5-11-02 ARACHNOPHOBIA CAVE
By Bill Walker

Cave Marathon
On Saturday May 11, Chrissy Jett and I hit a bunch of caves in Marion County. We started the day at the Speedway Quarry and toured Chalk, TOD, and Fishbone. That only took a few hours of our time, so after stopping for lunch, we headed south towards Belleview.

First we checked out the new unnamed cave that I had shown to Sean and Dan several months ago. The lot was totally overgrown and covered with banana spiders. We found a few long spider sticks and made our way to the cave (Chrissy and I both share a hatred towards spiders.) We checked a few leads, but nothing went, so we left for our next cave.

Next we went to another unnamed cave in Belleview. The cave is located in a quarry and has two entrances with about 100' of passage. The last time Sean and I were here, we noticed a few possibilities in the lower bedding plane room. A large, very historic cave was located in the area and quarried away 50 years ago. The cave we explored may be a remnant of the historic cave (or the historic cave may be located down the street in another quarry.)

Chrissy and I checked out the lower level and discovered about 100' of muddy, virgin bedding plane. We both got to put our hands in virgin mud. We exhausted all of the possible leads in the cave, but I might return at a later date to dig on the breakdown room (the entrance has a slight breeze.)

Arachnophobia

We left our muddy find to locate the Belleview formation caves. We drove to the area, but it was heavily overgrown, and I didn't have GPS coordinates. We decided to call it a day, but on our way home we did a little ridge driving through the area.

While driving down a trashed out back road, Chrissy noticed a trail leading into the woods. She asked if we could stop and check it out, so we did. You never know...

The area is located near Tucks and is very karsty. Rock everywhere. We walked 100 yards into the woods along a well worn trail. As we walked around the corner, we could see a slight depression and exposed rock. "You've got to be kidding me, " I said out loud. "There's a freaking cave here!"

We looked down into a small fissure crack about 15' deep. The entrance was choked full of spider webs and we could see what looked like going passage at the bottom. On our way back to the truck to gather our gear, I asked Chrissy, "So, what are you going to name it?"

"Did you see all those webs? It's pretty obvious that the cave should be called Arachnophobia."

After collecting our gear, we returned to the cave and located a spider stick to make the cave accessible. Chrissy went first because she found the cave (and I figured she would clear out any remaining spiders in my way.) Once down, we discovered that the fissure crack opened to a small, standing room and that our cave was really a cavern. We also discovered that the cave lived up to it's new name. The floor of the cave was home to many of the large, webless variety of hairy spiders. Wolf Spiders, Wood Spiders - whatever they are called. I call them scary.

At the far end of the room, wood and beer cans choked what looked like a low crack in the wall. Just for the heck of it, we started moving debris. Large spiders scurried out from under the rotting wood. Chrissy worked for a couple of minutes and opened it up into a nasty crawl - she went first, of course. I followed her in, knowing that the 3 wood spiders that had just tried to attack me had friends living in that crawl.

"You've got to be kidding me!" Chrissy said. " This thing goes!"

I hustled into the crawl and turned the corner. "Wait, " she said. "It doesn't." The crawl opened up for a few feet, and then became really tight, but continued on. "There's a huge spider on the ceiling." Well, maybe we'll save the squeeze for another day.

Six caves in six hours. A hundred feet of virgin, and one brand new cave. I wish every weekend was this productive!