I wasn’t surprised to see the creek in front of Hancock Cave flowing fast Saturday morning. Snow melt from the north side of the mountain takes days to run off, and it was raining as we left the restaurant—and pouring while we walked from the cars to the cave entrance. I carefully rigged the entrance while Jacob, Jillian, and Jim adjusted gear for the newest caver (Jim, son of the cave’s neighboring landowner).

The shower nozzle in the Entrance Room was set to high with streams of water pouring from the formations. Many more formations dripped in the Grantham Room, along with a cave salamander. We didn’t spot bats there, but the idea was more about getting my team moving and warming up. 

A loud rumble greeted us in the Octopus Room, but we progressed up to the Flying Zamboni and down the Corn Cob Crawl to get everyone warmed up. After a resounding trip to Hickory Dickory Pit, we traveled to TJ’s Trap. The soaked stalactites supplied a seasonal stream right through the clay in the middle of the room. That stream fed another loud rumble further down into the trap.

Jacob, Jillian, and Jim enjoyed a snack before I introduced them to a descent using the Breakdown Staircase. Heavy currents a few feet deep ran through the parallel passage at the base of the Staircase and at the base of Harrington Hall. 

While driving out the night before, I had mentioned to Jacob that one walking spot in the cave is unusually slippery beneath Rapunzel’s Tower. I looked at the tower and saw that the water level was likely chest deep. No Under or Over that day at the Over & Under. After I slid into a pool in In-The-Pendants Hall, my group couldn’t find the webbing in my pack but were able to pass me a sharp rock to carve out some footholds. Jacob also got to know how much heavier I am than he.

The water in the first Toilet Bowl was likely about 14 feet deep, so we didn’t travel to the Funnel Tunnel. Hancock Cave is significantly shorter when in flood stage, so we beat a hasty retreat to ensure that no one would get too cold in the cave. The bat count would be incomplete this year.

Outside the rain continued to pour, and the creek outside the cave entrance was noticeably higher and fast running. A walking stick was useful for three of us to cross the creek but broke when Jacob tossed it back for Jillian. Her balance was better than ours anyway. We noticed that a creek overflowed the road in front of neighbors’ houses, and that was only the beginning of the drive back to Marion.

Water flowed across the road over the mountain in many spots all the way to the top. When we reached the southern base of Walker Mountain, we noticed water levels rising to the foundations of the local houses. The river crossed the road once, but we were stopped when the water got much too deep for Jacob’s coupe. Fortunately a local gentleman directed us on a detour back to Marion. Tanya shared hot cider and tea with us to warm our cores before dinner and the drive home.

Outside Boones Mill Virginia as we were driving to Moncove Lake Campground, Taylor Tibbs declared that the best part of the weekend was going to be seeing a license plate that left so much to our imaginations: MEAT MOM. Obviously her expectations for the planned cave trips weren’t high. I started questioning whether I had chosen caves that the group would enjoy after they spent a week at the NSS Convention earlier in the month. The TriTrogs were a very young grotto last time I had been to Patton Cave (~1992), and so I wasn’t sure I should trust my memory.

After a gloriously comfortable night camping, we eventually got to the nearby parking area for Patton Cave to a warm welcome from friendly dogs and an even-more-friendly landowner. Her instructions for finding the cave entrance were exacting, but once inside, the ceiling was a bit lower than I remembered (5- to 6-feet high) although nice wide passage. We stopped in a few places to take photographs of the small formations we found.

Then the passage ballooned out to 40- to 50-feet high, and the formations got much bigger. The flowstone featured more sparkles and signs that the soot from long ago is being covered by milky white calcite rivulets. While Melanie descended from an 80-foot climb (while Mark Daughtridge helped guide her downward-facing feet), Mike Yang, Taylor, and I found a side passage snaking through the formations into yet more trunk passage. When the floor eventually rose toward the insoluble cherty ceiling, Taylor and Melanie relayed that their crawlway was at an end.

Then we explored a wetter passage with a clear blue pool off to one side and reddish tinted rocks on the walls. Melanie and Taylor pursued a near sump with very slippery banks, and then we beat a hasty retreat from the cave in search of dry clothing.

Sunday we had permission to visit Haynes Cave at the other end of Monroe County. It had likely been close to thirty years since I had been there, but the entrance was right where I thought it should be. The nearby roads and properties had changed a lot though. The drinking trough in the cave was pretty spectacular, but we saw no big sections of flowstone, soda straws, mites, or bites after that. We found lots of threading cave passages filled with gypsum formations and evidence of the abandoned salt mining operations.

I had remembered that the landowner’s tour ended at Windlass Pit, but I didn’t recall that it was located in the center of the threading passages. We had fun finding the top of the pit and got to observe all that the upper level had to offer, including some biologically active drops on the ceiling. Mark did not carry out a taste test to identify the species.

If only for me, the two cave trips definitely beat out the MEAT MOM.

< first photo taken by Ken Walsh and other three by Mike Yang >

So glad I got to join Phil Sullivan and Nick Taylor for a brisk survey in Buchanan Saltpeter Cave. After a prolonged effort to calibrate multiple electronic instruments, I think Sully was glad that I had Suuntos along to provide backsights. Still in the twilight zone, we started surveying  across a wide, decorated room but stopped when the 30-foot-wide pool from wall to wall got 2” deep.

From there we headed back toward the entrance where Sully had identified multiple other leads breaking away from the twilight zone. I felt embarrassed bumping my shoulder as I tried to swing my torso up onto a ledge. Fortunately Sully helped me with the climb (by hauling me) and rigged a bit of webbing to facilitate the climb down.

We found a short passage out of the cold January temps where a tri-colored bat was wintering. That short room felt like a sauna compared to the other entrance areas we surveyed (areas where big brown bats were sleeping). The upper passage seemed to continue beyond a great pit, but the cliff where we stood offered no access. I assessed that I might be able to find the room at the base of the pit from the entrance ( it worked!), and we set a survey station in the middle of a huge decorated room with multiple rimstone and flowstone banks.

From the entrance again we surveyed a walking passage to the huge decorated room with multiple rimstone and flowstone banks. Along the way Sully climbed into another upper passage that brought him to the same place that Nick and I walked to. I noticed a 2”-deep pool at the far end of this room but chose to survey a crawlway that returned us again to the entrance.

We sketched the cave passages that we had measured. I proved that I didn’t need Sully’s help at that torso swing climb, and we closed the loop between the two leads with 2” of water. Nick and I appreciated that we were wearing Wellies. 

We wanted to assess a few leads from the huge room to start the next trip. One climb led up to the continuation of our upper passage. The other one snuck past a flowstone cascade into a passage that may be the prettiest I’ve seen in Smyth County. Ready for the next survey trip.

Mike Broome’s GPS found a neighborhood shortcut as we left the Convention campsite, so we missed one of the landmarks (a low water crossing) as we drove to Tolly’s Cave in the Elk River Valley. However, it was just a quick turnaround, good parking, and (to me) a short walk up the hillside. Mike Broome, Lisa Lorenzin, Emily Graham, and I explored Tolly’s after a short climb past a salamander and spiders. We had a map along, and a great blow-by-blow description of the cave’s character.

We climbed and wriggled from room to room past some nice formations. Because many different geologic layers are sandwiched in and above this cave, we saw some cool blending of color, such as black dendrites decorating the walls. Nice rooms and good to cave with Mike and Lisa again. And it broke up the drive home from the NSS Convention. Thanks to Emily for picking this trip and gathering all the information.

On Wednesday at the NSS Convention, I took a morning class in speleothem repair practices. It followed all the steps from inventorying, matching puzzle pieces, drilling holes for support pins, building supports and splints from PVC pipes, and then mixing and applying epoxy. The class was led by Mike Mansur and Kirsten Bahr, and he brought along a full set of wooden blocks and cement pieces that we had to repair to create speleothems in a vertical box. Emily thinks that the instruction manual is well produced and certainly inspiring.

In the afternoon we took off for the entrance area inside Hamilton Cave on the NSS John Guilday Cave Preserve to try our hands at our recently learned skills. Although my big role was discovering stalactite pieces that had no matching pieces on the ceiling, the group did manage to repair four formations that afternoon. It was definitely a class that I learned a lot in and was excited by the prospect that other people might repair broken speleothems. It is exacting, patient work, and I hope to be able to support such repairs in the future.

Back in the 1960s, Perkins Cave was surveyed using carbide lamps to mark stations and trying to extend the cave in many directions at once. The 1972 map shows blobby walls and no passage detail over in the U Survey section. Naturally there must be some leads going north that they missed. 

The blobby northern section is mostly a massive wall of breakdown. Our March trip tried to survey a way over or to the right of the massive breakdown pile. We met only dead ends too small for humans. On April 8, Emily Graham, Piotr Suder, and I headed to the lower section and to the left of the breakdown pile. We still hoped that the breakdown pile could be surveyed over/under/around/through.

The previous day’s deluge left the breakdown drain area wet and slippery. Piotr and Emily pursued the slippery lead into a hole that quickly became too tight for humans. Off to the left we scaled and surveyed our way up into a room of pickup truck-sized breakdown. Off in one corner we found a dead bat clinging to the ceiling and covered in white nose fungus.  Behind that Piotr squeezed past other fungus on the floor and into a breakdown-choked passage.

Alas, no good leads. Piotr did a great job leading us out of the cave without ever consulting the old map. And I fastened the lock on the cave gate in under thirty seconds.

At the February TriTrogs meeting, we had enough members interested in a survey trip. It’s great when a trip gets mostly planned at a meeting. Matthew Weiss, Maria Droujkova, Emily Graham, and I stayed at Tanya’s house in Marion before the trip Saturday morning. We had no trouble finding our way back to the Perkins Cave survey lead, but Matthew and Maria photo-documented the trail to be sure we’d get back.

The stooping lead in the U Survey section took Emily (and the rest of us) beneath a massive breakdown pile and then turned into a low crawlway. It opened into a pantry-sized room and then into another crawlway. That one ended in a larger room with no human-sized exits.

We spent time trying to find another route past the breakdown pile but had no luck. It was still better luck than Maria’s boot had had, so we exited the cave with less survey footage than I would have liked. Fortunately Matthew was eventually able to re-lock the cave gate when we exited.

It had been a few months since the last TriTrog sport caving trip, so I offered up the traditional Hancock Cave Bat Count trip for New Year’s Eve. I don’t think we had had a bat count since pre-Covid, and a warm chili dinner at Tanya McLaughlin’s house seemed like a good idea in the frigid winter temperatures.
But it wasn’t actually cold New Years weekend. The mountain road was fine despite the icy waterfalls that still decorated the mountainside. We discovered that the stream outside the cave entrance was still frozen that morning around 11 AM when we crossed.
Laura Young and Emily Graham rigged a handline at the entrance. Laura’s exuberance during the trip was outweighed only by her cave pack. We were treated to bats in the Entrance Room and several other locations. Emily seemed best at spotting all six bats we found, and Laura’s experience with the Virginia Natural Heritage Program helped us identify the likely species from a distance. Emily’s Zebra Light made that possible. Laura appreciated that I hold out hope that some year we’ll find many more bats wintering in Hancock Cave. But not yet.
We took a side trip up into the Vertical Maze because Emily hadn’t explored that part of the cave before, but nothing up there looked very familiar to me. We traversed the passage where Tanya had led her first survey trip, but I think we needed to descend about twenty feet just to be near the top of the Breakdown Staircase.
As we spent five hours exploring the cave, the icy waterfalls and streams outside had thawed in the rain, so the Entrance Room greeted us with heavy waterfalls and a very slick trip up the handline and out of the cave. I found myself rolling from side to side to make any progress as I reached up for the handline used to haul out the cave packs. Near the top I tried again rolling my legs from side to side to fit out the entrance from my crouched position, with my knees catching on the ceiling by just an inch.
A great trip overall, but the new trail to the cave entrance is still mighty slick during a winter thaw.

Emily Graham and I accepted Vardell Smyth’s invitation to use his home in Boone, North Carolina as a launching point for a survey trip into Perkins Cave (Washington County, Virginia). Jason Lachniet trusted me to find my way back to the leads I left beyond the Second Discovery area of the cave.

Emily had to correct the routes I tried three times on the way in, but Emily, Vardell, and I made good progress toward the survey lead for the day. Our second survey station brought us up into the Gypsum Pancake Room, three-to-four-foot high and roughly thirty feet across. Side passages of varying sizes abound along this passage. The floor is composed of crumbling thin slabs of ceiling, but typical stalagmites and soda straws populate the indeterminate walls.

Surveying crawling and walking passages around the perimeter led to some dead ends and to one huge room (yet to be surveyed). Our original one lead left us with 468 feet of survey and roughly five new leads that all appear somewhat substantial. When finishing the last survey station, Emily was welcomed by nocturnal cave residents in what we’re calling Nibblers Way. Field mice gathered round her while I finished the sketching and even seemed to follow Emily as we exited the cave. With the mice to guide her, we exited with no wrong turns.