SBC Explorers Go Underground — for a Weekend

From staff reports

This semester, eight Sweet Briar College students and two instructors went where no SBC classes have gone before.

From Nov. 9-11, director of the Sweet Briar Outdoor Program Laura Staman and co-instructor Mike Hayslett took students in Introduction to Caving into underground realms not previously explored on Sweet Briar outings. The caving class is a new half-semester physical education course.

Hayslett, who taught “Life Science by Inquiry” during the spring 2007 semester, and Staman also led students on a SWEBOP caving trip the previous fall. Their experience together as caving associates goes back nearly two decades. Preparation for the new class included scouting the target caves with professional guide and colleague Paul Stern, director of Lynchburg College’s New Horizons Program.

The students attended four weeks of classroom sessions followed by a weekend full of underground exploration. The weekly sessions focused on dynamics of the cave environment and conservation of these sensitive ecosystems, as well as a range of safety and preparedness training. The class also attended an organizational meeting of the James River Grotto, a regional chapter of the National Speleological Society based at Lynchburg College.

The class culminated with the weekend caving trip. The group made their base camp at scenic Douthat State Park in Bath County, braving chilly conditions — temperatures were down to 22 degrees the second night — then prepared to go below.

On Saturday morning, the class explored privately owned Porter’s Cave in Bath County, then went on to Crossroads Cave in neighboring Highland County in the afternoon. Both are sizeable caves — approximately two to three miles of mapped passage each — out of more than 400 caverns discovered in these two western Virginia counties. The state now boasts 4,378 known cave systems.

The group traveled southwest on Sunday morning to Island Ford Cave, along the Jackson River in Alleghany County. This cave was shorter, about 2,000 feet of surveyed passage, but much wetter and a bit more challenging in places.

The group followed the upper passage back to its muddy rear, where the “Budda Room” holds the siphon pool that gives rise to the cave’s basement stream. The cavers followed this narrow channel back to the entrance, slogging down the ankle-deep creek bed and squeezing through the water-scalloped limestone.

Everyone emerged triumphant into the warm sunlight with a two-day total of 8 ½ hours of underground time and some five miles of cave crawling under their belts — not to mention mud under their fingernails.

The students also had close encounters with cave life while underground: Two common species of bats were observed throughout the three caves (often sleep-hanging right in front of their faces), and Island Ford provided looks at true troglobites, which are tiny, all-white millipedes dwelling deep in the darkness.