Last weekend Jason and I went to the SERA summer caving festival in Bristol TN. We drove up Thursday and set-up the camper. We were not expecting to have any kind of hook-up because the campground is just a big hay field but arround the perimeter there were a few power poles and water hook-ups so since we got there early we were able to score power and water. This was a major coup because is was very hot and we were lovin our AC. Next we hit vendor row and I mean we hit it hard. There arn't too many caving stores in south Alabama(none actually)so we had a lot of gear that we needed to upgrade. Before the weekend was over we had new cave suits, caving shorts, knee pads, Jason got elbow pads, foot loops, cowtails, we each got some t-shirts, new packs, a carabiner and we had already gotten new boots and Jason had a new helmet and headlamp since his went down Stephens Gap. We were the best looking cavers there for sure. Joey, Aimee and James came up later that night and set their tents up close to us. Saturday morning we slept in and were slow to get moving so didn't get to the cave we wanted to do which was a 135 foot pit because it was too far away. So we got directions and headed over to Worley's Cave which is all horizontal but only 15 min away. We were told it is the "Tumbling Rock of the south" or something. So we get up there and get all our shiny new gear on and go in the top entrance. My first impression was mud, a lot of mud. People kept falling on their rear ends. All these technical cavers falling down on flat ground it was great. This one guy we ran into fell on his hip so hard I swear the cave shook. I thought we were carrying him out for sure. Then as we got further into the cave we saw some reallycool formations. We followed this passage back as far as we could. We got to a squeeze and James made it through but his pants did not. We decided at that point that we had gone far enough. As we were heading back we ran into a group with a local caver and hs showed us a connection so we could pass over to the stream passage. We followed that passage back. Below are some pics from the cave:
Ryan and Aimee in the stream passage. As you can see the water was pretty deep in places.
Jason got his gear muddy
Ryan and Jason coming out of the crawl at the end of the dry passage
Aimee inside of a massive formation
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