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Cuddington
continued
About 1954, after I got back from Tennessee where I'd gotten into a lot of pits, I came back to Roanoke to live with my parents and began to cave in the Virginia area again. I began to look and search Walker Mountain again, and got over on East River Mountain. I remember Honaker's Cave and Caldwell's Cave were about the two nicest caves on East River. East River was sort of a disappointment. I spent more time on Walker than anywhere else; I walked the hollows and found small caves. Of course nothing as big as Newberry has ever been found in there.
When I came back from Tennessee I got a car and started going up to VPI. Larry and Betty still lived in Blacksburg, and I'd talk to them. At times the VPI Grotto would get down to four or five members. There for quite a while I'd come up with a car, and that would be the only way they could go caving. That's when I met Stan Carts and Steve Logan. I first met Charlie Marr, and he was one of the first men I trained on prusiks. Charlie's a small fellow about five feet tall, bit he trusted me. I remember his first drop. We went to Vampire Hole, which used to be called Byrd's Drop Cave. Byrd's Drop just never did sound like a good name for that pit, so I named it Vampire Hole. We went there and on the first pitch on the low side, Charlie used a safety and prusik knots. A lot of people would do that. I would offer them a safety and they'd accept. Sometimes the old VPI members would go with me, and they were used to ladders and safeties, and they just couldn't trust hanging on a single rope. You could safety them easy, because most drops were against the wall. So Charlie Marr and I would go on a lot of trips. Sometimes just he and I would go. We tried to do Higginbotham's #2 with just using ropes. All this time I was under fire about being crazy for just using ropes. We tried it, he and I, using ropes and ladders to haul the gear we'd need to get to the bottom. The ladders were for all the drops, and the ropes could be doubled to use for belay, to belay the last man down and the first man up. By the tine we got to the entrance we were all worn out, walking up from the road with all that gear. That day we only did the entrance drop, the second twenty foot drop, and then wandered around in that big upper room. That was the time I really got disgusted with ladders. I realized there was no way people could go real deep in a cave with ladders. I'd been really convinced before then, but I just wanted to give it one more fair shot, and really try it with the so--called "safe way."
Well, I think that Charlie showed Stan and Steve how to rappel and prusik. They tried it out in Clover Hollow or somewhere. Steve was just like a spider on the wall; he'd climb up in some awful hairy places. So anyway we'd take off, and sometimes Charlie would go, and another fellow, John Rogers, went some. I think his family owned Rogers Belmont Cave. Then I met Jim Quinlan and I showed him prusik knots. Bear in mind, he had done some rappelling and rock climbing before with the Philly Grotto, so he was fairly experienced. He hadn't gone the prusik route, but he was ready for anything. We got off some pretty good trips with him and Phil Gaylord. I ran into him out at Clover Hollowand he wanted to do some caving, so I trained him. Quinlan went out west and showed a lot of people out there how to prusik, so prusiking sort of spread that way. Meantime I always liked to cave in different places.
I went up to Cass and met some of those people up there, Huntley Ingalls, for one. One time we had a three or four man trip into Cass Cavewhich was supposed to be impossible then at that time, and I safetied them down the ladder. The way it worked was me and Hunt safetied them down, then we went down. I prusiked up and safetied the other men up the ladder.
The Big Stone Gap area was another area I caved in frequently. Roger Daugherty was living down there; he later went to VPI. He had written a letter to the NSS and somebody showed it to me at one of the Virginia Region meetings. I went down, and caved with those fellows several times. They had a high school group; we did some caving right around there in Big Stone Gap and Pennington Gap.
krietofferson, 78 |
I was the first one down into Swago Pit, the one with the waterfalls in it. I remember going into another pit near the Sugar Shack. I did a lot of looking for pits on Muddy Creek Mountain and around Fort Spring. I never did like Organ Cave; went in a little bit mapping with Earl and them; that cave sort of depressed me; everywhere you'd go, Bob Handley had been there.
I went to a couple of regional meetings, but you got to remember that most of those people from D.C. didn't think too much of me. The only people that I remember were really friendly was Bill Stephenson and Marguerite Klein. Interesting story about Marguerite one time I was at a region meeting in Franklin, WV, and I wanted to go to Sites Cave. I had been there once on a block and tackle trip. They considered it impossible to go into the cave even on ladders, so they lowered me so fast that I just banged against the wall. It was a harum--scarum type of deal, just drop you in and yank you out. So I wanted to go, and really look around the pit. A follow named Richard Sanders, from the Wytheville Grotto, went with me (he had had polio and went up the hill to Sites on crutches). I carried the rope, half--inch manila which was s.o.p. then, and went into Sites Cave. It didn't take very long to do it. Came back to McCoy's Mill area where they were to have a picnic that night, and somebody, Don Cournoyer, asked me where I'd been. I said, "Oh, we've been up to Sites." He asked me. "Where's your party?" I said, "Oh, it was just us." They said, "What'd you do, drop rocks or something?" I answered, "No. I went on down." They wondered if I'd gone down with ladders or something without a safety. "I just used a rope, rappelled in, and prusiked out." At that time they were sure it was a 300 foot drop. I tried to tell them it was about 190 feet, and then it was a slope. Not long after that there was a write-up in the D.C. SPELEOGRAPH. Marguerite Klein had written the trip up in a friendly way; she nicknamed me "Vertical Bill" in the article, referring to my climb out of Sites. I really didn't think it was much of a feat, but they really thought it was something.
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