The Challenging Worley's Cave

[photo by Jacob Jackson]

After a successful cave cleanup trip, just about everyone was itching to get back to surveying (maybe I exaggerate a bit). I set up five Sunday survey objectives for Worley's Cave (in Smyth County, Virginia) for two teams. Dave Duguid agreed to lead one team while I wrangled another.

Dave took Ava Pope, Dawson Duguid, and Tanya McLaughlin to the westernmost lead in the cave, and they rapidly surveyed 94 feet. Then they filled in the sketch of the Sandwich Passage and explored the cave's drain until it got too small for human passage.

In the meantime, my crew (Carlin and Kyler Kartchner, Jacob Jackson, and I) aimed at some stranger leads. Carlin scaled me and the waterfall drop to stare across at the lead opposite the pit. He dug in footholds with a shovel that allowed him to cross into the two-foot high hole. That leads into a fifteen-foot crawl and then lots more cave beyond. However, Carlin isn't sure that I'll fit.

Despite the tight spot, we convinced Carlin to climb out, grab fifty feet of webbing, and slide back again through the tight spot. After tying off the webbing, he slid back toward the pit and discovered that the webbing wasn't long enough. We threw up thirty more feet of webbing, and Carlin used the line to climb back down to us. There was more to survey up there than we could do in our short day before driving home, and hopefully it will bypass the cave's drain. So Mark Daughtridge should plan to finish up that waterfall survey he started.

Next we started on an uphill dig that I hoped would bypass the climb that Carlin had just done. I could see a long way up the slope, but packed rock and mud had to be pulled out of the way first. I dug for a while but realized that my team might be getting cold sitting at the base of the waterfall. So I took them over to view the Monorail Worm Display. While there, a small crack in the wall notified me that the other team was approaching.

With the arrival of a seventh grader, I had renewed hope for the dig. He and I worked together at Dawson's Dig. He'd tell me where I needed to dig, and we hollowed out six feet of the passage to two feet deep and two feet wide. Then Dawson squeezed up further to see the end of the passage. No moving air. Nice try on Sunday but no new footage for my team. The cave survey stands at 2365 feet, and the depth is now 148 feet.