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SERA Cave Carnival 2003 - Fox Hole Trip By Bill Walker Photos By Sean Roberts On Friday, a group of mainly Florida cavers went to Fox Hole Cave in Tennessee. I was surprised at the location of this cave as I've driven past it probably 50 times on my TAG trips. We started walking from the parking area and came across what looked like a huge open air pit. I asked, "What the heck is this? I haven't heard of any big pits around here." It turned out to be the entrance to Fox Hole, and as I walked closer, I noticed that one of the sides was a steep, muddy climb down. I was under the impression that the entrance was a small, unimpressive hole (I guess the cave name threw me off!) That day we toured the new section of the cave. A couple of people complained about the crawls leading to the new section, but all I could think of is, "wow, this reminds me a lot of home!" The cave reminded me a lot of the passages in Cumberland Caverns. The passage walls contained a lot of gypsum and our guide kept talking about some formation area he was going to take us to, so I figured we would see some gypsum flowers. For some reason, though, we never quite made it to the formation area. Oh well, we were all very impressed with the cave, so we decided to come back on Sunday and see the historic section. On Sunday, The Walkers, The Roberts, Adam, Cory, Jeff and Tyson returned to the cave. The mud slope was much slicker after all the rain that weekend, so Adam rigged a hand line and watched his rope get slimed as we made our way down to the entrance. We took off down the obvious borehole at the bottom and came to a couple of sweet domes where Sean took some pictures (#4.) We left this area and Sean stayed at the entrance to take pictures while the rest of us poked around the rest of the historic section. There was a sporty dog chain climb that we had to manuever and after that, some low passage that eventually led to the middle of a huge dome. It looked to be about 80' deep and just as high. On the way out, I was the first down the dog chain climb. Like an idiot I jumped the last four feet and twisted my ankle on the steep dirt slope. I thought to myself, "what the hell was I thinking?" as I rolled toward the edge of a 30' pit at the end of the slope. I recovered from my slide and sat in pain as I thought about what had just happened. My error was in thinking the floor was a flat, level surface, when in fact it was a 60 degree sandy slope. My ankle is still recovering. Live and learn. We made our way to the entrance and had to pose for Sean who had already exited the cave. After getting totally slimed by the muddy entrance, we cleaned up and headed home. On the way home we stopped by the roadside waterfall, which was just raging, and snapped a couple of pics.
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