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previous--Two Views of Miller's Cove prt2, pg179
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 two views of
MILLER'S COVE
continued Cliff Foreman: |
At the beginning of my explorations, I had always rappelled and prusiked in and out of all the drops. At that point in time, nylon ropes were not in general use for that purpose and we used mostly 5/8 inch manila as our main lines. It was very bulky to carry in and out of the small and sharp openings and passages of Miller's Cove Cave. Later, I began rock climbing the cave using a single 120 foot mountain climbing nylon rope doubled for rapelling. I pulled it down behind me. and then would lead--climb on my way out. This was quicker and easier for the most part. The only time we used a cable ladder in the cave was to explore the triple falls. |
On the way to the triple falls, near the bottom of the last large drop was about a four foot deep mud hole that looked like just another small mud puddle. Whenever I had a new person in that part of the cave, the experienced people always stepped quickly around the edge of the pool so that the new one was not warned. We had lots of fun watching him go for an unexpected mud bath.
On our rock climbing route down the last pit before the stream passage level, the higher and more exposed ledge was safer and wider that the lower--ledge route that was less scary. One person there invented the phrase, "climb higher and live longer ... if you fall it'll be longer before you hit". It was often repeated as a moral booster for less experienced people who didn't like exposure to a high drop.
One incident was interesting. Some Boy Scouts, not to be confused with my explorer scouts, were in the cave at the same time my group was. They didn't even know we were there since we had pulled our ropes down behind us. Well, anyway, one of them went lickety--split down a fifty--foot mud slide, and at the bottom he pitched forward and broke his wrist. We finally found out about the accident and got to him. We pulled, worked, squeezed and climbed our way out with him. Meanwhile, someone had gone out of the cave and had called the local rescue squad, fire department, Red Cross, and all of the other "official agencies" that one could possibly imagine. We had gotten the victim out just before they all arrived, and had sent him via car back to Roanoke. Then we returned to the cave to continue our trip. As I remember it, I think we started back in, then returned to the entrance for something else, and found it blocked by a jammed-in stokes stretcher, with a giant searchlight about two feet in diameter sending a blinding light down the little entrance drop. We got the thing out of our way, came out, had some coffee and donuts courtesy of the Red Cross, and then left them all in the lurch as we disappeared back into the cave to continue our trip. They just couldn't resolve in their minds that anyone would disappear back into that "awful" hole from which they had been dispatched to rescue someone.
On another trip, I had been carrying two small 35mm film cans of carbide that were riveted to the side of my hard hat. In the crawlway downstream below triple falls, with my head squeezed sideways in the low passage, the water got into one of the cans and it ignited in a small explosion that seemed to me to be just a mild puff. Other members of the party near the bottom of the drops heard it hundreds of feet away as a large violent explosion and one other person several feet away from me in the crawlway felt it as a tremendous concussion.
Cave stories are no good without a good scare occasionally. My Miller's Cove scare came when returning to the entrance from a trip, I encountered a copperhead or rattler (I can't recall which) about two feet below the bottom of the short entrance drop, a friend climbed up and shook it off the ledge with a stick. It fell to the floor where we killed it.
These experiences took place roughly in the mid--fifties and at the time, the cove was sparsely populated, as I judge it still is from occasionally flying over it in recent years. There were no roads to the cave entrance and it took a walk through perhaps a half mile of woods to reach the almost invisible entrance. After many trips there, I occasionally still had to look and wander through the woods to find the small entrance. Just an entrance without a sinkhole is pretty hard to find sometimes. The local people always were very friendly, curious, and asked me (whom they called Caveman) lots of questions about the cave.
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