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I reckon one of the biggest trips as far as caving goes with Bill Cuddington was one of the early trips into Newberry-Bane soon after Earl had discovered it. It was in the middle of the winter. Cold! Great day, it was cold! We camped in the cave down in the entrance drop of the Newberry entrance.
At one point we came out in the middle of the night and started off towards the cars. We hadn't gone fifty feet before my light went out and I noticed everybody else's light went out. And I heard Bill behind me, "Wait, Roy wait.;" "What'sa matter, Bill?" "I don't have a flashlight. Check my carbide lamp here and see what's the matter." I went back to check Bill's carbide lamp, stuck my little finger in the water chamber and it was solid ice. It had frozen in that first fifty feet of being out of the cave. That's how cold it was.
One interesting story about the Triple Wells was one morning before breakfast, Roy Charlton talked me into going down this passage with him that takes off from the entrance to the left and leads to the top of the Triple Wells. I was grumbling and complaining over rocks ... I was hungry ... Roy got ahead and shouted, "There's a pit or something." He started dropping rocks and he swears I nearly knocked him down trying to get by him to look down the pit. Anyway, we dropped rocks and we were real excited. We came back and told the others about it.
We got up a little late, Bill and myself. Earl, Joe and Ed were cooking and we were sort of in the way. I said, "Bill, let's try some of these side leads here." Well, Bill followed me and we got into a long crawly hole. Bill was complaining, "Let's go back. Maybe they've finished breakfast. I just can't stand this place. This is terrible." I came back to the top of the 250 foot Twin Wells, and threw in a rock. Bill was still back there in the crawly hole complaining. I said., "Bill. Bill! I got a 250 foot drop here!" Then I had to block the passage; Bill came running in so fast, hollering, "Where? Where?"
After we had a good breakfast, we got the ladders and ropes and went back to that drop. They let me drop in the pit first which in a way was a lucky thing because we rigged the third one, the one that we call the triple well. It's about I70 feet. You actually drop about I00 feet or so, and land behind the chockstone that you can see. You remember when you walk into the triple wells from the bottom, there are two big wells, and then you look up a slope and you see another well coming crown behind a chockstone. That's where we first came down. I dropped on off the chockstone. After I got down the first pitch, Joe and Ed came down, and I went on off the next drop. I got on the slope under the two huge wells, and immediately recognized where I was. They decided that we should all come down since we rigged it.
continued
"We hacked up a turkey and burned it in a frying pan!" |
CHARLTON: On the way to meet the other fellows for this trip I was going to give an acquaintance in Blacksburg a small turkey from my own flock that had been through our dressing plant. But he wasn't home so we kept on with it, and it wound up in the bottom of the cave. I didn't have proper utensils for cutting it up or anything; I just practically hacked it to pieces. No way to bake it, so we wound up frying it in a pan that wasn't even greased good. I couldn't see what I was doing; I was burning the turkey pretty much. But Bill was grabbing pieces of it, and two or three other people grabbed pieces. "That's good. That's good. Gimme some more!" I was about to be overcome by the smoke from the pan being burned.
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