Published: March 25, 2007 11:06 pm

2 Carter park caves get underground scrubdown

OLIVE HILL — For eons the caves took shape beneath the hills and hollows of Carter County.

During those untold thousands of years, no intruder beyond the occasional bug or rodent disturbed the cool, dark silence.

Then came humans with their curiosity and their lights and litter.

Over the past 200 years or so, and especially since the wiring of some of them for tour lighting, the caves of Carter County have slipped from their pristine natural condition.

Coatings of algae have bloomed a dull green around light fixtures. Seasonal flooding has swept debris and trash into the recesses of some caves.

Over the weekend, a dedicated cadre of cavers said a temporary goodbye to the warm spring sunshine and spent two days on an underground cleanup mission in Carter Caves State Resort Park.

They scraped and scrubbed algae and removed trash and litter from two of the more highly trafficked caves in the park.

“The mission is to restore the caves to their natural beauty,” said Jonathon Lewis, who is president of the ESSO Grotto, a local caving club.

There was a time when entrepreneurs, including the former private owners of the caves, would use colored lights and other gimmicks to liven up tours. But that’s all changed now, Lewis said.

The new standard is to keep caves as natural as possible.

That can be a tall order, considering the fragility of the cave ecosystem and the long, slow processes that cause their picturesque formations.

So when a crew of volunteer cave cleaners trooped into X Cave, one of the park’s premier tour caves, they chose their materials and procedures carefully.

They started with spritzer bottles of a weak bleach solution, which they sprayed on the algae and then scrubbed off.

The procedure calls for as weak a solution as possible, to avoid damaging the rock, said Roy VanHoozer of Lexington, who is the director of a restoration project at the Mammoth Cave complex in southwest Kentucky.

“Then you rinse it really well,” said Julie Hall of Marietta, another volunteer.

The cleanup crew wore Tyvek coveralls and respirators to protect them against the bleach. However, the weak solution left the air in the cave redolent of a swimming pool and wasn’t irritating enough to interfere with a tour group that went through.

The tedium of scrubbing rock was magnified by the exacting requirements of the task. Ernie Gilliam of Grayson wielded an old toothbrush to penetrate some of the smaller crevices. A wire brush might have worked faster but could have damaged the rock, he said.

While sometimes tedious, the job tested their caving skills. Brian Saul of Portsmouth jury-rigged a harness to use while cleaning in a 35-foot dome formation.

The cavers have harnesses they use in their recreational outings, but didn’t want to expose them to the bleach solution, which would eventually weaken them, Saul said.

So they used lengths of nylon webbing, planning to throw them away when the job was over.

It’s the first restoration camp at Carter Caves, said park naturalist Coy Ainsley.

Volunteers showed up from several states, he said. Besides X Cave, they worked in Cascade Cave.

The plan is to make it an annual effort.

“This is just the beginning. This just barely touches what needs to be done,” he said.

MIKE JAMES can be reach at mjames@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2652