New Cave Discovery

I may have officially discovered a new cave.

I used to try and do a lot of amateur cave exploring back in my youth in Alabama. Knowing where the caves were was tough in the pre internet age, with locations often passed along by word of mouth and often kept secret. There were USGS topo maps but most caves weren’t listed on those and the ones that were might easily turn out to be an overhang in a cliff instead of a real cave. I’m envious of all the information that is available today while i live so far from any good caving regions.

This spring i was in Alabama during what they refer to down there as armageddon. A few inches of snow was forecast and so the entire economy shut down for 4 days. Many of my friend were scared to attempt social gatherings lest their vehicles were overturned by marauders.

The beginning of the hike on the day of earth shattering snow was very nice walking.

In those younger days i mentioned Huntsville was much smaller. I frequently spent my free time roaming around on a long forested mesa called Green Mountain. Green Mountain is about 800 feet high, several miles long and has several caves on it. It’s made of limestone with a sandstone cap across much of the top. It extends almost all the way to the Tennessee River towards the south but with a few “passes” or gaps and a couple of knolls along the way that lend to being called other mountains. Although i felt like i knew Green Mountain like the back of my hand i had never travelled to that most southern kingdom due my thinking that it was really far away. I had a smaller view of the world then.

In actuality that portion of the mountain was a minority annoying drive that probably took 20 minutes. Since those days connecting roads have been cut across large tracts of farmland and my mother has moved to another neighborhood making the drive much shorter. It really only takes 10 minutes at most and I am much more patient than i used to be.

Things quickly got rockier and karstier and i started to have more fun.

The first pit that i found was not a big surprise but it was an affirmation. I had started to see enough signs in the terrain that i abandoned the stream bed and started following a series of depressions and eroded limestone features. It looked climbable and there was a crawl at the bottom that led into darkness on a slope. Might be something good, might be something bad, but i wasn't going to try and climb down a pit by myself. This pit is also not in the database, but it may have been discovered to not actually go anywhere.

So while my friends feared for their lives i thought i would go hiking up the mountain above a place where spring was marked on the map. I had been studying google earth and found several promising looking areas to explore for caves or cool cliffs or streams. Since it was the end of winter visibility in the forest was very good and open with no leaves or bushes limiting vision. The worst thing to worry about was the big thorny vines and briers. I had forgotten how pervasive they can be.

The most promising feature i had noticed on Earth was a circular crater near the top of the mountain. It was so obviously noteworthy i can’t believe I never would have seen it on one of my old topo maps, unless it simply didn’t appear on them. It was not hard to find during my hike either. Walking along an old logging road i heard a stream on my left but not on my right. Following the noise only a short distance i came upon a waterfall cascading into a huge pit. The pit had vertical walls of rock and was about 20 feet across. It actually had a rectilinear shape at the top and i could not see the bottom from my vantage point.

I was super excited. The place wasn’t labelled with a name on google earth and there were no pictures of the area on Panoramio. The pit was surrounded by a very wide circle of cliffs with a slope of leaf covered mud and sediment making up a middle layer. Getting close enough to look into the abyss was frightening and i was soon trembling with adrenaline. Most of the sediment was very slippery clay like mud just under leaves and that day many of the rocks were covered in patches of ice from a deep freeze when Alabama had to endure near zero temperatures.

The uncharted cave gaped ominously. I called it Fisher's Pit.

It opened up into blackness and quite readily swallowed any objects dropped into it with seconds of silence.

Jeff shone a high powered light into the darkness while i held my camera out over the maw. The autofocus worked incorrectly, i should have noticed at the time, so the bottom is blurry. But we estimated it at around 60 feet deep. The bottom was covered in large stones with a stream flowing through them and you can see the walls open up after the first 8 feet. The stream disappeared under a stone lip that looked to be high enough over the water to offer travel possibilities. We won't know until we can get down there.

I was unable to get to the rim of the pit but i did find a vantage point where i could see the bottom of one side. Unfortunately it was not another Fern Cave, dropping only about 40-50 feet on the side i could see. The stream continued on the bottom and disappeared under a ledge big enough to crawl into, so that was still intriguing. And although i haven’t described it here i had discovered two other cave leads on the way to the finding the pit. This southern mountain i was on seemed very karsty.

I took pictures of everything, located them on some maps and sent the info to my friend Jeff, who is much more active in the caving community than i am. Jeff was intrigued because two of the pits i found were not in the cave database.The big one though, turned out to have a name. We decided to go back and look for some other caves that were listed in the database as being nearby.

Part of the mountain has suspicious stumps and other signs of hunting activity.

The waterfall on the foggy day. The first day it had been icy and treacherous to climb down into the hollow.

Jeff takes some photos on his first visit.

After checking the cave database we found this is named Oliver Rothrock Pit. It's listed as 20 feet wide and 75 feet deep. It's very dangerous to get anywhere close to the edge. The ground was saturated with water and the soil was a slick clay under the leaves that was not only slippery but immediately erased any traction in your shoes treads. Although it has two waterfalls flowing into it it is described as not going anywhere, clogged with breakdown.

We brought flashlights and walkie talkies and in no time at all i had brought us to the first pit i had discovered, which was not in the database. It had been a black chasm on my first trip but the flashlight revealed it went straight down what looked like 60 feet. It opened up as it went down and on the boulder strewn floor we could see a small stream. We could not see up or downstream from the top but there were other worrisome depressions on the ground in the immediate area that i did not want to step on.

According to Jeff i might have officially discovered a new cave! Jeff double checked with another caver he knows and it does not appear to be a known pit. The next step is to get down into it and measure it’s depth. If it’s at least 60 feet or more it is classified as an official cave. If it is less than 60 feet and has no passage at the bottom it would be called a notable “karst feature”. If it’s a new cave i get to name it and when asked on the spot i decided to name it after my recently departed dog Fisher. Fisher’s Pit.

You can see there are many caves on Wallace Mountain .We spent most of our time that day looking for One Hundred Plus Cave, which we failed at despite having coordinates.

The fog made things interesting.

Yet another cave that we weren't looking for. This one was steep and hidden until you were right on top of it but it had a rock cairn next it. Although it narrowed quickly into a slide when we threw rocks into it they bounced and bounced very far down. If this is the cave we were looking for (it was in the area) it is nothing like the description.

This was the most interesting incorrect place that i found. There is a long line of rock strata here that are vertical instead of horizontal and look to have collapsed into a pit that is now capped off. In the center there was a hole between two of the boulders. It wasn't big enough to fit in but there was fog blowing strongly out of it. I did not investigate the crack in the foreground on the left but there was a piece of board lying in it. At this point our walkie talkies were dying and we decided we should find each other before the batteries were completely dead, which turned out to be quite difficult. We were far apart. I'd like to come back to this place.

As we moved on to the larger pit fog moved in. That actually made the mountain look a lot cooler than it had but it also made it more difficult to go looking for the other caves no our list. The part of the mountain beyond Oliver Rothrock got pretty weird and unusual. For a long way we pushed our way through a dense forest of trees no more than two inches wide. There were lots of burned stumps too and old fading dirt roads that never seemed to go anywhere. I wondered if there had been a major fire or the woods had been logged or both. We didn’t have much luck finding 100 Plus Cave. According to the description it was as large at the top as the Rothrock but it was also 120 feet deep. Sounds hard to miss! But the GPS data we were using was from the 1980’s (fairly inaccurate). Eventually we split up and got lost from each other in the fog. Even with the walkie talkies it was hard to find ourselves again. I did find another cave but it didn’t match up with the description. The area was full of karst signals though.

Eventually we got tired and wet and decided to call it a day. Avoiding the dense thickets seemed worth a hike to the top of the mountain and so we came back an entirely different route that was much easier. That meant that we never did get to visit the third pit i had come across on my first trip, but that’s ok.

It’s been driving me nuts that i can’t go back down there myself to get into Fisher’s Pit. I’ll have to annoy Jeff until he does it for me.

We broke out of the woods onto a powerline trail that had a dreamy look to it. The yellowed grass was the most intense color we'd seen all day. So we followed the cut even after the trail went back into the trees.