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A SATURDAY EVENING POST article (7/12/41) by Clay Perry, recounts the tale of four cavers, Jack Preble, George Dare, Schiller Martin, and Neil Wilson, who were trapped by a flash flood for five hours in the Sinks of Gandy Creek, WV, Memorial Day, 1940. The 3200-foot stream rose three inches in an hour. The explorers fortunately discovered the emergency exit, and escaped wet and shivering. They subsequently formed the "Ibinthruthesinks" Club which later became the Ohio Grotto of the NSS.
Another cave which the Ohio and S.S:D.C. Cavers explored in 1940 was The Hole in the "wilds of Pendelton County." There were about forty people on this particular trip, including a bug and crawfish hunter form the U. S. Museum, and a cricket, spider, and bat-collector from the University of Maryland. Starting in at lO:OO A.M. Saturday, the cave was found to be developed in the form of a turkey foot with three toes branching off to nowhere. The left toe was a dead end. The group decided to map and explore the middle toe, and after crawling and climbing, arrived at the end at 11:00 A.M. Sunday. More people met the group later in the morning, including fellows from Martinsburg, WV. No one in the memory of the oldest inhabitant in the region had ever thoroughly explored the right fork. When the group arrived at a ticklish spot in the passage where the ceiling came down to within two inches of a bottomless pool of water, most of the group quit.
The boys from Martinsburg, however shed their cave clothes, and with their flashlights continued down the passage. The boys exited at a large spring in which Dr. Morrison and Dr. Muma were collecting animal life. Ducky Thompson later discovered a blowhole on the other side of the mountain. After a bit of digging, the explorers were able to crawl about 60 feet, then duckwalk to a point where the roof was twenty to thirty feet high. The group travelled for six hours with no end in sight. |
The Ugly Caver Emerges Pushing a lake in Mystic Cave, WV, 1948 Photo by R.L. Lutz |
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Some of the land owners in the Organ-Hedricks area have become quite close personal friends over the years, some thirty years in my case. In particular, I'd like to say something about Lacy and Leola Sarber who own one of the major chunks of Greenbrier Caverns. Not long after we had connected the caves and formed Greenbrier Caverns, Mrs. Sarber started having problems with outing clubs and errant cavers from wherever. One time a group camped at Hedricks which belongs to Sarber, and used his split-rail fence for firewood. In addition, they took the logs and rails he had over the thirty foot Hedricks pit entrance and threw them down into the cave. One of Sarber's calves fell into the cave, and he spent the better part of a day trying to get the animal out. It later had to be destroyed. This sort of thing happened several times. After he lost another calf in the cave, Redford, Jones and I secured two big rolls of old fence wire in the entrance and bolted it in from below. About a year later, some joker cut his way through about eight feet of fence wire with wire cutters to get into the cave. They just plain would not leave the cave alone. It was sort of over the hill, out of sight from Sarber's house and was rather difficult to police. Eventually, Sarber got completely fed up with cavers in general, so he took some big, heavy concrete troughs, pulled them over to the cave behind his tractor, and lowered them into the entrance which blocked it fairly well for a few years. Still, the cavers tried to pry the troughs up out of that hole, and almost succeeded in digging around them at one point. It was about this tine, too, that some cavers were chased off the property with shotgun blasts. I think Hedricks is very securely closed now. As I remember my early days of caving in Hedricks, I drove one day about ten miles over to where the Sarbers lived to get permission to into the cave. He thought I'd gone considerably out of my way just to ask permission, and he never forgot that. At this time, there were very few of us who received permission to go into Foxhole #1which Sarber owns. Some cavers persist in going on into the cave, even though he's made it pretty doggone plain that they are to stay out. He doesn't want them in there. I really don't understand the landowner relationship philosophies of some caving groups.
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