After a lackluster winter at Amazon’s Fernley facility, Jenn and I decided we’d be better off looking for a job we enjoyed than one that promised big bucks and may or may not deliver. As one of our interests is caving, we decided to try and get jobs at a cave for the summer, even if it meant working the gift shop and cleaning restrooms. It turns out that we lucked into one of the most amazing jobs we could hope for.

Our first choice of positions came through and we got workcamping positions at Caverns of Sonora. For those of you that have never heard of it, Caverns of Sonora is one of the most decorated caves on the planet. While there hasn’t been a study that I’m aware of, I believe it could very well be the most decorated cave in the world based on formations per square inch. We are lucky enough to be spending a fair portion of every day guiding tours in this cave.

The tour is a very up close and personal experience. We are literally inches away from formations throughout much of the tour. On top of that, we are working for some of the best people you could hope to be around. The cave is owned by a family that has owned the land surrounding it for five generations and the general manager has been a true caver for forty-six years. I can’t imagine a better work experience.

Words cannot begin to describe this beautiful cave. But to give you a general idea, we spent a week training with two to three tours a day that are close to two hours long and on our first day off, we took two tours through the cave just to enjoy it and take photos. I snapped five hundred and forty some odd pictures in three and a half hours. Almost eighty have been uploaded to the gallery. The pictures do not do the experience justice, but they are far better than words could ever be. I only wish I had half the photographic skill of the professionals who have done the off-trail photos.

The pictures for this post are chosen more or less at random as I would be very hard pressed to pick favorites from the photos we’ve taken so far. At twenty bucks a person, the tour pushes the limits of our budget, but it really makes me stop and think what beautiful things we may have missed over the past two years by being thrifty. I hope none of them were nearly as beautiful as this, but I will definitely think twice the next time we pass a ‘tourist trap’ by because we don’t want to throw our money away. Some of those traps are probably every bit as worthwhile as this one. Please take a look at the gallery. I’ve yet to see someone come out of a tour disappointed; in fact, the most frequent comment is ‘this is the prettiest cave I’ve ever seen.’

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One thing the east coast has that you don’t have much of on the west coast is a large number of caving conventions. There just aren’t very many conventions out here, even if the cavers are at least as active. As luck would have it, we stumbled across the Northwest Caving Association Regional. It’s a little coincidental actually, since it changes areas every year. Regardless of all the random factors that could have prevented it, we did find out about the NCAR in time and make it down to Trout Lake, Washington for Memorial Day weekend.

As with every caving convention we’ve been to, the people were awesome. You don’t meet nicer, more down to earth people than cavers. On Saturday, we bummed a ride with members of the Silver Sage Grotto (out of Idaho) where we had a rather massive trip through Butter and Stairwell. I think we had twenty-four people underground at one point, counting the infant strapped to his Dad’s chest.

There were still a few interesting ice formations lingering in Butter, but they won’t be around much longer with the weather warming up. The nice thing about ice formations is that they grow back the next year, even if people do damage them.

Stairwell was more of a sport cave. The same two dozen-ish people went in, but there were a couple of crossovers that kept us from being right on top of each other as we were inside of Butter. One interesting feature of Stairwell was the ‘bubble room’. This was an area where lava filled the room twice, resulting in an interesting texture to the walls as the original rock was melted down and smoothed out. It was a short squeeze to get into, but certainly worth the trouble to see such an interesting feature.

Due to a couple of the Silver Sage guys being last out of Stairwell, we ended up having a beer around the truck and talking with one of the locals after everyone had left. He gave us directions to Poacher’s cave and since none of us were caved out yet, we headed over and popped around the cave systems in that area. There were many, many entrances in the area and one large passage that went a half mile or more before we turned back with going passage ahead of us. All in all, we had a pretty full day and Jenn and I didn’t manage to stay up much past dark – missing the big party night.

Sunday, we had an interesting cave planned. We had a group of about ten people, which was much more manageable than the previous day and headed over to Dead Horse. Dead Horse is one of the larger lava tubes in the country and we’d had people trying to scare us away from it since Friday evening. It seems there was concern that the lower entrance was flooded and the upper entrance, or ‘Rat Hole’ was a tight, awkward squeeze that was even tougher to get out of than into.

Mark and Randy from the Silver Sage Grotto

The Rat Hole turned out to be easier than popular opinion had predicted. We did have one person unable to enter due to body size, but everyone else got in without too much trouble. We actually had a couple of first time cavers on the trip and ended up getting creative halfway through the cave. At one point, we realized we had someone without a headlamp who was carrying a maglite! Mid-cave, we did some impromptu outfitting and got him a head lamp and some clips to hold it on his helmet.

Towards the bottom of the cave, one of our group seemed to be getting mildly hypothermic. Understandable, as he was wearing a T-shirt and shorts and had been crawling across a rather damp floor in a cave that was a little chilly. Once again, the group managed to take care of itself. We improvised a thermal suit from a large garbage bag, got him something to put between butt and cold rocks and got some carbs in him before we turned back.

At the rat hole, everybody got out without too much trouble. Just in case, we’d sent a more experienced caver out first who was giving anyone that needed it a quick tug. At the end of the day, we were all out safe and sound with nothing more than a few scrapes and bruises. Even our new cavers were still raring to go, so we popped into Wicked cave for a few minutes since it was right across the road.

Overall, NCAR was a blast and we were happy to make a caving convention this summer. We’d been expecting to miss them all as there aren’t very many west coast conventions and we can’t be in Alaska and at all the east conventions at the same time. We made some new friends and now we’ll have a few more people we’ll have to pop in and visit when we want to go caving out west!

Free/Cheap Campsites mentioned in this post:
Trailhead BnB

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I hate to post two stories so close together, but since our internet connection is about to go from ‘two tin cans and a string’ to ‘no one can hear you scream’, I’m going to go ahead and put up the Carlsbad post along with a link to the fancy pictures.

One of the sights we were both looking forward to since we hit the road was Carlsbad Caverns. Neither of us had been here since we were children and while I couldn’t recall anything about the cave, I remember being fascinated throughout the entire trip. Since we’ve taken up caving as a hobby, Carlsbad has taken on the aspect of your run of the mill holy shrine and a required pilgrimage.

We knew our America the Beautiful pass would get us into the Big Room for free, but one day underground wasn’t going to do it. We’re trying to stick to a budget here, so rather than paying for a guided tour of other sections of the cave or other caves in the park, I emailed a couple of people in the local grotto and asked if they had anything going on. It was short notice, but they both responded and took us on two separate trips in two days with two caves each day!

Day one, we hit the Parks Ranch cave system while we were waiting on one person that was traveling from El Paso for the trip. It was a fairly narrow system that was much drier, hotter and full of sharp gravel than we’d become used to on the east coast. There was a small campground right above the cave system, so we left the camper right there for the night and hitched a ride with Phyllis to Slaughter Canyon.

I learned just how hardcore desert cavers are for the next part of the trip. We hiked a bit over ninety minutes across the desert to reach Christmas Tree cave. Before even reaching the cave, I was just about out of water. Luckily, it was a pretty easy cave that was much cooler than Parks Ranch and we came out at sundown for the return hike. Christmas Tree is a very decorated cave. There are formations all over the place including the cave’s namesake ‘Christmas Tree’ formation that actually looks like a small evergreen was planted and then calcified.

On day two, we met up wth Kevin, who was taking a family group from Colorado out for the girls’ first wild cave tour. They sure got a fair bit of excitement – the first cave we jumped in was Yellow Jacket and within thirty feet of the entrance we found a fair sized Western Diamondback curled up and none too happy about intruders in his home. We were glad he’d taken up residence at the far side of a fairly large room so we could ease past him. Overall, this cave had very few decorations and was mazy with a few tight squeezes. Jenn finally got to see just how fat I am when she wriggled through a hole that was so tight on me that I was forced to exhale in order to move forward and had to quickly pull my pants back up after exiting the hole! That squeeze ended up being our stopping point as one of the group couldn’t fit and one of the girls had no intention of trying.

The kids must’ve had a good time, though, because everyone was up for a run over to Doc Brito, which is a fairly short cave. The only really interesting part of this trip was a hairy section on the climb down. I went first and missed the hole for an easy climb down. I was left hanging by one arm with a short drop onto unknown ground. I managed to pull myself back up and onto the right path with a lot of huffing and puffing. Everyone else got a mini-lecture on which route to take as even a small drop like that could have been nasty with an unlucky landing and the bad route seemed to attract most people as it was the easier to see coming in.

On day three, we rested! Thanks very much to Phyllis and Kevin for organizing these trips. Thanks also to Brenda, Amy, Bryant, Gina, Andy and his family for making the trips so enjoyable. Gypsy cavers couldn’t hope to come across a friendlier group than the Pecos Valley Grotto.

Finally, on day four we made it to Carlsbad. We took the natural entrance to the Big Room and were likely the slowest people there that day as we had to stop and shine flashlights into all sorts of nooks and crannies. Also, I had to shoot roughly a hundred pictures; but sadly, most of them didn’t turn out too well because the scenes are just so large and impossible to light up well. We did get a few good shots, though. Now we have an excuse to go back again soon.

We ended up taking something like five or six hours to make it through the ‘basic’ tour. I do believe we were passed by everyone that started the tour after us, including an entire busload of Asian tourists who would pause for a few seconds, stick up a camera phone to snap a picture and move on. For all I know, their pictures turned out better than ours. We did, at least, see what we were taking pictures of and sat down a few times just to enjoy the scenery and peace. But, I guess they had to hurry as they have an entire country to see while they’re on vacation. I’d hate to hear what it sounds like during the summer after hearing the approaching tour group!

I won’t even try to describe Carlsbad. You can see a few of the keeper pictures from the gallery here. However, the pictures don’t even come close to doing it justice. You’ve really got to see it for yourself.

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In New Mexico, the mountains were dotted with cave systems. On one dirt road, North West of Carlsbad Caverns, I saw four of them on the same mountain. As usual, Johnny wasn’t able to scout, because he was driving, so I showed them to him. He then pointed out that they were moooving.

Maybe I should wear my glasses more often. That way I wont end up sticking my head in a cow.

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For your participation, you will receive free camping during the event, an official T-shirt, a guided cave tour, new friends, and a fuzzy warm feeling that comes from making a difference.

Work will include the following:

• Formation Repair and Cleaning

• Visual Work to Camouflage Man-Made Features

• Vandalism / Graffiti Work

• Clean-Up of Trails and Commercial Areas

• and Much Much More!

More information can be found on the website. Please ignore the 2008 date. It is a typo.

You can also contact them @ 606-286-4411.

The event will be held at:

Johnny and I had a great time in this park. It is where we worked on the bat gate. There is a ton of wildlife in the area. We saw deer every day for most of the day. We also saw a fox and a number of skunks. Its a very nice park with a lot of caves in it.

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We left South Carolina in a hurry and made a beeline for the Great Saltpetre Cave Preserve in Mt. Vernon Kentucky again. We were hoping to get some caving in and see some friends once more before it gets too cold to be in Kentucky and we head out west for the winter.

We got to GSP on a Friday evening and were disappointed to find there weren’t many folks around for the weekend. By the end of the weekend, we hadn’t managed to go caving, but we did meet the head of the GSP committee, who had not heard of our ‘pseudo-real temporary membership in lieu of an actual real membership and almost real camping pass’ which had been issued by the former membership chair of the Greater Cincinnati Grotto. However, Bob, was polite and let us stick around while we straightened things out.

Halfway through our first week there, we met Shane, who had come up to do some trail maintenance and caving. We ended up doing a night trip with Shane to John Griffin cave. We later heard conflicting information regarding the closed state of this cave due to bat hibernation season. As of this moment, I am unable to find it listed on the cave closure list. I wish we’d had this list handy during our time at GSP. There is a 1600′ stream passage that has acted as an obstacle to finding the other entrance to this cave system. During our trip, this passage was nearly dry and it would’ve been an excellent time to try and find the other end without risking hypothermia as previous expeditions have.

Friday night, Shane’s wife and daughter came down and we hooked up with another couple to do an evening trip to Sinks of the Roundstone. Jenn and I had been in the cave during Karst-O-Rama, but we barely scratched the surface of the cave. During this trip, we saw several new areas. Now, it seems like an even nicer cave because I’ve seen that there is quite a bit of cave there that we haven’t seen and experienced some of the more interesting passages that we passed up during our previous trip.

Saturday night was the Halloween party. Jenn got suckered into sewing tarps to act as a wind break for the party. I made a couple of chocolate pies, decanted a bottle of whiskey and finished making the bottle of limoncello that Jenn had begun work on during the week. I can safely say that none of this was left over except the ‘lemon hooch’ that I had to wrestle free after a drunken hayride so Jenn could have a drink or two.

Sunday, we got together with Shane’s family and went to Climax cave. Climax is a really fun cave. It has several different maze areas where you can get quickly turned around if you’re not careful. Jenn and I have been on trips to this cave twice now and I’m still not sure we’ve seen much more than half of it. This is one of the caves that makes people really appreciate the reflective markers I’ve made up. In fact, the next time we ran into Shane and family, they’d made their own set of flags similar to my own.

The first half of the following week passed quietly until people began arriving to setup for the Rockcastle county elementary school field trips. Once again, Jenn got suckered into sewing tarps as the previous tarps were not dark enough to block the sun so that we could show movies to the children. Thursday and Friday, we got to remember what it’s like to get up early… we were helping with the cave tours of the Great Saltpetre cave for 2nd and 4th grade students. We had a lot of fun and made sure to follow as ‘tail gunners’ for a different guide every trip. Each guide had a little bit different lecture to give as we were walking through the cave, so we got to hear quite a bit of the history of the cave.

By Friday evening, we finally got our GCG membership straightened out and were no longer ‘the squatters down on the point’. Dave rolled in Friday evening and we spent the weekend hanging out and looking for caves. The sad thing is that we were looking for known caves, but with poor directions. We spent Saturday afternoon climbing all over a ridgeside and found a few holes, one of which was human-passable, but only about 40′ one direction and 15′ the other. The upside to this was hearing Dave scream like a girl upon seeing ’some sort of giant rat-like monster’ and then hearing him shout ‘OOGEDY BOOGEDY!’ in order to frighten off the critter before sending Jenn and I in for further exploration.

Sunday was almost as bad, except we drove Dave’s truck through some 4WD trails rather than actually walking. We found one potential cave, but the entrance was awfully tight and downhill around a corner; none of us was really comfortable with trying to get out of that belly-crawl once we got in. Jenn made it in the farthest, going headfirst while I held her feet. She was able to see around the corner and it was more of the same, so we gave up on that particular hole as being a lousy way to experience a first hand cave rescue.

Monday, Shane and his family came back down and he took us over to Wells Cave which is about and hour drive from GSP. The entrance to the cave acts as an excellent nerd filter. It took about ten minutes to negotiate a crawl through four to six inches of mud that has the consistency of peanut butter. Behind this, there is over eleven miles of cave. We’ve barely explored this cave; it would take much longer than the time we had available to see anything approaching the entire length of such a system.

And today, we’re back on the road!

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After we spent a couple of weekends at the Great Saltpetre Preserve caving with some great people from the area, we headed towards Boone, NC to start our next stint as carnies. However, we got sidetracked leaving Kentucky as Jenn noticed Carter Caves State Park was just a few miles out of the way. As this is where Crawl-a-thon is held in January, we decided it would be worth a quick stop over and looksee.

We got up bright and early and explored Laurel and Horn Hollow caves. Both are rather short trips, that have been ‘prepared’ for tourists, but they are still unlit, self-led trips. Horn Hollow has a beautiful entrance, but is otherwise not much to look at from inside. Laurel was quite a pretty little cave and we were able to get off-trail and explore the upper passage as well as climb a small waterfall that most non-cavers would have never seen.

Once we got to the camper, covered in cave mud, and I got stripped down to my high performance underwear, a couple of guys walked up, and rather than running away, they wanted to chat, which marked them as cavers and not afraid of dirty, half-dressed hippies in a parking lot. This was our introduction to Roy and Jerry. They were in the area building a bat gate, which is designed to let bats in, but keep people out during bat hibernation season. Since we were the only muddy folks around with a bat sticker on our vehicle, they assumed we’d be good suckers, err… candidates, to volunteer to help out.

Well, they were right and we decided to come out with them the following day and see just what it takes to build a bat gate. It turns out, that it requires a lot of sweat and a fair helping of calluses, bruises, burns and muscle. Just a friendly note: if anyone ever asks if you’d like to ‘pack in steel’, run away screaming. Steel gets packed in increments of roughly 400 lbs, in this case by five guys along a ridge, both uphill and downhill. After a few hours of this, I was more than happy to be put in charge of the acetylene torch. While I spent a lot of time bending and kneeling, it beat the heck out of packing steel. Luckily, the forestry service and wildlife management services were contributing a lot of manpower to the project or we’d still be trying to get the steel in today.

Roy and Jerry were super nice folks to work with. They took us out to eat a few times and related lots of caving stories. By the end of the first day, Roy had promised to pay for our campsite as long as we hung around. By the end of the second day, we were on the payroll for the duration as well. By the end of the week, we’d been promised a spot to camp in Texas or Virginia and a cave trip into Mexico if we manage to get out west this winter.

This was Roy’s 310th gate and he says he’s quitting… after just one more gate. We had a great time working with Roy and Jerry as well as all the forestry and wildlife folks. You can’t beat doing something new and intriguing, getting paid for it and having a free campsite while meeting interesting people!

View more images from Carter Caves State park, including building the bat gate, Horn Hollow Cave, and Kevin’s Kave in our gallery.

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We are still alive. We are sorry about leaving you hanging, but we have been too busy living and having fun to sit down and write about it. We should have some more time on our hands soon. In the last month, we went to Karst-O-Rama, stayed with my folks and made all kinds of

tasty treats, met tons of great people, explored some wild caves, went to Wormfest, been practicing rope climbing and decending, and… well that’s enough for now. Stay tuned; Lots more to come!

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We made it back from Karst-O-Rama alive! We met some really amazing folks that were happy to bring along complete novices, loan equipment to complete strangers and give lots of advice. Jenn’s parents and her nephew came along in her parents’ Class A. The road getting in and out of the Great Saltpetre Preserve was… interesting… for the 35′ motor home, but we made it without any mishaps.

The general format of Karst-O-Rama is caving all day and partying all night. The electric sites are smack in the middle of the party camp, where there are no quiet hours as there are in the family camping area. It was awfully hot, hitting the 90’s every day and we were glad to be underground during the heat of the day.

Thursday afternoon, we took a tour of the Great Saltpetre Cave, which is a ’show cave’. In other words, it is lit up, has high ceilings and an easily negotiable path. The cave has quite a rich history as a mine and a Civil War hospital. More recently, it was used as the location for Fire Down Below, which is where most of the lighting came from. There is a single room within the cave which has been used to host a party with several thousand attendants while a band played on the rock ’stage’. While we were there, it was often being used to play frisbee.

We had been advised to show up and borrow equipment rather than buying gear ahead of time, so once the Pre-Howdy party started, we headed over to introduce ourselves and try to bum some gear. It was either too early during the event or we just didn’t run into the right people and we didn’t find any spare gear floating around for Friday, although Ryan was glad to offer some spare gear for Saturday. We did, however, meet a nice group of folks that offered to take us caving on Friday if we could score some helmets.

Friday morning rolled around and we finally got lucky. We ran into a chap called Thor who loaned us a couple of converted construction helmets. Since we were halfway there, Jenn and I broke down and bought headlamps, packed our gear and just barely caught the last ride out to Sinks of the Roundstone cave.

Sinks of the Roundstone was a pretty darn big cave. It was mostly dry with some tremendous rooms. Unfortunately, it is a very well known cave with an easily accessible entrance. This means it is heavily graffitied and has an inordinate amount of litter.

We also met Chaos, the caving dog. He is a Blue Heeler (Australian Cattle Dog), and the most extraordinary thing about him was the way he would run up and down his ‘herd’ of people and try to get the stragglers back with the group. Sorry Jenn, you’re going to have to ‘lose’ a couple of cats before we have room for a puppy.

After having a blast caving on Friday, we broke down and bought a couple of helmets. This meant we had an easier time borrowing a helmet and lights for Jenn’s nephew on Saturday. Also, we’d met a few more people and had an easier time scoring a helmet and lights from Mike when we found we’d missed our trip due to the long hike back to our campsite. Luckily, we got spare gear and still managed to catch up with a group heading out to Mullins Spring Cave.

Mullins Spring was a completely different experience than the day before. The entrance to the cave was through a waist deep pool of water that was damn cold. This did have one very nice effect… no graffiti or trash! There was a little more rock climbing inside, but not nearly as much mud as SoR. About a third of the way in, we encountered the second pool that must be crossed. This one closer to five feet deep and we had a few people decide they’d rather wait there than get that wet.

Six of us continued on and found that the best features of the cave were behind the water. There was a high dome with a waterfall, a nice flowstone formation and a couple of quite large rooms. Unfortunately, our camera man was one of those that stayed behind, so we missed out on some nice pictures. Chuck did get some awfully nice pictures of both trips though. There are quite a few posted in the gallery.

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