by Sean Ryan
This area south of Albany is drive-by country for any trip to Schoharie, so it�s not that visited by New Jersey cavers. Allen was looking to fix that. He had a hit list of caves that had escaped his visitation until now, and I was happy to tag along. People coming to the NRO from outside the area would anturaly gravitate to the bigger caves like Surprise and Pompey�s, but I expected a capacity crowd to get multiple new caves under your belt in one afternoon.
It ended up being just Allen, JoAnne and me. Worked great for carpool purposes. As soon as breakfast was over, we rolled out of there and onto the Thruway north.
Allen and JoAnne navigated their way to our first stop, the Mt. Marion Indian Caves. It was on a 90-acre plot a very nice woman bought and built a modern cabin on. The cave was within sight of her backyard, touching the Mudderkill Stream. Her family had occasionally explored the cave. They just called the cave "the cave", or sometimes "Indian Cave." Calling something Indian Cave is like calling it Crystal or Mystery or Surprise or Devil�s Hole: there�s probably eighteen other caves within an hour with the same name. But whatever the name, this was a new cave for all three of us.
Mt. Marion has several entrances, the closest one by a small beaver dam we used to traverse the Mudderkill. We didn't know if the beaver lived in the cave � I spent the whole time in the cave expecting a 20-pound rat to start gnawing my leg off.
The cave is bumpy and narrow and runs for a long distance as hands and knees passage while daylight is still in sight. It led to some parallel canyon passages we were able to duckwalk in. It wasn�t the most pleasant place to crawl around in, but I was having no problems getting around. Allen and JoAnne were frustrated from just a few feet in, though, since they were trying to follow the map.
This cave was completely wrong, according to the map. The map showed the passages going in different direction. The exact opposite direction. In fact, this map made perfect sense once you turned it upside down, and ignored the compass rose pointing north. Eventually we decided to never mind which was the map said to go and to instead go where there actually was cave passage.
We followed a split of the stream that joined up with the topside stream. It was swelled thanks to Friday's rain, so the passage was more sporting than usual. It led to the lake room, which we didn�t get to see much of since the lake was now kissing the ceiling. The owners that explored it usually got further than us, since they could go further without SCUBA gear.
We backtracked our way out of the cave, going out a separate entrance once we saw its glimmer of daylight. We popped out after about fifteen minutes in there, rather good time for one of these little potholes. We explored the surrounding woods, and Allen and JoAnne found the B section of the map, which is why this is Mt. Marion Indian Caves, plural. A small waterfall rained down into an underwater basin. It was soaked and mossy and hard to even look down there, but the echo of the water gave an indication of going passage. A hundred feet away was huge sinkhole full of swirled sticks. That entire basin was full of water yesterday, and it had all been funneled through the cave. These two spots connected. The landowner said that her son had crawled in the sinkhole drain once when it was dry, and come out of the waterfall basin. Give that guy a membership!
We changed back to regular clothes (me staying in my neoprene socks to save some effort down the road) and then drove down the road to Railroad and Lizard Cave. Allen and JoAnne located the best spot to park, just off the side of a highway past a bridge. We got out, suited up - I saw a little snake in the grass! - and followed a trail that led down the slope of the slanted embankment.
JoAnne showed off her science knowledge by naming most of the plants we were walking by. The obvious useful point of this was to steer clear of poison ivy, but she also named a dozen plants that won�t cause rashes but which are still neat to identify on sight. Wish I knew more botany.
We were looking for Railroad Cave first, since it was bigger. There wasn't a railroad here any more, or even railroad tracks, but the flat grading of the railroad tracks still existed. This flat wide path was a contrast to the otherwise steep slop that went down into the river. That was the level trail we followed. When we got close to where one of Railroad Cave's entrances should be, we followed the compass direction and began looking up the slope for the two horizontal entrances, both 75 feet or so to the north, up the slope We beat the bushes for a considerably larger radius on that slope, and came up with nothing of any geologic note. I found one leaf-choked hole that might have going cave beyond it, but that was hundreds of feet from where the second Railroad Cave entrance was supposed to be.
Presuming the compass directions were flip-flopped on the map, then the two horizontal entrances were south, along the riverside. A constant jumble of boulders and cracked rock strata made this site look promising. All three of us, however, were not able to find anything that looked like an entrance. Rats.
We had to make do with the presumptive vertical entrance. It was a narrow open pit, with sun shooting straight down to the leaf-strewn floor 22 feet below. Might as well go down the pit, and see if we can find some easy way out. If not, then we�ve found an unmappe dcave, and have just the small problem of getting out of it.
The pit is a narrow mail slot entrance, so I wedged myself in its narrow right edge and worked my way down two body lengths. There was a leafy shelf in the canyon that I wanted to stand on. I kicked away at the leaves on top, then the leaves below that, and then the entire shelf fluttered away. Guess this is a straight drop to the floor, then.
Allen tied a 30-foot piece of webbing around a tree and lowered it to me. I'd need this for the last ten feet down to the floor � and more importantly for the first ten feet up if this pit was a dead end. The webbing only reached to eight feet above the floor, so Allen hauled it up and tied another length to the end of that, and I was able to arm belay down those to the sandy leafy floor.
To my left the passage went ten feet and sumped. Uh oh. Did the rain flood this cave, too? I checked the other direction. A sandy hands and knees crawl. I t went a hundred feet or so, and then I saw a bit of daylight. I crawled and saw daylight from two separate entrances, left and right. I picked left, found a long passage of water, which was fortunately only an inch deep.
I crawled out onto the rocky shore of the river. So this was where those other entrances were. We had just missed them when we looked, discouraged by the bad luck finding them on the slope. I had every intention in the world of climbing up to Allen at the top of the pit and casually chatting for as long as I could without mentioning that I wasn't down in the pit any more. But Allen spotted me as soon as I stood on the rocks. I blame my bright red cave suit.
Knowing that this was indeed Railroad Cave, Allen and JoAnne quickly climbed down the pit. Railroad�s map, like Mt. Marion�s, made perfect sense once you ignored that compass rose. That sump by the pit is marked as a lake - a pretty grand name for two square yards of puddle. A one-foot belly crawl off of my hands and knees crawlspace takes you into several decent-sized rooms, and one relatively huge one.
We spent ten or fifteen minutes inside the realtively huge room. It had fossils jutting out of the wall: coral and crinoids and shells. This stuff would have been chipped away if this was a more popular cave. I need to stick my head fairly deep into Surprise in order to find anything like this. And here it was, maybe a minute from daylight. Here�s a big upside of these lesser-visited caves.
We crawled out of the right passageway this time, which was completely dry. Once outside, we could see exactly how both of these horizontal entrances looked like unpromising shadows in the boulder cluster, neither one indicating any going passage.
We reversed the trail up to the car, and found three more cars parked there. One of them had a hunting bumper sticker, and a freshly emptied 24-oz Budweiser can. Probably for the best we didn't run into them. Our final cave was Eighmyville Cave, which claims to be the largest cave in Duchess County. I think that�s like being the world�s tallest dwarf.
The landowner was again very nice, thanks to Allen's phone calls to him. He happily led us over to where the cave was, advising us that it wasn�t worth suiting up for.
The first thing noticeable when we got to Eighmyville was a giant dead raccoon at the cave entrance. His paws were splayed, and the broken tree branch he was lying on matched fairly well with a fresh snap in a tree overhead. He was probably a casualty of yesterday�s rain: there weren�t any flies on him, and he looked fresh enough to stand up and get back to flipping over garbage cans. We offered to bag the raccoon and toss him in the first Dumpster we saw, but the landowner said that the coyotes would take care of any carcass within a few days - another sign that the raccoon had been a recent victim.
Next to the Eighmyville entrance was another cave, Meyer Cave. This one goes all of fifteen feet before taking a tight right turn and narrowing out to nothing. But so long as you�re in town to see the biggest cave in Dutchess County, go the extra forty feet to see the smallest cave in Dutchess County!
It didn�t take too long in Eighmyville to ascertin that the raccoon lived in the cave, taking some of his meals and most of his dumps here. Scat was everywhere, as well as numerous small skeletons that were incompelte but well preserved. JoAnne put her science to work trying to figure out what animals these little skulls represented. Too big to be squirrel, too small to be dog, too pointed to be cat. We ultimately decided on fox.
Visiting Eighmyville without coveralls wasn�t the best idea. There�s not much cave there, but what little there is requires crawls and scrambles and constant maneuvers that you might not want to do if you�re wearing a decent pair of jeans.
Five caves in one day, and there was still an hour to kill before the grotto-prepared chicken dinner. Allen had a very good way to spend that hour: the Delaware Mine in central Kingston. All three of us had been to the mine a few years ago, a big pit full of warehouse-sized limestone slabs just waiting for a schmoe to stand under them so they could collapse. I wasn't too eager to return. But Allen had directions to a new place to explore.
We followed the path around several unquarried hills � or maybe in a quarried valley, it's hard to tell once nature takes over for a few decades � until we found the spot. An aluminum fence was secured around a huge opening in the hillside. It met up with a two-foot high wall of cement blocks. A three-foot wide hole was in the cement fence, and was an obvious place to limbo inside. Here the mine wasn�t open-pit, but a closed shaft.
Once in there, we got more underground passage in one place since I last took the Holland Tunnel. The mine was a hundred feet across, forty feet high, and went well beyond the reach of any of our lights. This passage was enormous. There was a regular mechanical clang coming from deep within the cave, as if some giant bat robot was testing his echolocation.
Just a few yards in front of us, there was a chasm. It went down fifteen or twenty feet, jagged and nasty all the way. There were some pieces of old wood thrown over the chasm, making a slippery rotten bridge that made me jump across a narrow point rather than trust it.
On the other side of the chasm was a floor so flat you didn�t have to look at it. The thick unmined columns - with similar spacing to the Rosendale Mine - were some of the only landmarks, aside from the beer bottles and graffitti of numerous previous visitors. It was disorienting to be able to make out nothing in any direction your light was shining.
That robot pinging sound ended up being a Busch can placed directly over a ceiling drip. The sound echoed for hundreds of feet. Some wrecked red ventialtion shafts on the flor match up with a gap in the ventilation shafts up front. I followed the still-bolted shafts for a long while, using it like my trail of bread crumbs. Allen and JoAnne went off in their own directions, us keeping track of each other through glimpses of light a football field away. Eventually the mine gets to where the water table turns it into a lake, and the three of us found ourselvs at the water�s edge.
We came back to camp completely satisfied. People did what, Surprise�s again? Bah. We did five caves, plus a mine that�s close to being the literal size of Delaware. We had to change the Earth�s polarity to make sense of the maps, but that�s a small price to pay for a nice day of caving.