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Earl Thierry & Roy CharltonPhoto by SA Loyd |
Somewhere I have the program for the first Virginia Region meeting held at Blacksburg back in the early 1950's. I served. as delegate-at-large, as you know, on the Council for several years. Mason Sproul nominated me back when we were working on the Culverson Creek Cave System. I helped Mason dye Culverson Creek, and then check Spring Creek. We went over to Spring Creek, and could smell an odor that smelled like a blooming rendering plant (like the product that comes from a rendering plant). I said , "Mason, I smell something that smells like fish meal or meat scrap." He said, "Yes, they had a fish kill over on Culverson Creek." I said., "Mason, no need of you putting dye in there. This is the resurgence if you had a fish kill." Well, his dye work showed this was the resurgence of it, or at least a series of resurgences.
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I was at a number of Council meetings. Gave a talk at one meeting on this cave radio business. People were quite interested and had a lot of questions. About the time I got interested in cave radio, Earl was quite active. I'd go to Roanoke while he was living there or meet him down in the Wytheville area while he was down there. After he moved east of me, he would pick me up, and we would go on into West Virginia/Greenbrier/ Monroe region.
Earl somehow, had a knack for finding virgin caves. I remember one time up in the Franklin, WV, area, Earl took off up a mountain, and I said, "Earl, you're way above the limestone; you'll never find, a cave up here." He said, "Oh, let's just ask around." He turned down along a little old dirt road up on the top of a mountain there at Friends Run, a little old house back there. Girl came out and, said, "Yes, we got a cave up here. We'll take you down and show it to you." Well, we found a cave. The girl said quite often there was ice in it on the first of July. The cave gave me a funny feeling. Walls weren't exactly vertical in the entrance room; they were sorta leaning back, wider at the top than they were at the bottom. Well, about all we could find was the entrance room. The girl and her husband left. Earl stuck his head up in a hole and I said, "Earl, I've looked in there already. Just a blank wall." Earl didn't answer; he just started crawling. All of a sudden he said, "Roy, come on!" I looked in the hole and no Earl. Just a blank wall. I crawled in behind him. There was a fissure at right angles to the wall I was looking at. He'd dropped down into another passage. It was a maze-type cave, and wasn't a solution cave at all. It was a fault cave. When the Friends Run water gap was cut, this particular strata slipped out, breaking along the joint system and leaving this cave back under it, the roof strata staying put. Bill Hedrick Cave, I believe the name was.
One weekend that really stands out in my mind caving with Earl was the weekend we found two major caves. One was the Indian extension of Rockland Cave. l'd been in it one time. This time, my brother Jim and his wife, Jeanette stayed on the outside. I had five foot sticks that held the cave radio coil, and I said, ''I'm going to probe that pool back there; it looks like a siphon, and i'11 see if I can find a shallow place in it. I got back and got through that pool and got into some nice big tremendous passage. No Jim behind me. Got a little panicky before I got out; I coulda lost my tracks. Well, I told Earl about it after I got out. Earl was right there. Happened to be graduation weekend, Jeanette's graduation. Do you know what she did? She left in the middle of the weekend to go caving with us! She had to be on that trip. Seeing that cave, I can't much blame her. That was a real cave. About the most beautiful one I have ever seen. lt would have been virgin except for the lndians being there before us.
Well, after Jeanette and Jim went back for the rest of the graduation exercise, Earl and myself stopped back by Connell's there, below Fort Spring. We'd stopped there before and asked about caves. Mrs Connell said, "Oh, yes, I remember you. You stopped by in the rain that night." I said, "Yes." She said, "Oh, I know where a cave is. Go down to my husbands brother's farm there. He's got a cave there that a sheep fell in one time. He had to go in and get it out."
continued
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