Cavers: Eugeniya, Rory, Zack, Pari, Lawrence, Devin, Pablo
By Zack
At about 7 am, we left Walker Memorial in search of vert caves and adventure. We had an ambitious day planned: all things vertical in Sellecks Karst Preserve, including 3 vert caves (Sellecks Cave, Levys, Cave 575) and the small Natural Bridge within a sinkhole in the area. We had a large group for a vert trip, but thanks to Pablo's 7-seater we were able to accommodate everyone.
It was about a 3 and a half hour drive to our obligatory initial Stewart's stop, but I slumbered through most of it, allowing the time to pass quickly. We arrived at the preserve around 11 and gathered our gear for the hike into the preserve. Our car was parked alongside the gravel road beside a swamp, and within a minute or two of beginning the walk we found a logbook of past cavers. Giniya jotted down our names with relatively accurate spelling and we continued along the trail into the woods in search of cave. The karst boundary was marked with yellow signs, and along its edge we came across the first cave, Levys. It was the one most likely to be wet, so we chose to do that one last and decided to continue on in search of Cave 575, which we believed we'd find next.
The trail was not particularly clearly defined, so we largely bushwhacked and wandered around to find the cave, though we had yellow NCC diamonds to loosely mark the karst boundary for us. The forest around us was very pretty, colored orange yellow and red by the falling leaves. About 10 minutes of searching later, we found Cave 575 and Natural Bridge right beside it. Because our group was so large, we chose to split in two: Devin, Giniya, Pablo, and Pari continued on to find for Sellecks Cave while Rory, Lawrence, and I began to rig the descent into Cave 575. Choosing an appropriately sized tree at the top of a leafy slope leading down to the cave entrance, we used our longest (~120 ft) rope to descend, though this was far more than we needed for the first pitch. Everyone returned and got their gear on, and we entered the cave. It was tight inside, and we could only really stand in a single file. There were two other pitches we could choose to rappel, and everyone began with the one on the left. There was too much abrasion on the entrance to continue using the same rope we had initially appealed in with, and inside the entrance, the only thing we could have anchored to was a small rock that didn't seem heavy enough to hold our weights. Thus, we chose to meat anchor and take turns going down the short (~20 ft) rappel to see the last bit of cave. It was a slightly squeezy rappel and ascent, but at least there was a nice (and dry) dead end to sit in at the bottom! The cave was full of fossils of many different sizes to look at while meat anchoring, though it was too short to have cave darkness. The fossils were very plentiful -- the walls were positively covered in them and none of us had been in a cave that had nearly this many fossils before! There were quite a number of whole and unbroken fossils, as well as some really large ones -- one of them was as big as our phones. The drop on the right seemed even tighter and Lawrence was the only one who chose to do it. Lots of rocks were dropped in the process, and it didn't seemed worth it for anyone else. Our group was big enough that it took about two hours for everyone to enter and rappel/ascend the drop on the left, and we wanted to exit the cave so we could move on to Sellecks.
After ascending out of Cave 575, we rigged Sellecks with our longest (~120ft) rope, which didn't quite reach all the way. The rope was able to reach all the way down the steep slope to the cave's entrance where there was a bolt that could be used to rig a rebelay and descend the extra ~20 ft into the cave itself. However, once rigged to the rebelay, the rope was just barely a few feet off the ground. Additionally, the bolt used for the rebelay seemed extremely sketchy, and after evaluating the only source of abrasion that called for a rebelay was a wooden log and not a sharp rock, we elected to not use the bolt or rebelay at all. We ended up joining another one of our shorter ropes to the end of the ~120 ft to make it more comfortable to come off rope once inside the cave, because the rappel ended on a muddy slope that we were cautious not to slip down. Once inside the cave, we found there was little passage to explore, though the initial room was cavernous and had a nice view of the slit we rappelled in through. This rappel was by far my favorite of the trip and was definitely the longest. When we rappelled down, we rappeled along a steep slope covered in fallen leaves until the last 20 feet. After rappelling, we got to watch cascades of leaves falling down from the bottom, as people knocked them down while rappelling down above us. The lake room within the cave was flooded, as expected, but Pari and I continued up into the back passage where we found a muddy but still enjoyable scramble up to a little room. The mud was deep and threatened to steal a shoe, but the room had great flowstone and allowed for cave darkness (until Devin wandered in with in headlamp on). By the time everyone had entered the cave, we had explored everything within it already and began to ascend out. As I began to ascend, I realized the specter of daylight savings had crept up on us, as it was now about 5:30 and the sky was quickly beginning to darken. The ascent was time consuming, especially with 7 people, and by the time everyone had ascended out it was now fully dark and had begun to drizzle. We had left our bags and clothes by Cave 575 (a few minutes' walk away), and finding them in the dark was challenging.
Because dark had fallen and the rain had caught up to us, we didn't have time to do Levys and will have to return another day. We made the four hour drive back to campus and once again employed the use of MacGregor's industrial sink. However, because Cave 575 and Sellecks had been mostly dry with little to no crawling, our gear wasn't particularly muddy and decon went by very quickly, allowing us to end the day hanging up our gear in the office at about 2 am.