Freezing Our Butts Whilst Caving at TAG

Frigid TAG Caving Jan 18-21, 2008

Given the short supply of three-day weekends in the Spring semester, Alex and I (Jeff) thought it imperative that we lead a trip up to TAG for the MLK break. We suspected that it might be cold in the mountains of northern Alabama in January, but we really weren't prepared for the level of cold that awaited us. We originally had 12 people sign up (the limit for many caves) but as the date approached, several found excuses to be somewhere other than the projected path of a major snowstorm. In the end we had 9 (some of which we had to forcefully drag from their warm Gainesville homes).

We arrived at Tumbling Rock around 3am. We had made special arrangements to camp at the cave but when we arrived we found a vicious dog guarding the lot. Andie tamed the savage beast and we went inside the enclosure to set up camp. Despite the fact that all the forecasts were calling for a blizzard on this particular night, not a single flake fell and the temperature hovered around a relatively balmy 32 degrees.

We headed into the cave around 10 the next morning. The water was up and Kings Shower (a 300-ft waterfall) was much more impressive than it had been on our previous visit. The SCCI caretaker directed us back to the epic Mt. Olympus rockpile and we scrambled to the top to see the impressive pillar of fire. The cave's register is located at this pillar and can apparently only be reached by inching across a steep mud slope with a harrowing drop below. No one on the trip really wanted to sign the thing that bad, so we scooched down the mountain, and made our way back to the entrance. At one point we got lost and went in circles for a while, arriving at the same room at least 3 different times.

We got out around sunset and the temperature was beginning to drop. We headed for Scottsboro and grabbed pizza at a sports bar and then dropped by Walmart to mill around for an hour or two so as to delay the inevitable camping in the freezing cold. The temps dropped to around 15 on this particular night, and despite wearing every warm thing we owned, several of us did not sleep as well as we would have liked.

In the morning, we spent a few hours warming up at McDonalds, then swung by Sheldon's Cave. None of us really wanted to change into our frozen cave clothes, so we just hiked 20 minutes up to the cave in our winter coats. The entrance was epic, with an impressive icicle-covered waterfall dropping into a deep pit. We 'spelunked' into the first room, then returned to the car.

The next stop was Limrock Blowing Cave which was a fun little jaunt but slightly wetter than we would have preferred. We headed for the final rooms along an obvious passage that we had not seen before, but some members of our group were sketched out by all the boulders that seemed to be in the process of falling from the ceiling, so we returned to our cars. Alex's car had taken a nasty hit to its muffler on the drive into the cave parking, so some of us made a Walmart run to get a hacksaw to remove it. Alex and his passengers had a much noisier ride from that point on.

We arrived at Pettijohn's around 1am that night. By our best estimates, it was even colder on this night than it had been on the previous. Since we had neglected to camp in a designated site, we were run off by a game warden around 8am the next morning. Some of our group went home immediately but 7 remained to try our hand at the cave. Many of the caving clothes were encased in ice from the previous night and it was necessary to boil water to thaw them out before proceeding. We went a little ways into Pettijohns, though half of our group turned around at the climbdown. The rest of us slogged through a room full of mud, sliding down a series of chutes into something closely resembling diarrhea, and exited an hour or two later. On the way out, we encountered a group of parents and children who were apparently there for some kid's birthday party (an annual tradition) - I must say that this beats the pants off any party my friends or I ever had back in gradeschool. We returned to Gainesville around 10PM Monday night.

Trip members: Alex, Jeff, Andie, Frank, Barbara, Tyrone, Tyson, Allison, Curtis

Location: Northeastern Alabama, Northwestern Georgia

Cost: Around $50 - costs were driven up by a bad car/people ratio (mostly because of an absurd amount of gear), and many trips to warm restaurants/Walmart.

Topics of conversation: Cave bunnies, Tyrone's absurdly powerful yet cheap flashlight, Rapelling down abandoned missile silo, How very cold it was