TAG Fall Cave In 2001 - Sittons, Howards Waterfall

Bill Walker

The weather was cooler on Friday, but not too bad. We got off to a slow start because we couldn't figure out what cave to do. We really wanted to do the newly discovered Rumblimg Falls up in Spencer, but couldn't find out out where it was. We decided to do Sittons Cave.

Sittons
Sittons is located East of Trenton a few miles outside of town at the foot of Lookout Mountain. The cave has 2 entrances and we decided to do the upper entrance which turned out to be a huge, sinkhole like entrance (photo 1.) We followed the cave back through stream passage that was sometimes knee high. You come across sets of formations all along the way. The first set of set is on top of a natural bridge that crosses the stream (photo 2.) Past the bridge there is some upper level maze stuff to the left (photo 3.) I picked a spot on the map called Salami Dome that I thought we should attempt to see, and I'm glad we did. Sean and Becky were taking photos, so Brandon and I set off to find the Salami dome. We started off on some crawlyly stuff to the left of the stream, got to a room, looked up and saw photo 5.

Howard's Waterfall
After Sittons, we went back to camp to try to figure out what cave to do next. It was about 2pm, and we didn't want to drive too far to go caving. We decided to go to Howard's. It would be my third trip to the cave, and I was reluctant to go again, but I had never seen the other entrances, so I thought it might be a good trip.

It took us a while to find the other entrances. We didn't bring a map, and I was under the impression that the other end of the cave was left of the first drop. We poked around there for a while, and did the lower level stuff near the entrance, looking for the big room. We finally figured out that we had to go further into the cave to find the side passage to the other entrances.

That whole area of the cave is different from the rest of the cave that I had been in. The climb down into the big room is very tricky. We used the permanently rigged rope to drop the 20' climdown. In another area, we rigged a length of webbing to help with the climbdown into the big room. The pictures below are from that area.

On the way out we meet a large group of college girls and talked to them for a while. They were from a small school in the area and all had new Petzel helmets and Duos. After we left, Becky said, "Bill, that must be your ultimate fantasy... to come across ten college girls in a cave like that." The funny thing is, that is exactly what I was thinking!