Blue Spring Cave, Sparta, TN - Cathedral Room Trip 2016

Today's trip takes us to White County, Tennessee where we're visiting Blue Spring Cave near the town of Sparta. This is a beautiful area of the country where the hillside is dotted with pine trees. Our caving group includes folks from Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. From the parking lot we walk along a short wooded path to the cave entrance. This particular entrance is man-made which was excavated in 2001. It's a short climb down some stairs till you reach the main walking path called Johnson Avenue. Here's the path we took to the cathedral room. All in all the trip was around six and a half to seven hours but that was because we were taking pictures and shooting video. Overall this trip could be done in about four hours. This map shows the left half of the cave. This map shows the right half of the cave. Now if you look at our trip to the cathedral room you can see it's a pretty small portion of the whole cave. Blue Spring Cave is the largest cave in Tennessee and the ninth largest cave in the United States. This cave was just discovered in 1989 and that year a group of cavers enlarged a blowing crack at the rear of the cave which dropped into a large passage which is now called Johnson Avenue. This walking passage was very muddy so a local grotto conducted a service project where they paved this area with crushed stone to make a more pleasant experience for future cavers. This section of the cave is almost like a commercial cave in that sense. This formation looks like the lunar surface of the moon with its rolling hills and valleys and alien structures. This is an interesting formation that kind of reminds me of Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars. It's kind of big and rolly in its shape. Our group had to make their way across it moving from right to left. There's a small little opening on the left hand side which we all had to squeeze up through. We had to be kind of careful moving across this because it was a little slippery. This is a pool room and it is absolutely gorgeous. I have never seen anything like this. This room has some beautiful formations and the water is just super clear. It has amazing reflective properties. To navigate through this room, you have to stick close to the left-hand wall. There's a walking ledge just underneath the water level. This is our final destination. After taking some pictures, we'll be heading back. You see Bradley here gearing up to drop a 80-foot pit in this room. The pit opening is kind of small. I heard the first caver that discovered this room almost stepped right into it before they realized how deep it was. As we paint around this huge room, you'll see a variety of large beautiful formations. Even with packing three HID lights that put out a combined 21,000 lumen, I could only illuminate about a third of the room at a time. If you're into photography, you can easily spend 30 minutes taking pictures here. As we're making our way back out of the cave, we have to climb up this steep slope. Thankfully, there's a rope to help us make the climb. As you can see, this is a pretty big space too. How's that? Perfect. If you remember this scene, Tim accidentally dropped one of his gloves into a 30-foot pit. Being cave conservationists and tool-using primates, we put our heads together and developed three options to recover the glove. The idea here was to tie a rock onto the rope to act as ballast and then add some duct tape. Once we lowered this contraption, the hope was the duct tape would stick to the rubber-coated part of the glove. Did it work? All right, now we're on to option number two. Oh, oh, oh. Can you get that in the, uh, where the hand goes in? Right there, right there. Here we go. Will he win the prize? Suspense is killing me. Just snatch it, snatch it. You got it. Oh. Anybody have some bubble gum? You know, if we filed a really sharp point on it or something, that's what you need. We had to get Ray Long's camera out of a cave like this one time. And Tim almost happened to have a copper bracelet on, and so he made a hook out of the copper. Did it work? Good job, Mikey. You had the solution. This is the room adjacent to the bridge. I wanted to show it off from a different angle so you can see how lovely it really is. It's truly a privilege to visit a cave where the formations are perfectly intact. If you look from left to right, this room is loaded with stalactites and stalagmites. Here our group is making their way out, walking along Johnson Avenue. This part of the cave is large and expansive and reminds me of how a show cave typically looks. Most of the passages and rooms in this cave are pretty large in size. There were only a few places where we had to belly crawl or squeeze. The cathedral trip is normally a four-hour adventure, but we spent over seven hours underground in order to shoot some video and take some pictures. Regarding wildlife, we didn't see too many cave critters, so to speak. Even around the pool room area, we didn't see any crayfish or salamanders. Other sections of the cave may have some more cave life. Maybe we'll check that out on our next trip down. As we exit the cave, it's nice to be back on the surface. The sun is still out and the temperature is in the mid-70s. There's a strong blast of cold air coming out of the cave, so it's like standing in front of a large air conditioner. There was plenty of mud in the cave, as you can tell by our clothes, and you'll definitely get wet up to your knees in the pool room. If you visit this cave, you might want to consider wearing neoprene socks just to help keep your feet warm. For more information on caving, you can visit the National Speeological website to find a caving club close to you. Thanks for watching!