West Cemetery Cave

West Cemetery Cave is a pretty neat that very few people know about. We're able to cave there without having to drive too far and the walk to the cave is not too bad either. The cave moves a bunch of water and become flooded quite quickly. The ceiling averages about 4.5 to 5 feet tall in most places. There is an active stream in the cave that provides home to salamanders and crawfish. The cave seems to terminate in breakdown at one end and the other end has a sump and a bunch of mud. There are a few decorations in the portion of the cave with the mud.

The Upper Cumberland Grotto surveyed this cave in winter 2001. The surveyed length is around 3,000 feet (1,000 meters) so far.

There is a housing development being built directly adjacent to this cave. At the very least fertilizer and street runoff will affect the cave. More likely the local children will discover it and destroy it. This cave is probably doomed to become a "party cave." Time will tell...

More christmas tree gypsum.

Some stalactites with nice colors.

More stalactites.

Upper Cumberland Grotto member Nora Dickins writing data in the survey book. January/February 2001.

UCG member Mark Joop taking a bearing with survey instruments.

A very unusual fossil in the cave. It looks like a crab leg or maybe the bill of a sword type fish.

Quite a large crinoid stem. Crinoids were tubeworm like reef animals that lived in the reefs that make up todays limestone beds in the area. This particulary animal could have lived between 100 million and 300 million years ago.

Greg walking through some of the borehole passage in this cave.

I had to slime my way up through a muddy hole to see these.

That is how most of the passages look.

The decorations are pretty nice.

Greg provides a sense of scale for this cluster of formations.

The same formations from a closer angle.

Upper Cumberland Grotto member Clinton Elmore in West Cemetery Cave on a winter 2001 survey trip.

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