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Watersink Cave trip report

  by Mike Frazier

On November 23, 2008, due to a last minute cancellation, I was graciously invited to join several members of Blue Ridge Grotto to explore Watersink Cave.

For those of you who attended the fall VAR meeting in Covington, you may remember Phil Lucas’ film presentation on this cave during flood stage. After seeing this short film, I jumped at the chance to see the cave when it’s dry.

We arrived at Phil’s place, which is very near Breathing Cave, during the mid-morning hours. We quickly dressed and proceeded down a very nicely prepared gravel path to the cave entrance. It is obvious that Phil has put a lot of work into this project. He has bulldozed a fairly large parcel of land at the base of an enormous rock face into a nice level lot well suited for a host of outdoor activities. At the base of the rock a large diameter, vertical culvert protrudes from the ground about 4 feet or so with a locked wooden hatch at the end. When opened, there are steel rungs driven into the rock to get you up and in position to drop into the pipe which has a built-in wooden ladder. It is an easy climb down to a rock ledge at the bottom of the pipe, with more wall mounted rungs to get you to the cave floor.

The first room is large with a high ceiling checker-boarded with calcite deposits and a few nice formations. This room continues down serving as a main trunk passage. As an interesting feature, the cave is outfitted with a series of cameras and sensors so Phil can monitor the underground water activity during the wet season.

Without getting into too much detail, there are several passages leading off to both side of the trunk, all with very interesting characteristics and loads of fun crawls. Not an easy cave to get lost in, but many hours worth of fun exploration, both wet and dry. There was a dig taking place at the back of the cave after most of our exploring was done, but many of us had to return home for various reasons and were unable to take part. I hope to help out with this at some point in the future.

If  you ever get the chance to have Phil take you through this cave, don’t miss it. He is a very gracious host with many interesting stories of how the cave was discovered, improved and managed over the years. I am very glad I had the opportunity to see it.

Mike Frazier