A Lost Chapter from Elk River Cave
text and photos by William Storage, except where indicated
This is not just an attempt at a catchy title. I really
did lose this description for over a decade. I wrote the below description in September 1995,
and then lost it before publishing it. I rediscovered it, misfiled with some
work files, in 2007, just as Alan Leedy and crew were expressing some interest in working the cave.
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John Ganter in the entrance to Elk R. Cave, 1983 |
After digging open Elk River Cave in May, 1981 we reckoned that the
underground Elk River, upstream to My Cave and downstream toward the resurgence
would soon be revealed. Although we racked up impressive mileage in half a dozen
new caves along the north-south trending Elk River valley through the eighties,
the underground river itself proved to be a barrier to exploration. The river’s
impressive basin of about 100 square miles upstream of these caves provides
unparalleled flood potential. We found in the years that followed that the caves
where the underground Elk is seen, Falling Springs and Elk River Cave flood to depths
exceeding 100 feet. No one has seen the fury of the rising Elk underground, but
on two occasions we witnessed the surface river’s transition from bone dry to 6
feet deep frothing brown torrents in a matter of minutes. Since access to the
leads in the cave is through a 3-inch airspace at river level during droughts – and
8000 feet from the entrance – we reserved push trips to the cave for very
special weather conditions. The last survey trip to the back of the cave was in
September 1987, when John Ganter and I polished off about a thousand feet of
river passage, almost all of which was deep river trunk requiring swimming. This
passage ends where the river wells up from a vertical walled sump. On that
survey trip, we also successfully climbed the nearby Prophecy Dome, possibly
seen by the previous survey trip four years earlier. The forty foot dome led to
a tiny hole, easily dug open from below, into a fat, sand floored walking
passage, heading both upstream to the south, and downstream to the north. Or so
it appeared. |
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In years that followed we attempted several trips back to
the Prophecy area, all foiled by hopelessly high water even in late summer
droughts. In most cases we were stopped by water to the ceiling right at the
beginning of the river passage, a spot known as The Beach. In one case we made
it farther, to the very low air spot in the middle of a scorching, burnt grass
summer, horrified to find no airspace at all. As years went by, the cautiousness
of aging overcame the nagging of an unattended lead; I vowed to cut Elk River
Cave from my
party list forever.
September 1995: the worst drought on record in Randolph
County West Virginia left crops in ruin as school children sat at home, schools
closed due to the lack of water. Dead grass and blackberry bushes lay in the bed
of the normally dry Elk, and also the Tygart, Cherry, and other nearby rivers,
not lying on karst. I thought about Elk River Cave, and was tempted, but
not enough to chance it; the days were muggy, and cumulus clouds appeared each
afternoon. Then on Labor Day, a massive cold front descended upon the entire
eastern United States. Temperatures dropped into the low fifties. No cloud was
visible on radar across the entire eastern US and Canada. No local weather cell
would have chance against this mass of Canadian air for several days. In short,
rain that day was absolutely impossible. |
Doug Medville - through thick (mud) and thin (squeezes) |
Still, it took several hours for the idea to gel. After
all, I had written the thing off. I had no caving partner, and only one wetsuit.
After facing the fact that this was probably the best opportunity of a lifetime
to return to Prophecy Dome, I sped off to the Old Timers Reunion to find teammates. I knew no one
else who had seen the underground Elk was at the reunion, so I needed to find
cavers with a suitable constitution for this sort of trip.
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Roberta Swicegood (1982), Dick Graham
(1984) and Ron Simmons (1984) - Elk
River veterans |
Already afternoon, the choices might be slim, I worried. At
OTR I got lucky. I found Ben Schwartz and Mike Futrell, both veterans of the
tight, wet, and cold. Convincing them that this trip simply had to come off that
day was no problem. Unfortunately there was only one wetsuit among them. We
flipped a coin. Mike won – or lost, I can’t remember – and an hour later he and
I stood at the entrance to Elk River Cave, squeezing into wetsuits pre-chilled by this
strange day’s almost-cave temperature air, and planning exactly how little gear
we could get by with. We elected to bring a single rope and a piece of sling.
Surveying was now out of the question. It was already late in the day. Everyone
had to head home in the morning, and our wetsuits were marginal for the hours of
constant immersion this trip required; mine was a wimpy surf suit with an
additional neoprene tee-shirt. Mike had mismatched, borrowed pieces of a dive
suit that fit poorly. In our haste, and knowing that surveying was out, we
neglected to bring even a compass.
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The entrance drop was almost clear. Five minutes of log
removal brought the usual blast of bone chilling wind in our faces. I guess the
outside air was still above cave temperature. We descended 80 feet down to the
Happy Maggot Passage, shocked to find the formerly 20-foot high, goo-floored
passage now six feet high. Merciless logging and bad soil management had taken
their toll. We tied loops in the webbing as a crude ladder and dropped the 8
foot pitch near the end of Happy Maggot. Ten minutes later we were up the easy
thirty foot dome series. We then charged down the half mile of wide Upper Trunk
to its end at the 30 foot pit into Reverse Canyon, where in dry weather a
stream flows to the south, opposite the river flow. I had climbed this pit many
times before. I was comfortable without a belay, especially in it now
drier state, but the pit is rather wide, and I had brought the rope to belay Mike if needed; he is a bit shorter than
I. Mike’s skills for this sort of thing
were of course well honed. We stashed the rope to cut weight. There was no further climbing
until Prophecy, a high, but narrow fissure with great friction and holds.
Reverse Canyon and the passages that follow had all
suffered dearly under the logging. Where I remembered – and our photos show –
sand floored canyons, we tripped and slid along light-sucking and shoe-sucking
mudways. We climbed the final steep slope into the river at the Beach, and
commented that the water seemed so warm. Even to our steaming wetsuit clad
bodies that had not stepped in water above the ankle for the last mile and a
half of climbing up and down giant mud funnels. |
Roberta and John in Happy Maggot Passage, 1983 |
It would be swimming from here on. Gradually, the water
seemed to get cooler. We moved swiftly up the river passage to keep from
shivering. After a wrong turn or two, we arrived at Prophecy Dome after three
and a half hours from the entrance. It’s amazing what kind of time you can make
with a lean team and a mission – and fifty-degree water to motivate you.
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John Ganter and Kathy Nutter in the Upper Trunk
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At the top of the dome we squeezed through the body-tight
hole in the floor of Prophecy Trunk, seen only once - by me alone - a decade
before. The elongated dome, an enlarged joint, runs nearly parallel to the river
below. Now in the trunk we had to decide whether to head back downstream, toward
the entrance, or upstream toward Falling Springs Cave, still a mile away.
Downstream was tempting because near the beginning of the river passage is an
overlying lead ending in large boulders in the ceiling down through which blows
a strong draft. If we could follow Prophecy downstream to the North, we might
find ourselves looking down into moveable boulders that would yield a route not
threatened by a drop of rain miles away.
But if we spent all our time pursuing that possibility and
failed to connect or even get close to a connection, we would have wasted this
chance at Elk River Cave’s real secret. |
We decided to head south, upstream into the void.
After a few hundred feet, our trunk had decayed to a muddy
crawl. This soon transformed into a cobble floored 3-D maze, where crawlways
went through wild vertical excursions of ten or twenty feet – not at all what we
expected. Oddest of all, we couldn’t be sure, but scallops and gravel
orientation seemed to indicate that we were headed downstream, not up. After an
hour we gave up, returning to the top of Prophecy Dome. There we paced, tired
but too cold to stop moving, discussing what to do next. With the weight of the
long cold swim ahead, and the late hour, I suggested we head out. Mike proposed
a quick check of the north heading passage, which now seemed unimportant, since
an upper-level connection back to known cave would merely give access to passage
with little hope of being pushed further.
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We allocated 30 minutes and charged off. The passage
enlarged to a fairly clean trunk with a knee-deep stream, up to 30 feet high and
wide. After about 15 minutes of brisk trekking we hit a 20-foot high wall of
well-rounded boulders. We made no attempt to dig, but noted looking straight on
into the blockage that it seemed pretty final. Our now constant shivering, the
late hour may have affected our assessment of the finality of the breakdown. I
looked at Mike, and he nodded almost imperceptibly. Enough said. We high tailed
it out of Prophecy Trunk.
At the base of the dome we eased back into the river and
began the swim downstream toward the entrance, pushed more by coldness than by
current - significant in a few places. Despite the knowledge that no chance of
rain existed, we were relieved to find the water level unchanged in the low
airspace areas. We soon arrived at the beach and climbed out of the underground
Elk River and up the steep gravel slope for the last time. Barely a word was
spoken for the next hour, and 8000 of easy walking interspersed with a few
climbs and mud obstacles later, we squeezed up through the entrance series and
popped out into the cold September night.
We discussed the details of the trip with those waiting
outside. Confusing – that the good lead died, and the bad lead was big trunk,
and that what should have been a downstream lead carried a stream flowing toward
us. Later, when I looked at John Ganter’s draft of the map, I realized what had
likely happened. |
Mike Dyas, master of mud,with Susan Medville, 1981 |
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Photo of me under the Elk by Ron Simmons, 1984
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We had been deceived by the fact that the rest of Elk Rive Cave very
seldom strays from heading due south. The joint that forms Prophecy Dome
crosses the North-South trending river passage at a significant angle.
Prophecy
Trunk does not parallel the surface river. It runs NE-SW, parallel to Simmons
Mingo, major passages in nearby Falling Springs, and the main trend of My Cave.
Our trek upstream represents a major jog in the cave, heading way back under the
mountain to the east. If there was a way on through the breakdown that stopped
us we would have been unlikely to see it looking straight into the pile of
boulders. It may have been 135 degrees to our right, at a spot where the trunk
wanted to continue its north-south trend. All of which makes the place just a
bit more interesting. But I have no desire to return right now.
Epilog – Twelve years after writing the above, … Well,
you know - if you're a caver.
William Storage, Nov. 16, 2007 |
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