Surprise Pit, Fern Cave, Nov. 17

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The four trucks rumbled down the 4-wheel drive road. Well, rumbled and sloshed. By time we got to the parking area about half the road had been just a series of 2ft deep mud pits.  It was just about 10am, and for the first time in my experience with the Birmingham Grotto, we were early.  At pull off we waited for Steve Pitts for 10 minutes.  He was there, right on time.

Twenty or Thirty minutes down the mud road and three locked gates later, we were at the parking area for Fern Cave.  It was time to get suited up, and this time, Steve would wait on us.  There were nine of us in total: Steve, Jeff, Allen, Dave, Sam, Daniel, Jonathan, Randall, and myself.  Fortunately, earlier at breakfast, we had discussed whose borrowed rack who was using, so as to not instill doubt about our abilities in the face of our guide.  They say he already didn’t like Dave very much- or rock climbers.

The plan was to bounce Surprise Pit and take photos, while Steve and Daniel rappelled to a ledge to gain entrance to Torode’s Hall.  The ledge was about 130ft or so above the cave floor, and there were tale of some fixed ropes for the traverse.  Daniel had been on the ledge before by means of a long pendulum swing that he did not hope to repeat.  To split the party into two teams we would need two ropes.  I had never seen a 500ft rope before, though I would become familiar with it as we hauled them up the hillside.

We actually took three ropes, two 500ft and one 100ft (or maybe 150) in case we wanted to rig the hand line on the ledge.  One of the big boys was coiled and the other we stuffed into a massive pack as we headed up to the entrance.

It was a warm morning and we sweated it out hauling our gear.  The entrance was a sinkhole, but jammed with boulders, so as not to be a direct route to the pit.  Steve put down his large pack, pulled his smaller cave pack out, put on his helmet, picked up a rope and headed in.  He would get a 15-minute head start to rig the drop.  Allen and Daniel followed in shortly after.  Dave set up a hammock, tied off to one the scariest widow makers I have ever seen.  I thought it would be a shame for us to survive the cave only to be killed by the hammock tree.

Randall and I headed in next.  A waterfall dropped down into the sink, and broke upon the boulders, which were clogging up the hole.  There were small person sized entrances on either side of the pit, which appeared to just lead around to the same place.  I stepped through the curtain of water and into the cave passage.  Randall followed me with the 500ft rope.  There seemed to be a couple of options as to where to go, and everyone who had visited the cave before was already deep inside.  We waited around for Jeff, and then followed the water.

The horizontal tunnel was easy enough to navigate, and most of it was easy walking passage.  The stream ran very shallow, intermittently filling pools full of blind crayfish.  We followed it for less than ten minutes, sometimes climbing up on waist high ledges to avoid deeper pools.  At the end of the passage were a couple of large boulders, and going over the first, you could see a bolt on the left side.  We down climbed behind it, and started out onto the ledge.

I had seen photos of the ledge a week before, and it was definitely something I had been thinking about.  It is about a yard across and is a polished muddy limestone, a slippery surface that boots would never grip.  On your right side is the void.  437ft of nothing lead down to the cave floor.  We couldn’t see the floor, but we were assured that it was down there.  The ledge was easy enough to cross, without a hand line, but you felt a little bit better about belly crawling it.  Passing a 500ft rope across it makes things slightly more challenging.  In only a minute or two, and we were across.

Surprise Pit is not so much a pit, but a monolithic underground canyon.  Beyond the ledge is a platform, about the size of my living room.  The original ceiling had collapsed, the breakdown lodging itself in the narrowest part of the canyon to create the platform.  It has probably been there since the Holocene, or some other time that I can’t comprehend, but its still unsettling.  All nine of us slowly ushered out onto the platform – our living room sized hangout, held together by mud and friction, slotted 400ft above oblivion.

It is an island in the sky, and you could rappel off of any side of it.  There are also a couple of holes in the floor, which Daniel nonchalantly pointed at and muttered “Death”.  We rigged the 404’ drop on the far side of our floating island.  As you walked up to the edge, the canyon expands.  None of our headlamps could penetrate very far.  As you looked around it was nothing but darkness on three sides.  It was the still dark that nightmares are made of.

 Though I have been in a number of wild caves now, it is still awe-inspiring to me that something of this magnitude is hidden beneath the surface.

I have been in Alaska and away from caving for nearly two years. Part of the job that took me North involves rock climbing guiding with teenagers.  I have done enough climbing to know that all four of the rigging bolts had been recalled years ago.  Steve’s rope also had duct tape around part of it, to mark “the bad spot.” At least we rigged all the bolts, and backed up to a boulder.

Despite the myriad of mental challenges that had presented themselves, I had still psyched myself up for this journey.  This would be my deepest single pitch rappel, having done Moses’ Tomb a couple years ago.  I looked at the rack I borrowed from Jeff, dwelling on the fact that since Moses’ Tomb I had only used my rack once only, a couple of weeks ago.  With nine people rappelling, I had lots of time to think.  A long time.  One by one, our companions passed over the lip into the darkness below.  Allen hollered every 100ft or so, just to hear the echo.  Sam, being the lightest, had trouble feeding the rope into her rack, and was on rope for almost 30 minutes.

Well over an hour later, it was just Randall and I.  Though we had started caving about the same time, Randall had been to Ellison’s before, so as the more experienced, I was able to convince him to go last.  “On Rope!”  I clipped my safety on well before I got to the edge. Then I clipped an additional safety.  I threaded my rack and checked it three times, maybe four.  The lip looked like it would be a pain in the ass to ascend over.  Randall looked back at me over the edge.  I slipped off into darkness.

The rope was stiff.  I was rappelling on 5 bars and having to feed it.  I was too nervous go down to 4.  I imagined the same thing had happened to Sam.  My headlamp couldn’t penetrate the darkness on any side.  Once I had left the island, I was engulfed in it.  If there were formations, or even walls at all, I couldn’t see them.  It was a primordial darkness, a place so deprived of light that it drank up my beam as fast as it could leave my headlamp.  I could see my companions at the bottom. They were just a couple fireflies looking in different directions.  I realized that the lights I was seeing were Daniel and Steve on the ledge.  The others were even smaller, impossibly far away.

About 200ft above the floor the rope sped up.  It was a comfortable speed, but incrementally I stopped it, just to reassure myself that I could.  As I descended, Allen captured my rappel on video.  Jonathon stepped away from where he was giving me a fireman’s belay.  My feet touched down.  I looked up and the rope just vanished upwards into the darkness.  It seemed like you just had to have faith that it was attached to something. “Off Rope!”

The bottom had a pile of breakdown, about 75ft high.  Dave and Jeff were up top, lighting photos with a spotlight.  I walked down to the bottom.  A magnificent waterfall spattered drops on the stones at its base.  From there it was a scramble over loose rocks to the top of the pile.  A huge boulder halfway up was covered in crinoid fossils.  The room was a massive cathedral of stone. 

Daniel and Steve had kicked the rope off the ledge and rappelled to join us at the bottom.  The ledge to Torode’s Hall was large and their rope had piled right on it, but sloped downward and was covered in rubble.  Everyone below would have been in rock fall danger if someone were to traverse the ledge.  But the fixed rope was there.

Now there were two ropes, and nine people climbing out, six of them frogging.  Sam and Jonathon soon began to tandem frog on the first rope.  It would still be over two hours before the final members of our party began their ascent. I took off my kneepads, and sat on them to insulate myself.  It was starting to get chilly.  Sitting at the bottom of the pit, with this island of breakdown above you, was no more comforting.

Randall climbed out with his frog system in 26:40.  I came up just one or two minutes slower.  I saw nothing until the very end of the climb, as the steam coming off my body made me feel like I was in a very dark sauna.  The lip was a monster, consuming 4 minutes of my time.  I slid my ascender up an inch, threw my legs above my head to touch the rock, thrust myself outward, and slid my other ascender up a couple of inches.

Upon cresting the lip, I found myself back upon the island, or rather the Waiting Room.  Dave and Jeff had just begun to climb, and it would take all of us to pull, coil, and haul the ropes out.  The platform was covered in clay, a similar consistency to the media I had used in a sculpture class in college.  A shelf stood chest high against the far wall – covered in sculptures.  I made a stegosaurus to pass the time.

Dave and Jeff climbed up within just a few minutes of each other, and we set to work.  We had all been a little nervous before a long rappel, and Dave admitted that he was using a homemade rack that he had never rappelled on before.  With the ropes coiled, we pushed back across the ledge and headed for the entrance.  It was dark as we emerged, but at least the walk was downhill.  It was a successful trip Surprise Pit, and warrants a trip back to explore Torode’s Hall.  We had peered into the void, and returned safely to the other side - just as long as the hammock tree doesn’t fall on us…

Photos: Jeff Harrod, Alan Cook, Dave McRae, Brandon Phillips

More photos (larger and better) and videos at Jeff's Site, all of the Caving exploits:  Spelunkologists

What the hell is a frog system?  Frogging

Nat Geo on TAG caving:  Southeastern Caves