All those different Caves

Well, I have to agree with Doug, Lemon Hole is my favorite cave, but Copperhead is a close second. Here, Doug has the honors of holding our new "Official Mascot." The idea here is that this will appear now at every future cave we go in. Sometimes it will be obvious, sometimes not...so keep your eyes peeled...

Doug, Ryan, and myself were the only three to go this time. We took Doug's car, and Ryan's truck. We couldn't all comfortably fit in Ryan's truck for the whole ride there, but we needed a truck to get up the dirt roads once we got to Derry. Having his truck saved us about an hour and a half of walking, but we still ended up hiking for an hour. The irony was that it rained the whole trek up to the cave, so, for the first time ever, we were wetter when we went into the cave than when we came out. This cave is in the middle of no-where, and not only that, you would never even see a hint of it existing. It is literally a hole in the ground. It drops in vertically about 38 feet or so. That's me decending into the bowels of the earth (note the Hodag Proof Helmet!) It was pretty easy going down. Ryan had gone down just before me, so he was able to let us know that infact, the rope ladder fell short of reaching the bottom by about four feet. Once we all got into the cave, we were amazed at how many white spotted salamders we saw. We saw them about as far back as 1000 feet into the cave. We even found a frog and a toad. How they got in there, I'll never know! The main thing we saw were bats. There were lot's of bats...if you don't like bats, don't go in this cave.

There was a small stream in this cave too. At times is it was right under our feet, but the water was barely an inch deep (even with all the run-off of the last day-and-a-halfs rain). But there were portions, where, the River Styx was dry (water was underground-even more so than us). It was cool, because you had this channel that snaked around for fifty or sixty feet at a time, that was 6 inches wide, but two feet deep. That's my foot, so you can get an idea for how wide the River Styx actually is.