Caving Pages

The Upper Cumberland Grotto met on Sunday, November 8th, 1999 to explore this long known about and quite large cave. Present on the trip were Andrew and Nora Dickins, Jonathan Tinsley and his girlfriend Selene Fitzpatrick, and myself (Jay Greene). This cave has over 4,000 feet of mapped passage, but only about half of that is accessible without having to crawl through a stream in about 8 or 10 inches of water.

The entrance area is quite nice with lots of moss covered rocks and the stream trickling amongst the rocks. The opening is a nice semicircle hole at the base of a rock bluff (how many times have you heard that....?). The entrance hall has many large boulders scattered around the floor and a couple of side passages leading off. Both were explored. One got too small to continue in less than 50 feet and was full of crickets. The other followed the stream off to the right around some boulders where it collected into a nice pool. We saw a sculpin (a type of bottom dwelling fish similar to the algae eater commonly seen in aquariums, although the sculpin is a carnivore) in the pool. This passage looped back over to the main entrance passage after a short distance.

The cave is mostly a long stream passage with the actual stream crossing back and forth over the "caver route." The ceiling height varies from over 30' (in a few, small places, to as low as you wanna crawl in. There are a couple of nice formation areas, but over all the cave is not heavily decorated. There are lots of chert nodules and rocks laying around in the stream sediment. The main passage eventually ends in a room that is full of mud and silt to the ceiling. A stream crawl leads off at the left of the room, but it is pretty wet. Better wear your poly pros. We did not push the stream crawl, although the cave is probably much nicer beyond the crawl. Another day I guess.

The entrance to Kuykendall Cave. That's Selene, Jonathan, Nora, and Andrew (from L-R).

My friend Windy smiling for the camera in the formation area of Kuykendall.

Some nice formations in an area above the stream passage.

Jonathan standing near a very nice drapery.

Jay (your web author) on the other side of the camera. I'm looking at a pretty neat column.

A rather impressive column and some neighboring flowstone.

Selene and Nora in a formation gallery.

Jonathan and Andrew standing in the main passage of Kuykendall.

Andrew and Nora sharing a soft drink during break time.

The group posing amongst some dripstone and flowstone.

Selene and Jonathan giving some perspective to the multicolored stalagmite in the photo.

Kristen Bobo looks back just after squeezing into a tight spot that neith Marion O. Smith or Mark Joop could fit into. They tried like hell though, as the next photo shows.

Marion O. Smith (left) and Mark Joop trying to fit through a very tight squeeze.