Among the interesting events that took place while we were involved in this project was a flood in the cave. We had been over in one section, and when we came out, we found water roaring down the Organ Passage. We really hustled down to the end of the Upper Stream Passage to see what was going on in the Waterfall Room. We found waterfalls squirting out of the walls and landing over twenty feet in the floor of the room. A.Y. Owen likened it to a flood in one of the side canyons of the Grand Canyon. It was quite impressive.
This was a learning time for us. We discovered that all the publicity we'd put out relative to our discoveries, we'd brought in all kinds of cavers to see what was going on. We quickly found that we couldn't get anything done because of having to take tourist trips with these new cavers. In order to try to protect the cave owners, we decided to move away from the Greenbrier Cavernsand begin working in the Great Savanuah area on the other side of Lewisburg.
About this time Edwin Kaufman, a school teacher at Frankfort, WV, began caving with us. We started working in The Hole, Culverson Creek, McClung'sand other caves in the Great Savannah. Edwin had known all of the people in this particular part of the country since childhood; so again we had more caves than we could take care of. We had big cave in just about every direction. We went through several different surveying techniques, doing a good bit of resurveying when we'd find one method didn't work. We finally came up with a need for computers, and styled the survey to suit the computers!
Something a lot of people don't seem to realize is the work that my group did in the Greenbrier Cavernswas done in two distinctly different time periods. We'd gotten, as I said, the Organ-Hedricksand the Lipp's-Humphrey'spart worked out and then we beat our heads against a wall for quite awhile. Finally, we backed off for several years to work on other caves and I came back with fresh enthusiasm. I really think that it allowed us to work harder on Greenbrier Caverns, and we nearly put it together that time. I think the byword is to NEVER GIVE UP; and that there is no such word as CAN'T! I think there's still a great deal of big cave to be found in the Greenbrier System. I think that although VACS says there is probably 200 miles of surveyed cave in Greenbrier County alone, that's really just scratching the surface.
To wrap it up I'd like to say that this January will mark the beginning of my thirty-second year of going caving. I sure don't intend to let a little old thing like a broken back to keep me out of caves. I'm coming back in 1979 and one of these years I'll get into some of the big caves that I've been talking about before I hang up my carbide light and my spiked cave boots!
--Robert H. Handley, December 1978.
DC Grotto Adopts Organ
On several occasions over the last few months the DC Grotto has been represented in the depth of the Organ Cavesystem. The purpose of these repeated trips has been the collection of data conducive to the drawing of a map. Ever since I first visited the Organ system in early 1958, I have been personally fascinated by this cave. There is more to be found in this system as far as different cave features are concerned than in any other cave I have visited. To date the DC Grotto has accumulated data for 81,000+ feet of surveyed passages. This is concentrated in an area which encompasses three of the main cave streams and their intersecting levels. There are yet whole sections of this cave that have not been touched, and even the large amount of reported passages mapped to date by WVACS (90,000+ feet) only includes main passages. What this means is that we may have here a system that can challenge in size some of the largest caves in the world. The DC Grotto will go on mapping, and plans to publish this map are reaching the final stages. So far we are thinking in terms of a folio-type scientific study of the system.
Pat Moretti, DC SPELEOGRAPH, August, 1970
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WHY
It's called the
Thunderbolt
Passage
John F. "Bud" Rutherford, formally of Charleston WV, wrote of a strange phenomenon which occurred to he and John Davis while the two were surveying in Ludington's Cave.
On the second trip into the cave after our discovery of the main part of the cave in the early sixties, we had gone to the main upstream end of the trunk passage. We were surveying downstream with a compass and a steel tape. While stretching the tape for a distance measurement, the tape suddenly 'bit' us! We were standing 100 feet apart. It felt like a jolt of 100 watts.
We discussed the situation in a very animated manner for quite a few minutes. I checked the for an underground cable we might have dragged it across. There was none to be found. We then cautiously touched the tape, and since it seemed harmless enough, we continued our survey. Only several shots later did it occur to Davis that we had been hit by lightening. We were well over a mile inside the cave.
Shortly thereafter we joined a second survey party which had been working it's way upstream and we related the unlikely event to them. For some reason they, they allowed as to how we'd a nip out of the bottle, rather than out of the blue! they maintained that position until offered a $5.00 bet that we'd find that there had been a hard rain outside while we had been caving. That, at least stifled their snide remarks, jeers and catcalls. There were no takers, however, and soon we were so impressed by the rapidly rising muddy water that we aborted part the planned surveying. Today we call it the thunderbolt passage.
Bud relates another tale that also happened in Ludington's. He was on a trip with Charlie Maus, Kay Robbins and Bob Handley. Neither he nor Charlie had flint wheels in their lamp reflectors. Charlie lit his lamp from a burning cigarette; it took ten minutes.
Ruthterford, letter dated September 23, 2974
Organ - Hendricks - Culverson - Creek - Ludington's, page 141, part 4 The Endless Greenbriar, Discovering West Virginia, Virginia Region History History published in 1979"
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