| The
Kentucky Caver Quarterly
Proceedings of the
Bluegrass Grotto: the North Central Kentucky Area Chapter of the National Speleological Society |
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Page 21 [contents] || 
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vol. 41. iss. 2, June 2006 |
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but certainly prospective leads. After a brief
stop to drain water from our boots, a carbide change and the usual
caver bantering, I began to set my standard for the day with not one,
but two mistaken connections. Both times announcing that I was sure
this was it when in fact I had found well…. nothing. This is new
passage to Peg and me, of the new length of 8.57 miles of passage we’ve
seen about 2100 ft of it! We reached a breakdown pile blocking our obvious direction of travel. We all had no idea what the sump looked like, so we arbitrarily decided this was it. Gary dove into an opening in the breakdown while I clambered up a small, slanted climb on the left side of the passage. (Editor’s note: Remember you also found the bottom of the big dome-pit! That was before you went up the little climb to the breakdown chamber. And don’t forget my pesky barkabarkabarking that threatened to bring the ceiling down in an avalanche upon you. (SORRY!)) Peg contented herself by throwing rocks and mud clods into a pool! Narrated by the sploosh of Peg’s entertainment I squeezed through a narrow crack and found myself staring at a familiar unstable ceiling. At the same time Gary and I tried to keep a conversation going about the NSS numbers he’d found smoked onto a rock in the breakdown pile, punctuated by the occasional sploosh. Then sometimes Peg would be the relay-person since Gary and I couldn’t hear each other! I continued into the breakdown chamber, moving as rapidly as I could out from under the deck of cards ceiling. I had the foresight not to announce what I’d found until I confirmed it by finding our last survey station. Contented I tried to convince everyone to come up the climb so I could show off our find to Gary. Gary didn’t bite, but I smoked an X at the top of the climb to mark the connection. And we headed out, goals met, competitors bested, and a slew of other |
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 (Peggy climbs) Dunbar Cave State Natural Area One and a half miles northeast of downtown Clarksville TN by Hilary Lambert (BGG & KEEP). Dunbar Cave got ‘demoted’ from State Park to Natural Area status a few years ago, but it is alive and kicking. My son Oliver Renwick and I visited Dunbar recently, as sister/daughter Peggy Renwick is an interpretive tours staff member there this summer. Peggy and husband Ben Currens have been regaling readers of The Kentucky Caver with their adventures in exploration and mapping of new parts of Dunbar, and she showed us that entrance – a locked concrete box in long grass at the bottom of a shallow sinkhole on the edge of a housing subdivision. Then we got back in the truck and drove around to the front ‘historic’ entrance, where a small visitors center provides shade and bathrooms and natural history displays while people wait for their tour to begin. Takes about an hour, costs $4.00 a person, and people must bring their own flashlights, as the electric lights have been removed. |