyes and a tail, and sometimes four stubs. They swam around my hand like it was a natural formation.
The cave changes personality midway through. At the Fungus Footpath, the cave stopped being the warm, wet swamp runoff, and became the classic cold northeastern cave. I don't know how often water makes a cave warmer, but in the summer, that's the case with Hannacroix.
We tried not to get soaked, so only our hands and knees on down got the chill now. We crawled toward the Alligator, a horizontal band of rock that hangs down just enough to make it look like Abraham Lincoln. (OK, it looks like an alligator.)
You're never more than 100 feet from an entrance, so JoAnne and Shital went toward the Sleeping Alligator entrance. The map said that a tiny little crawl led to the Gallery - actual formations in the cave - so I wanted to check it out.
After two minutes of wriggling, I was in a 'room' so small there wasn't room for my feet to stick up. After another two minutes of wriggling, I was able to get the map out, and I saw this wasn't the Gallery, but a halfway point in the crawl. Two minutes later, I was in a room covered in formation nubs. They weren't long, but there were a lot of them, in a ceiling that sloped its way to meet the floor.
I shouted to JoAnne and Shital from the Gallery entrance (all these entrances, and we still hadn't gone near the Main Entrance) and they popped down to see the formations.
Outside the Gallery entrance, JoAnne found a glove left from another cave trip. Moss has completely overtaken it. It looked like natural moss, except that it had five fingers. If anyone took a nap here, they'd wake up looking like Swamp Thing.
Rain was threatening, so we ran back to the car. In a rare bit of good cave timing, the first drops hit right as we were changed and ready to drive home. No one had any leeches, by the way.
For a month I had the idea to map Merritts. No one I asked knew of any map to it. It'd probably only take a day to map it. It'd be a great grotto project (for Met or the NNJG or Central or whomever I could trick into returning there).
Then I brought it up to Bubbles at an NNJG meeting. "There's a map," she said. "I've seen it."
"Oh. Never mind."
"You can still map it, though," she said.
"What's the point of that?" Why would I want to map a cave that's already been mapped? Practice?
The idea of mapping Merritts appealed to me enough so the traditional Hannacroix disgust was cloaked. But now that they've both been mapped, any return on my part would only be for personal enjoyment.
Knowing that, I ain't returning any time soon. So I can explore a cave the size of a tollbooth? To roll the dice a second time on having to pick leeches off me? To see formations the size of a gnat penis? Good God, why?!