Posted by Chris Kerr:

Eight of us met at HPER, 830 sunday morning. The participants were Angela, David, David, Justus, Matt, Scot, Scot, and trip leader Chris Kerr. Scot Yost, who has been on half a dozen of Chris' trips before, was invaluable as a second experienced caver (I don't know anyone else's last name). The planned trip to the Cookeville caves was changed, as it had rained there the day before and the latest weather radars indicated there were two more rain storms heading across TN (the Cookeville caves are 'sewer type' caves that can flood). By noon, the group had entered Camp's Gulf Cave, a cave on a large tract of land donated to Fall Creek Falls State Park by the Bridgestone/Firestone Company a couple of years ago. Camp's Gulf Cave is a five mile long cave that has lots of passage that can be safely explored during rain storms. The cave is partially described in Tom Barr's 'Caves of Tn'. The group walked to the end of the entrance passage before entering a breakdown choke. A fifty foot vertical free climb leads through boulders, squeezes and across ledges before opening into the top of the first room of the cave. A river rumbled from a dark corner of the room which we did not go to or see with our lights. We exited the room through a dry cave passage, found a cave register and signed it The cave floor was a pile of loose rocks and boulders. This made walking difficult and treacherous; much of the day was spent traversing passages that were sixty and a hundred feet wide, and filled with this collapse. Some of the passages are so large that we could not see the walls of the cave! We were too busy trying to walk to look at the walls, anyway. The broken rock was jumbled everywhere and some of it seemed to be covered with a thin layer of greasy mud that would throw you on your butt if you weren't paying attention. At 2 pm we reached the third room in the cave and had a quick lunch break. This immense chamber is hundreds of feet long and wide. It has a hundred foot high mountain of rubble in its center -atop which we munched- a ceiling of smaller and smaller circles in its hundred foot high roof, and some 'Big Orange' colored dripstone. The room was found and named Expo Hall in 1982, when the World's Fair was held in Knoxville. After lunch, we climbed down another side of Expo Hall and entered a low and muddy tube. This passage was about thirty feet wide and ten feet tall and led us past more dripstone and two small rooms. We stopped at the edge of a steep mud bank. Fifty feet below us we could barely see a pool of water; this marked the elevation of the underground river. It was 3:25 and time to go. The trip out was much quicker and several of us stripped down to our undershirts to keep from overheating. Everyone seemed to have a good time. Several climbs in the cave -the breakdown choke, the register climb, the Willy Nilly below Expo Hall, and the rubble slope leading down to the muddy river over flow passage- gave everyone pause, presented a physical challenge and slowed us down. At 5 pm we exited into a sky darkened by heavy thunderstorms. Scot's car was a mile away and five minutes of walking in the rain completely soaked everyone, the soaking a typical end to a Chris Kerr caving trip. We got back to campus about 8pm. Scot had a camera and hopefully he will post some pictures.

Caving Trip Reports