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A JUNE TAG TRIP "Yes R.D., there's rattlesnakes on Sand Mountain." Brian Williams and Caren Beck ( Part 2) So we all head over to a little system called Iron Hoop, which is really just another entrance to the Jess Eliot Cave System. The cave is located in the bottom of a stream bed with a tight little entrance that looks like it takes a lot of water during heavy rains. What pleasant thought on a cloudy day. It's a pretty impressive cave with some route finding in the beginning and then a nice rocky stream crawl to get to the big stuff. What really stands out in my mind was all the fun we had just GETTING TO the cave! We had to drive down 2 miles of the narliest, tire shredding, oil pan dragging, 4-wheel logging road we have ever seen! (and the Vinzant wagon isn't even 4-wheel drive) We were either bumping over rocks, dodging mud holes or plowing through creeks. At one point over a creek the rocks were so big RDs truck looked like a entry in the Baja 400 as he pounded along. Unfortunately, Team Vinzant didn't make it look as graceful. Big blue had a really bad time of it, and from what I hear the ride inside was even worse! It was kind of hard to watch all that big blue truck getting smacked around. I actually felt sorry for that truck. "Rodeo Bob" took it much better but I don't think Brian liked treating his truck like that. After talking to some "big" locals on even bigger 4 wheelers, we found out that 200 miles on a 4-wheeler "ain't nothing" up in these woods. We finally made it to a clearing where we parked and walked another ½ mile to the cave. The cave had a cool climb down entrance that was chocked up with debris from the recent rain. And sure enough, stuck in the cracks of the ceiling were the typical leaves indicative of flooding passage that occurs regularly during rains... hey, did anybody check the weather forecast? Once inside we climbed across lots of breakdown hunting for a rabbit-hole crawlway. Matt finally found the hole and away we crawled. We continued on in what we thought was the right direction but turned out to be a miserable little muddy passage. But oh what fun it was to slither through the icy water and "get some crawling in" as RD says (since we don't get enough of that in FL). We made Sully go first, send in the probe we call it. He finally squeezed back down the passage to announce that it was the wrong way. Looked like he had done a bit of digging with his helmet before he decided it got too tight. Finally we back tracked to the correct passage. Here's a tip, go down the BIG passage to the right. Turns out the big way got smaller and smaller and ended up in another fun, low cobblestone crawl with some stoop -walking in the stream thrown in for good measure. After about 1000 ft of this fun over sharp wet rocks we popped out into a huge room that went in 2 directions . Up the passage to the left we were impressed to see some huge flowstone and hundreds of rimstone dams with the water cascading down and making everything look like continuous ripples of stone in a frozen stream. This cave definitely gets the "most impressive flowstone" formation award. The entire stream was a flowstone floor! Next we headed downstream to some awesome black and white formations, waterfalls and more stream fun. It gets deep too. Somehow we managed to get all split up in this section but finally regrouped near the crawlway junction. On the crawl out, R.D. announced that this was his last trip into this cave. He said he was getting too old for all that crawling. We thought he did great. But it was an honor to be included on his final trip to Iron Hoop Cave. Captions 1. Group shot at "Iron Hoop" entrance 2. The long wet road 3. Painful to watch, painful to ride 4. Heading up the trail 5. A bit of a squeeze at the entrance 6. The rabbit hole 7. Scalloped walls, stream passage 8. Andy and some Good stuff 9. RD eye’s the pretties. 10. Stream crawls sometime lead to big rooms 11. Some big rooms have big rivers of flowstone 12. Matt and more 13. Brian and more 14. Decorated stream passage
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