SERA 2009

picture by Kevin Bruff
Last weekend Jason and I went to SERA. We drove up Thursday and stopped at Alabama Outdoors on the way. The Nashville Groto was hosting so when we got there I helped Aimee finish painting the "burning caveman" and we set up camp. They had also volunteered us to lead a trip to Tumbling Rock Saturday and I helped clean the showers on the last day. After hanging out for a while and visiting vendor row we grilled steaks and James, Dave and Carol were practicing for open mike nite so we had an impromptu concert.The next day we went to Flowstone with Kevin. When we went to the meeting area there was this guy with a massive beard hanging out hinting that he would like a ride so I took a chance and picked him up. You never know what you are going to get when you pick up a caver but Will turned out to be pretty cool and since our friends were working the event and he didn't know that many people we ended up hanging out a lot over the weekend. Flowstone was close to Ellison's where we went last year and the hike was just as bad if not worse. Of course, if we were hiking we would say it was a nice hike but since we weren't... Anyway we finally made it and rigged up to a nearby tree. We had 9 people in our group so even though there was no cave to explore it took a long time just to get everybody up and down the rope. It was a 226 foot rappel that started out as a squeeze but after 15 feet opened up to pretty much a free rappel. After it opened up it was maybe 50' across(I'm guessing I really have no idea. With a waterfall that looked like a shower coming down right in the middle into a pool then flowing down the rocks at the bottom. The pictures don't capture how pretty the water running down the rippled rocks was.
This is a rattlesnake we met on the hike in:


Here is the opening. It was smaller than this when they discovered the pit 8 years ago.


Here are some pics from inside the cave. There were several salamanders down there and you can kinda see the waterfall.


Friday night we got back so late from caving we missed most of the festivities. We saw a little of open mike nite and grilled sausage dogs but that was about it. Saturday it was our turn to lead a trip. It was the only horizontal trip for the day so we had a lot op folks. There were 11 cars in the caravan and it took an hour and a half to get there. Gerald told us we just had to get them there and they could do the trip on there own but it was obvious some of them needed a guide. So Jason took lead and I was going to bring up the rear but there was one couple who it became obvious were not going to be able to keep up. I took them and just kind of did a separate trip. It was like being at work helping people with mobility problems :-).I had to physically assist the lady the whole way through. Jason actually had the harder group because he had everything from experienced and fast cavers to ridiculously slow cavers. He had to keep stopping the group and going back to get people so he ended up doing the trip twice. For an easy trip we were both sore the next day. That evening we had a "mardi crawl" parade and a band and were able to enjoy the activities. Sunday we cleaned up a little and headed home.