Gary pulled a permit from the SCCi website, and we decided to meet up in Woodville sometime before 11am on Saturday morning. Jack and I left the house right at 8am and after only one stop we made it to Gail's Diner in Woodville about 10:20. Gail's Diner is not much to look at, but the service was fast, super friendly, and not very expensive.
After a quick breakfast and a few cups of coffee, we loaded up and headed up to the SCCi Kennamer Cave Preserve a short distance away. The road is pretty rough and probably in worse shape after all the recent rain. My truck is not 4WD, but it had no trouble getting up to the parking area. I probably wouldn't take a car up that road, though.
After we parked, we spent some time gearing up and I loaded up my Cave Mule with most of the stuff. Gary joined in on the fun and gave the Cave Mule about 75 feet of rope to carry as well. About 100 feet from the kiosk there was a pretty loud waterfall and we went over and took some pictures of that. Then we got started up the trail right at Noon.
Now before we started the hike, there was some question about the length and difficulty of the trail up to the main entrance of the cave. Gary thought it was about a mile with 1000 feet of elevation gain. Mark Ostrander who is the property manager told me it was about a mile with 300 feet of elevation gain. By the time I got back to the truck, my pedometer was reading me having walked 4.75 for the day, and I did very little walking before I got there. When I got home I did some research using the topo map mode on Google maps and I think the parking area is about at the 600' line and the cave entrance is roughly at 1100', so it's about a mile and 500 feet up according to the map. I think my pedometer read higher because I was taking shorter steps slogging up the trail which was covered in wet leaves.
So the upper-middle-aged guy and the two old farts trudged up the old logging road/trail, while Jack the Cave Mule set a blistering pace and pretty soon disappeared from sight. After about an hour and two short rest breaks we made it up to the hollow where the main entrance is and I started yelling for Jack. The trail, by the way, is very well flagged so it's pretty hard to get lost going up there.
Jack came back down the trail and said he left the pack and the rope next to a hole in the ground, but he didn't see the cave entrance. When Gary and Andy caught up they told us the hole was, in fact, the Dug Entrance, but that the main entrance was just around the corner of a bluff where the stream was flowing.
Jack and I went to check out the main entrance, which was taking a lot of water. It looks vertical but Gary said it can be climbed down but he probably would never try it with that much water going in. I can tell you the entire area around this entrance is amazingly beautiful. It's worth the hike up there just to see that, regardless of whether you go in the cave or not.
After a final gear check and a quick snack, we got ready to go in through the Dug Entrance. It's a hole that's about 2.5 feet in diameter, and it drops down a few feet then turns a bit then goes down about 4 or 5 more feet before it takes another sharp bend. It's tight on me. Not super tight, but enough that I was having to squeeze a bit at a few spots.
Gary went in first and then I went in, followed by Jack. Andy came in last. At the bottom the slope levels out for the most part, but it's very low passage that's about a yard wide or so. It's covered with fist size and smaller rocks. In some parts I could crawl on my hands and knees, but a lot of it was belly crawling. Also, about 10 feet down that passage a stream comes in so you're crawling in about 3 inches of flowing water that is very cold. My first thought when I hit that spot where I had to belly crawl through water was "Oh man, this is gonna suuuuck."
The problem is that I usually cave in shorts and a t-shirt and I never got any real caving knee pads and I've never used elbow pads. My knee pads are just carpenter knee pads that have a solid outer surface and some nice gel packs on the inside. They're usually pretty good for a short hands and knees crawl, but they don't stay in place very well.
So fairly quickly I realized that I was going to get very cold, and my knees and elbows were going to suffer greatly. As we pushed on down this tunnel of misery, Jack said he couldn't see Andy anymore behind him. Apparently Andy saw that belly crawl through the water and decided to rout then and there. He's much wiser than I am.
After about 75 feet we got to a spot where it opened up a bit, and there was a small dome off to the left that also had a small stream coming out of it. Ahead of us was a short serpentine section and then a hole that Jack said looked like it went down 20 to 30 feet with all the water going with it. This area of the cave was also covered in huge cave crickets. I told Jack they were just waiting on one of us to expire so they could feast like kings.
We had a quick pow-wow there and decided we were already getting cold and we weren't really equipped or ready to deal with a tricky climbdown so we decided to rout at that point. Gary and Jack went ahead of me and I started the crawl back to the entrance. This was the point where it really started to suck.
On the way in I was headed slightly downward and the water was helping me slide along a bit. Now I was going back against gravity and the cold water was really starting to get to me. I would snake my way up a bit and at the tightest, lowest part I just kept telling myself "six more inches. Just go six more inches. Now go six more inches." I wasn't in any real danger, but it was hard. I had to stand at the bottom of the climb-up after I got out of the water and get myself together for a minute or two before I got out. My arms from the elbow to the wrist looked like ground hamburger at this point. Will definitely get pads before I go back. Jack just planked the entire way up and down the tunnel and emerged completely unscathed.
The wind had picked up a little outside by then and it never really got into the 50's like they had predicted in the weather forecast. I just got my stuff and started walking down the trail so I wouldn't lock up too much. Again, I'm in much better shape now so it wasn't really a problem, but I did wish I had a light jacket at that point. I guess losing 118 lbs of insulation has made me a bit more susceptible to the cold than I used to be.
After we got back down to the vehicles, we changed and followed Gary back towards Guntersville. We made a quick stop at Sauta Cave which I had never been to before. It's a short walk back to the viewing platform they've built outside the closed and gated cave. During the summer you can stand there and watch a large number of bats exiting the cave, but when we were there it was quiet and peaceful but the stream was flowing pretty fast out of the cave.
Then we headed over to Camp Maranantha to eat dinner with the rest of the Birmingham Grotto. I saw some old friends and made a few new ones. It was a great day, even without seeing very much of the insides of a cave. On the way home Jack and I enjoyed a radio show we found that was playing Blue Grass music.
Jack at the main entrance of Kennamer Cave.
