Beech Tree
Tymme Laun, Sean Lewis, ~Brandon Stephens
Beech Tree had a very interesting karst window entrance that I happened upon 275 feet away from where it was supposed to be. There were bluff walls on 3 sides of the sink and an old ceiling level was evident. Many spots looked like cave ceiling around the edge. It’s a neat entrance. The entrance itself wasn’t very big, it was a 4’ wide belly crawl which quickly opened up into a wider hands and knees crawl. There was a short belly crawl and the passage dropped back down to standing size. There was a hole in the floor here that I checked out using webbing as a hand line. The webbing wasn’t necessary to get down but it made getting up much easier. At the bottom there was a decent sized room with no leads. I climbed back up.
The passage became a canyon passage from here. Brandon and Kari bailed on us at this point to get some grub at the CHUG grotto meeting. Ahead, a tight canyon dropped off below and it got tight on top as well. It became very difficult to navigate with vertical gear. We hadn’t brought packs to stow our gear in so we backed up and turned around looking for a spot in the tight canyon that we could drop down. We found one and I proceeded down.
I was now midway up in the canyon passage. Ahead the canyon widened too much to chimney in. There were two drops that went down into the same area. I assessed the area for spots to rig and had Sean bring down the rope. I rigged around a natural bridge and went down the tighter of the two drops. The first section ended up being easily climbable but there was a pit at the bottom. I was careful on my way down to avoid a bat that had fallen. I found a bolt and rebelayed the rope and was about to help the bat out when he flew by me slightly touching my lips. I’m still alive, so I guess it wasn’t the kiss of death.
I rappelled down and got off in a larger room midway down. Sean came down and I sent him farther below to explore that section while I checked out the other side of the room. I found that it connected with a dome room which had a crawl and another spot that dropped down to a canyon like stream passage. I figured this connected with where Sean had gone.
After Sean, verified that there was only one nasty lead off his pit (which I suspected connected with what I was looking at) he came up and I checked out the wet canyon passage. The passage turned in the direction of Sean’s pit and also went to the right where I was surprised to see it dropped down about 10’. The top of the slope was flowstone and too slick to free climb so I rigged some webbing around a limestone jug and progressed down. There wasn’t anything at the bottom but a rock wall separated it from another room on the other side. I climbed up the wall and looked about 10 feet down the other side. It also looked to slick to free climb but my webbing reached close enough to the floor that I was able to do it.
I was now in a dome room. Sean verified that a hole in the ceiling connected to one of the crawls out of the earlier room by a light connection. There were no leads off of the room. There was an obvious drain in the floor. I tried climbing back up the right side of the wall but determined that wasn’t going to work and slid down the webbing and started again on the left side. About 2 feet from the top my foot loop caught around my knee which was annoying. I untangled it, and then grabbed a couple good handholds and worked my way up. It would have been extremely difficult to climb without webbing. At the top I found Sean straddling the other short drop. His legs were spread pretty far apart but at least he was holding onto the webbing; gutsy. I climbed back up to where I’d rigged the webbing and back to the dome room.
I don’t think we made it past Turner’s Dome and Faker’s Dome though I thought we did a pretty good job of pushing everything that we could from the lower level. It must be necessarily to stay high in the canyon passage to see the rest of the cave. The map makes it look like there were continuations up high from the last two dome rooms that we were in. Anyway, we climbed back up the rope, up a climb down and worked our way up the tight canyon until we got back to the upper level. I would describe this cave as sporting and actually kind of want to go back sometime to figure out the rest of the cave. The current map could certainly be improved upon. It should really have a vertical profile.
It was dark when we exited the cave but once again it was still quite warm. We hiked up the ridge and followed a trail in the power line cut back to our vehicles. I detoured to verify that my safety wasn’t where we’d parked for Birthday and then enjoyed the drive home braking for and dodging suicidal deer. There seemed to be more people traveling northbound on 37 between I-64 and Paoli than normal.
By Brian Killingbeck © 2005
