Indiana Cave Capers

Thursday evening my cousin Erik came up from Tennessee and we got ready to go to South-Central Indiana for their annual Cave Capers convention.  I was looking forward to getting underground!  We left Kentucky late Friday morning and endured the boring endless cornfields of Indiana.  They seemed to never end.  But finally we arrived at Camp Rivervale, where the convention was taking place this year.

                                    (Our chicken noodle slop we had for dinner)
Nothing much was going on Friday evening so we set up camp, cooked dinner, and relaxed until we finally fell asleep.  It was a nice cool night and the moon was out.  There was a small point near our campsite where we could see the West fork of the White River down below.

The next morning we got up and ate a poptart and then went to the registration tent.  After reading through our guidebook we decided we wanted to go to Wayne Cave.  Wayne cave has about 4.25 miles of known passage at this point.  It is owned by the IKC (Indiana Karst Conservancy).  It was a locked cave, meaning it had a gate on it.  To our surprised no one else was interested in going to this cave so Erik and I signed our waivers (required for this particular cave), got the key, and headed out.

We got stuck at the first gate to actually drive onto the property because the combination they gave us was wrong.  Our new wonderful Aunt Amy worked very hard to get us the phone numbers of some people in charge of Cave Capers and we were finally able to just park outside the gate near the road and hike onto the property.   Then after a hike down into a sinkhole we came to the cave entrance.

                                  (Entrance to Wayne Cave)
Wayne Cave's entrance are two consecutive pits.  The total drop between both of them is 22 feet.  It's fairly easy to free climb.  So Erik and I both came down and then decided it would probably be best to close the gate in the chance that somebody who wasn't supposed to come along got in.  However, I checked and made sure I could lift the heavy gate open.  I could.

So we climbed down the two pits and soon we came to the famous part of the cave.  A 1/4 mile crawlway.  It takes about 1 hour of crawling to get through.  Some places had enough room to be on hands and knees.  Other places you took your helmet off to get through.

                                  (Stalactite Squeeze, looking back)
On and on we crawled.  Occasionally we passed some pretty formations hanging down around us in the crawlway.

Finally we came out of the crawl and were faced with a large canyon running perpendicular to the crawl passage.  After taking a break and consulting our map we deduced we were at camp 1.  We decided to try and reach camp II (There was also a camp III farther on.  It started to sound like climbing Everest).  After traversing an old stream bed for a while and seeing some more great formations....

we came to a tricky area that is a Tri-level canyon.  We wound our way through this trying to find our way to Camp II.  We even climbed down to the lowest level of the canyon.  It was only on the way back that when we finally realized how to get out we discovered how hard that climb was.  It was the scariest climb I've ever faced in a cave and was almost certain I was going to fall.  But Erik and I both made it up safely.  It also didn't help we were pretty fatigued at this point.  Especially since we'd only ate a pop tart for breakfast.  Not exactly carb rich food you need for caving.

By this point we were stumbling out... We were ready to be done.  But we still had that 1/4 mile long crawl ahead of us.  It was agony, and it seemed to take forever.  But we finally did it.  We quickly devoured all the granola bars we had packed along with us.  Rested, and then did the first climb up.  We could now see daylight!  So up the last pit I climbed and wedged myself into position to push up the gate only to discover......

I could hardly budge the gate!  I was so tired and fatigued that I couldn't push open the heavy iron gate.  So Erik squirmed his way up beside me and on the count of three we used our helmeted heads and put all our effort into swinging the gate upward and escaping the cave.  And at that moment Erik slipped sliding downward a couple feet.  His helmet snagged and his mag-light mounted on the side snapped off falling to the bottom of the pit.  He left it there however, believing it not worth the climb back down and up to retrieve it.

So we locked the cave back up and rested for about 10 minutes before hiking back to the car to change.

It was definitely a great experience and fun caving in my third state!