next--Giley Cave2, pg185
articles index
|Names.
|Photos index
|Cave index
|Places and Grottos.
VAR home page
|
previous--Butler Cave2, pg183
next--Giley Cave2, pg185
articles index
|Names.
|Photos index
|Cave index
|Places and Grottos.
VAR home page
|
|
Scaling poles that don't...
Ceilings intent on becoming floors... The joys of dysentery... -just some of the charms of CAVE |
The first mention of Gilley Cave near Pennington Gap, VA cones in the May 1955 issue of THE NEWS. Roger Daugherty of Big Stone Gap reported at this time that while he and others had explored the Devil's Pit (a 61-foot sheer drop) and two smaller pits below it, there was still much virgin passage to be explored. He invited anyone interested to contact him to see the cave. Some of the people who also knew about the cave were members of the UVA Grotto through Larry Fleenor of Pennington Gap. These were the principal mappers and explorers of this fascinating cavern. The following reports tell a little of their fun as well as hardships.
READ ON~
During Easter vacation I visited Gilley Cave with Larry Fleenor and Richard Byrd. The entrance to the cave was small, and required hands and knees to enter. Once inside, the cave enlarged. There were many small dome pits containing waterfalls and several large rooms encountered along the way. We tried to follow the main passage; many leads looked just as likely. At one point, we jogged a bit to the right to follow a parallel passage. As we walked down the passage we could hear falling water ahead of us. Continuing on, we came to a pit spanning almost the entire width of the floor, some fifteen to twenty feet wide. This pit was almost perfectly circular and uniform to the bottom.
We tossed a rock into the pit, and after approximately two and a half seconds it hit the bottom; the pit was thus about 100 feet deep. In addition, a waterfall poured down the center from an overhanging ledge some thirty feet above. From the splash of dropped rocks hitting the bottom of the pit, we could tell that the water was shallow and draining off somewhere.
The cave is reported to continue for nine miles and to have a large underground river. More trips are planned to this cave.
On June 3, 1962 Earl Geil, Joe Overman, Roger Baroody and three other UVA Grotto members met below the entrance to Gilley Cave. After receiving permission from Mr. Collier to enter, they carried gear and food to the entrance with the idea of setting up a base camp about one mile back in the cave. From the entrance everything was lugged to the 60-foot pit, Devil's Pit, about 3000 feet in. All of the party crashed for a night's sleep.
Geil and Perzanowski, returning from Pennington Gap with extra food and a second steel tape, found the rest of the group remapping the entrance passage. (An earlier map done by Roger Daugherty and Claude Greever had existed up to that time; it wasn't very accurate and was one-quarter complete.) They decided to cease mapping for the moment and hunt for the lake rumored to exist beyond the sixty-foot pit, and to locate and map the river reported to exist near the back of the cave.
Geil rappelled down the Devil's Pit (the same one he thought had been 100 feet) and discovered two smaller waterfalls of about ten feet each going still deeper into the short passage at the bottom of the pit. Geil warns that descending into the pit is not recommended as the walls are very muddy and crumble easily.
|
previous--Butler Cave2, pg183
next--Giley Cave2, pg185
articles index
|Names.
|Photos index
|Cave index
|Places and Grottos.
VAR home page
|