Middle Cave

Saturday morning I woke up at GSP.  I had camped there with my friend Jon Carman.  He was doing some caving with the Bluegrass Grotto, but I was going to be joining the Cincinnati Grotto on a trip.  So after waiting around and getting some breakfast I joined everyone at our meeting place.  We piled into a couple trucks and headed off.  After a short walk down a gravel road, and down a slope, we saw the entrance to Middle Cave.  Bob Dobbs led us in.

At first I thought it was going to be a miserable cave.  It was just crawling through a bunch of gravel, rock, and junk.  It's a giant sinkhole, and when it floods trash is washed in.  But soon we hit walking caving passage.  It wasn't too long and we began to hit a couple domes, with some waterfalls in them.

Then there was a really nice waterfall that went down in two stages, and up on a ledge above were some small formations.  It was really quite a beautiful small room.

Bob led us on.  We got to a point where it was really tall canyon passage.  People like Gil climbed along the top, and at one point I went up to.  I was far above the group, on my own.  I finally realized I could go no farther, though.  So I had to backtrack to where I climbed up.  And as I was climbing down I suddenly heard a very demontic hissing right on my head.  I hit my helmet and discovered a bat.  It then clung to my hand and kissed in my face.  I yelled and flung the hand around until the bat lost its grip and fluttered to the bottom of the canyon.  I never saw it, unfortunately and it decided to stay on my helmet.  One less bat, but I'm not that sad because they are creepy little animals.

But I finally rejoined everyone else and found that they were in the "Room of the gods".  I talked to Bob and then realized that we were in the back end of Blue Hole Cave.  There is an old map that shows the section of cave on it.  But I guess it's mostly forgotten about, but at one time during a drought the cave had been connected.  Mostly it's sumped, though.

There was a sidepassage that was very neat.  A small canyon off-shoot led to a dome.  At the top a stream came out of a hole and a very nice waterfall flowed down.

We dropped down to the main stream passage, finally.  Everyone stopped.  Scott and I waded downstream, and yodeled when the cold water got deep.  But after a while we turned around and came back.  Some of the group poked around.  But we finally turned around.  It was the end of the line.  We had some new people on the trip so it did take quite a while to actually get out.  But it was nice to add another cave to my list!

For all of my photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/116396676277007122980/20120226MiddleCaveFebruary252012