Cave #22 - Custard Hollow Cave

After I got back to the campground from Overlooked Cave, I put my helmet outside of the tent, leaving it there overnight. Unfortunately, it rained pretty heavily that night while I was asleep, so the Apex got completely soaked again and was back to having the same problems it was having the day before. Everyone was planning on going to Custard Hollow Cave that morning, so I didn't have time to get it all dried out again before we left on the trip.

Fortunately, fellow caver Alan Cook from Birmingham had an extra cheap led light that he let me borrow. I put it on the helmet, thanked him profusely, and climbed into the back of the waiting pickup truck. Custard Hollow is only a few miles from Sinking Cove, but it's on some fairly rough dirt roads, so like true Alabama rednecks we loaded up 30 people in three pickup trucks and headed down the road. It was a pretty wild ride, and dodging the limbs was the primary concern.

Truck #3 Full of Alabama Redneck Cavers

We all got to the parking area with only minor lacerations, and everyone unloaded and got geared up. We took a group photo, then we all headed up the mostly dry stream bed to get to the entrance. After a very short walk we came to the first of three entrances to the cave, which are all pretty close together. Half of us went in the first entrance while the other half went to the second. All the entrances come into the same entry room, which is mostly scalloped canyon with a good bit of water flowing through it.

Group Shot Before Entering Custard Hollow Cave

There was some crawling soon after this room, and the first place you're really required to get wet. This cave has a lot of water in it, mostly in waist deep pools. The water is cold, and the first time you dip your boys into it is not so pleasant, but after a while everything from the waist down just goes numb and you deal with it. There were a few spots that required some crawling and a bit of bent-over duck walking, but most of the cave was big booming borehole that goes on for miles and gets bigger as you go deeper.

As we got deeper into the cave, we split into lots of smaller groups, which changed up a lot as people stopped to rest or one group went off in a different direction. There's a good number of decorations in the cave and I didn't see many broken formations either, even when they were right next to the path like one really pretty piece of cave bacon was. I guess since the cave is so remote and access is somewhat restricted the yahoos haven't gotten in there to break everything.

I went pretty far back in the cave, but didn't push it as far as some people did. I came to another low crawl and was feeling pretty tired at that point, so I decided to turn back with Terry and Van and we exited the cave together. We did get turned around at one point and ended up in a pancake room that may have kept going but I was generating so much fog at that point that I couldn't see far enough to tell.

Also, I really missed my Apex on this trip. The borrowed light was adequate when I turned on my mini-mag to go along with it, but I realized that there has been an arms race going on in cave lights the last few years, and a 15 dollar Walmart light is not going to illuminate much for you when you're surrounded by Sten-Lights, Apexs, and big carbide lamps. When I was away from all of the people with those lights it was fine, but when they were near me my eyes couldn't adjust enough for my spot beam to do much good.

After we got back to the campground, after another wild ride, James and I walked up to the resurgence entrance and rinsed off in the pools. We went back as far as the twilight zone, but we didn't have lights with us. I'm not counting it as a cave visit anyway. I found a pretty large snake skin around one of the pools, but no sign of the snake it belonged it. We had a great meal that night, with Jason Wall smoking up about 30lbs of butt all day and a great buffet of other stuff layed out as well.

It rained again that night, but this time I had all my stuff in the tent. We packed up pretty early the next morning and headed back to Nashville. This cave was definitely a treat, especially considering I had never heard of it until that weekend. There's still more of it to see, so I look forward to going back soon.

If you want to see more pictures, head over to Spelunkologists.com and see the three pages of pictures from the trip that they have up there. All the pictures in this blog post are courtesy of the photographers there.

Hatch and Others Enter Custard Hollow Cave

A Good Week

For the first time since I started using a pedometer about 3 years ago, I've managed to walk more than 10k steps a day for seven straight days. Over the last 7 days, I've put 79,254 steps on it, which is over 36 miles and averages 11.3k per day. I've actually walked enough to lose weight without doing the low carb diet, and pretty much eating like I normally would other than not going to buffets.

I'm going to try to push it out to 8 or 9 straight days this week, although I may rest up some for my caving trip this Wednesday night. The best day this week was when Jack and I went to the Greenway yesterday afternoon. It was really hot, and I burned through almost 2 liters of water, but we walked a little over 4 miles. Here's a picture of Jack on one of the bridges.

The Joy of Leather Furniture

Yesterday afternoon, Marissa, Jack, and I were upstairs together for a while, watching Barney or working on the computer or playing with Jack. Marissa had removed his diaper and we were letting him air out some before we put a new one on.

At one point, Jack was over near the banister and we were not really paying much attention to him. I heard him say something like "pee pee Mommy's chair", but I didn't think anything of it at the time since there was no chair anywhere around. After a few more minutes, we put a new diaper on him and I went downstairs.

As I was walking by the leather chair in the living room, I noticed it had liquid all over it. Suddenly the pieces all came together. Apparently he had managed to pee through the balusters and only got the chair wet. Since I found it, I had to wipe it up, but at least with the leather it didn't soak in.

Best Lynyrd Skynyrd Cover Evar!

You have to love the Internet when it lets you dig up things like this.

Cave #21 - Overlooked Cave

Way back in 2001, during the 4th of July weekend, I went caving for the first time at Sinking Cove Cave in Franklin County, TN during the Birmingham Grotto's annual camp-out. I had a great time, and it eventually led to it being one of my major hobbies. I've been wanting to go back for a while now, so this year my Nashville caving buddy James Wood and I decided to crash the weekend and get some caving done. James is also from Birmingham, and his brother and other friends were going to be there, so we both knew plenty of people.

James' brother Daniel and some others had a vertical trip planned to Guys Cave on Friday morning, so we left out about 7:30 to get there in time. After a quick stop for gas and a few Hardee's biscuits, we hit the road and headed down past Sewanee to get to Sinking Cove. It's in Tennessee, but you can't get there from here. You have to drive down into Alabama and then back up into Tennessee.

We got to the campground about 10:30, and the Wood brothers and their friends left for their vertical trip. I got my tent setup and all my gear unpacked, and then sat down to work on my main light. I had sprayed my Apex off the night before with the garden hose along with my other gear, and now it was refusing to turn on. I disassembled it and let it sit in the sun for a few hours while I talked to some of the people still in the camp. Jason Wall from the Birmingham Grotto was there to cook for the weekend, and I helped prepare about 100 pieces of chicken that he put in the smoker. He had a spicy Cajun marinade that I don't remember the name of, and he put about two chickens in big zip lock bags along with a can of beer and let them sit for a few hours before he put them on. They turned out awesome. I think one of the reasons so many people show up for the weekend is just the food that Jason turns out.

I talked to Hazard Bryant for a while, and we started talking about a cave he found a few years ago that he named Overlooked Cave. He called it that because people had basically been going by it for years and apparently no one had ever found it. He kept it to himself for a few years while he was exploring it, so not too many people have been in it as of yet.

I decided that if I could get my Apex working again I'd go check it out. I put the light back together and put the batteries in, and it started working. It was doing some funky stuff with the settings changing rapidly, but since it was such a short cave I figured I could do fine with my backup lights if I had to.

I got a few sketchy directions from Hazard which included the phrase "look for the big sycamore tree then go straight up the hill" and hitched a ride with someone leaving who dropped me off where I hoped was near the cave entrance. As he drove off, I looked at the hill and saw about 20 or 30 damned sycamore trees and no signs of a path. I finally just picked a way through the undergrowth that didn't look too thick and started up the hill. I got up to the first rock line after about 200 feet, and headed down it. After a short walk I came to a hole that I figured must of been the cave, although it didn't seem to have a lot of air coming out as everyone had said Overlooked Cave would have.

I rested a minute, got my gear on, and got down on my hands and knees to crawl into the hole. I only went back about three feet and realized that it dead-ended at about 7 feet total. There was a small crack in the back that seemed to be blowing a little bit of air, but this was definitely not a cave. I backed out and decided to keep going down the ridgeline.

After some more bushwhacking and keeping a careful eye out for snakes, I came upon a large, rocky, dry stream bed. No one had mentioned a stream bed in the directions, but I decided to check it out anyway. I climbed up it a good ways, and it was full of old rotten logs and wobbly rocks, but nothing that looked remotely like a cave. Once again, I retraced my steps and kept going down the ridge line. Finally, I crossed a fresh trail of trampled undergrowth and could feel a very nice stream of cool air pouring down the hill, so about 3 minutes later I was standing at the entrance of the cave.

I had worked up a pretty good sweat by this point, so I sat down in front of the cave for about 20 minutes, enjoying enough cold air pouring out that it felt like I was sitting in front of a large air conditioner. There were butterflies and dragon flies all around, and I watched a snail crawl across a leaf for a while too. Very relaxing to say the least. Now I was ready to do some caving.

The entrance of the cave is about 2 1/2 feet high by about a yard wide, and is shaped like a half dome. I stuck my head inside and turned on my light, which had finally settled down and was working fine. I belly crawled in about 10 feet and stopped to consider things. I don't really enjoy crawling very much, so I was tempted to stop at that point. I decided I had to at least go far enough back to get out of the twilight zone of the cave so I could at least claim to have been "in" the cave.

The entrance passage goes back about 50 feet with a slight curve to it and then takes a hard left. I considered stopping here again, but eventually decided to just quit being a wuss and to push on. After about 30 more feet, the cave opens up a little so I could stop belly crawling and sit up and rest for a bit. A that point I was at a T, with one passage heading back in the general direction of the rock face and looking like it got pretty low again. The hands and knees height passage continued further back, so I headed that way. The floor was still dirt, with lots of old vegetative matter laying around. The ceiling also had a lot of crinoid fossils and I spent some time while I was resting looking at those.

I kept crawling further back into the cave, and noticed several times that there were green leaves in some of the holes in the walls, so I guess the cave has several much smaller entrances. After a short while, I came to a room that was about 40 feet long by about 10 feet wide and the ceiling was about 5 feet tall. The floor here was covered in old nut shells, so I started referring to it as the Nut Room. I stopped at the end of this room and once more thought about turning back, but I started hearing what sounded like water in the distance, so I kept pushing on.

After about 50 more feet, the passage started getting taller and I was finally able to stand up in the cave in what was a much bigger room. It had hundreds of soda straw formations on the ceiling, and a small stream ran down the middle of the room, disappearing under a small pile of rocks. The water was making a large echo underneath, so it was obvious that there was space down there, but the hole leading down was obviously too small for me to fit in. I found out later from Hazard that it leads down to a small room with a 10 foot waterfall, but then gets too tight to go much further.

I followed the water upstream and came to another low crawl with a good bit of water in it. I didn't really feel like getting wet at that point and my knees were starting to talk to me, so I decided to turn around at that point. I found out later that it was just a short crawl before it opened into an even larger room with some nice flowstone, so I'm going to have to go back and check that out at some point.

I crawled back out of the cave, stopping frequently to rest and look at more crinoid fossils. I spent about 2 hours total on my trip, and had a nice walk back to the camp where Jason had some of his chicken ready to munch on.

I don't currently have a camera to take caving, but to make Heff happy here's a link that has some links to some video and some pictures taken in the cave last year by Scott Fee of the Birmingham Grotto.

Cave #20 - Indian Grave Point Cave

Ever since I started caving a few years back, everyone has mentioned Indian Grave Point (IGP) cave to me. I was starting to feel like I was the only person in Tennessee who caves who had not been there yet. As a matter of fact, I was sitting at Paul's house Saturday night watching fights, and we started talking about caving. One of Paul's friends immediately asked me, "so have you been to IGP yet?" I told him I was leaving at 8am the next morning to go. He told me about going there 40 years ago with the Nashville Grotto.

So we all met up at the McDonald's off Hwy 109 at 8am, and headed out about 8:30 or so after waiting for a few stragglers. There were 12 of us total on the trip. We got to the parking area near the cave a little less than an hour later.

The landowners of the cave are very friendly. The cave is located in a cow pasture on the side of a very steep hill. You park on the side of the road next to a creek and then go over the fence on a climb-over that's been installed to avoid damaging the fence. Then you're staring up a hill that you've got to go up about 250 feet at about a 50 degree angle. The view of the surrounding valley from up there is great. It was early enough that you could still see some mist moving around on the hills.

Once you get up there, you're at the entrance sinkhole. You slide/climb down about 8 feet, with a nylon rope being there to help out. The entrance sink hole is fairly large, with a good bit of water dripping down and moss growing on a lot of the rocks at the bottom. At the back of the sink, you head down into the cave through what at first is a low crawl.

It opens up fairly quickly into what I was told was some old saltpeter works. There's a small stream channel twisting through the mud and the ceiling gets low a few times before you get to another short crawl which opens up into the first good-sized room, which has a small dome at the top. On the right side of this room, there's a huge chunk of rock that at some point in the past broke in half, leaving a crack that you can crawl through to take a shortcut to the deeper parts of the cave. This rock is about the size of a trailer, so it's pretty impressive to think about it breaking in half at some point.

After that is a crawl down a big pile of breakdown. It's not that big of a deal normally, but almost all of the breakdown in this cave is covered in mud, so you have to be extra careful. I still banged up my shins and my forearms a lot, and my ankles and knees took some extra punishment as well. All of them are talking to me today.

Then you come to a nice open area with a fairly clean floor that you can walk around. Since this is such a popular cave, someone got the bright idea to build a fire ring here. I'm not sure what the attraction is about building a fire so deep in a cave, but it doesn't appear to have smoked things up too badly.

After milling about in this area for bit, we headed deeper into the cave. At one point there was a low crawl that everyone went through. I saw a slighter taller space to the left that I decided to go through to spare myself a bit. Unfortunately, I had to slide off this into mud. I didn't think it was that deep, but it ended up going about half way up my calf. Nice. Now my boots weighed about two pounds more each.

We slogged on over some more muddy breakdown, where my newly muddied boots caused me to slip and slide even more. That's where most of the bruises on my shins came about. Eventually we arrived in the largest room of the cave, known as the Cascade Dome. It featured twin domes which had some water coming down. Apparently there's a route to the top of them, which James and a few others explored a bit, but didn't attempt to go to the top.

After resting there for a while, we pushed on back some more. Joey and I ended up in the area known as the Garden of Eden and we waited there for the rest of the group. This area features some dried up rimstone dams and a small pool of water known as Madonna's Pool. It has some nice decorations as well, and what appeared to be bivalve fossils in the ceiling. Someone had also crafted a miniature Stonehenge out of mud and left in on a shelf here.

After we met up with the rest of the group, a failed attempt at rocking an abandoned pack was discovered. We also played around for a bit with the strangest discovery of the day. Someone had left a stuffed marionette cat in the cave, wrapped in a baby blanket. This prompted stories about the "ghost baby" the rest of the trip, and we left the marionette hanging by the register on the way out to intrigue the next group of cavers.

By the time we were headed out, I was just about bushed. I had to stop and rest several times, but finally climbing out of that sink hole was awesome. This time is wasn't my legs that were so tired and sore, it was my shoulders and arms. I guess all the walking for the last few weeks paid off, so now I need to do some more push-ups.

This was supposed to be a clean-up trip, and all 12 of us had garbage bags, but only 4 bags ended up being hauled out. There was also very little visible graffiti, so someone has apparently been doing a lot of work on the cave lately. It was definitely worth the trip, and I'll definitely be going back at some point to see the parts I missed on this trip.

Defatassification Update #1

In what's sure to bring a tear to the eyes of Jefferson and Wilfred, I "brokeback" under 300 pounds today. Today's D.B.A.N. was 298.7, for a total of 16 pounds lost in the last 10 days. With the exception of a family reunion incident last Saturday, I've been very good about keeping my portion size down, along with keeping the carb count low.

I've also been doing a lot of walking. So far in June I've gone over 10k steps on 7 different days, including every day this week. I should be able to bring that up to at least twenty 10k+ days in July. Yesterday after work I hit the Stones River Greenway for 3 miles, since Marissa and the kids weren't at home. The dam trailhead is on the way home from work, so it's not too hard to stop and even do 20 minutes worth and it's not nearly as boring as walking through the neighborhood. There's also a nice little blackberry patch that has been ripening this week, so I treat myself to a few of those on the way in and out.

One of the key things that helps me make sure I get at least 10k steps in a day is to get as many as I can before I get home every day. If I still need six thousand steps at night, it's harder to motivate myself to get out and hit the sidewalk than it is if I only need four thousand. Getting about two thousand steps at lunch is a good way to make sure I get home with at least 5k. It's been getting hot and humid at lunch time lately, so yesterday I drove two miles and walked all around the K-Mart for about 20 minutes. I would drive to Opry Mills, but that's about a 10 mile round trip and there's no need to waste that much gas.