Caving trip to Saltpeter with Robert and friends 1972

It was 1972
I suppose my friend Robert got it going ... because he called saying a bunch of guys wanted to go caving.
The local caves were well-known so it wasn’t like explorers going to the moon.

There were easy caves and hard caves.
I decided we we'd go to the toughest ... .. the most dangerous ... the least travelled....  Saltpeter.
There were no trails leading to that one. You had to know where it was.

One end of the cave was mined for saltpeter during the Civil War ... but that was the main entrance ... we were going in the second entrance and headed a different direction into those flood channels.

Maybe it was show-off on my part wanting to go to Saltpeter, or maybe let the guys see something they would never experience again.
In any case, it was secretly an honor.

I had taken people on caving trips to the easier caves, and once to a fairly hard one where we ended up helping two people get themselves out. They weren’t in desperate need of rescue, except maybe they didn’t know it yet.

Another time I'd gone caving alone in that same cave and ended up helping a group find their way out. It was a confusing place but I learned years before to look back to recognize where I came from. And for crying out loud, the first explorers burned and marked arrows along the route if you knew where to look.

Except Saltpeter.
There were no arrows or marks on those walls, or if there were, they had long been washed off by the floods and the continual dampness.
Aside from scaling down between narrow walls, getting lost, running out of light, injury and exhaustion, the real danger in Saltpeter was flooding.

Those caves were storm drains that had been carved down into the limestone and it was best to go on a day when it hadn't been raining.
I'd gone into Waynes cave after the rain to have a look at the water level, to get a gauge of the danger.
You wouldn't do that with Saltpeter.

When I was in high school, my friend Steve and I usually went caving in the winter because it was safe, but then you came out wet and nearly froze in your pants getting back to the car.
It was Steve who got us started caving. He was two years older. I was 14 and been roaming farm fields, forests, railroad tracks, and crawling around limestone quarries since 7. Maybe earlier.
My parents let me do what I wanted. Of course I had to go to school, but my great love was the long walk in the country.
That's how I met Steve and his brothers the summer before my sophomore year. I ran into their house next to the railroad track on the way to somewhere.

Steve was different. His parents wouldn't let him leave the yard.
Until he met me.
His mom let him take two 15 minutes hikes each day.
That permission combined with my natural instinct for rule breaking extended the timetable and was catalyst for change.
Of course, his parents told me to go home and not come back more than once.
I kept coming back.

Steve had lots of ideas that we did together.
We built tree houses, wandered cow pastures, climbed fences, explored barns, made gun powder, hunted snakes, shot model rockets, went canoing, exploded small propane tanks, and so on.
Neither of us were mall and arcade kids.

He started reading about caves, and then bought the gear.
I followed along. He had his driver's license by then.

Steve was a genuine explorer. I was more of a safety and mapping guy, not that he needed either.
It was Steve that pushed us into the cracks and passageways and adventures that I would never done on my own.

He's the one that found the second entrance to Saltpeter cave after we searched multiple times.
It was on the map, so we knew it was somewhere but couldn't find it.

We ended up going in the main entrance, the old mining entrance, and crawled our way over toward the second entrance but ran out of cave.
Steve started climbing up between two rock walls of pure white. I went along like usual.
Thirty feet up we ran out of cave again.
Neither of us wanted go back the way we came. We were tired and decided to eat lunch. I always brought 4 bologna sandwiches.

Steve kept saying it had to be right there. I don't know how he knew.
Then suddenly he said, I hear a plane.
We both looked straight up. I heard it too.

The cave sits under the hill just west of the Bloomington airport.
Sure enough, there was one more crack we hadn't seen, and if that little propeller plane hadn't gone over while we were sitting there eating lunch, we would never have found it.

A few tricky footholds later and another twelve feet up and we we out in the sunshine laughing.
Amazingly we had walked right by the entrance in every search. It was a split that went straight down between two rocks about a foot and a half wide at the base of a small rock outcropping.
It was impossible to see unless you were right on top of it.

Saltpeter was our favorite cave after that, but it was different. It was wetter. Flooding was no joke. There were four or five different streams from all directions, and then they'd disappear into a crack or behind a collapse. It was hard to make sense of it.

The first time we got back into the deeper passageways we saw grass and stick debris stuck on the ceiling.
There were long stretches that got submerged, and I studied the distances and challenge of getting to a high spot if there was an emergency.

Steve eventually moved on to other things.
He finished school, still needing adventure, and started running an old Ford in daredevil road races with the law.
I didn't go that direction exactly but he was gifted that way.

Anyway, it was spring 1972 and I checked the weather carefully, so Saltpeter would be safe... and that's how the decision was made.

The group of guys showed up and I had the equipment ready to go.

They were rallied behind a guy they liked, and he was level headed, so it was going to stay organized.
My friend Robert was always independ and he came with another friend, so there were about 7-8 of us.

I didn't see a problem or risk among any of them, so no worries about somebody getting careless.
I'd seen it before where I had to pull a friend up off a ledge to keep him from falling down a 30 foot hole, and if I'd seen it in 1972, maybe we would have gone to a different cave.

For me caving was always something new.
I don't know what the other guys saw.

Maybe they noticed the long crawlways through water. Maybe the white stone wall with scallops where the dripping water made the stone so porous that your fingers and feet would grip without effort.
Did they notice the low wide stretches where you scraped the gravel out of the way to fit through.
Did any of them see the different streams coming from all over? Or the indistinct route at times. Did any of them look back so they could get out on they're own?
Or did they simply trust me? I don't know, but I tell you that cave is about focus and hard work.

I wasn't the leader that day.
I was just a tour guide and we were going to a 60' waterfall at the far end of the cave.
Genuine now. Not a 40' that looks 60'.
It was two and a half miles away ... we were going to move fast ... and it wasn't going to be easy.

The entrance is a wide crack between stone walls. It drops down 5 feet, where you have to stoop over to lower your legs into another crack.
There is a stone that sticks out where you put your foot and then lower your body down another 5 feet where you are at the top of this sloping white wall.

Everybody made it ... then we started down the sloping wall, reaching near the bottom before crawling over several slabs of breakdown and into a streambed running east and west.
We started crawling west as the passageway got lower and lower until you were layng in the water.
We reached the small dome where the stream divides.
There are two streams of water ... both streams come from the same source ... one flowing east, where we just came from ... and the other flowing westerly.
We took the westerly route, which is impossible because it's too small to fit ... unless you scrape the heavy, round gravel out of the way and turn your head sideways.

Think about it. Lots of people have been down that passageway. All of them scraped the gravel ... and then the water moves the gravel back ... because the passageway floods entirely ... and you would never have time to get out before it flooded.

After the gravel crawlway, the passage opens up so you can stand.
There is a high spot at this point that might not flood.

Up ahead is a tee where the passageway joins another large tunnel.
The stream we were crawling in joins the larger stream at this point, and both continue west.
We go west.
The stream starts cutting a deep channel that is too narrow to walk, but the upper part of tunnel is a wide tube with soft dirt sides that slope toward the center.

The dirt is there because that section of the cave fills completely with water. The passageay ahead pinches down into a siphon and the water backs up causing debris to gather up and settle. The dirt is not washed away because the current is not strong enough, and the dirt is soft because it is composed of newly washed in leaves and grass that rot over time.

A passageway branches off to the left.
It is called cobble crawl.
It's 880 feet of crawling on your knees over stone that looks like choppy water. It looks that way because the passage floods, and the current flows in a way that sloshes it into waves that mimick the stone.

Cobble crawl ends at Waynes room where you come up through hugh slabs of breakdown into a massive room.
The first time we saw it, we thought it was Waynes cave. So did others who came before us, and that's how it got its name.

You can see the room floods by the color of the stone, but up higher there is a wide dry ledge. It is the only dry area in a long stretch of tunnels that fill completely with water. It's the safe spot in that cave.

From Waynes room the tunnel continues into another large room where you make your way around the breakdown before ducking into a low passage that comes out at the dome with the waterfall.

We were there.
We were standing on a pile of breakdown inside a large dome about 30 feet in diameter.
Looking up, a small stream of water spills from a passage coming out of the side at the top of the dome.
The map never showed a passageway into the waterfall ... maybe the mapping crew didn't go up there ... or if they did, the channel immediately pinched off. I don't know.

We were on the far side and getting a small spray of moisture and watching the water fall into a pit below us where it disappeared.

The walls going up the side of the dome are tiered. Looks like you could climb it like a ladder.
As the water carved down through each layer of rock, it uniformly washed out between the layers, and, in some places, deposited or caused round stones.

The waterfall probably runs year round. I never saw it during a rain or at full throttle.
I imagine that thing would roar off the top and fill the entire dome with spray.
It was scary thinking about that place filling with water.
Maybe you could climb the sides up so far, but the map didn't show any other passageway.

There was one place you would be safe from flood.
It was a high and bone-dry series of passageways located in Waynes room, and that dry spot was the only reason I took the risk of Saltpeter.
The dry area passages went nowhere, but the group could huddle safe and cold in the dark and at least not drown.

On the way back out of Waynes room I half miscalculated the carbide lamps.
I left my bag at the beginning of cobble crawl. I should've taken it with me but that 800 foot crawlway is so tough that I parked it instead of dragging it along.

Our light source was several carbide lamps. Water drips down into the carbide and creates acetylene that goes through a tip. You burn the acetylene and it creates light.
Every couple hours you clean out the lamps, put in fresh carbide and fill it with water and maybe clean the tip, and you're good to go.
The extra carbide and water were in my bag.
The trip had taken longer than anticipated and the lamps were starting to dim. They needed a fresh reload.
I had a few tricks.
One lamp at a time we turned it off and cleaned out the carbide, and then salvaged enough unburned pieces to get three lamps going, and then peed in the water container.
I had a pretty good understanding of light but my inexperience showed. I should have assigned each man to carry a small supply of their own.

I put the group in overdrive getting back through cobble crawl. Just as well because we were getting tired, and that was the toughest spot on the return trip.
We made it to the bag got the lamps going, all of them this time and the rest the trip was uneventful.
The guys were pretty joyous getting out, made me think that some of them were a bit nervous about it and we were definitely tired.

The true measure of their mood was how boisterous the fellows were when we got back to the apartment, clumping up the stairs with more energy than when we left. Like they conquered Everest. Not quite, but it was fun.
I suspect they had an adventure, but I still wonder what they saw, and what they thought. Or maybe they went out for a beer and forgot the whole thing next day.

Gene Haynes