Caving at J-4
October 17, 1999, near State College, PA.(Sorry, I can't give out cave locations except to say that this cave is near State College, PA. Your local NSS grotto can give you information about local caves.)
Under the direction of Raffi Reyes and Cat Lazaroff, eight of us decended upon the uncreatively named J-4 Cave in central Pennsylvania. After a very lovely evening spent consuming bowl after bowl of Cat and Raffi's sumptuous veggie chili and toasted whole-wheat tortillas, we hit the sack under cold, clear skies and a nice quarter moon.
The morning that greeted us was gray and misty and seemed undecided on the whole precipitation issue. Continuing in the fine culinary tradition of the night before, a batch of extraordinary cornmeal blueberry pancakes were prepared as we struck the tents. Five cars convoyed out to the cave staging area where we donned our caving gear. To my slight chagrin, I was the only caver of the eight of us wearing "mufti"--my usual heavily soiled and duct-taped jeans and nylon windbreaker--instead of spiffy one-peice coveralls. No matter; there are no fashion police in a cave. We trecked down into the abandonned quarry and found the cave entrance.
Despite having been in a dozen or more caves over the past few years, I was rather taken aback by this particular entrance. Perched 20' above the floor of the quarry in the side of a cliff was a small grotto with an 18" corrugated culvert pipe projecting from the side. This was our cave entrance. Prepped for battle, one by one, we disappeared head-first down this tube with varying degrees of gracelessness. Struggling with the usual transition from daylight to headlight, I could make out another, similar tube projecting through another hole, this one somewhat shorter in length. After that squeeze, I crawled through a few turns of crawlspace and chuted down a highly polished mostly vertical space.
My fears that the entire cave would consist of such tight crawlspaces were laid to rest when we assembled in the first room. There was more or less horizontal caving in tall passageway for a time and we all worked on regaining or developing our cave legs. Raffi at this point went ahead to scout out the path through a confusing region of interconnected passageways. I have quite a bit of climbing experience and can generally move at a pretty fast rate through cave environs, but it is trully astonishing how fast that man can move! Up a series of short climbs, through a narrow, diagonal canyon and into a large chamber. While we waited for the rest to arrive, the bulb in my headlamp blew. Damn! I was thinking black thoughts about spending another five hours at the mercy of my hand-held minimag, but fortunately, Cat had a stock of extra bulbs which brought me back to reasonable, hands-free luminosity.
There followed several hours of very pleasant caving as we pushed back into the remote regions of the cave. J-4, named after the discovers who apparently all had names starting with 'J', is a fairly extensive cave with long east-west-tending passages with occasional north-south connectors. It's mostly dry with very little life or live formations. Our mission was to push all the way back to the formation climb and the dome room where the best "pretties" were. We rigged a difficult descent over a pit with a rope (the flowstone overhang) and Indy insisted on rigging one dicey traverse around a corner over a deep pit and through the upper bits of a body-width, deep canyon (the highway step across). Through the wedding-cake room, through a tight squeeze, and down a newly tied ettrier on the Formation Climb into the official Back of the Cave. Raffi, Adventurer Photographer, kept a careful photographic record of some of the more interesting moments as we descended drops or squeezed tight bits.
Having reached our objective, I followed Merle and Indy up a 30' dicey climb which, were I outside with climbing shoes on, I would have never attempted, unroped as I was. Still, flowstone makes for great handholds and caving boots have a surprising bit of traction if you place them carefully. On the ceiling, above the reach of human-types, were some extremely delicate soda straw formations of the most startling ivory whiteness. Hair-thin fibers, presumably some sort of fungus, were growing from rice grain-sized bat droppings. Beautiful translucent bacon and flowstone on the walls.
Indy and Merle plumbed the lower levels of a canyon and found the "dripping wax room", a beautiful canyon choked with more of the pale white flowstone and formations. Meanwhile, Aaron and I did our best to stuff me (being the smaller of the two of us) into a an 8' long crawlspace which lead to 'something interesting, no doubt'. After having ascertained that indeed it did lead to something interesting, failing to fit through the exit and suffering, for the first time in my life, from claustrophobia, I beat a painful and muddy retreat toe-first out of the jam. Everyone played poking around in holes until, after jamming through the tightest, most awkward, wriggly, feet-waving-in-the-air sqeeze yet (I have never had my backup light around my neck under my shirt get hamper my progress before) we reassembled in a large breakdown room and concidered our options. Amy had fallen and cut her hand open and was furthermore feeling generally sub-par. But she gamely agreed to move on a little before leaving for the surface world.
To the Dome Room! (which turned out to be right over the hill we had been sitting on). A very nice 50' dome indeed. Fog from our breath and insufficient light prevented us from seeing details at the top, but great curtains of flowstone draped down the length of it. Various windows and parapets looked out into the room from various heights. We climbed through some very rounded passage with several branches and rough, almost cave popcorny walls until acheiving the largest, lowest parapet (which provided another photo op for our ever-vigalent cameraman). Into a narrow descent and a room with loose breakdown. The boys crawled through the breakdown and scattered to the four winds in an orgy of cave exploration while the women, always the voices of caution (sheesh!) argued for starting the return trip. In my portion of the cave exploration orgy, Aaron and I discovered passages back to the dome room--his a narrow aperture, mine a long, narrow crack which my pelvis barely navigated. We soon rejoined the others and began our escape.
The problem with one-entrance caves like this is you have to spend a lot of your time backtracking. Fortunatly or otherwise, caves look extremely different depending on which direction you're going and often you don't recognize where you are until coming upon some unmistakable landmark. We were also getting tired and clumsy so we took a minimum of scenic detours and made our way out in two hours. Climbs which were hard going in were easy coming back out and vice versa. All of a sudden, after navigating a very slippery ascending squeeze, I found myself confronted with a peice of metal pipe. The exit at last? All ready? Yikes! One by one, we hauled ourselve out and into the shining sun, humidity and flocks of ladybugs. Ah!
A very enjoyable, energetic cave. A few steps up from Whiting's Neck, that's for sure!
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