Me and Binkley
So how did I, Gary Roberson, come to be involved with Binkley Cave? Well, Binkley Cave and I go back a long way. This year, 2012, is now my 46th year of personally working in the Binkley Cave system. How did it all begin? The following is my way of making a long story short.
When I was 11 years old, my Boy Scout Troop 53 from Mount Tabor School in New Albany, IN took a camping trip to a neat place called “Cave River Valley” (now owned by the state of Indiana). It was my first camping trip and our patrol leader “Richard Heavrin” took us Tenderfeet into Lamplighter’s Cave, which had only been discovered a year or two earlier. It was love at first sight!!!
The day I turned 16 and got my driver’s license some neighborhood friends and I were off to Cave River Valley in my 1960 Studebaker Lark. We were late getting home (but that is another story) and I was grounded by my parents from caving for 6 months. Now that is what I call tough love! The next 6 months were torture, but my sentence was finally served and I was released to go caving again.
My senior year in high school I had analytic geometry with Terry Crayden and we started caving some together. After graduation I was off to college at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, but I keep in touch with Terry, who had started a cave exploring group known as the Indiana Speleological Survey (ISS) with some members of the Purdue Outing Club.
The summer and fall of 1967 we were doing a lot of caving and digging near the famous Wyandotte Cave – one of the oldest show caves in the US. As it turned out years later, we just missed making some fantastic discoveries on Wyandotte Ridge. However we weren’t actually finding much new cave and Terry wanted a big cave project that the ISS could sink it’s teeth into. He recounted the story Lewie Lamon, one of southern Indiana’s pioneer cave explorers, had told him about the big Binkley Cave south of nearby Corydon.
At that time, the Binkley was closed by the owner and he wasn’t allowing cavers to explore. But as I listened to Terry’s stories, I got excited. I didn’t know it at the time, but God was preparing me to be a “Doer”. While I would often be afraid, in the process, I have since learned that I thrive on the challenge and adventure of big projects- the kind of things that many people aren’t willing to risk. Though I was too timid to knock on Harvey Binkley’s door, the cave owner, and ask permission to explore his cave; I did write a letter. To my surprise, he wrote back and said "Yes”.
Thanksgiving weekend I rode the train home from Nashville and we took our first trip of hundreds to come in Binkley Cave. As they say, “The rest is history!” Indiana Caverns is just the next chapter in our Binkley Cave adventure.