Fall 2017 - National Speleological...

Fall 2017

Inside Issue:

Friars Holenew exploration

Formationsphoto essay

Bob Liebmanobituary

Ralph Hartleyobituary

Tawney’sdead cow

VARfinancial report

WVCCbanquet info

BCCSnew grant

Vol. XXX, No. III

The Region RecordThe Region Record is the quarterly publication of the Virginia Region of the National Speleological Society. Any articles, announcements or other materials of general interest to cavers in the Region are welcome. Send all materials to Nikki Fox (1726 Longs Pump Road, Harrisonburg, VA, 22802, or [email protected]). Electronic submissions are preferred, but any kind of submission will be allowed. Non-copyrighted material contained in the Region Record may be reprinted by organizations that are affiliated with the VAR or the NSS, as long as credit is given to the Region Record and the author. The opinions expressed herein are those of the individual author and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors, the VAR, the NSS or their internal organizations.

VAR Officers Chairman: Craig Hindman, 443.286.2781, [email protected] Chairman: Judy Fisher, 304.258.4974, [email protected]: Carol Tiderman, 410.792.0742, [email protected]: John Fox, 540.831.7517, [email protected]

VAR Committee Chairs

Conservation: Andy Reeder, 434.248.6443 & Meredith Hall Weberg, [email protected] Landowner Award: Janet Tinkham, [email protected] Service Award: J.C. Fisher, [email protected]: Jim McConkey, [email protected]: Philip Balister, [email protected]

Region Record

Editor: Nikki Fox, [email protected] Editor: Yvonne Droms, [email protected] Manager: Carol Tiderman, 410.792.0742, [email protected]

Region Record Subscriptions• New NSS members in the Region receive two complimentary copies of the Region Record.• Current NSS members moving into the Region from elsewhere receive two complimentary copies. Current NSS members who move within the Region will not receive free issues.• When a subscription is going to expire, the last issue will be stamped “Time to Renew.” No other renewal notice is sent.• When a person attends a VAR meeting he or she will automatically receive the next four issues. If he/she is already on the list, four additional issues are added to the subscription.• When multiple people live at the same address, only one copy of each issue will be sent to the address unless a request is sent to the Circulation Manager.• New subscribers (who have not attended a VAR meeting), or people renewing, need to complete the form (http://var.caves.org/var/communications/recordSubscribe.html) and mail to: John Fox, P. O. Box 3056, Radford, VA 24143. Make check payable to “VAR” or “The Virginia Region.”

© 2017 Virginia Region of the NSS

page 2 Region Record, Fall 2017

Cover Photo by Nikki FoxChris Coates and Rachel Twiford in the southern borehole of Friars Hole Cave System. At 46.56 miles in length and 627.1 feet in depth, Friars Hole is the longest cave in West Virginia and the sixth-longest in the United States. Read more about the recent exploration on pages 4 to 11.

2017 Calendar

Sept 22–24 Fall VAR at the Mountain Institute on Spruce Knob, Pendleton County, W.Va. Hosted by the Pine Mountain Grotto. Oct 21 Bridge Day in Fayetteville, W.Va.Nov 11 West Virginia Cave Conservancy Banquet in Lewisburg, W.Va.Nov 18 Virginia Speleological Survey meeting, noon, held at Natural Bridge Caverns, Va.

Region Record, Fall 2017 page 3

This year’s Convention was on the smaller size, just under 700 in atten-dance. COG was on the smaller size as well. There were a few motions on changing the wording to be gender neutral. VAR did put in a motion to have a full accounting of the office funding and budget.

It was related at the board meeting that the NSS office needs money to remodel the main bathrooms. They are only bringing in about 40% of what they need from rentals to cover expenses. They would like to remod-

el the bathrooms and showers in the campground. As of June, the utilities had cost about $48K, with time left in the year.

There was also talk about NSS mem-bership retention as it seems mem-bership drops about 100 per month. The dive section board voted to drop the requirement of members having to join the NSS. The Dive section has about 800 members at this time.

• Earl and Cheryl Suitor received the NSS Certificate of Merit.

• Dave Socky received the Spelean Arts and Letters Award.

• Dwight Livingston received a Fellowship Award.

• Alex Sproul received the Outstanding Service Award.

The VAR elections are being held at the Fall Meeting. If you or some-one you know would like to run for an office, put your name in. I know that John Fox would like to step down. He has related that he is willing to put in one more year to be able to serve 20 years.

All of the current officers have been in place over 20 years, so if you would like to make a run at a VAR office, you just might get elected.

- Craig Hindman h

Message from the VAR Chairman

Region Record, Fall 2017

It may have all started with Bruce Fries.

It was 2014, and I was relatively new to WVACS. Every Friday night on project weekend I would arrive weary from the road, push open the door of the big building and bump straight into Bruce talking animatedly about “the Friars Hole air.” It seemed to the naive ob-server that Bruce could find “the Friars Hole air” anywhere — an observation echoed in a headline from the Spelunker Gazette: “BRUCE FRIES FINDS THE FRIARS HOLE AIR IN HIS TOI-LET.”

I got a good chuckle from that and then I got the chance to talk to Bruce myself. I learned about what Mountain Dave Knox would later famously dub “The Motherload”: Underground Spring Creek, the hypothesized major conduit linking the Friars Hole valley to several others along a sizable karst plateau drain-ing south to J.J. Spring. Finding “the Friars Hole air” on the other side of the dry Spring Creek bed meant connecting to the Motherload, and that was what Bruce was after. Bruce’s knowledge of the Spring Creek basin was impressive and his enthusiasm was conta-gious.

I sat at the fire after he went to bed, ruminating about Burntwood and Robbins Run and Icebox . . . and then something occurred to me. “Hey,” I asked Kyle Mills and Adam Lake, who were up tending the fire. “What hap-pens to the Friars Hole air in Friars Hole?”

I already loved Friars Hole and the entrance closest to Spring Creek was the coolest — but it had never occurred to me to go downstream

to where the map ended. Why go on a short trip when you can turn the other direction and go for miles? But that was sport caving logic. Friars Hole was already big cave, it didn’t have much farther to go before it hit the middle of the Spring Creek valley, and it seemed mysterious that Friars would just end, maybe only a quarter mile shy of the Motherload.

“There’s some kind of sump,” said Kyle. “Talk to Doug Medville.”

Three years and thirty cave trips later, Friars Hole still isn’t much closer to the Motherload. But I am happy to say that as of earlier this month, I made it through that sump. And with quite a bit of help from Doug Medville, as well as Kyle, Adam, Mountain Dave, and a large handful of other WVACS cavers, Friars Hole is a little bit longer than it was before. It has been hydrologically con-nected to neighboring Robbins Run and we are well-positioned for the next push.

Figuring out the cave’s flow patterns, pushing a myriad of grueling breakdown digs and finishing an epic dye trace

marks the end of Phase One of down-stream Friars Hole exploration for me. I am armed with a lot more knowledge moving into Phase Two: I hope that in three years I can write another oversized trip report about the next thirty trips, this one titled: “Friars Hole Phase Two: The Motherload,” (or maybe “Friars Hole Phase Two: Less Hypothermia Than Phase One”). But for now, here is a summary of the past three years of effort, and everything we have learned therein.

Friars Hole is composed of a system of strike-oriented main drains in the upper Greenbrier limestone, which developed on three distinct levels by the headward retreat of the old Hills Creek and the descent over time of the local water table (in concert with the sinking of Spring Creek into Underground Spring Creek). The main drain levels are interconnected to each other and to the surface by a web of infeeders, vadose pits and canyons, conjugate thrust faults and correspond-ing breakdown collapse, and localized floodwater mazes. Where the cave runs through nice, steadily dipping limestone it produces beautiful trunk passages that look simple and logical on a map.

Where the cave hits faulting and insoluble rock layers, it produces a clusterf*ck of breakdown and sumps that looks on a map like a cross between the “before” picture of an acne commercial and a self-portrait by an enraged three-year-old. Just down-stream of the Friars Hole entrance, the whole valley passes into a significant zone of complex faulting, at roughly the same place that the cave’s base-level water hits the bottom of the upper Greenbrier and enters the Taggard shale.

The Friars Hole Airby Keely Owens

Photo by Nikki Fox

Keely Owens surveys a passage beyond the elusive sump in Water World on Sept. 9, 2017. Owens led the first team to return there since 2002.

I didn’t know any of that when I first started enthusiastically dragging people into downstream Friars. All I knew was that I was having a much harder time finding that sump than I expected. It turned out that the little ole half-page downstream section of the multi-page Friars map was as complex as a bowl of spaghetti. The Great Friars Trunk doesn’t end in one nice clear sump — it splits off into a tangle of near infinite breakdown leads, all leaking ambigu-ous, taunting air (a fact which initially excited me but ultimately revealed itself as the most daunting feature of down-stream Friars). You can’t find the sump by following the water to where it disap-pears (I tried that first), nor can you find it by following the surveyed cave to its farthest down-valley extent (I tried that next). The sump is, in fact, tucked into the middle of the whole mess, and isn’t a terminal sump of the main flow as I had thought, but rather a minor infeeder that gets sumped where it joins the main flow. It took me five trips just to recon the down-stream area and figure all that out.

Something else I didn’t know, and was so excited about the project that I was slow to admit, is that Friars Hole is rough in the winter and early spring. In the winter of 2014–2015, “rough” meant a snowmelt waterfall on the first drop, gloves that froze instantly to rope and gear, merrily whis-tling entrance air and then trying to figure out how to remove frozen vertical gear with hands that now functioned like bags of hamburger meat. And that was a pretty mild winter. Over the next two winters, “rough” expanded to include ice climbing the nuisance drop, ropes transformed into icicles by drip water, snowmelt falls all the way from the entrance to the final drop, aborted trips, and finally, roads paved with black ice. I won’t say that I will never do another winter Friars

trip, but most of them are somehow now conveniently scheduled between May and November.

In the middle of that first winter, I got a chance to talk to Doug Medville, who sent me both his blessing and a large map of the downstream Friars hole quadrant, which included the elusive sump. He also invited me out to lunch with the folks who had discovered the sump. It was then that I learned its story.

Most of downstream Friars had been scooped and surveyed in the 1960s by the same group of cavers who initially dug open the Friars Hole entrance. In addition to Doug himself, prominent among this group was the famous Lew Bicking. It turns out that when I first started looking for the sump, I was retracing some of the steps of the old

explorers. Like me, they followed the water, down into its breakdown nest to its unstable terminal choke. Along the way back, Lew’s girlfriend Barbara Lauster noticed a small side passage, leading to a large breakdown room they dubbed Barbara’s Room. No leads were found from Barbara’s Room, although a small waterfall entered from the ceiling. They also followed the high, dry passage trending along the strike on the cave’s highest level and found a beautiful but short stretch of borehole floored with big dirt dunes that they called the Lost Passage. Climbing down an exposed canyon near the Lost Passage, Virginia caver Bill Mauck found another beauti-ful stretch of dry walking passage, this time on a mid-level between the Lost Passage and Barbara’s Room. Mauck’s Discovery, as they named it, ran north-west long enough to deliver a small

stream into the top of Barbara’s Room and then cut back along the strike in a parallel route to the Lost Passage. Both the Lost Passage and Mauck’s Discovery ended abruptly in breakdown at the same point along the course of strike. It was there that the old-timers left it — they had much greener pastures to scoop.

At least, until 2002. Brian and Sandy Preaux, among others, began working in downstream Friars Hole, and had the gump-tion to begin pushing the copious breakdown pockets at the end of Mauck’s Discovery. One of them went. After a brief mining effort, the group emerged into a large breakdown room they named “Mauckland.” On the far side of Mauckland, a bedrock wall can be followed down, down, down, all the way down to the cave’s base level. There, a small infeeder enters a joint in the bedrock — ending in a sump.

The famous sump was closed on every trip they took into Mauck-


Photo by Nikki Fox

Keely Owens (left) and Amy Skowronski in Mauck’s Discovery, a nice walking passage.

land — until the day that it wasn’t. On that day, an extremely dry day in the late summer of 2002, they put their faces down to the sump, not expecting much, and found that it had air. Surprised, they pushed slowly through a long pool with variable air space and cold rushing wind, past a section of ear dip, and emerged into a low, wide stream passage carrying a lot of air and swift water. Impressed, they named it Water World. Excited but also quite cold — the “Friars Hole air” is recognizable in part because Friars is an exquisite cold sink — they scooped what they could, and planned to return the next weekend and survey.

The two-team survey yielded about 1,300 feet of active stream passage, carrying water of unknown origin and running a strike-oriented course roughly parallel to Mauck’s Discovery and the Lost Passage/Friars Trunk at a lower level, passing underneath Mauck’s Discovery in two places. The group left many strong leads going in breakdown at both ends of the passage, and they also rigged up an impressive infrastructure to assist safely traversing the sump in the future (including a lead line and a hypothermia tent for getting warm back up in Mauckland). Then they left — and as it turned out, nobody came back for the next fifteen years.

Not that they didn’t try. A small amount of rain fell between that weekend and the next, and when the group went back, the sump was closed. The next week-end they went, it was still closed. Again and again, they tried, but the seasons came and went, and the dry-conditions luck did not come back to that group of cav-ers. The “Friars Hole terminal sump” entered the caving canon (“Friars Hole? Oh yeah, it ends

downstream in some sort of a sump . . .”) — and those who went looking for it tended not to find it, and never found it open. The cavers who knew the sump’s nature were biding their time, waiting for the perfect weekend. Everyone else went looking for the Friars Hole air in Burntwood and Robbins Run and the other greener pastures. By the time they blinked, twelve years had gone by. And then I talked to Doug.

Big Water and the First Quest for Water World

Water World doesn’t have a monopoly on the downstream Friars leads, but it boasts two tantalizing features: 1) the leads there have not been well checked; and 2) it has both air and active water. Now armed with Doug’s map, in the new year of 2015 I set out for Water World.

Finding the sump predictably closed, I started out trying to connect to Water World through the breakdown at the end of Mauck’s Discovery, a passage near Water World’s downstream end, although 50 feet higher. Dianna Orn-dorff, Mitch Berger, Mountain Dave and Greg Jones suffered through that

winter digging, scooping and surveying the Argillaceous Lead, a small canyon, which went a hundred feet, turned away from Water World and doubled back under the main passage, and then ended in breakdown.

Next, my eyes followed Water World upstream on the map toward Barbara’s Room, the large stand-alone break-down void discovered by Lew Bicking’s girlfriend. According to the map, the end of Barbara’s Room was only about 50 feet northeast and 30 feet higher than the furthest upstream extent of Water World. I had been to Barbara’s Room, having stumbled into it accidentally dur-ing an early foray. The room has an odd feel to it: you approach it from the inside of a cramped breakdown maze echoing with the noise of the Friars trunk stream, and it is large, misty and looks perpetu-ally virgin due to perennial flooding. It looks like an orphaned piece of borehole, out of place standing there all alone. For all of these reasons, I figured that the breakdown in Barbara’s Room had prob-ably been exhaustively pushed by genera-tions of cavers, and I set the objective to go check out Barbara’s Room as a mere detour on the way to other leads.

It was May of 2015. Right off the bat, that cave trip was very different from any of its predecessors. The weather was nice. I got plenty of sleep. We got to the cave by 9 a.m., and Mountain Dave wasn’t complaining. The five of us — Mountain Dave, Kyle, Mitch, myself, and Dave’s daughter Donna — got down to Barbara’s Room smoothly, pausing only to briefly lose track of Mitch (birthing the nickname, “the Blair Mitch”). In Barbara’s Room, after briefly in-specting the breakdown, Kyle moved a single rock

page 6 Region Record, Fall 2017

Photo by Nikki Fox

The Lost Passage in the southern part of the Friars Hole Cave System provided leads for the current generation of explorers.


and I slid down a single hole — and we were in virgin cave.

The breakdown at the bottom of Barbara’s Room is a false floor; when you slide through it, there is another, mud-floored bottom to the room, with a still pool at its nadir. That lower level can be followed beyond where Barbara’s Room itself chokes off, as a crawl with scalloped bedrock on one side and breakdown on the other. From there you can crawl and stoop 600 feet, passing a small waterfall, to an intersection with a wide, low stream passage that almost perfectly matches the 2002 description of Water World.

It was surreal to see so much water: the ceiling is not high (5-15 feet), but it is 25-50 feet wide and even in low flow it houses a swift, silent stream with far more water than the underfit Friars trunk. Scallops and sedi-ments in the upper walls and the ceiling make it very clear what happens in higher flow. Holy crap, I thought when I first saw it, we got into Water World. Then I looked at it again, checking it against my beat-up map. There was a serious problem with that theory: the big stream was flowing in the wrong direc-tion. A feeling of unreality grew, and the errant thought crossed my mind, that maybe we had somehow found a major infeeder coming from Robbins Run. I dismissed that idea as unlikely. We were just going to have to survey it and see.

Before we started properly scooping, we had to return to collect Mountain Dave,

because Donna had been having back problems and needed some help to exit the cave. While we went back from the stream junction to collect him, we lost track of Mitch for the second time. This time, Mitch took a wrong turn and climbed up into a virgin breakdown void that he mistakenly thought was Barbara’s Room. He came back down to the main

crawl before we marked his absence, and it wasn’t until several months later that we excitedly rediscovered this lead-filled void and Mitch informed us, in a deadpan voice, that he had already been there. The “Blair Mitch Project” is not the most stable section of breakdown, but to this day it still contains possible digs to follow the active water toward

Friars Hole Cave System Timeline

Source: Capital Area Cavers Bulletin 1: "The Friars Hole system: Highlights of the History of Exploration" by Linda Baker, Doug Medville, Bob Anderson and Bob Thrun, 1982. Graphic by Nikki Fox.

1861-5

Snedegars CaveHistoric, saltpeter mined during the Civil War.

1951

Crookshank PitAlso historic, known for a long time. Pit descended by Huntley Ingalls in 1951. Jan 1, 1956, he and George Moore dropped the pit and approached but did not connect to Snedegars Cave.

1964

Friars Hole Cave

1976

Rubber ChickenEntrance dug open in March 1976 by Barry Baumgartner, Gordon Mothes, and Doug Medville. Cave partially explored in March–April by Baltimore Grotto members Tim Walker and Bob Pine. This was followed by a big, three-survey-party trip on April 21 when 9,600 feet were surveyed. Rubber Chicken

Connection to Friars HoleFirst made by Canadian Cavers from the Friars Hole entrance but they didn’t realize they were in Rubber Chicken. Surveyed from the Rubber Chicken end on

May 22 by Ed Strausser (Baltimore Grotto), Chuck Hempel and Charlie and Barbara Williams. Con-

nected into a survey station left by Lew Bicking at the upper end of Friars Hole Cave.

Crookshank Connection to Rubber ChickenMade in Spring 1976 by groups digging through breakdown from both ends. From Rubber Chicken side: Tom Hay, Ralph Kennedy and Tom Curtis. From Crookshank side: Doug Medville and five others dug through after voice connection made.

1978

Rubber Chicken Connection to Canadian Hole

Summer 1976 trip to the end of the Rubber Chicken Highway by Bru Randall, Walter Plunkett and Ed

Strausser. At the end of the Highway, they started going downstream in crawls and had probably

crossed over into Canadian Hole but didn’t know it. Official connection made on Labor Day weekend

1977 by Canadians John Mort, Anneliese Recklies, Al Thurston and Oliver Slupecki from the north.

Toothpick Connection to Rubber ChickenMade over Veterans Day holiday by Bob Anderson, Linda Baker (Devine) and Patty Mothes. They pushed the low Toothpick stream downstream into large passage and surveyed 2,500 feet in 70 sta-tions. They then explored for several more thousand feet, found footprints at the far upper end of Rubber Chicken Cave, went downstream in Rubber Chicken, doing a lot of route finding since none of them had been to that part of the cave before, and finally went out the Saltpetre entrance in a 16-hour trip.

1977

1979

Monster CavernFound in August 1977 by McMaster University (Canada) cavers Alf Latham and Oliver Slupecki, surveying in from Mud Canyon (the passage going west toward it).

Monster Cavern Waterfall Climb

First attempted in April 1979 by Ron Simmons, Dave Hubbard, Dave Morrow (all U.Va. Grotto) and others. Climb attempt continued in May by Boston Grotto people. A few weeks later, another attempt made by Bob Anderson, Ron Simmons, Dave Hub-

bard, Linda Baker, Peter Keys and others. Made good progress and got 18 meters up. The climb was

finally completed Fourth of July weekend 1980 by Bill Stone, Bob Jeffreys (Connecticut) with support from many others. Climb was completed after 30

hours of bolting in 6-hour shifts.

Entrance dug open on Aug. 16 by George Titcomb and Charlie Schwab of the D.C. Grotto. Cave

explored and surveyed in 1964–65 by Lew Bicking and others. Survey continued after Bicking’s death by Charlie Williams (Pittsburgh Grotto) and others.

4.5 miles surveyed.


Water World.

With both the Blair Mitch and Moun-tain Dave back in the fold, we scooped the stream 500 feet to where it ended in sumps in both directions. Tired and excited, we planned to return the next month and survey. We exited the cave about eight hours after we got in, to find a balmy evening and pizza deliv-ered right to us at the cars, courtesy of Donna.

Our scooping crew, minus Mitch and Donna, returned the next month with Dianna, Father Jon Venner and Sara Springer to survey. As it turned out, we had indeed found the Water World water — upstream of Water World. The stream segment that I short-handedly called “the Big Water” (to contrast with the little water coming in at the water-fall), runs parallel to the Friars Trunk — but 200 feet lower, at the same level as Water World. Big Water is separated from Water World by a section of break-down collapse and sumps where the Friars Trunk water (which is the little water waterfall) comes down out of the breakdown to join the main flow.

The pool at the new bottom of Barbara’s Room was the most progress we had gained in the direction of Water World; it brought us to within 15 feet according to the survey. We decided to set aside a whole week later that summer to push everything we could in Lower Barbara’s Room and Big Water. Mountain Dave taught himself how to dig so that he could mine away the 15 feet between Lower Barbara’s and Water World; this launched the infamous A-Dig, which ended two days after it started with Mountain Dave muttering to himself while sitting in an inner tube (it also launched Mountain Dave’s digging career, which is still alive and well). Despite my stubbornness, I had to admit that the A-Dig was daunting: not only were we digging blind, based on a survey that spanned 50 years, we were trying to dig into downward-sloping shale

perched over water.

After that, Mountain Dave was done with Barbara’s Room — but I wasn’t. I started another dig near the pool, which I called the B-Dig; this was a dirt-floored dig following the bedding plane above the pool and it had air. I returned to the B-Dig several times that fall, and with the help of Mitch, Dianna, Adam, Father Jon, Caitlin Burgess and several others (including of course a begrudg-ing Mountain Dave), the B-Dig turned into a hell of an impressive dig effort. Unfortunately, the end of that dig turned upward along the plane and headed back toward Barbara’s Room. Feeling dubious about continuing the A-Dig blind, and with all of the leads in the Blair Mitch Project ending in nerve-racking instabil-ity, I reluctantly joined Mountain Dave elsewhere in the cave.

Intermission: the Lost Passage Leads

While I putzed around in Lower Barbara’s Room, Mountain Dave had something better to do. As mentioned, even outside of Water World, the kill-line that terminates the cave on all three levels is a solid tangle of breakdown with air blowing out all over. None of these leads are nice. But the options for push-ing them are endless. And the promise looms that once that nasty faulted zone is breached, the cave will resume its generous character.

Mountain Dave came to call his dig be-low the Lost Passage “the Horror Hole” and it was a lead we had marked near an oddly sketched blob on the map labeled the Hammer Passage, which we had not yet found. Mountain Dave’s Horror Hole was a grim breakdown dig with loose rocks and air — cold, cold “Friars Hole air.” A lot of the folks who worked on the Horror Hole came to Friars with us once and never again. Neverthe-less, Mountain Dave dug, scooped and surveyed another 130 feet, which never got better and never ended. The Horror Hole remains a viable breakdown dig,

but the direction that both the air and the lead are trending suggests that it is heading back toward known cave.

Before it became the Horror Hole, Dave called this effort the Hammer Passage Dig, and ironically it got its new name while he was waiting for Adam and Caitlin to scoop an alternate route into the actual Hammer Passage. The cozy upper-level Lost Passage turns into the

Photo by Father Jon Venner

Adam Lake starts surveying in the Star Chamber dig.

Photo by Nikki Fox

Dave Knox makes his way in the “the Horror Hole,” which was pre-viously called the Hammer Pas-sage Dig, below the Lost Passage in southern Friars Hole.

Horror Hole down low, but up high it pinches off into a low, round room with a dirt floor and sparkly flat ceiling called the Star Chamber. Adam and Caitlin, as well as Kyle and Megan Vogt, had noticed air in the Star Chamber in late 2015, so after a few brutally aborted winter trips, the Star Chamber dig was launched. It was a luxury dig by Friars standards: high and dry and close to the entrance. I felt that at age 11 my daughter, Neeka, was ready for both vertical and digging, and that the Star Chamber was out-standingly tolerable, so I brought her along. Adam and Caitlin led Neeka and me, with Mountain Dave, Father Jon, and Wayne Per-kins, in clearing the dirt floor away to where a low, wide breakdown space opened under the flat ceil-ing. Adam and Caitlin had gone in to scoop the tight area, while the rest of us sat there and listened, bemused, to Mountain Dave, who had at this point missed dinner.

“Can you hear them in there? I don’t think I can hear them . . . It’s not going, I don’t think it’s going and I tell you what. If that doesn’t go in there, it’s gonna be time for MOUNTAIN DAVE’S HOUSE OF HORRORS DOWN BELOW — a HYPOTHERMIA DEATH TRAP . . . The cold’ll get ya if the boulders don’t crush you first.”

Dave’s dig became the Horror Hole after that — and as it turned out, that’s exactly where the Star Chamber lead went — back down to the Horror Hole, by way of the actual Hammer Passage. The Hammer Passage ended up being a huge open bedding plane partly filled with breakdown and other sediment in all directions. In many places, the floor pinched up to where it became too tight to follow or even see; no actual walls in sight. At the top, it opened up into a large room, in which the breakdown continued to climb, up and up. From

there, a series of rabbit-holes also led back down to the Horror Hole. We did an epic survey of the Star Chamber/Hammer Passage, connecting two loops and adding some new cave and new breakdown leads to the map, in addi-tion to producing an actual sketch of the large, awkward room. The Dye Trace

On his first trip to Big Water, in late Au-gust of 2015, Adam noticed something that I hadn’t. The water in the stream was warm. The wild thought I had had when I first walked into Big Water came back to me — what if that water came from sunlit Robbins Run? I took the hypothesis to Doug Medville, thinking he would shoot it down. To my surprise, Doug instead got excited and encour-aged me to run a dye trace.

There are three streams currently utiliz-ing the Friars Hole conduits, none of them connected to each other anywhere in the known cave. The farthest up-stream drainage takes what is left of Hills and Bruffey Creek and carries it to J.J. Spring (in most flow conditions). This

stream is called Rocky River and is visible in the Canadian Hole section of Friars. In the middle section of the cave, water from multiple local sinkholes joins together to form another stream known as the Droughtway. Finally, the Friars Hole stream repeats the Droughtway’s pattern in the farthest downstream section of the valley. Prior to 2015, all three streams disappeared into separate breakdown/sump areas, their wa-ter not seen again until J.J. Spring.

In 2015, we found the Friars Hole stream coming in as the little wa-terfall downstream of our junction with Big Water. This accounted for that stream, but eliminated it from being a possible source of Big Wa-ter’s main flow. Close to Big Water as the crow flies, but separated by Parker Mountain is Robbins Run.

As of 2015, Robbins Run was assumed to also emerge at J.J. Spring, but it had never been traced. So Big Water could potentially be composed of up to three missing water bodies: Rocky River, the Droughtway and Robbins Run. Of those, only Robbins Run would have a short enough distance from the surface to stay warm.

The first set of traps was placed in Sep-tember 2015, and eight of us went out to Robbins Run to drop fluorescein on a beautiful autumn Sunday. But it wasn’t until a year later that the traps were re-covered. Later in the season, several of us got the exciting experience of trying to collect dye traps during wet conditions. After a rain, the still pool and dry crawl below Barbara’s Room turn into a single loud, neck-deep torrent and Big Water is inaccessible. We kept setting new traps, but between the winter snowmelt, the spring rains, and finally the great flood of 2016, collecting the traps was a perpet-ual loss. When we finally got back into Big Water the following November, I


Photos by Keely Owens

Dave Knox drops fluorescein into Robbins Run on Sept. 13, 2015.

. . . continued on page 14


The first time I went to Monster Cavern was in the fall of 2016. As we made our way to the huge room, it came to light that there wasn’t really a map of the pas-sage between the blustery Hanging Gar-dens (past the Rubber Chicken High-way) and Monster Cavern. There might have been one at some point, but it grew legs and wandered off. The decades-old notes that weren’t lost to the ages were railroad tracks — walls but no detail.

After seeing the discrepancy between how convoluted the area is in person and how it’s represented on the map, we started putting survey trips together to go out there. The trips take all day in terms of hours spent underground and the surveying itself (some of which is resurvey, some of which is new) has proven to be a cold, soggy and rewarding endeavor.

For each of these trips, we have entered through the southern entrance of the Friars Hole Cave System right off Friars Hole Road. It’s a long haul, but it’s rela-tively easy passage and more a test of endurance than one of mettle. There are other en-trances to the system that you can reach the Rubber Chicken Highway from. The route through the Snedegar entrance involves a seasonal sump and on the one occasion we hoped on going that way there was rain so we re-routed to the southern entrance. As of right now, we haven’t attempted a survey trip from the Snedegar Saltpeter entrance yet.

A few weeks ago, a group went to Crookshank to attempt that route as described in “Friars Hole (Monster Cavern Waterfall)” by Terry McClana-than in the Cumberland Valley

Caver Vol. 14 No. 1. Unfortunately, they found that the flooding from last summer had left a large puddle/sump near the base of the pit, leaving the rest of the route inaccessible. Canadian Hole is closest to Monster Cavern but, as it has been for the past few decades, is very much closed.

From the southern entrance, it’s about 3.5 miles to where we are surveying, which sounds like a lot, but it flies by. The main river trunk at the bottom of the entrance drops is mostly just waltz-ing down beautifully washed rocks and is followed by the energy-intensive Dung Ho Way. The Dung Ho Way takes you to some canyon passage and a switch-back climb at Connection Rock, which will take you to the Sheep Dip, a traverse, a climbdown and the Shark Room. From there you scuttle into the Rubber Chicken Highway, the Hanging Gardens and the part of the cave we’re surveying.

Our first survey trip was in October of 2016 with Tony Canike, Deirdre

Conroy, Andrew Lycas, Nick Socky, Paul Winter and myself. We started our survey at one of the only carbide stations we could find: B119. Team 1 (TC, DC, PW) started their survey there, while Team 2 (AL, AS, NS) traveled further ahead and left a prominent survey sta-tion for Team 1 to tie into when they caught up to us. One of the big finds of this trip was a 30-foot by 60-foot room, with only a couple sets of footprints, that wasn’t included in any of the documen-tation — that I have found, at least — for the area. It has a few leads going off it and a tremendous flowstone/drapery formation we named Cthulhu.

Though we put a reasonable amount of footage in the book, this first trip ended up being a bit of a recon trip as well. Not only were there more leads and side passages than I recalled, it was far breezier than I remembered. This was the trip we realized that the surveying may be slightly bleaker and more time-consuming than anticipated. However, it also struck up a renewed interest in the

infrequently visited area.

Andrew Lycas, Alex Ma-lone, Philip Moneyhun, Keely Owens, Nick Socky and I attempted a trip in December of 2016, but the roads were covered with ice and my Adventure Accord went rogue (a phrase which here means, “ended up in a ditch”) so we worked on a surface dig and dropped dye in Snedegar’s Staircase entrance instead.

Eric Hahn, Andrew Lycas and I got back into the cave in February of this year. We surveyed some woefully cozy passage and closed a loop before getting into

Friars Hole - Beyond The Rubber Chicken Highwayby Amy Skowronski

Digital Map by Carl Amundson & Doug Medville

Parts of the Friars Hole Cave System map lacks detail, as seen here in the section of Monster Cavern.


the stream that will eventu-ally take you to the Log Roll Crawl, Mud Canyon and Monster Cavern. After a few hundred feet of damp, windy surveying in the main stream passage we left a tie-in station in the middle of a room (we were finally standing!) where the stream flows into a hole at the base of the wall. Along the stream, there is a parallel pas-sage here that dips in and out all over the place and makes for a bit of confusion as far as route-finding. Staying in the stream is the best bet — for the most part.

On April Fool’s Day, Friars pulled a prank on Eliot Edling, Eric Pelkey and myself (which we should have anticipated). When we arrived at the entrance, we found ourselves looking at a huge amount of water pouring into the normally dry or slightly damp entrance. Ducking into the cave cleaned our helmets and the passage leading to the first drop had white water shooting straight out of the walls. The ledge where we would normally hang a webbing handline and free climb the drop had frothy water shooting down it and we had to yell at each other from two feet away over the sound of crashing water. We called the trip.

In July, we started getting into the really nitty-gritty passage. Eliot Edling, Keely Owens and I ducked into the low-ceil-inged stream passage that had been left for us in February. For the next several hours, we didn’t sit up all the way or find ourselves in anything that was remotely dry. Every surface in the passage leading up to the Log Roll Crawl consists of not-quite-hands-and-knees crawls/scuttles/contortions and is covered with just enough water that you end up soaked to the bone. Couple that with the air blast-ing from Monster (it blows your hair back), and you’ve got yourself, as Keely

says, “some jacked-up surveying.” When the only way forward was a cozy belly crawl through the stream, we turned our chilled selves around and surveyed slightly more pleasant side leads. Much to our dismay, however, the slightly more pleasant side leads took us to another belly crawl in a stream. Although we didn’t get a lot of footage in the book, we did crank out a hefty amount of grim unpleasantness.

August brought us a two-team trip composed of Tony Canike, Eliot Edling, Molly Lucier, Steph Petri, Paul Winter and me. Midway through the Rubber Chicken Highway, there is a “climb-down” that is a two-ledge sandy con-trolled slide from one shelf to the next (then to the ground) on sloped, shallow ledges with no handholds. Bolt Master Paul set two inconspicuous bolts in the ceiling and we left some webbing there as a handline for future trips.

As for surveying, both teams ended up going through the stream crawl. Due to the parallel passage previously men-tioned, one is only required to do ~45

feet of this nonsense, but you can drag it out to 100–150 feet if you want. Though your helmet may simultaneously graze the floor and the ceiling at some points — as may your belly and back — but you don’t have to dip your ears! We leapfrogged each other in the Log Roll Crawl on the way to Mud Canyon. For refer-ence at how stupendous and expansive some of the passage beyond all the mess is, espe-cially when compared to how it is accessed (and to assure you, dear reader, that these trips aren’t all bad): when I asked for LRUDs at a station in the heart of Mud Canyon, our point person hadn’t even gotten to the station to mea-sure them yet.

After a couple more trips, we will be able to replace the chocolate chip cookie that represents Monster Cavern on the current map. At present, the leg-ends of a long-lost dry route to Monster is gnawing at the back of my mind. I’ve heard it mentioned, read about it in old articles, but have not found it in-cave or an accurate description of its location in print. We have yet to find a route past B119 that could be considered “dry” but perhaps if we start in Monster and work our way backwards we’ll find ourselves somewhere that was overlooked on the way in.

I’m excited to see what we find when we start really poking around in Mon-ster Cavern itself. On top of the leads we don’t know about yet, there’s also a lead at the top of the 103-foot waterfall in Monster Cavern. The waterfall was bolt-climbed and several hundred feet of passage was surveyed (“Rock Engineer-ing On The Monster Wall” by Bob Jef-freys, published in the NSS News, Vol.38 No.?) about forty years ago. They left a low, wet lead that I am interested in, but that is a project for the future. h

Photo by Tony Canike

Amy Skowronski, pictured right, and crew three hours into an August 2016 trip to survey Log Roll Crawl on the way to Mud Canyon in Friars Hole.


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Brad Cooper looks at a formation dressed in his camp clothes during a week-long exploration of the Chestnut Ridge Cave System in Bath County, Va. The trip was funded by the National Geographic Society and members of the Butler Cave Conservation Society in June 2012.

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People admire formations in an un-named Pendleton County, W.Va., cave.

A water drop perfectly captured in Grand Caverns this March.

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ABOVE: Aragonite in Locomotive Breath taken in February 2017.

LEFT: Ryan Maurer in a self portrait above a drapery formation area in Maxwelton Sink Cave.

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A delicate aragonite formation drips water in the Heaven Passage of Maxwelton Sink Cave in this 2015 im-age. This specific formation was destroyed in West Virginia’s 2016 June Flood.

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was flabbergasted to find that all of them — all three sets — were still in there.

With three separate occasions of dump-ing fluorescein, the signal came through loud and clear. The Robbins Run stream definitively — and quickly, in under 24 hours — flows directly through Parker Mountain and into Big Water. We also tried to trace the Droughtway, but that test was inconclusive. A new set of traps sits in Big Water currently, waiting to re-test both lost upper Friars Hole streams. The Sump

The A-Dig and Water World hadn’t left my mind, but there seemed only one way to get the information necessary for a smarter A-Dig: to enter Water World the old-fashioned way. Through the sump. But if I was going to avoid wasting my time on endless fruitless pilgrimages, I would have to be strategic. First: it was clear that I wasn’t going to get to pick my weekend. The weather was going to pick my weekend. Second: I was going to need to up my water-mon-itoring game. Knowing that a significant amount of the flow in downstream Friars was coming straight from Robbins Run proved to be the keystone. With help from Greg Springer, I set up a game cam over Robbins Run Hole in mid-July 2017, programmed to take a photo every six hours. With the stream cam photos, cross-referenced with rain gages on Brushy Mountain and in Jacox, I figured out the approximate rainfall threshold that would cause Robbins Run to flow. Due to the recent unsuccessful attempts to recover dye traps, I also knew that if there was any water going into Rob-bins Run Hole at all, Big Water would be a swim and the sump a total bust. I therefore set my sump-trip threshold at approximately one month of zero flow in Robbins Run Hole, plus zero rain in the forecast.

Those conditions finally occurred in early September of this year. Three years from that first conversation with Bruce, and fifteen years from Water World’s discovery, Amy Skowronski, Nikki Fox and I dropped fluorescein into the pool at the bottom of Lower Barbara’s Room, then doubled back around to Mauckland, changed into wetsuits and went smoothly through a tolerably open sump — to be immediately greeted by the exotic green of our own fluorescein floating by in Water World. I knew I wanted to make a trip through the sump count in part by trying to set up a way to guide the A-Dig; I did some research and found that a strong magnetometer may be able to detect a neodymium iron boron magnet of sufficient strength through up to 20 feet of bedrock. So, in I hauled such a magnet, and to the great amuse-ment of the others, I coated it in PVC cement, wrapped it in a plastic bag and ce-mented the whole mess to the bed-rock wall that is supposedly 15 feet away from Lower Barbara’s Room. Then we checked out the famous downstream leads and started the Pussy Patrol survey, extend-ing Water World another 200 feet into a tight but maneuverable breakdown area called the Party Hole, which is a very promising breakdown dig by downstream Friars standards.

Phase Two will

involve revisiting the A-Dig, pushing the Party Hole and the other digs in Water World either via bypass or via carefully chosen sump weekends, and continuing to work on some of the leads that may bypass the kill zone on higher levels. It will also involve some pushing from the Robbins Run side, to find the places where Robbins Run and Friars Hole are connected under Parker Mountain. The faults that kill Friars Hole are still daunt-ing, as is the fact that Water World and Big Water are sandwiched in between the layers of the Taggard, and following water through the lower Taggard is noto-riously hard. But the carrot still dangles with the potential to double Friars Hole back along the still-undiscovered under-ground Robbins Run as well as to follow it home to the Motherload. h

. . . continued from page 9

Photos by Nikki Fox

TOP: Keely Owens prepares to go through the sump, leaving Water World after the first sucessful visit to the area since 2002.

ABOVE: Amy Skowronski (left) and Keely Owens watch the fluorescein run down the chest-deep water of Water World in September.


Marian McConnell began a discussion on how the NSS chooses Fellow Award recipients each year.

NSS Fellow Recipients are chosen each year from nominations and letters of support written by NSS members.

That means YOU.

A huge thank you to those who have sent in emails and letters to support a particular caver. Please keep writing!

In addition to the annual awards, such as the Conservation and Outstanding Service awards, the NSS only awarded eight Fellows this year.

The Fellow award is bestowed upon 10 percent of the NSS Membership, and the current membership is 8,641 people. The sad thing is there were likely 20+ additional potential Fellow recipients, but those people did not receive enough

letters to support them being in the top 10 percent. So, reduced NSS mem-bership penalizes active cavers — the movers and shakers, the scientists and the explorers — from being noticed and thanked for their contributions.

Here’s the solution: • Please continue your membership

in the NSS. • Renew your NSS membership if it

has lapsed. Contact the NSS Office and get your old NSS number re-activated. You are paying $45 for a nice magazine, some NSS book-store discounts, great comradery and your support of the current, active cavers out there.

• And please keep writing to nomi-nate cavers for the honors they deserve.

Let’s get together and write up some letters of support! h

Annual NSS Fellow Awards by Marian McConnell and Mary Sue Socky

Reprinted from the Carbide Dump, Vol 52, No 8 Issue, page 55

Sinkhole Cleanup Photos Needed

by Bob Hoke

The West Virginia Cave Conservancy is currently preparing a brochure on karst to distribute to landowners in the karst areas of Virginia and West Virginia. We would like to include a couple photos showing a trash-filled sinkhole before and after being cleaned.

Ideally the photos will be taken from about the same location at a sinkhole site and will clearly show the results of a cleanup effort.

If you have any good quality photos that might be appropriate for publication in the brochure please send them to me ([email protected]). Needless to say, photographer credit will be given. h

Spring VAR 2017Attendance

Adults 252

Children 18

No Shows 12

Total Attendance: 270

Spring VAR 2017Financial Report

Income Expenses

Registration $9,415

Cabins $320

Hookups $25

Facility $800

Catering $4,375

Cabin Refund $40

T-shirts & Misc $100

VAR Fee (252 x $5) $1,260

Bounced Check $35

Bounced Check Fee $20

TOTAL: $9,760 $6,630

Net Profit: $3,130

Spring VAR 2017 Report by Tommy Carpenter

As VAR host at the Thorn Springs Park, Franklin, W. Va., from April 28-30, it was a great learning experience to take on the challenge of hosting the main event. I owe everything to the VAR volunteers who stepped up to help where help was needed and on filling me in on knowledge and check lists to get the event off the ground, such as financial handling, location, advertisement, trip lead-ers, vendors, catering, DJ/music entertainment, movie presentation, pre-registration, cave closures, above-

ground activities, vertical workshop, etc.

We had 270 cavers show up for the festivities. The weather turned out great as well. I believe we had about 7 or 8 cave trips go out, and no ac-cidents or injuries or missing cavers were reported. I’d be willing to host another VAR in the future, as over-whelming as the task may seem, it went really smoothly and was not real stressful. Thanks to all the volunteers in the caving community. h


Robert Lee Liebman ObituaryNSS 12718 F

by Bill Liebman, Bob Addis and Emily Davis

On the morning of June 15, 2017, Bob Liebman, proprietor of the Bob & Bob Speleo General Store, passed away qui-etly after a long bout with cancer. He is survived by his brother Bill Liebman, also a long-time caver, and another non-caving brother Larry.

Bob was born in July of 1942 in the Studio City section of Los Angeles, Calif. His teen years were spent in the San Francisco Bay area, where he at-tended San Jose State College prior to a stint in the Navy. He was a Vietnam Veteran. After the Navy, he transferred to California State University at Los Angeles. At CSULA he majored in and received a degree in Police Science. He also was a coach for the university bowling team. His life-long passions were trains, bowling, Froggie his cat(s), and caves and caving.

Bob grew up with his dad’s interest in trains and the family pastime of bowl-ing. In 1968 he went on his first caving trip, along with his brother Bill, with a school outings club named the Alpin-ers. The trip was to Soldiers Cave in California. The club provided the hel-mets and carbide lamps. In 1969, Bob located the Southern California Grotto and immediately joined it. Shortly thereafter he found grotto sponsors and joined the NSS and eventually became a life member.

Caves and cavers then became his pri-mary passion in life. His first conven-tion was Blacksburg in 1971, traveling across country in his blue station wagon with his brother and another Alpiner member. In 1970, at the So Cal Grotto, he met Bob Addis.

After the 1972 White Salmon, Wash., NSS Convention, the two Bobs were

traveling down the coast of Oregon when Bob Liebman stopped and went into an old hardware store looking for carbide lamps. They had some, so Bob Liebman borrowed money from Bob Addis to purchase them. Carbide lamps were getting scarce at that time, and Bob Liebman wanted to sell them to cavers who could not find them. The two Bobs kept looking and buying lamps and parts, and the 1972 Old Timers Reunion (OTR) was the very first event for Bob & Bob sales.

That was the very beginning of “Bob & Bob” Speleo General Store. The two Bobs went on to find and purchase items that cavers needed. They began attending various caving events selling equipment to cavers. Remember canvas grip?

Bob Addis sold out to Bob Liebman in December of 1973, but Bob Liebman decided to keep the Bob & Bob name. The two Bobs had branded themselves as “Cavers Serving Cavers,” and that is exactly what Bob Liebman did for 45 years, as he served cavers and the caving community. He attended hundreds of caving events in 35 years, and finished as a mail-order business the last ten.

Many cavers bought light sticks from Bob as kids, and then cave gear when they got older.

Bob gave out change with two-dollar bills everywhere he went. While it made making change easier, it was primar-ily a public-relations ploy. Merchants wherever cavers went would experience a sudden influx of two-dollar bills. This would demonstrate to a community the economic impact cavers provided to their businesses and community during their visit. This was emphasized by the fact that cash registers did not have a slot for the two-dollar bills.

In the early 1970s, Bill Liebman brought Bob a white cat while on a caving trip to the Mother Lode area of California. The two brothers went to the Calaveras County Fair there and watched the celebrated Mark Twain jumping frog contest — which is where Bob named his cat “Froggie.” Bob’s white cat became his mascot and traveled everywhere he went. Over the years Bob had eight white cats all named Froggie.

Bob led a nomadic life style spring through fall, attending and selling equipment at discount prices at most caving events. He strategically located his business in Sinks Grove, W.Va., to maximize shipping expense savings, by being located within 500 miles or less of most of the active caving population.

The area is, of course, as the name implies, a karst sinkhole plateau. Many days were spent caving and ridgewalk-ing, and sometimes they would go caving at lunch. Bob would often go to farm auctions, where the auctioneers would drive potential buyers around the property to view it. Bob was not


interested in buying the farm; he was cleverly getting chauffeured access to look around private land for sinkholes and cave leads that he did not have ac-cess to otherwise.

Over Labor Day 1971, Bob provided support to Bob Addis’ stalagmite-sit-ting world record at a local commercial cave, Lost World Caverns in Lewisburg.

Bob Liebman served 19 years on the NSS BOG, working on many com-mittees. He also spent many years as the NSS liaison with the Show Caves Owners Association. It is probably safe to say that, in his travels and cave-owner liaison position, Bob met and made friends with more cavers than any other individual caver ever has. He had a nearly photographic memory, and he could recall details of trips decades old and people he had met. This was most apparent his last few months when several of us spent time with him sharing stories of the “old days.” He could remember people, trip details and restaurants that none of the rest of us

could.

If you have something that you would like to share with the caving world, email a paragraph or two or more to Bill Liebman (caver2007@sbcglobal.

net) and Bob Addis ([email protected]) and they will be posted online at www.4bobandbob.com. h

Photo by Bill Liebman

Bob Liebman sells caving gear out of his van at an event.

Dead Cow in Tawney’s Caveby Wil Orndorff

Travis Coad called me on July 26, 2017 after finding a not-dead-yet yearling bull, hypothermic and in very bad shape, on its back at the entrance to the lower passage coming off of the Tawney’s Cave sinkhole entrance in Giles County, Va. I managed to track down the cave owner and he said that the young bull had fallen to what he thought was its death yes-terday evening. He was sad to learn that it was still suffering, and he has since euthanized the beast.

He said he would prefer to leave the carcass in the cave to decompose. The carcass is not along an active or intermit-tent waterway, and as such probably doesn’t pose a serious threat to water quality. Smell quality, on the other hand, may be compromised for some time.

I told him there were no laws prohibiting leaving the

carcass there, since the young bull literally self-dumped into the sinkhole. I agreed with the owner that removing the carcass, however morbidly fun that may be, would

be dangerous since at over one thousand pounds it’s much bigger than typical rescue loads. I said cavers would be willing to try, but he prefers to

leave it to decompose in situ.

Anyway, just wanted everyone to be aware of the situa-tion. Might want to avoid that part of the cave.

He asked me to pass along his gratitude for the heads up and the offer to assist, and I didn’t push the issue.

If anyone has any serious concerns about this, please let me know and I can pass it on to the owner. h


Ralph Hartley died on June 14, 2017 due of complications of lymphoma. Ralph was an important project caver in the Virginias, mostly in Germany Valley. He will be sorely missed by family and his many friends in the cav-ing community.

Ralph was born in Boston, Mass., in 1958. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1984 from the University of Maryland College. He worked for over 30 years at the Naval Research Laboratory performing research in robotics and computer vision.

Ralph lived in Rockville, Md., and is survived by his wife Tsai Hong, his children Stephen and Iris, their spouses, Maya and Seth, his grandson, Kaien, his mother, Dorothy, and his brothers, Henry and George, and their families. He was predeceased by his father, Bob, and his brother, Albert. In addition to caving, Ralph traveled the world, visiting 41 countries with Tsai Hong and their children.

Ralph began caving in the mid-1990s when he was in his thirties, what he thought of as a late start, which he made up for quickly. He joined the Potomac Speleological Club in 1994 (#590). He participated regularly in the Gangsta Mapper projects, learned to sketch and contributed to all the Gangsta Mapper surveys. He joined the Germany Valley Karst Survey (GVKS) early in its formation, helped break open Memorial Day Cave in 2002 and was a major player in the 2002 to 2007 Hellhole Survey project.

Currently Ralph is in the top ten of GVKS caver survey stats — with 36,192 feet surveyed. He set up and maintained an SVN database for GVKS, which keeps project files up to date and readily accessible to GVKS members.

Both the Gangsta Mappers and the GVKS cavers knew Ralph as a cavers’ caver, a valuable team player on a proj-ect and on a survey trip. His affinity for the low, the small, the wet and the muddy was well known and respected, a reputation that caused some to think twice about joining Ralph’s team and maybe look for something easier. Many called him “Mud Puppy” and kidded him about his habit of leaving his gloves behind.

Ralph was appreciated for his intellect and integrity. There was nothing he didn’t know something about, much he knew well, and he would patiently explain it to you. He was quick to speak up for what he thought right,

not in a hasty way, but with a passion for accuracy and always a laugh for some ironic twist.

Ralph was cartographer of Memo-rial Day Cave, an over-26-mile-long cave in Germany Valley. Ralph not only maintained a working cave atlas of Memorial Day, he wrote a com-puter program called Carto to do it with. Ralph conceived Carto as a way to produce a finished cave map using survey sketches for detail, using them directly without tracing. Run-ning Carto, a cartographer can input sketches via scanned images, input survey data via a PLT file, morph the sketches to fit the survey data, draft the cave walls and arrange overlapping passages. The result is a finished cave map in which one can see, between the usual plotted black walls, the actual raw pencil lines, the faint blue grid, and the tan cave-mud patina that some shivering sketcher sweated over deep underground. There is a real charm to the image, and a connec-tion to the survey trip that no tablet tracing can capture. Carto is a useful program and has its followers. Carto’s morphing algorithms are excellent, smoother than what is found in other programs.

Ralph faced down his cancer and won. He did not let it stop him. Through a long period of cancer treatments, Ralph and Tsai Hong came to Ger-many Valley nearly every month for the GVKS project weekend. April this year, only a couple of months before he died, Ralph went on another cav-ing trip in Germany Valley. It was a classic GVKS project vertical trip, in Warner Noisy Blower, down a couple

Ralph Levering Hartley ObituaryNSS 39818

by Dwight Livingston

Photo by Yvonne Droms

Ralph Hartley splattered with mud in Warner Noisy Blower in 2015.


of drops to an old lead that needed to be surveyed. Ralph led a survey team and sketched.

Later, in the Warner Room, he lit a straw in an overhead boulder choke, making another bit of progress in a tricky and dangerous lead. More

crawls followed, more breakdown, more leads checked, more black humor, and Ralph’s familiar laugh, until the team was 400 feet below the entrance in wet breakdown, where Ralph spent a few hours drilling and tamping and hoisting the broken pieces of rock. The trip ended after

midnight, as a good cave trip should. And Tsai Hong had dinner waiting at the field house.

(In lieu of flowers, please consider donating to the Leukemia and Lym-phoma Society at lls.org.) h

BCCS Sinking Creek Grant Programby Mark Minton

The Sinking Creek Grant Program is a new science initiative of the But-ler Cave Conservation Society, Inc. (BCCS). Its purpose will be to provide small monetary grants, typically on the order of a few hundred dollars, to help defray costs associated with carrying out cave and karst science research in and around the Burnsville Cove, Vir-ginia (home of Butler Cave, Breathing Cave, Chestnut Ridge and others).

Interested parties are invited to submit a proposal to the Sinking Creek Grant Committee detailing the nature of the research they would like to do, the amount of money they are requesting, how the grant money will be spent, and how this would further understanding of the caves and karst in and around the Burnsville Cove. Applicants do not need to be members of the BCCS. For example, we anticipate that university students might make proposals for re-search to be conducted in the Cove in the furtherance of their degrees. There is no prohibition on repeat grants to the same individual; however a person may only receive one grant at a time.

Sinking Creek Grants will typically be disbursed directly to successful appli-cants, rather than through institutional channels, in order to minimize red tape and overhead expenses. These are small grants and we want to ensure that re-

cipients derive maximum benefit from them. Grantees will retain ownership of any equipment and supplies pur-chased with their grant money. Use of Sinking Creek Grant money for travel expenses, lodging or food is discour-aged unless the proposal demonstrates that travel-related expenses are a primary limiting factor for undertaking the project. Grant money is gener-ally intended to be applied directly to the research at hand in the form of equipment, supplies, and services such as analyses, spectra or tests. Grant recipients must follow all applicable ethical and legal standards in pursuing their research, including obtention of any necessary permits. The BCCS can often aid in gaining access to caves and properties of interest, most of which are private. Lodging may be available free of charge at our field station.

We intend to keep the application re-quirements for a Sinking Creek Grant as simple and open as possible. We an-ticipate that proposals would be one or two pages long. As long as the points listed above are addressed (who, what, how much, what for and why), we will judge applications by their merits. Tell us a compelling story! We can always ask for more details if necessary.

There is no specific timetable for ap-plying for a grant; however all awards

must be approved by both the Sink-ing Creek Grant Committee and the BCCS Board of Directors, so applica-tions must be received with sufficient time for review. Awards will typically be made following the BCCS annual meeting, which currently takes place in October.

Grant recipients must provide a writ-ten report stating how their grant money was used and the results of their research to the Sinking Creek Grant Committee at the conclusion of the project or annually for longer-term projects. The Committee should also receive a copy of any publication result-ing from the project, whenever that may appear. The BCCS should receive acknowledgment for the grant in any such publication or presentation of the research. The BCCS reserves the right to publish abstracts of funded propos-als as well as final reports in any outlets or formats it chooses. Arrangements can be made to protect proprietary information, as necessary.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Mark Minton is the chair of the Sink-ing Creek Grant Committee with Butler Cave Conservation Society, Inc. h

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