Mapping Cassell Cave, WV

A survey trip with the Gangsta Mappers

"Boy you're tall! You must be a climber..." -- double-fisted Jolt-Cola-drinking hardcore caver Miles Drake

I've been caving recreationally for some time now and it was with great excitement that I geared up for my first serious caving venture. Caving with a purpose, if you will. The Gangsta Mappers had again turned out in force to continue the mapping of Windy-Cassell Cave in Pocahontas County, WV. Cassell is a large cave at least 6.6 miles in length (according to a rough survey from the mid-60's) with at least four entrances of assorted flavors. Prior to this, the fourth survey trip into the cave, 2.43 miles of passage had been mapped in beautiful, glowing, computer-aided detail. But there were still probably five miles to go, much of it deep in the interior beyond tight crawls or vertical work.
Friday night, during the requisite milling about and map meditations, the GH survey team had been established consisting of Devin Kouts, Rafi Reyes, Mark Kochte and myself, the rookie of the group. The other three had worked together before and I know Rafi and Mark well from the climbing community. Apparently, cavers come in three types; mud-puppies, lizards, and monkey-boys. Being a trio of monkey boys, we were to concentrate on sections requiring climbing and vertical work, which was fine with me. Our mission was to connect the G and H surveys and replace the rope on the Window Climb. While it's a pretty short piece of cave, this ties together two large sections of the survey and connects the entrances to each other.

Gordon Birkhimer's photo of the Windy entrance. There are lots more pictures from previous trips and of surveying and general here!

By 10:30 the next morning, we had suited up and slid through the Windy entrance. By some stroke of luck or maybe because I was the new guy, I got to carry the new rope and the cable ladder as well as my overstuffed cave pack. Oh joy! Right off the bat, we rigged a 15' climb with the cable ladder (thus lightening my baggage count by one) for other, less vertically inclined parties to follow on. Then, at great speed, we traversed narrow passage. 450 feet in, we dug up another cable ladder from under some stones and I chimneyed my way out to rig it from a bolt. We sashayed down the wide Times Square under and over massive blocks and natural bridges. From there on, the passages became lower and much crawling ensued. We slithered around a tight ledge on the edge of a pit complete with loud waterfall and emerged on the other side near the Shazam Chute. Then more canyon walking and scrambling down a few more drops, some with webbing or ropes, some without, none requiring gear.
At length, having broken a slight sweat, we descended a series of tricky chimneys into a large chamber perhaps ten feet wide and thirty high with a small waterfall and high ledges. At the far end was the Window Climb, the start of unsurveyed territory. A rope dangled down the far wall and disappeared up through a tight hole (the Window) to the passage above. Being a rock climber, I usually rely on rope only as a safety and ascend with hands and feet. But being in a cave, faced with a potentially deadly fall, we donned harnesses and ascenders and climbed the rope. I had borrowed parts for a frog system from Rafi and had, as they say, a strong theoretical base. But some difficulty was had in applying this theory--I need to practice this a bit!
While the three of us settled down for a bit of lunch, Devin slithered out to the lip of the drop to install a new bolt. We had heard that people who know what they're doing can install a bolt in 15 minutes or less. However, amongst the four of us, we had installed zero bolts and even swapping out pounders to restore circulation to limbs, it ended up taking an hour and a half. Rafi took pictures of everything which, along with cooking sumptuous post-cave meals, is what he does best. Finally the bolt was in. The old rope turned out to be new, so we just re-rigged it from the new bolt so it hung free of the wall. I bundled up the rope I had hauled all the way in to haul all the way back out again. Llllllovely!
The surveying started a little ways further on near the 0,0 Point where the two sections of cave finally intersect. Our first station was in a series of multi-level canyons. Designated HZ15, it was the final survey station for survey HZ from August. Surveying tasks were assigned: Rafi and Mark would do the shots, I would sketch profiles and record the data, and Devin, elected as most artistic amongst us, would sketch.
The process is entirely fascinating and worked something like this: Mark would find a prominent rock or protrusion to use as a survey mark and would set up the tape measure on it. Rafi, at the previous station, would pull the tape tight and measure the distance. Then, using accurate compasses and clinometers, Rafi would measure the azimuth and inclination from his station to a flashlight resting on the forward station. Mark would then measure the back azimuth and back inclination to a flashlight resting on Rafi's station. I would record the numbers and make sure that they matched to within 2-degrees, which they did about two thirds of the time. If they didn't, readings were repeated until they matched. Meanwhile, I would record the distance of each station from the floor, ceiling, left and right walls and draw a profile of the passage to scale in my notebook. This sounds pretty straight forward and it is provided you're in nice walking passage like

but most of the passages we were in looked like

in cross section, so my job was often challenging and was never boring. At the same time, Devin was scampering around sketching a detailed qualitative map of the area marking down survey points and salient features. When all the data is entered into the computer, a line in three dimensions traces out the passages of the cave with high accuracy. The sketches and profiles are then scanned in and morphed to fit the line. The result is a beautiful map, much more accurate the those of past decades.
What was shown as a five foot wide passage on the old map was, in fact, a bedding plane collapse with a five foot wide walking passage flanked by dozens of feet of 6-inch-tall space. However, the passage was largely straight and simple, so we did 9 "shots", some of them rather longer than the recommended 25' maximum (let's put it this way, our 50' tape wasn't always long enough). A couple side passages, including one almost-virgin passage Devin found, await surveying attention, but we stuck to the straight and... well... wide main corridor.
At the ninth station, almost back to our bolt and the end of the run, Devin appeared out of a crevice in the wall and announced he'd found a crawl that lead out to the ledges overlooking the large chamber below the climb. So we crawled into a 18" tall by very wide space and surveyed a few more stations out onto large balconies. Going back to station 9, we did one more shot to our new bolt, one straight down, and then one to the last GG station, thus tying the H and G surveys together and connecting the cave! I was the last to rappell down from our new bolt (we all made Devin go first since he placed it!) and was shocked to see that my aluminum figure-8 rap device had aquired a noticable groove in it cut by the muddy rope. Yikes!
Feeling pretty tired but pleased at completing our mission, we worked out way back the 1100 feet past Times Square to the shorter cable ladder I had rigged on the way in. We dumped our baggage and kept going. Walking in large canyons brought us to the beautiful Pond area. Simply gorgeous! We laid some pink tape down on the floor to define a path through the largely untrammelled formations on the floor. Better to sacrifice one section than the whole. The walls were about ten feet apart and the ceiling thirty or more feet overhead. Great curtains of flowstone and stalactites hung above. Large rimstone pools sat on the right and filled with water so clear you can barely see it. Around a bend we found the largest pool of all backed by cascading flowstone and formations. Another party had waded through earlier that day, so the water was sadly clouded, but Rafi took some photos and headed back.
At length, we made it back to the entrance and emerged into the chilly West Virginia night ablaze with stars and a brace of meteors. The time was quarter to nine giving us over ten hours in the cave. We hurried back to Cass and to the crockpots of waiting Chicken Fricesee put up by Cat and Rafi earlier in the day. Pure heaven!

The process of surveying was completely fascinating to me and I can't wait to get out and do more; particularly the couple of interesting leads we turned up in section GH. Caving with such an accomplished crew was a great pleasure and definitely a step up in intensity and physical exertion--never mind time-in-cave--from my previous experiences. I seem to have passed everyone's criteria and was invited back for more in November by all and sundry. Look for another trip report then!

Howdy all,

Just note to fill everyone in on some results from the past weekend's survey trip to Cassell. All the data has been entered, and we have now surveyed 3.29 miles!

Another two months pass and I make my way back to Cass and the Gangsta Mappers. It's colder this time; leaves have fallen and intermittent snow is falling. This time I brought my friend Tom Kornack along to partake of some serious caving (as opposed to the tourist stuff we've done together before). I also brought my own set of vertical gear since last time, I was fortunate enough to borrow a set, and I couldn't count on that again.
There was the usual driving out through the Virginias and nocturnal arrival at Cass where we were all stowed in House #135. We'd scarcely walked in the door when I was recruited by Devin for a continuation of our surveying last time. Not having vertical gear or experience there-in, Tom was unable to join us which was a shame. But he was picked up by Dave West and Miles Drake instead for some climbing-oriented exploration near the Windy entrance and pond. Catching-up was done and maps consulted as the night wore on and people trickled in.
The morning dawned grey and cold with intermittent light snow. Penelope Pooler, the third member of our team and, more importantly, the cook for the evening, had yet to arrive so we were a bit worried. She finally rolled in at 8:30 and we were on the road an hour later.
A team had already arrived at the Cassell Pit entrance and had rigged the 96-foot drop. The lack of recent rain meant that the waterfall was merely a trickle. Gear was donned and we dropped through into the warmth and humid darkness getting only minorly wet in the process. The bottom of the pit was a beautiful large room with light and water streaming in. Once the team had assembled, we squirmed through an excavated pile of boulders into a low sewer passage and headed out at speed.
As has been mentioned before, the overall structure of Cassells is two north-east to south-west trending sets of passages. The Windy Entrance serves the southern of these while the Pit serves the northern. A diagonal river canyon passage connects the north-east end of the northern system (the Junction Room) to the middle of the southern system (the 0,0 Point). Our mission was to descend the pit, traverse to the Junction Room and strike out through the stream passage to the 0,0 point. There we would ascend to the upper level (southern) passages and map a few leads we'd found last time. According to Devin, dropping the pit and taking this longer route would be conciderably easier than going in the horizontal entrance and traversing the relatively tough terrain we saw last time. I'm not sure it really was less effort, but was eager to see new cave and put up no protest.
We reached the Junction room and turned a sharp right into one of the main lower-level stream passages. For a third of a mile, we were walking in high stream canyon with walls roughly 5 feet apart and a ceiling 50' overhead. The farther we went, the more water was underfoot flowing from toe to knee deep in the opposite direction. No side-passages could be found at our level and going was fairly easy if you were willing to get your feet wet... which for Devin and I, was not an attractive option. While Penelope dived right in to the shin-deep water, we stayed up on the walls as long as possible and made our lives that much harder. Periodically, we would be forced through some constriction or over some obstruction in the canyon. Personal preferences were apparent in that I usually went over things and the others usually went under. More times than not, it seemed like after squeezing through some awkward spot, a more logical and graceful option presented itself.
At length two things happened: first, Devin and I gave up trying to stay dry and jumped in the water and, second, we reached the 0,0 point. From here, we were to survey up to the upper level and tie the two halves of the survey together. Fortunately, there was an easy scramble up from that point and up we went. Devin sketched and took numbers while Penelope and I ran the instruments--she foresights, I backsights. Starting things out with a bunch of high-inclination shots wasn't the easiest, but got us in the mood for some rather... creative... shot selection. We surveyed back and forth up the canyon until meeting up with Ralph, Karen and Ken's team. After collaborating on a long, high-inclination shot, we parted company, climbed up a short rope and were in the dry, dusty upper level I had been in back in September.
Our next surveying went from the main 5' high passage up into a narrow crawlway T intersection. To the right was the crawl out to the ledge over the Window Drop. To the left lay uncharted and possibly virgin territory in a wide, low bedding plane collapse area. Bat bones and a mummified caterpillar greeted our crawling. Without even looking at the maps, this felt like the top of the cave. Very dry and dusty. I was reminded of an attic. Quite a contrast to the wet lofty canyons of the lower layer. Penelope had stayed at station GH8 while I followed Devin to another intersection where the passage became a little taller. We shot a line through the couple-inch gap between ceiling and floor.
Onward from there we surveyed a number of other low, wide crawls parallelling the taller passage in this very sandy region. Sometimes we could see through narrow cracks back out to the main passage. At length, we reached a dead end with a small aperture through which we could see the main path. A little shoving of sand around made it big enough to worm through and we were done.
There were several other leads to check. One of them ended up in the top of the Cassells stream passage. Various ledges on either side could be seen continuing, but travel in that direction would be very dangerous. Another passage nearby was a rapidly narrowing canyon with a very passable upper corridor. The floor was solid and continuous and it bent out of sight, again, in the direction of the stream canyon.
Back at one of our intermediate survey stations, we continued down a slot and ended up sitting on a ledge at the top of the stream canyon about 50' off the floor. More ledges could be seen heading down the canyon as before. But this time, a passage opened up directly opposite us on the other side of a 3' wide gap. No footprints marred the mud here and the rocky shelves were untouched save by a Little Brown bat preening himself from the underside. Eager to survey virgin leads, I urged us to take a few shots. Everyone was tired at this point and wasn't keen on taking that short-but-potentially-very-long, precipitous step over the canyon. Never-the-less, I proceeded over the void and poked my head in. The virgin passage stayed about 3' high and perhaps 4' wide for about 30 feet before turning slightly to the left. Water had obviously flowed out at some point from this system as the mud below me was carved into various sinuous patterns. Noting this down as one for another day, I headed back and we started our retreat from the cave.
Bidding farewell to the upper reaches, we rappelled down a short rope at the 0,0 point and started slogging through the canyon no longer caring that our feet were getting wet. Since I had been a little more nimble on the downclimb, I was a bit ahead of the others and had a chance to enjoy the canyon by myself. The water was clear and flowed past my boots at a fairly lively pace with a faint burbling sount. The walls had that particular organic, carved look only found in caves such as this. I walked quietly ahead enjoying the unexpected reflection of my light from the water on the walls far ahead. For the first time, I really had a chance to take in my surroundings and the beauty of this cave. Every now and then, I would stop and look upward at the soaring ceiling and hypothesize about some potential passage up there invisible from down here and accessible only through some rather rugged maneuvering. A distinctive rain-on-metal-roof sound heralded the approach of the two cataracts in the corridor where the stream dropped a foot or so over sharp black rock. Alien black nodules the size of my fist protruded from the walls here and there looking like fossilized bats. The whole experience was peaceful and satisfying.
But everything grows old and the trip out started to seem a whole lot longer than the trip in had been. The stream became less omnipresent and we squeezed back through the same troubling spots we had been through before--again missing the more obvious, easier routes. Emerging in the Junction Room, we side-tracked to see a beautiful dome with formations and a rope leading to the Ball Room area; another trip for another day.
At long last, we popped back up through the boulders and were in the pit. Some of the vertical gear had vanished implying we were the second group out of the pit (of three). The waterfall was a bit more active now and gone was the shaft of light streaming in. Eager to get out and eat, we donned gear. Just then Rick, Bob and Barry appeared and settled down to wait as we exitted. Devin made the climb and I followed, getting rapidly soaked. I climbed as fast as possible through the pouring water and my frog system worked flawlessly. I was soon past the water and starting to feel the cold outside air. Stars could be seen sparkling above. Another 20' brought me to the lip and a little maneuvering had me standing outside. Penelope started up and I headed for the car to change and warm up.
Soon we were back at Cass downing mighty portions of Penelope's Jambalya (with THREE different kinds of fish in it!) and comparing notes with the others. Despite the fact that we only surveyed a couple hundred feet, it was a very good trip. We entered our data in the computer and marvelled at how the map had grown. Bob announced that the total surveyed portion was now at 4.15 miles. Halfway there? We'll see...

The cold rain of a friday afternoon in Baltimore translated to a cold flurry of a friday evening in Durbin, WV. Tom Kornack and I rolled into that worthy borough (population 75) at about 7:30 pm and located the new home of the Gangsta Mappers, the Durbin Depot. Only a few other people had arrived so, after an entertaining incident involving getting the car stuck in a surprisingly deep puddle, we settled in for the long wait to find out what we would be doing this weekend.
Having spent the past two surveys working in the region between the Window Climb and the 0-0 Point (a wide, dusty area which I will henceforth dub The Belfrey), I hankered to get farther into the cave. According to the rather speculative maps drawn back in the 1960's, the cave is ferociously complicated around the Windy and Ballroom entrances then stretching back in two long series of corridors to the south-west. These branches (dubbed the north and south branches) appear fairly simple topologically, though there are passages on at least three levels which usually parallel each other.
At last the rest of the crew arrived and we set about consulting maps and planning the morrow's assault. Given the amount of rain we'd had recently, the pit would most likely be impassible due to waterfall. One team composed of very small folks (Miles, Karen and Rick) would enter the narrow Ballroom entrance and work on surveying the rats-nest of passages which lie above the Windy entrance. A second team composed of folks who either had time constraints or didn't want to do a long trip would enter the Windy Entrance early and work on some leads near there. The remaining three teams would follow them and head as quickly as possible for the unsurveyed end of the south branch. Tom and I joined Ralph Hartly, Bob Zimmerman, Pat Bingham, Rafi Reyes, Bob Alderson, Barry Horner and Gordon Birkhimer in the South Branch Fellowship.
Quickly checking out the Pit entrance, we discovered that there was no way without dry suits and possibly scuba gear we would be going that direction. While there is normally a small waterfall dripping down the hole from about two thirds of the way up its 96-foot extent, a frothing river ran along the valley and disappeared down the normally dry mouth of the hole. Perhaps two feet of non-waterfall space were available to rapell through, but it would me a very wet time in any case and the chances of hypothermia and death was large. We'd have to take the long way 'round.
Slipping through the Windy entrance at 10:30, we travelled quite quickly through the well-remembered maze of passages we had traversed back in September. It is a long bit of fairly rigorous caving, but we reached the Window climb without much trouble. My new headlamp (a Petzl Duo) was behaving nicely and provided ample illumination on the lower setting. In my roll as official Monkey Boy, I had volunteered to bring vertical gear and set up the cable ladder for the rest of the crew. The bolt at the top of the climb looked much the same as when we installed it, and I quickly set to work installing the ladder. Ralph and Tom were bellayed up and I passed off bellay duties to Ralph for the rest.
Much waiting ensued while everyone climbed the ladder from the bottom. For a lark, I sent Tom and Bob down the hole I'd explored the first time in dubbed Danforth's Misery (Mystery?) Hole. Soon, I had crammed myself in there too and Pat was convinced to join us. Good, stupid fun was had getting in and out of a volume about the size of an airplane lavatory but covered with sharp rock fins on all sides.
Together again in the Belfry, we scooted through the dusty, wide passages and dropped down to the 0-0 point in the lower stream passage. Technically, we'd just changed caves and were now in Cassell's rather than Windy, but the distinction is somewhat academic at this distance from the entrances. A hundred feet of sloshing upstream through shin-deep water (except for those masochists who worked very hard keeping their feet dry by staying up on the walls) brought us to a small beach and a three-part climb back up to the middle level of Windy. This climb was a bit sketchy and could be greatly improved by adding a hand line.
From here on I was in new territory. First came an arduous avoidance of a small but extremely deep pool of stagnant water and the beginnings of a 1000' long crawl that had been surveyed in November by Karen, Ken and Ralph. I don't know if this passage has been labelled yet, but it is significant and deserves a name. I'd like to propose Speleothem Alley. The passage varies from belley crawl to occasional walking passage with the majority being hands-and-knees work for about a thousand feet. Vast forests of soda straws hang from the ceilings and numerous other formations, all of them fragile, adorn the floor on one side or another. We longer folks had to take great care not to snap off the ceiling formations and my shoulders or helmet claimed, I'm sad to say, more than a few. With all the trafic and heavy breathing, visibility was limitted to a few yards through the fog and dust.

Detail from the old map of what we surveyed. Red is our team. Yellow is Alderson, Horner and Birkhimer. Green is Zimmerman, Pat and Rafi's upper level passage. Blue is water.

At great length, sweating and complaining mightily, we emerged into a taller chamber reprenting the current limit of modern surveys. A loud waterfall appeared and disappeared through the breakdown comprising much of the room. Barry, Bob Alderson and Gordon headed off to survey two leads on the west side of the chamber. Bob Zimmerman, Rafi and Pat headed up into the loose rubble following the waterfall. Ralph, Tom and I checked a very nasty, tight mud-and-breakdown lead on the east and then headed down a short drop into wider, cleaner passage. We surveyed a short distance to a lovely stream passage in a tall canyon fourty feet tall and perhaps six wide. Beautiful! Downstream appeared doable as a hands-and-knees water crawl but upstream appeared to sump. Leaving the water crawl survey to others more inclined toward that sort of thing, we continued on through some nasty high-inclination cramped shots leading back up to the waterfall room. No going leads and nothing terribly exciting there.
Somewhere in there, my low-intensity light ceased to work, breifly worked again and then finally died so I had been operating on halogen power for several hours. As EVERYTHING was encased in a good quarter inch of mud, I opted to not try changing bulbs then and there and changed batteries more frequently. But I had no shortage of light... Grrr!
Next we headed up to assist Bob's team above the waterfall. The passage wound upward through some extremely loose, large blocks. Somewhere in there I dropped a large rock on Ralph which narrowly avoided breaking his arm. Much more carefully, we left the loose rock and emerged into dry, dusty passage where we found the other survey team.
Beyond them was a large pit which appeared to go at the bottom. Ralph climbed down into it and we ran a shot across. Then I joined him climbing down a very unpleasant, muddy slope. From below things were much easier to understand. We were in the bottom of a 20' deep, conical pit with loose sandy, muddy walls and no apparent exits. Below us a narrow vertical fissure revealed rushing water 20' below. Chunks of dirt and mud ricochetted off the walls and into the water at our slightest move. Ralph bravely shimmied down the fissure while Tom lowered a tape from the survey station above. I stood rooted in place not wanting to drop anything further into the hole. Ralph reported that the stream passage was a few feet wide and perhaps four feet tall including about 18" of water. The total drop put the water at about 70' below the cave entrance which is about the level of the stream passage in other parts of the cave. Very exciting!
There is a carnivorous insect called an antlion which burrows into the ground and creates a conical pit in loose sand. It then waits for ants to wander through the pit. The slopes are steep enough and loose enough that the struggling insect can't help but slide downward to be consumed. It was thoughts like this that occupied my frantic mind as I very gingerly clawed my way back up the slope to where Tom and the others waited. With absolutely no rock to hold on to, this was a very frightening process. But eventually we escaped this giant Antlion and, at 7pm, started out for dinner and bed.
The trip out was much like the trip in only with more fatigue. The crawl through the Speleothem Alley was not as bad this time around and we descended to the stream, traversed and ascended again up to the Belfry from the 0-0 Point. I donned vertical gear while everyone else climbed down the ladder. Finally, I took down the ladder, re-rigged the rope and rapped off. There then followed a few hours of retracing our steps past the Shazam Chute, Times Square and countless other junctions and branchings. Finally we went up the cable ladder, through the delightful maze of passages and arrived at the final drop. Again, I waited while everyone else used the ladder. Then I scrambled down the very exposed face and everyone exitted the cave.
Outside it was snowing, 18 degrees and very dark. The time was 11pm and my gear was freezing solid as I walked. Awkwardly, everyone stripped it off and climbed into the waiting cars. Soon enough we were revived and eating Rafi's amazing chile back in Durbin.

A good trip though I didn't get to survey as much as I would have liked. It's becoming increasingly clear that the farther portions of the cave were only very marginally mapped back in the 60's and we are going to discover a lot of structure not seen on the old map. Furthermore, unless a back entrance is discovered, it is going to take a very long time to get all these distant passages fully mapped. The Waterfall room where we began surveying on this trip is only half way from the entrance to the rear of the cave and that trip took four hours to accomplish. We have a lot of work ahead of us, there is no doubt!

The Home Cave

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