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FriendlyWindy Mouth
More Pioneering With Charlton;
Hixson Begins His Quest
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On the way out we surveyed; I was the recorder. I said, "Roger, how far from wall to ceiling? Roger said, "Put down 50 feet." Well, I know good and well it was more than any fifty feet to the walls in that room. We would go by a side lead and say, "Here's a side lead." Some guy'd say, "Not another one"! And mighty soon it would be 25 or 30 feet or something equally as wide. We just walked right on by it. That was a tiring trip. To top it off, we got Jim home Sunday night. Before he got to sleep good, Jeanette kinda nudged him, and said, "Time to go. Time to go." Jim's eldest son was born that night.
On a trip to Windy Mouth Cave, we stopped up top of the plateau at the house the Taylors were living in. They had been very friendly and helpful and had pointed out dozens of small caves to us. This particular trip Mrs. Taylor told us, "My husband's spotted an old-she-bear and two cubs down at the mouth of Second Creek. You folks be careful." We sorta scoffed at it; we didn't think there was any bears around at that time of year, especially in the middle of all these farmers with cattle. We went on into the cave to the canyon passage. We were going to take this little side lead that had a trickle stream coming out of it. Alan Boudreau, Jim and Harvey were ahead; I was doing a spread-eagle crawl up over this little stream, trying to keep off the gooey mud that was about the consistency of toothpaste. I had my head poking into this walking passage where they had disappeared. Right at the edge of the walking passage was a great big bear paw print, and water was now standing in the toenail holes. I stood there contemplating on how old that print was. Couldn't be but so old with water standing in it. About that time three guys come charging down the passage, crawled over me and kept on. I declare I got turned around and left with them and said, "What in the Sam Hill happened to you?" They looked at each other right wild-like, then Jim and Alan looked at Harvey and said, "You tell him. You heard it." "Heard what?" He said, "We got back there and heard this terrible growl." I said, "Growl? no growling back here unless it was us." They said, "It warn't us." So that's the Bear Track passage in Windy Mouth. We later went further on into the cave up that passage. The area is just full of bear tracks. How recent they are I have my doubts, because we have never been able to find a hole back there. And the bear certainly didn't come the way we came. How it got in or when, I don't know.
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I went in to Windy Mouth Cave with Bill Nelson and a good-sized crew of people to the Twin Wells area back up through the Blow Hole. We threw a line up and threw it up, and threw, it up. We finally got the line up, but it jammed some way so we couldn't pull the ladder up. So we had to prusik it. Nelson got out an old prusik, rigged it and the ladder, and got the whole party up except one man who decided he was too bushed to go. Got up there and found a little passage, not too much. back in the crevice, bill thought he felt an air breeze so he started pulling out boulders and got down through the crevice into a crawly-hole and sand floor. It wasn't big enough to get through. And that man dug that passage about as far as I could follow him. We got back into a real pretty passage, so pretty we all walked in each other's tracks. We found, I reckon, a thousand feet of nice formation passage. Walls covered with crystal flowstone. On the way back, we stepped. in the same tracks we left when we came in. We left a small polypropylene line rigging the drop.
Several years later at the Mountain Lake NSS Convention, Jim Hixson and some guys thought they would do the Bear track passage in Windy Mouth. They lit out. I didn't go with them. At the time they were due back, I kept checking their camping area; they weren't there. I checked. I think they were about two days overtime getting back. They finally got back. The night when I found out that they were there, I roused somebody out of the sack. And the first question I got from them was, "Where in the world was a passage with one set of tracks where a guy had gotten up with a clotheslines?"
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