Sometime in 2008 or 2009, Brian Winchester told me about a sinkhole having a small hole with air flow on the property of one of his clients. I replied that it could lead to an extensive cave, since caves on that ridge often exhibited relatively large sizes; i.e., Warrens, Dead Man’s and Little Dead Man’s Caves. He quickly obtained permission from his client to do some digging at the site. I enlisted Mike Gordon on the project and a few weeks later the three of

us were looking down into the steep, obviously active sinkhole. The blowing hole was small, perhaps a few inches across, so we began enlarging it using hammers and an entrenching tool, carrying away the sediments with a 5-gal bucket and spreading them around on the ground a short ways from the sink.

As the excavation became larger and larger, so too did the amount of air issuing from the hole. I won’t say it blew the hats off our heads, but it was a right smart wind and it fairly howled. We were impressed. After several hours of pounding, shoveling and lugging, we were stopped by a 1.5 ft diameter chert nodule that completely

resisted efforts to either break it into smaller rocks or undermine it.

Sunday, October 24, 2010
On Sunday, October 24, 2010, Mike Gordon and Kitty Markley met me at the parking area and we walked to the dig site. We had not been there since the last digging operation, so we had to hunt a little before re-finding it. Once there, it did not look exactly like we had remembered, appearing to have opened up below the 1.5 ft chert boulder that had stopped us before. We quickly set to work with the entrenching tool, set at 90 degrees rather than being straight, and hoed and hefted a bunch of 5-gal buckets worth of sediments out to expose a drop of several feet down to what looked like the top of a joint-controlled passage. As before, the more we dug, the more that the hole blew air, although not as much air as we remembered during the first dig.

The critical chert boulder, however, this time came free quickly under Mike’s persuasion as a result of erosion having significantly undermined it. The left wall is relatively soft limestone that erodes easily under the hammer, but the chert nodules on the right-hand wall were what needed to be moved. Quite hard, the chert yielded only slowly under our hammer blows, and yield it did but not much. Furthermore, the fissure narrowed as we excavated our way down into it, making it very hard to hammer effectively at the chert, so we were limited to digging and hammering with short strokes at awkward angles. Finally, we were working in such tight quarters that we were almost unable to remove the sediments that we could loosen from the walls and floor.

Nonetheless, on our bellies with head down and feet up, we could see beyond the dig that passage large enough for possibly two people side-by-side continued another 8 or 10 feet. That sight gave us renewed energy and we continued to pound away on the rocks, but this time we had only a masonry hammer to work with, I having forgotten to bring my 5 lb sledge hammer. Mike and Kitty could almost pass through the entrance squeeze, but projections above and on the lower left stopped them. Finally, we called it a day and agreed to come back the following Friday afternoon.

Friday, October 29, 2010
On Friday, October 29, 2010, Kitty Markley, Mike Gordon and I returned to the dig site and continued enlarging the entrance. This time, I brought my 5 lb sledge hammer, two cold chisels and a crowbar. First Mike and then I took turns at hammering rocks and shoveling sediments out of the hole. Kitty lugged the earth away in a 5 gal bucket for scattering around the small entrance sinkhole. After I finished my stint, Mike went into the hole head first and announced that he thought he could get inside. “No guts, no glory,” he said. Slowly, he was able to push his way in as we cheered him on. Once inside the entrance passage he was able to use the entrenching tool to excavate the hard-packed dirt floor of the passage down several inches. Kitty then tried to push her way in, to no avail, so Mike began working on two large rocks at the base of the left wall. Surprisingly, they broke free after only a few whacks with the sledge hammer, and he pulled them further into the cave and out of the way.

While I was staring at the slightly enlarged squeeze and trying to decide whether I really wanted to push it, Mike explored the passage onward another 30 ft, turning around in a second room after finding that the passage continued on at least another 30 ft. I still didn’t like the looks of the entrance squeeze and declined to push it, so Kitty crawled forward and she was able to get in. She crawled off and found Mike, and the two of them returned to the second room and pushed the passage further into more and more passages, exploring perhaps a total of 200 ft.

They then returned to the entrance to coax me in. Kitty emerged from the cave to show me that a person really can get in AND out, so I resigned myself to exploring a tight, viciously sharp-rock cave without elbow pads and knee pads, got down on my belly head first and boots several feet higher than my head, and ground my way in. The entrance squeeze is very tight, and we all had to work our bodies like inchworms to get past it, Mike scratching his rib sides, Kitty mashing her breasts and me banging up my knees and elbows. Ow!

The entrance passage before and after the squeeze is perhaps 10 ft long and heads roughly WNW, opening into a very small room (Foyer) about the size of the inside of a small car that one can sit up in. There is a tight passage at the SE corner of the Foyer that drops down 2 – 3 ft and heads off in a roughly SSE direction. Mike took that a short way when Kitty was first trying to enter the cave, perhaps a distance of 30 ft. Heading off roughly in a NNE direction, the passage continues below a tabletop rock through a narrow, body-height route over a (bed)rock that had a sharp nubbin pointed straight up. Mike and Kitty were able to pass that obstacle but I could not, so I took the sledge to it and solved that problem and then slithered past it into the Second Room.

You can also sit up in the Second Room, but much more spaciously and with more sitting spots than in the Foyer. The Second Room is perhaps 10 ft long by 6 or 7 ft wide and 3 – 4 ft high. Continuing in a NNE direction, the passage narrows down into a body tube that was armed with several more floor nubbins that raked my boney chest. Ouch! I backed out and took the sledge to them, lowering that floor by another inch or two. I don’t know how Kitty and Mike passed those nubbins without flesh wounds, but then again, I never did see their bare chests, so maybe they didn’t?

That passage quickly opens up into a hands-and-knees crawlway several feet wide that turns into a vertical fissure 6+ ft tall at its far side. At that point, to the ESE there is exposed a second, parallel joint-controlled passage accessible through either of two body-sized windows in the rock separating the two passages. The first fissure goes another 20 – 30 ft and ends. Climbing through the windows, the second fissure passage continues on in a NNE direction at least 60 ft to a third room about the size of a closet that you can sit or stand in. The second fissure passage is a bear, having rough wall projections that grab clothing and being narrow enough that the caver has to move through first at one level and then another. Its walls are very soft and crumbly, often causing foot- and hand-holds to fail, plunging the unwary ape down into ever-smaller fissure passage, trapping boots and knees. It is slow going, and somewhere in there, I suffered a small avulsion in my left forearm, which bled like bloody hell, only I was so focused on making the passage that I didn’t even notice it until later after the blood had thoroughly dried!

From the third room, the cave continues on in three directions: the fissure continues to the NNE and there are two more passages headed SW and WSW. Mike and Kitty made it to that third room, from which Mike explored another 30+ ft down the NNE passage. Neither Kitty nor I went further than the third room. I turned around at the third room because I was by myself, was quite tired at that point and had no backup lights with me. It turned out that Mike was not too far behind me, in the original NNE passage, but had slipped down into the narrow fissure and encountered an “issue” in getting back up to snuff. Clearly, it was time to call it a day.

I have to admit that the three of us were poorly equipped on that recon scoop. Oh, we had backup lights, helmets and other gear outside the cave, but we had intended to enter the cave only for a quick look-see and did not plan to push very far. Under those conditions, we expected to have to do additional digging or pounding inside the cave (which we did), and planned on returning for full cave gear if the cave proved to go. What we had failed to consider was that none of us wanted to go back through the entrance squeeze any more than we had to, so we resigned ourselves to exploring “just a short ways” without proper kit. We bad!

Upon finally exiting the cave, Mike and Kitty were able to come back out without assists, but I needed Mike to help me by grabbing my arm and pulling me past a crux section. We planned afterward to return on Sunday October 31, and I plan to enlarge the entrance squeeze some more before going back into the cave. We also plan to take surveying equipment and start mapping the cave on Sunday.

Sunday, November 14, 2010
Kitty, Mike and I met at the parking lot at 2:30pm and walked to the dig. I walked my bike in case we needed to go back to the vehicles for anything, a capability we indeed needed in digs 2 and 3 but not on this 4th dig trip.

After I sketched the entrance sink, Kitty and Mike entered the cave and surveyed stations 0 to 2. I was unable to enter the cave due to my larger size or worse technique, or both. Maybe my attitude toward that horrible entrance squeeze also had a bearing. Whatever, I don’t intend to re-enter the cave until the entrance is enlarged in one particular place. We agreed that I would phone Sean and invite him to blast that one particular place. It’s either that or I pound away with the sledge for no telling how long, and if I can’t get in, I can’t work on the survey.

Abandoning the survey, Mike and Kitty spent the next 45 minutes walling out all the cave’s passages, turning up a disappointing total estimated length of 250 ft. The cave was exhaling air during the visit. Mike and Kitty followed the air but lost it in the 3rd room, which is formed at the junction of several joint-controlled passages. The Dunellon Duo believes there is slim possibility for significantly extending the known length of the cave, but if so, it would most likely be via side passages currently too tight for cavers.

Tuesday January 4, 2011
Sean and Becky Roberts, Bill Walker and I met at the K-Mart parking lot to drop off Sean and Becky’s car. We went to a nearby store and Sean got a damaged, free wood dowel to use as a packing rod. We then drove to the property and down the back dirt road to park close to the cave. It took Sean and me two trips, plus one trip by Bill and Becky, to carry all the stuff to the cave entrance.

The mission was to enlarge the crux restriction at the entrance through the use of gunpowder; specifically, to remove altogether or at least reduce the width of a long boulder on the lower left wall that we called the “pillow rock” due to its shape where it hindered passage. Sean uses a 120vAC drill with a long masonry bit, a 125 amp-hour car battery and an inverter to convert the battery’s 12vDC current to 120vAC. He uses a good quality bit, but it won’t penetrate chert and it is getting dull and bent.

Sean looked at the situation and was not encouraged. The pillow rock was inaccessible to him and his drill, so he had to blast rock from the left wall four times in order to access it. His fifth blast was to the pillow at its junction with bedrock (or a much larger boulder), and perfectly broke it off there, but it proved to be too large to easily move out of the way from above. Mike and Kitty had meanwhile arrived, having walked in from the parking lot. Mike slipped into the cave and began working on the pillow from below. He tried working it back and forth, but it was wedged in too tightly, so he put the rock hammer on the rock pointy end down while I pounded on the rock hammer’s head with my 5-lb sledge. After 15 minutes or so, we succeeded in breaking it free from the wall. Mike dug under it and horsed it around from below, while from above I pushed on it with my feet and dug dirt away from its side so it could slide away further from the wall. At one point Mike was corked in. This bothered Sean, but Mike was confident and not a bit claustrophobic. He then moved it over to the right wall, giving him (and me) enough room to pass.

Mike moved back into the cave and I slipped down beside the pillow to see if I could get it even more out of the way, as it still resulted in a constriction too small for our larger comrades. The pillow was long, half as wide and half again as thick, with a flat edge that I wanted to use to stand it up against the wall on edge. That would get it well out of everyone’s way. I hammered a ledge of rock off the right wall and scraped down the floor sediments a few inches to a flat plane and then set the rock exactly where it needed to go. At least, it needed to go right there for the time being; in the future, we might want to move it further down slope into the first room of the cave.

At that point, being finally able to easily slither in and out of the entrance, I was a very happy caver. Now, I can enter at will to survey or even push new passage. What a team! Since the cave is tight overall and Bill and Sean wanted to see the cave (for the first time), I elected to exit the cave and prepare to go home. I didn’t get to bed until midnight, but I slept happily and soundly.

By Buford Pruitt, Jr.
June 16, 2005

A week or so ago, an old friend and work mate from the early 1970s named Brian Winchester contacted the FSS Board via the FSS website regarding a cave lead. He said it blew air and was close to Gainesville. Since I wanted to see my old friend again, not to mention see a blowing hole in the ground, I called him and we put together a checkout trip that occurred on June 16, 2005. Mike Gordon was to join us, but at the critical hour we had trouble communicating with cell phones that were perating at the limits of their range, so I arrived at the rendezvous site sans Mike. Brian and I drove over to the property and he led me down some well-worn woods paths, first to a sinkhole and then to a sinking stream. I also collected data for submission of survey forms to the Florida Cave Survey.

The sinkhole is approximately 15ft wide x 20ft long, and fairly steep-sided. The sink’s convex sides are a strong indication that the sink is geologically active. From the sinkhole emanated a stream of air similar in volume to the Santoian dig site near Ocala, which is to say more than most Florida dry caves but less than Moose’s Echo or Warrens Cave.

The sinking stream is a first order stream (intermittent) that drains seepage from surrounding sediments in addition to forest runoff. It courses through a small ravine and ends in a sand-and-detritus-bottomed sink that has no less than four potential dig holes.

None of the holes blew air and all are small, although a person can get completely inside the drip line of one.

We then walked back to our vehicles for digging and caving gear, and I tried one last time to call Mike. Miracle of miracles, we connected and it turned out he was only a few minutes away from the site. We met him at a new rendezvous location and then back to the parking spot we went.

We packed our digging implements, flavored water and DEET, and went first to the sinkhole. Mike began the dig, and I spelled him after a while, and after a half-hour or so of moving rocks and dirt the wind blowing from the cave began to pick up steam. After an hour of digging, the air flow was, I think second in volume only to what I have experienced at Warrens Cave (Florida’s blowingest cave) and waaaay more air than what issues from the Santoian dig. Let me say this again, a little differently, lest I be accused of understatement: There was a LOT of air blowing out of that entrance, so much so that Mike’s eyes were drying out despite his tears of joy at the find! The wind was literally howling as it came through the winding rocky passage, and that is no suck-in lie, I swear on my dead momma’s grave!

Alas, after an hour or so, we reached a temporary limit of endurance while trying to excavate mud from the tight fissure entrance and trying

to widen the rocky fissure with a sledge hammer while scrunched up within its narrow confines. The cave had successfully fended us off for the nonce, so we took a break and walked over to the sinking stream only a hundred yards or so away. We piddled around the sinking stream terminus for a short while before Brian caught fire and convinced us to return to the sink and wale away on the rock and mud a little longer.

Several hours later and several feet deeper, Brian and Mike were pooped (I’m too large to fit into the fissure and actually dig). By that time the air blowing from the cave had diminished considerably as a result of changing barometric conditions and probably also due to some blockage of the passage beyond by collapsing dirt. We each wriggled head-first down into the nearly vertical passage to see what lay beyond, and Mike determined that a small person (I’m too big. Did I say that already?) could hunker down into an alcove on the right and scoop mud into a bucket. The fissure passage evidently bells out under the mud floor, so we think we can access the cave without having to chip or blow away much more rock (sorry, Sean!).

Warrens Cave is near the northern tip of a ridge, under which Warrens only penetrates a mile or so in a southerly direction. This new blowing hole is near the southern end of that same ridge, several miles away. You can connect the dots. FSS cavers years ago tried to find a back door to Warrens, to no avail. I would love to think this entrance could be it, especially considering the volume of air screaming out of it, but that’s fantasyland. What is not fantasyland is that there is a significantly sized cave at this dig site.

Brian is going to discuss our findings with the landowner and try to get us permission to continue the dig. Alachua County has green space ordinances that require land to be set aside within new developments, and we have every reason to believe that the cave entrance and the sinking stream can both be placed within protected parks. So, we hope to soon need volunteers for this dig.

WARREN’S CAVE, ALACHUA COUNTY

The trip into Warrens Cave last Sunday went very well. We all got to do pretty much what each of us wanted to do and no one got hurt. Wendy collected some loose trash from the Crossroads and made a list of the contents of the Crossroads’ emergency kit. Wendy and I collected three more old bones from where I got that llama bone a few weeks ago, and hopefully Sean will get them identified before the FSS gettogether at the Brinson’s later this month.

I was excited to learn from Brian about the floor collapse between the Crossroads and the Second Drop. I have been going to Warrens for 30 years, and this new development IMO can be called a “major” event in Warrens Cave, at least in terms of the life of this caver. Here is a list of “major” events that I can remember: (a) the long term lowering of the aquifer in the mid-1970s which caused the pool at the Crossroads to dry up for at least two decades, (b) the collapse of the enormous chunk of bedrock forming part of the west wall beside the Second Drop, (c) the long term drought reversal that has allowed the aquifer to rise once again to the level of the Crossroads floor, (d) last year’s hurricane inputs of water and detritus, and (e) the current collapse of the floor. If anyone knows of other similar, significant events, I would like to hear of them. If I install a staff (water level) gage at the Crossroads, would y’all be willing to email me with readings whenever you are in the cave?

I do believe the enormous hunk of bedrock that has broken off (this needs a name: How about the Sixty-Ton Gorilla? It sits wherever it wants to) is continuing to settle down further. How far down can it go? Is there only sediment under it like the sediment in the lowered passage? Did the Sixty-Ton Gorilla break down because the sediments are washing away from below it, or vice versa? Who knows these things?

Like Brian, I am intrigued about the stratigraphy in the floor collapse, and wonder how much of it is recent and how much of it is much older; i.e., Pleistocene? Neat stuff, these dirty data banks. I dropped down into the lower passage using a rope I had brought and strung through a jug handle in the east wall. I did not use the new rope Brian had left permanently rigged at the Second Drop because it would have rubbed too much additional dirt into the lower passage. Frankly, I was more concerned about clods of dirt falling down into the back of my jumpsuit than I was about the dirt sides caving in, although the latter was cause for pause. I waded through muddy, tannin-stained water maybe 6 feet to a low restriction that led another 5 or 6 feet further and down into cleaner but still tannic water.

I do hope that, if cavers in the future decide to continue to dig the passage to the west of the Crossroads, they refrain from dumping their dirt into this new opening. Sediment-filled passages get opened up by fluctuating water tables, and it would be way cool if the process were allowed to continue and the passage subsequently enlarged sufficiently that additional surveying would be appropriate. That would be the first surveying that I know of in Warrens Cave in appx 14 years, and it would be within a stone’s throw of the entrance! Ok, ok, you’d have to have a pretty good arm.

The old bones (llama and whatever) that we collected for the FMNH were taken from a layer of sediment appx 16 inches below the former floor level on the north side of the Crossroads, yet the height of the lowered floor section on the south side of the Crossroads is much deeper, perhaps 7 – 8 feet. Thus, some of the exposed sediments in that passage could be very old.

After exploring and, yes, pushing new passage in Warrens (I went at least 4 feet beyond Brian’s boot prints), I tested my full-body Italian SRT harness in the Cashew Squeeze and in some of the passages between there and the Second Squeeze. It works fine. How convenient is it to not have to take off one’s SRT harnesses until one leaves the cave? How many times have I had to take off seat and chest harnesses below an entrance pit in TAG in order to explore the cave beyond, and then had to stop again to put them back on when returning to exit the cave? This is not so important in Florida, but it will be a real boon in TAG, and in Austria if I ever get there.

I saw no bats whatsoever in the cave. This was disappointing, as Adam Scherer had mentioned at the April FSS meeting that he had recently seen about 10 bats in the cave. He said they looked like they were hibernating, so maybe it has warmed up enough for them to awaken and move on. I hope that’s the case.

The majority of our group went all the way back to The Pit: Sean, Becky and Brandon Roberts, Mike Gordon, Ann Markley (“but everyone knows her as Kitty” – sung to the tune of the Beatles’ Rocky Raccoon), and Danny and Annette Brinton. Perhaps one of them will chime in with their adventures, and photos.

On a sadder note, when picking up the key to the cave, Bill Oldacre told me his dad had just died. He will be out of town as a result until sometime next week.

By Buford Pruitt

Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne toppled a lot of trees in the Gainesville, Florida area, and many trees that were not totally blown over suffered significant limb loss. Warrens Preserve suffered heavily from the 2004 hurricanes, with medium to large sized trees felled all along the property’s entry road including one particularly large tree that fell directly on top of the property line gate. Several large trees were also down across the off-site road that leads to the property. To add to the mess, a half-dozen or so beetle-killed pines that have been standing dead for several years
around the cave’s entrance sinkhole gave up the ghost during the hurricane winds and augured into the sinkhole immediately in front of the cave gate.

Sean Roberts discovered the situation and called me in early November, and I then organized a cleanup via the Florida Cavers Yahoo Group. Thirteen people and five chainsaws showed up early on the morning of Nov. 20 to clear the road and cave entrance. The participants were Adam Scherer, Jennifer Loughran, Corey Brasalier, Eric Amsbury, Steve Nesmith, Wendy Shirah, Sarah and Sequoia Cervone, Jeff Moore, Annette and Danny Brinton, Tom Feeney and me. Wendy took photographs of the event, which will hopefully be posted soon on the website. It was warm and muggy all day, like summertime, as it had rained the day before and even rained a little on us that morning while we worked, and my clothes were soon soaked. Oh well, welcome to Florida.

In the morning we broke up into several groups, each with 1 or 2 chainsaws and 3 or 4 people. One person with a chainsaw would cut and 1 or 2 others would haul the cut debris out of the road. We lined the edges of the dirt road with debris in order to encourage people to stay on the road when driving back to the cave entrance.

We started on the off-site trees that blocked our entry to the Warrens Preserve dirt road, and then worked our way back to the cave entrance. We were apprehensive that we might have to replace the entry road gate, but the gate worked fine after being uncovered. Oh, it has a few more dents now, but somehow I doubt anyone will notice them. Someone did a bang-up job of constructing that gate in the first place. It took only about 2.5 hours for us to clear the road of debris. I was really impressed with the way that everyone worked together so efficiently.

A large tree at the entrance of the dirt road had been pushed over by the hurricane winds, and in so doing had left a large, deep hole in the road. A group consisting of Wendy, Jen and Corey used dibble sticks and a shovel to gouge dirt from the root mat of the fallen tree and placed the dirt back in the hole. Hopefully, the hole won’t hold too much water and get wallowed out over the coming years. If so, we will need to go back and fill it with clean sand or gravel.

After lunch we tackled the giant “pick-up sticks” that bristled up out of the cave entrance. This was no mean feat. These limbless pine poles were largely debarked, and because of the recent rains were slick and wet, not to mention heavy. After debating at some length about the best way to remove them, we settled on chainsawing them into sections in place, then manually hauling them up and out of the sinkhole with ropes. Danny and Eric did most of the chainsawing, and the rest of us formed a “bucket line” to haul them up and away. Some of the logs tended to snag on the iron ladder when they were being rope-hauled up, so Danny (“Igor”) hoisted them on his shoulder and walked them up the ladder. Clearing the cave entrance took about 3 hours.

After the cleanup Jeff, Annette, Danny and I did a quick tour of the historic section of the cave to assess the changes that were caused by the hurricane water inflows. A lot of dirt was excavated and carried to deeper, unknown portions of the cave. The entrance passage between the cave gate and the top of the First Drop had been lowered by 1 – 2 feet and additional dirt has been excavated below the drop to the Crossroads and from the right-hand passage in the Crossroads. We found a large broken bone, possibly a femur that had been excavated by the storm waters. As it looked and felt old, we retrieved it and later passed it on to Sean, who took it to a palaeontologist where he works at the Florida Museum of Natural History and learned that it was from a llama. Presumably, that llama died there in the Pleistocene.

We noted a relatively deep pool (4-6 ft?) of tannin-stained water in the right-hand passage beyond the Crossroads. Three dead mice floated in the stagnant pool. We saw another, living mouse in the historic section and 1 or 2 more living mice on the distal side of the Cashew Squeeze. All were cotton mice (Peromyscus gossypinus). This is the largest number of mice I have ever seen on a single trip into Warrens cave. We also saw a single bat, asleep.

This makes twice now this year that cavers have assembled to remove logs from the entrance of Warrens Cave. Since there are more standing dead, beetle-killed pines around the sinkhole, I imagine we will have to remove more of them in the not too-distant future. Management is a never-ending occupation, but that’s ok – I enjoy any excuse to go to Warrens or to spend a day with cavers.