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Well, I turned around and went back through the muddy, narrow passage and climbed back up the sixty feet to the bottom of the 92 foot drop. There I could call up to the others. I told them it really looked good. They told me to go get the ladders and stuff. They decided it would be better just to take a quick look around. And mind you, they said QUICK LOOK! Little did they know that I'd be gone for six hours.'
I headed back into the Vault Room. There I picked the most obvious looking passage which later was named, the Subway Passage and started down it. I went almost to the end of it, turned around and came back. Of course I had to stop to carbide up once and stop for something to eat. I always carried a bunch of tootsie rolls with me, didn't know about the good, high protein bars you can buy now. I came back out and finally got lup to the bottom of the 92-footer. Of course Larry, Betty and Earl were frozen to death, just about. We pulled the ropes up and headed out of the cave.
It was a week or so later that we came back: Earl and I, Tom MacDaniels and Bob Sayre; Tom and Bob were VPI Cave Club members. We headed', back, and I was all excited. This was about the greatest thing that had ever happened to me in caving. We got down to the bottom of the 92 foot pit. We rigged all those drops. Went on down to the Vault Room and into the subway Passage. I had estimated that I'd gone a mile; they hee-hawed about it. Well, it turned out I hadn't gone quite a mile, about half a mile; they were surprised that it was as big as it was. They really became enthused too. We got more or less to the end of the Subway, and mapped back out to the Vault Room. Well, I began to name all these passages. It was me who named the Vault Room, and the Subway Passage, and a lot of others back in there. I really was rally enthused about it! I never did name any after myself though. Earl or somebody else named the 175-foot pit, Bill's Rappel well. When we got back to the Vault Room, I went up that passage that leads uphill out if there and winds back to the bottom of the Triple Wells.. Being at the bottom of those wells blew my mind too. At the time I couldn't get anyone but Earl to come back there and look at them. Everyone else was real tired then. I used to be so tired when I got out of that cave that I wouldn't even eat; I'd just go right on to the sleeping bag and sack out. Now I've learned that that's the best thing to do when you get out of a cave exhausted. Anyway, we got that far that time, and we were really excited planning other trips
A weekend or so later we were in there. We wanted to find out how to get down that real big drop, you know where it went, that I had found on that first trip, the drop that's now known as the Rappel Well. We found a way into the Bottom of that from the 92 foot drop. There's a climb over from that; it's real easy and you come up at not quite the bottom, in the side, I guess, about twenty or thirty feet off the floor of the Rappel Well. I do remember standing there with some VPI Cave Club members and looking up that drop, realizing that it would be a nice rappel. Of course they all said it would be completely impossible; it was impossible to rappel that far. At that time we figured it was 225 feet high! We estimated that just because the other drops that paralleled it were so deep. That was sort of a challenge.
On the next trip, the Staircase was discovered. We were in the cave exploring, I think it was me, Earl and Roy Charlton. We were at a place called the Funnel Room which I named because it looked like a big funnel. We had gone in there and Earl had climbed up the climb on the other side. Earl was just like a mountain goat; just like a spider. I couldn't get up there, and Roy had difficulty in following him. I just decided to stay there because I didn't want to get wiped out. So they went down, and began to work their way down what is now called the Staircase. They worked their way down until they could look down fifty or sixty feet and, see footprints. They realized that you could probably get to the bottom this way.
There was another trip into the cave before I made my big rappel. I had a group with me from VPI, and Earl wasn't along. I can't remember who all these people were, but we went down so far, and I rappelled off a place in the Staircase about sixty or seventy feet. Then I started working my way up under them while they were trying to climb down as much as they could. We finally found a connection.
Before the next trip, I went to Sears and Roebuck to buy a 250 foot piece of rope of half-inch manila, especially to start doing those big drops with, or that BIG drop. I didn't have any plans beyond that because they had almost convinced me that I probably wouldn't live beyond that drop anyway. continued
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