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Greenbriar Caverns




continued

At this point we had in the Organ-HedricksSystem, four entrances: Organ and Hedricks, of course, and the Master's and Sivley's Entrances. Over at Lipp's, we had two entrances, plus the Godfrey's entrance and later the Erwin's entrance, making a total of eight entrances for the two caves. Somewhere along in here I got married, but it didn't slow caving up too much!
Earl Thierry had been in the area for awhile working as an engineer for the West Virginia Turnpike. Sometime in the middle fifties he and I went into Ludington's. I had been looking at the topo sheets again and saw that a stream went underground. One weekend Earl and I followed the creek downstream, and sure enough, there was a moist cave entrance. We went into the cave, and negotiated a few hundred feet. The two of us were walking along, and I said, "Earl, wouldn't it be something if we go around the next corner and find a forty-foot drop?" And what do you know, around the next corner there was a thirty-five foot drop! Talk about being clairvoyant
Anyway, it was quite a while before Ludington'sdeveloped into the system that it is today. Following the topo sheets again, we went to the Culverson Creek sink. After moving logs for several hours, we were able to get in, negotiate the entrance pool, and go on downstream. The main trunk channel of Culverson Creekhad developed some really big cave also. Something like a mile down in the cave there were trees the size of telephone poles, forty feet up in the top of the passage. Further beyond that, we found log jams with logs some three feet in diameter composing the dams. We did quite a bit of mapping during this time under the direction of Earl Thierry, while still spending a great deal of time in Lipp's and Organ Hedricks.
About 1957 1 had pretty much given up caving and gotten interested in other things. Caving did continue, though, and quite a few folks were still at it. I often shared my thoughts with them on a connection between the Lipp's System.
One Monday morning in August 1958, I received a call from a caver's wife saying that he hadn't come home from a cave trip and she didn't know what to do. That was the beginning of the first rescue effort that I had ever been on. We did quite a few things wrong, such as filing a missing person's report with the state police, and various other things we could have done without. I went down intoLipp's Cavewhere they had gone, and with the help of Charlie Dickenson, found the three cavers, Hugh Jones, Conrad Revak and one other fellow. We were able to get them out of the cave without a great deal of effort. They had gotten their ropes muddy when they carried them into Lipp's Canyon. When they had finished their exploration and were coming out this particular drop, the knot they had been taught to be a prusik knot would not hold on the muddy rope. After trying for about an hour, they realized they had better quit before somebody was hurt. They spent something like twenty hours waiting there. They lined up in a row and kept switching off; the middle man was the only one who was warm. Actually, they had a double rope down the hole, and if they had been more familiar with climbing techniques and been able to improvise a bit, they could have tied loops in alternate ropes and climbed right on out with no problems.
After that incident, Jones and Revak rekindled my interest in caving and we started re-exploring the western side of the Organ Hedricks Complex. We worked out through the Flat Room at Floyd Collins Avenue, and later worked out the lefthand passage from the Handley Room. Finally, by moving rocks and breaking other rocks, we were able to get into the passage that we called The Breezeway. It led on into a good sized canyon passage that was later named Jones Canyon. We followed it for quite a long way, but finally gave up as it became ratty and low.
On our following trip, Jones and Revak worked out of what is now called Skid Row that led into the Flat Room area. On another trip with Jones and Revak, we followed a lead that they thought was a good one. We now figure it came within a few feet of a connection with Lipp's. While Revak was the one who followed the lead, he was quite tired. While he was on his way out and resting frequently, Jones and I went over to another lead, and had almost given up when we came to a small room that appeared to be a dead end. On closer examination of some rocks on the floor, we saw blackness beyond. Pulling out the rocks, we found passage. Jones and I went in and discovered footprints in the soft mud. We were really on to something at this point; Jones and I just ran down the passage!
We came into a junction in Lipp's Cave that we recognized. The two of us were ecstatic; we jumped up and down, and hollered at the top of our voices! We were almost overcome with joy that we had made the connection between Organ-Hedricks and Lipp's. This was now one of the biggest caves in the country.
We went back and told Revak we hadn't found anything, that the lead was blocked. As we started out, though, we told him we were going out a different way. Soon he realized that we were in passage he'd never seen before and we told him we had found the connection. We all three celebrated that night. This was September of 1958.
We had a collection of caves with eight different entrances. Actually, it was one tremendous cave which had been put together in pieces when we first had connected Organ to Hedricks, then we had found Lipp's and connected it to Humphrey's. Ultimately, we'd connected the two systems. It seemed inappropriate to call this large cave by any one of its entrances; our solution was to call it Greenbrier Caverns. When we made a public announcement of our find, we called it Greenbrier Caverns.
We played games in that cave, and would take our friends from Kentucky, or Pittsburgh, or VPI through and try to see how rough a trip we could give them or how much of an impression we could make with them! We set goals, such as if you worked a hundred hours in the cave, you could name something in the cave for yourself. As a result of this, of course, Jones Canyon was named for Hugh Jones and the first two big rooms in the upper stream passage are named the Revak Room and the Thierry Room. The cavern really occupied quite a bit of our time.
Sometime in January or February 1959, John Rutherford contacted LIFE magazine proposing a story about the cave. In July of that year A.Y. Owen came to West Virginia for a week to photograph Greenbrier Caverns. There were about a dozen of us working with him, carrying several thousand dollars worth of photo equipment into the cave each day for twelve to fifteen-hour trips.

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