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Bob Handley, 1954 Photo by S.A. Loyd |
The Endless
Greenbriar Organ - Hendricks - Culverson - Creek - Ludington's |
At one of the Grotto meetings, in April 1949, Bob Barnes, Bob Flack and I decided that it was time to push for a connection between Organ and Hedricks. We set up a trip for Memorial Day weekend. For some reason one of us was delayed in leaving Charleston; when we got to the campground near Hedricks, we found that a crew had already gone into the cave, although their purpose was unknown. The group included Mike McGriff, Sara McFarland, Don Engle and. Charlie Ray. When they returned to the surface about midnight, they said they spent eleven hours in the cave, looking for the connection. The next day, bright and early, Flack, Barnes and I got geared up, went on into Hedricks, and three and one-half hours later came out into the commercial part of Organ It was quite a thrill Both the tourists inside the cave and the owners outside the cave were amazed and really didn't understand where we'd come from. They knew we hadn't gone in the Organ Entrance, and it was difficult for them to believe that we had gone in over a mile away.
After that, we were off and running with trips exploring the system. There was big cave just about everywhere we looked. One weekend in particular I remember that I had been studying topo sheets and told Flack that if we'd go over on the other side of Hedricks we'd run into big caves. We did go over there; the first cave we found was one at the head of Slate Creek with a good-sized room. Later that day, we came into the Black Room, and then into Floyd Collins Avenue. This cave was bigger than anything we had seen in Kentucky; in fact it was bigger than anything either of us had seen in our lives. It was mind-boggling! We worked on into the extreme upper passage and followed it down into what is now known as the Waterfall room. We thought we'd come out into the bottom of the sinkhole at night! It was quite an event. The room is larger than 100 feet square and about 60 feet high where you enter it; it was larger than our lights could pick up. Of course, we found the first big room, on up the upper stream passage. Just about everywhere we went, we found big cave.
On one trip into Hedricks, Flack, Segal, Workman and I found what we called Cyclops Hall. Here is where I had one of my close calls while caving; this one may have been caused by the fact that in those days we all wore tennis shoes. I was in the lead, and had gone out probably forty or fifty feet ahead of the others. All of a sudden. I discovered that I'd run out of ledges in this passage, and that the walls were getting muddy. Looking down, I saw that the Boulder Stream passage floor was thirty feet below. So very, very carefully, I backed out of that. Later in the day we managed to get down into the Cyclops, which for quite some time had only one entrance. it was a large passage, and in the beginning we considered it to be a room. It is a large passage thrown across sections that are forty by forty feet or larger. Sometime along in this period Flack left for Washington;not long after that the Charleston Grotto folded up. Caving did not stop however; we continued on in pretty good order. continued
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