This time we'd be leading a group of Boy Scouts through Clarksville Cave in New York. Scout trips normally go to Leigh, but Leigh has become harder to get into than Fort Knox. Clarksville's one of the few caves without access issues, and a great one, to boot.
I was bringing my girlfriend Rachael, who had been caving a few weeks before at Trout Rocks in West Virginia. She likes the water, and so wanted a wet cave. I figured she'd change her mind as soon as she felt the cold Clarksville water, but I wasn't going to discourage her. I wish I had a Clarksville map to pass out to the Scouts and Rache, but the Clarksville map is huge, and hard to fit onto a photocopier. I had to make due with drawing on the gravel with my finger.
The last car to arrive in the Clarksville parking lot was, naturally, the car with the grotto helmets. Luckily helmets aren't underwear, so the Scout were able to change into everything but their helmets, and we ready to go soon after Jeralin pulled in with Bob and Andreas.
THE TOURIST TRIP
The entrance pit, which normally has a couple old tree trunks criss-crossing overtop, had a new trunk on top of those. It was a long pine tree still budding pinecones, so it must have been knocked down recently. Maybe a storm.
Our group of 13: (five cavers, seven Scouts, one Rachael) began filing down into the cave one by one. One of the parents bailed out at the entrance, and a couple people weren't having luck with their grotto helmets, so it took about twenty minutes to get the reduced group of 12 into the first underground room with 12 working lights.
We worked our way to the passage that leads to the Lake Room, right where the water gets deep. This was our turnaround spot. The Scouts were able to tiptoe and hopscotch through the stream to this point, having not yet reached the point where you say "Hell with it" and just start clomping through stream passage because it's easier.
Bob blew out his carbide, everyone else turned off their electric light, and we planned the return trip in the utter blackness.
Some of the group wanted to do the tight squeeze out, some wanted the wet duck-under entrance, and some just wanted the trip to be over ASAP.
We split into two groups: those going through the squeeze out, and those taking the big safe way to the main entrance. Everyone who wanted the wet stuff would meet back at the main entrance, and we'd go back in and do the duck-under.
Jeralin and Bob led most of the group to the squeeze. I had never done it; every time I've been in Clarksville, I've been on a project of some sort, so didn't have the time to visit squeezes and duck-unders if the whole group couldn't do it. I led one Scout, two chaperones and Rachael to the easy entrance. Not that Rachael wanted out: she wanted the duck-under, on her second day of caving, no less.
I then promptly got us lost in the fifty feet it took to get to the entrance. The passage I was following promptly dead-ended with a small pool of water to the right. How did I get us lost so quickly?
Two minutes of "Are we lost?" and I righted myself. The pool of water was the way to go, with passage above it. It just looked very different going out than coming in.
We got back to the surface, and I passed my giant water bottle around. I was hoping this wouldn't be the whole trip. There was more litter than usual around here, so the Scouts didn't seem to mind cleaning up some beer cans. Every can and broken bottle seemed to be a different brand, so either people recycled 11 of every 12 containers, or there was a whole lot buried under the leaves.
THE FIRE
We walked out of the pit, and saw the remnants of a huge campfire not thirty feet away. It was a stone-lined pit, but there were over a dozen huge charred branches sticking out in all directions from the pit, so the fire wouldn't have to be very creative to escape it. The huge mound of ash was hot enough to cook food on.
I passed the water bottle around for a last round, and then poured it all, about 1 1/2 liters, right onto the ashes. It threw off steam like lava hitting the ocean, but barely made a dent. We needed a lot more water.
Luckily there was a whole cave full of water. I ran into the cave to that confusing pool - the first spot deep enough to fill a water bottle - and got another two liters. On the way out I found a half-full two-liter bottle of Dr. Pepper, and brought that out. Two liters of water and one warm half-liter of Dr. Pepper later, and there was a little wet black spot at the center of the pit.
The litter radiated out from this campsite, the uncreative standard litter assortment: broken bottles, cans, cigarette butts. But here's where things get different. Two nearby trees were chopped down. One of them was the pine that lay over the Clarksville entrance. A third tree had a huge gauge in it where someone had tried to chop it down. No effort seemed to be made to use these trees for firewood. These guy thought they were Paul Bunyon.
A second, cold firepit by this one was a mound of black ash and nails. Thousands of nails were in here. The wood they burned must have been from old construction projects, or picnic tables. There were plenty of nails in the hot firepit, too.
I did three more shuttle runs into Clarksville before the squeeze group came back. Between the Nalgene and Dr. Pepper bottles, ultimately 20 liters of water got on the fire. The ashes got less and less dramatic with each dousing. On the last trip, when the freshly squeezed Scouts got to pour the water on, they barely gave a hiss.
At what point do you call the fire out? I could have poured all day. But we weren't waiting for people any more, the fire hasn't spread in its first night of being abandoned, it was seriously soggy, and the sky was ready to rain at any second. I spit one last time on it.
REENTRY - THE DUCKUNDER
The Scouts had all left for home, so it was a reduced trip of five: Jeralin, Bob, Andreas, Rachael and me. We'd be doing the duck-under. I felt nervous about bringing Rachael to such a tough caving spot, but she wanted to do it.
Our new passage meandered through ceilings of various heights as we splashed through the Bathtub before settling on 'annoyingly low' and sticking there for a while.
We crawled into a room with a loud little waterfall off to the left. It was loud enough to obscure any conversation beyond ten feet. We were crawling down a sloped surface full of protrusions and pits and walls, like a coral reef on the side of a blimp. Water ran down the side of the blimp; belly crawls gave us wet bellies.
The miserable conditions of the crawl ensured that we weren't going in the right direction. Sure enough, we had to turn around. Andreas and Jeralin scouting leads, Rachael following along, and me still trying to turn around.
I had the empty Dr. Pepper bottle in my pack, which was snagging on every overhead protrusion. This is the worst part of caving for me; that snag which somehow leads to you getting your feet and knees and elbows caught on everything else, exhausting you while you're not even moving forward. I opened the pack, flattened the bottle, and strapped it back on. By this time the group was gone.
They were probably twenty feet away, but I couldn't see them, and the waterfall blocked all shouting. They couldn't have gone far, so I worked my way backwards, poking my head in every little hole.
I found the right hole in ten minutes, which led to a refreshing bit of walking passage and shouts from the rest of the group. Rachael told me not to do that again. Deal.
We followed the bellowing cursing of Andreas to find the duck-under. Bob and Jeralin had already done it, and now Andreas was hunched over in the water, eyeing his options while saying very nasty things about the duck-under's mother.
This would be the sensible time for Rachael to freak out about what she was about to do. But she slid to her chest in the water without complaint, and waded to the duck-under. Within a minute, she was under and on the other side. Wow.
This was my first duck-under. from Schoharie and Scott Hollow I knew the pain of wading past waist deep in this cold water, and sure enough the involuntary falsetto noises came out of me again. But then I had to go chest-deep, just like everyone else. The frigid water gets you there in a different way. It puts your body into shock, so you can't breathe normally. So this was what it felt like to die on the Titanic.
I was looking at an inch or two of air space. I pushed my pack underneath it and Bob grabbed it. It wasn't necessary to go completely under, but the limbo required to keep your nose and mouth about water would triple your time spent in this arctic stream. I didn't even bother taking my helmet off. I focused on taking a deep breath (which took a full minute) and then closed my eyes and dove under.
I poked my head up two seconds later, and didn't hit my head, so I guess I did it. I had never been so cold so quickly. I was having trouble opening my eyes, and then having trouble focusing, so it was thirty seconds before I could confirm I was on the other side. I stood up, and I weighed thirty pounds more.
I had four people to commiserate with, including Rachael, who had only been caving two days in her whole frickin' life. I really needed to do something more pleasant with Rache next weekend.
We were almost out, and it felt good to move and warm up. We worked our shivering selves to an eight-foot cliff overlooking a big room. Jeralin descended first, then Andreas, who slipped and landed right on his butt. He was fine.
I was third. I watched my steps, and made it down. Rachael was behind me. I pointed out the footholds she could use, in case she couldn't see them, and then I saw the huge snake.
Most snakes you see are harmless little garter snakes, but this one could eat a garter snake for breakfast. Three feet long, thick as my big toe, tan with brown ringed spots. It looked like a rubber snake, except that it was moving, slowly. This was a new dilemma.
There should have been more worrying about the snake, but most of it was "That's so cool!" If there was a stick, we would have poked it.
After waiting a few minutes for the snake to more, we realized a cold blooded reptile in a cave ain�t going to be moving that fast. So Rachael climbed down very carefully, and then Bob.
(We learned later it was an eastern milk snake. It's not poisonous, but it's a 'king snake' because it eats smaller snakes. It might have actually eaten a garter snake for breakfast.)
We popped out the side entrance of Clarksville, about 100 feet away from the cars, and it was raining. It wasn't making us any colder, but it was maintaining our cryogenic states.
We changed into dry clothes in one of the more miserable changings I've experienced. The heat was blasting in my car, and it still took that plus multiple slices of steaming bread at an Italian restaurant plus our entrees to get rid of our chills.
If I knew how lousy the duck-under was, I wouldn't have brought Rachael through it. But she handled herself perfectly. The grotto, me particularly, was very impressed with her performance and toughness. She also has no fear of snakes.