Starting October 1, the blog is switching focus from cave development and operation at Indiana Caverns to the continuing exploration of the Binkley Cave System of which we are a tiny part. Today, CEO Gary Roberson catches you up on what the ISS cavers having been doing while we were busy developing the show cave.

Since Dave Everton seriously got involved in the Binkley Cave project in January 2009, there had been a whirlwind of activity and new discoveries. Cave trips took place 40 or more weekends each year. This all culminated with the connection of Binkley Cave to Blowing Hole on February 11, 2012. This connection brought the surveyed length of the cave system to 34.72 miles and elevated Binkley to the 11th longest cave in the US.

However, since the connection, the cave had been pretty stingy in revealing more secrets. The historic connection had also been the catalyst that resulting in the development of Indiana Caverns starting in late May 2012. While Dave organized many trips to the cave through the rest of 2012, the survey results were pretty meager.

However this all changed with another historic connection in Miller Cave, which was surveyed by Norm Pace way back in 1960, into the very upstream end of the Blowing Hole part of the system. Upper Blowing hole had going leads that had not been checked due to the four mile one way trip length through lots of deep water and bathtubs from the nearest entrance.

On March 9, 2013, Indiana Speleological Survey (ISS) cavers finally made the connection after several dig and blasting trips. In my first trip, through the connection I was absolutely amazed at all the work they had done to make this connection a reality. While the Miller entrance passage was rugged and involved a lot of crawling, this new entrance to the system cut about five hours off the round trip time to upstream Blowing Hole. With the new shortcut, survey teams started heading in Miller to map in Upper Blowing Hole almost every weekend.

Between the breakthrough and early June, ISS cavers surveyed over a mile of new cave in several of the now accessible leads. However they all eventually petered out in low water crawls or ended in terminal breakdown.

On June 8th, Dave Everton led a team to check out an insignificant looking lead off the Upper Blowing Hole trunk passage not far downstream from the connection ladder. Although the passage was only crawling height, the team quickly realized there was strong airflow in their face as they crawled forward. There was potential here!

On June 22nd, they returned to continue surveying the low crawl. This time, Rand Heazlitt, whose work on the Indiana Caverns development had kept him from survey work for over a year, was finally back with them. Indiana Caverns had opened the weekend before so Rand was now free and ready to get back to his first love.

The team surveyed about another 500 feet to a point where the passage started getting very low, wide and wet. It appeared to be an ear-dipper ahead (That is a cave passage where you have to turn your head sideways with one ear in the water so you can breathe in low air space). Everyone was cold and tired, but there was a big reverb and the airflow was still strong.

Rand had always been one of the stronger ISS push cavers. While it had been a year since he had done any real caving, his adrenaline was high. Rand volunteered to push ahead and check the passage out to see if it was worth every returning.

Dave and the others lay there for what seemed an eternity listening to Rand sloshing in the water. Finally, they could faintly hear him hooping and hollering far in the distance. In spite of the fact that they were all severing from the cold, they all immediately plunged into the ear dipper to join Rand.

When they caught up, they found that the passage they had been surveying through was a 1700-foot long overflow crawl. Rand had emerged into sizable parallel underground river. Water was flowing out of a passage from the left and heading downstream to their right. They checked both directions for a few hundred feet. They reached a large walking passage to the left about 500 feet downstream and all three passages kept going strong. There were lots of big cavefish too. It was obvious to everyone that they had made a major discovery! Only time would tell how significant it might be. They decided to the name the new area The Wild Wild West, since it was on the southwest edge of the Binkley Cave map.

Check back for next week’s blog to learn more about the Wild Wild West.