MIT Caving Club visited Morris Cave, located in Vermont, on Sunday, May 12. The entrance was a short walk away from the road and was directly next to a pretty waterfall. Unfortunately, this means that much of the ground is wet and quite slippery, which makes it marginally more difficult to change into cave gear before entering the cave. Morris Cave is unmarked and not visible from the road, so we were able to leave our things at the cave entrance.
The cave began with a narrow crawl that led into a slightly larger space full of spiders. After we got past the spider section, the cave narrowed again and the ground became covered in some type of animal feces, some of which was covered in white fungus. Once our knees were thoroughly covered in the aforementioned fecal matter, the passageway finally became clean, but then we quickly arrived at the first of several squeezes. This first squeeze was a pinch followed by a claustrophobia-inducing section that involved crawling for several meters on loose rocks. The second and third pinches were supposedly typically wet, but on this trip they were mostly dry.
After the third pinch the cave opened up into a large room covered in boulders. We visited various smaller offshoots from this room, including an area that had a small lake. We found a boat that was presumably for crossing the water, but there was a hole in the boat so we were unable to cross. We decided to try to replace said boat next time MIT Caving Club visits Morris Cave. We also visited several other areas including a small waterfall and a “sandwich” between large sheets of rock at a steep angle.
We spent several hours in the cave and then headed out the way we came from. We encountered no difficulties on the way out, and all pinches and other difficult parts of the cave to traverse were approximately the same difficulty in each direction.