Pompey's Cave, 12/22/2023
Cavers: Eugeniya, Juan, Lauren, Rory, Zack
By Eugeniya and Rory
After an adventure looking for parking and a brief walk in the woods, we spotted the top of an old wooden ladder poking out of the ground. It quickly became apparent that the creekbed had flooded and covered the entrance with debris since the last time the cave had been visited (a common occurrence with this cave, as it floods entirely during heavy rains). We removed branches and frozen leaves until we were finally able to descend down the ladder into the cave. We were greeted with a stunning large cavern and a fast-flowing river. Walking upstream seemed easier to start off with, so we set off, quickly discovering that the water was not only flowing very fast, but also incredibly cold, still retaining its temperature from the below-freezing world just above us. With somewhat numb feet, we proceeded into the cave, where we saw lots of beautiful cave formations. There were sections with large amounts of flowstone and rimstone, and one portion looked sort of like a mansion with a winding calcium carbonate staircase. Another section was reminiscent of a spine running along the ceiling. We also found a cave spider along the way! At the end of this section of the cave, we saw the squeeze that connected this section to the upstream portion. We thought that while it might be doable, this would get us very wet and very cold, and we had no desire to end up in that state. Thus, we set off back to the entrance, and then emerged into the sunlight to look for more cave entrances above ground. While nominally we were looking for cave entrances, in practice, we spent the next hour or so looking at ice instead. As the cave was beneath a creek bed, there were plenty of puddles that had frozen over with thick layers of ice. We discovered many things you can do with ice – from shattering it against other ice, punching it, biting it, or throwing ice chunks into each other, there turns out to be a lot of things you can do with a slab of ice
After some exploring and lots of playing with ice, we eventually found another entrance into the cave, from which we again had to excavate frozen leaves and branches. We climbed in to find a large slab that sat above the water. Three of us – Lauren, Rory and Eugeniya – braved the cold water to explore the possible paths to take from there. Upon some amount of exploration, we found that the path upstream required getting more than chest deep in the water. The squeeze from the Historic Ladder Entrance to the Fallen Slab Entrance that we had briefly considered doing in order to find this entrance turned out to be impassable due to the high water level. Because neither path was an option, we decided to leave and keep looking for entrances.
Juan and Tud decided they were very cold and got changed to warm up in the car. In the meantime, armed with a greater understanding of the cave’s orientation based on the two entrances we’d found, we set off to look for the entrances farther upstream. We eventually found another hole that seemed to lead into the cave, and spent some time removing endless leaves, a bucket, and failing to remove a log. However, the hole was squeezy, straight-down, and without a view of the bottom, so we were unsure if we would be able to leave the hole if we entered it. We think that perhaps we had found the so-called Skylight. We decided to use our last bits of warmth to return to the Historic Ladder Entrance, take photos of the speleothems in the upstream portion, and explore the downstream section this time.
Heading downstream from the entrance was an interesting adventure of navigating strong currents. As the stream went further downstream it flowed fast through a tube reminiscent of a subway station. We scurried along some ledges on the edge of the river, occasionally bravin the swift waters, as we encountered large expanses of more and more wide open passageway. However, aware of the people waiting for us, and afraid of the foretold sump at the end of this passageway (a place where the river would get deeper) and the strong currents, we turned back after several hundred feet without quite finding and discovering the sump itself.