April in the August Section

Breathing Cave, Bath Co., VA

A survey trip with the Gangsta Mappers

The next in my series of post-Ph.D. celebrations was a survey trip to Breathing Cave with the Gangsta Mappers. I hadn't been underground since November and haven't been on a real cave trip since September. Seven whole months! Furthermore, this weekend was the one-year anniversary of breaking my ankle in Cassell Cave. To this end, Tom Kornack arrived at my house at 6 pm on a rainy Friday, we picked up the cavaholic Rick Royer in Towson, and headed west.
Neither Tom nor I had been to a Breathing survey and cartographer Bob Alderson had invited us many times. Bimonthly activities in Cassell had been enough. But we were both anxious to see some new (and reportedly easier) cave and enjoy the vernal weather. Rick was a Breathing veteran and it was quite fortunate that he was with us. After several hours of highway driving in the dark and rain, he guided us unerringly over some spectacularly twisty, hair-raising US250 and a series of smaller and smaller roads which we would have no chance of navigating. Finally, Rick said, "turn left here!"
"Where?" I asked, looking around. We were on a straight section of road with dark field on one side and bare woods on the other.
"Right here, really!" There was a gate in the barbed-wire fence at that point. I've known Rick for quite a while and he hasn't lead me astray yet, so I drove carefully on a set of faint ruts leading off across the field and around a bend behind a knoll. Just when I was beginning to have my doubts, we rounded the hill and came upon the Shenandoah Valley Grotto (SVG) Campground: a lovely field with a pavillion and privy and several cars.
Dave West and Karen Wilmes were already there as were Gordon Birkhimer and a friend of his, Kirt. Everyone was introduced and we set up tents in anticipation of an early start the next day.

Saturday I awoke early to a misty, cool morning. No one else was up yet, so I went for a quick exploratory ramble. Everything was beautiful in the daylight and I was glad to have gotten there. A small creek flowed through the woods at the edge of the field and a bridge lead across into more pasturage. On the other side, the path continued past a cliff face with a double cave opening. Grass grew right up to the entrance and it was one of the most visually pleasing entrances I have yet seen (this, it turns out, is Owl Cave). I continued up the hill through the woods poking into the numerous sinkholes and ravines. I walked back via a wooded ridge over the top of Owl Cave and then down by the river where it flowed through a steep-sided ravine.

Girding ourselves for the rigors ahead. Photo by Gordon Birkhimer.

By the time I got back to camp, more people had roused and others were starting to arrive from farther away. Bob Alderson (cartographer for this cave) arrived with the maps and people began to form teams. The total population was 14 including a number of new surveyors and inexperienced cavers so we split into four surveying teams. Breathing cave has two sections; the Historic Section north of the entrance and the larger Main Section (which was dug open at some point) south of the entrance. Tom, Rick and I had vertical gear and were assigned to survey as much of the August Section (one of the farther Historical portions) as possible. The three other teams were to map parts of the Main Section; one team was to do scaling pole work and two would do more horizontal survey near the Serpentine Way.
We set out for the half-mile drive to the parking spot. Then followed a long, two mile hike up the hill on jeep roads to the cave entrance. We arrived at 11:30 and got right to business being the first team in. A large block of snow covered with leaves remained in the entrance left over from a particularly snowy winter.
Breathing Cave is largely joint-controlled and looks very grid-like on the map. Most of the passages trend NW-SE or ENE-WSW; the joint systems intersect at about a 70-degree angle. Rick guided us in via a series of confusing turns through alternating crawling passage and tall canyon. This section was not terribly decorated though there were many bats of several species around. At length we came to the 40' drop into George's Gorge. I rigged my rope on the pair of bolts and rapped smoothly down. It wasn't the most satisfying drop I've seen, but I was feeling relaxed and not too choosy.
When the others had arrived, Rick lead us up through a pile of massive break-down to the other side of the Gorge, down a short passage and we were confronted with a small hole in the wall rather reminiscent of Hamilton Cave's Airblower. We were looking for station BC28 to start our survey at. The ceiling above the hole was marked with BC27. Rick wriggled through, found BC28 on the other side, and the survey was on.

Rick stands in the entrance to Breathing Cave. Photo by Gordon Birkhimer.

As sketcher, I brought up the rear while Rick set stations and did backsights. Tom, in the middle read the tape and did frontsights. When I wormed through the not-too-bad constriction into the August Section, I found them hard at work setting up the first shot. We were in a low passage perhaps three feet tall and five wide. The floor was packed dirt and sloped away before us. Perfect sketching conditions! Rick and Tom have no hang-ups about long shots; a couple 30'+ shots through similar passage brought us to the first room. I was rapidly filling the first page of sketching and having an easy time of it. In the first room, the ceiling rose to about seven feet and another passage intersected blocked with mud after about ten feet in each direction. Splay shots were performed while I caught up. Then it was back in low passage for another two shots until a similar but much larger room was reached. We paused for a while and had a quick first lunch.
From this Junction Room, a major passage headed south down a steep incline. To the north, another set of passages branched off. We tackled the south passage first surveying down the steep mud past a large rock tongue and into a stream canyon with a 20' ceiling. The floor was suddenly level and covered with stream cobbles. Despite all the recent rain, the floor was dry. The stream cobbles continued to the east while the ceiling dipped steadily downward eventually pinching off the passage. This is apparently a separate drainage system than the rest of the cave and Bob Alderson was particularly interested in any going leads in this area. While there were numerous side leads headed up or down-dip, they inevitably ended in mud fill. Sorry Bob!

Old BCCS map of the August Section annotated with significant landmarks.

To the west, a climb up thin strata of dark, hard rock under a set of wedged boulders lead to tall, thin canyon. Straight ahead and to the righ were steep mud slopes up to mud pinches near the ceiling. To the left, however, the ceiling sloped down to nearly meet the floor. A narrow, very tight passage was left however and the dirt fill sloped downward at 10-20 degrees, clearly going somewhere. Rick eagerly dove in and started wriggling downward. For reference, he is by far the smallest of the three of us. After 40 feet or so we were running out of tape and the passage was becoming too small for even Rick's collapsable frame. We took a shot and he started to retreat (uphill, feet-first!). At this point it became, as the old Chinese proverb says, 'interesting'. Rick was having serious trouble getting out; his caveralls kept riding up and producing the most excruciating wedgies. When we heard him say something about being really worried we started to get uneasy. Rick does not panic easily but there was definitely an edge in his voice I'd never heard before. There was no way for us to get in there and the nearest person we knew would fit (Karen Wilmes) was surveying in some unknown location on the other side of the cave.
I briefly tried backing in hoping to hook my feet around Rick's to help pull him out but was stopped about a body-length in by my ample hind-quarters. Tom, being somewhat skinnier than I, stripped down most of the way to limit his radius and started down with a chunk of webbing we'd gotten out. Meanwhile, Rick had gotten a few body-lengths closer and was now perhaps 20' away. Tom finally managed to get a slip-knot around Rick's ankle. Now to get Tom out. I got in far enough to grab Tom's boots and hauled him out. Then we pulled the webbing giving Rick support. It was all pretty scary, but fortunately, everyone was fine. We sat for a while and rested and took in more food.
With the southern half of the August Section surveyed, we turned our attentions to the northern portion. The cave changes character here subtly; the steep dip is still there in the bedding planes, but the passage is much wider and large breakdown makes the sketching more interesting. Tom and Rick took off down the passage taking shot after shot as I tried to keep up. Again, the passage headed down hill passing many short side leads choked with mud. Just past a pair of 10' tall bedrock towers, we emerged into a spatious room with a 30' ceiling and stream cobbles on the floor. Again, the passage headed east with the ceiling steadily diving toward the floor.
As I sketched the complicated passageway, Rick and Tom surveyed ahead. Tom dove into a steep, slimy hole at the terminal end and discovered a batch of liquid mud becoming totally coated in the process. In trying to extract himself from this obvious dead-end, he rolled onto his back and caught a falling rock directly in the face. From a hundred feet away as I was sketching like mad, I heard him say, "Rick! Can you see if all my teeth are still there?"
"What?!" I exclaimed. By the time I got there, Tom was out and kneeling in the mud spitting bright red blood all over the place. A deep gash on the inside of his mouth showed what happens to lips when caught between rock and teeth. He rested a bit and got cleaned up but insisted on continuing the survey. I was getting wary because both of the others had been in predicaments and I figured I was probably next!
Fortunately, the going became much more benign. We took off up a mud slope to the north and found ourselves in a curving, low crawlway about three feet wide and one to three feet tall. This finally opened up into a high room with two mud chokes to the north and a hole in the west wall about the size of a laptop computer. Through the hole I could see a tall passage and concluded that we had come out into surveyed territory again. Following Rick and Tom through the hole (feet first with a lot of wriggling; the hole empties out about six feet off the floor) I found that we were indeed in big trunk passage. But the passage was blocked on either end by mud and dirt! We surveyed the Terminal Room and turned for home.
Altogether we'd done 52 shots covering 1305.2 feet of survey in nine hours of work, by far the most survey I've done in a day. We had five pages of data and six of sketches! The trip out was quite energetic and we had to pause to peel off warm layers. George's Gorge was ascended in good time and Tom coiled the rope while we prepared to make our exit. Finding our way out from there was a confusing series of alternating left and right turns until we emerged at 11pm into the silent Virginia woods. We walked back the two miles of trail, changed at the car and drove back to the deserted campground. Two teams were out but had long since decamped. Much food was consumed and, just as we got to bed at 2am, Bob Alderson and party arrived from their scaling pole adventures. Stories were swapped and we returned to bed.

Sunday, I awoke with a pounding headache and some surprisingly sore muscles. After a quiet breakfast with Tom, Rick and Barry Horner (the only others who had elected to spend the night), Tom and I spent some time playing around in Owl Cave nearby. Since we were wearing street clothing, we didn't go too far inside, but what we did see impressed us. There were numerous bats, fossils and weird ridges of dark material sticking out of the walls. They almost looked like more fossils, but I suspect they are some sort of mineral inclusion. I pushed into a narrow bedrock passage for perhaps 100 feet before turning around and heading out. A trip for another day. The drive home was without incident and I arrived in Baltimore by 4pm quite satisfied by the weekend's adventures.
Sadly, I won't be able to get back to Breathing before heading for Colorado this summer. It is a lovely cave with lots of moderate challenges and interesting terrain. It's very nice to spend under an hour getting to and from the survey section. We accomplished quite a lot of survey in relatively relaxing cave. The three of us work well together and I look forward to next month in the more challenging and more familiar Cassell Cave.

The Wilderness Journal

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