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TAG Fall Cave In 2003 - Sauta Cave Bill Walker Photos by Woody Vinzant On October 12, a group of us joined the masses at Sauta Cave. This is a cave that I had a read about when I was a kid and had always wanted to visit. I had been to the lower entrance several times and had always been impressed with the air flow coming out of the massive entrance. You can feel it a hundred feet away on the trail! I jumped at the opportunity to do this cave, despite the nine hour drive back to Florida. My plan was to arrive at the cave at noon, pop in and see the big stuff, be back out and on the road by two, and hopefully get back home by eleven Sunday night. That was the plan at least. Stephanie Juiliano and I hooked up with Brian Williams, Cindy Butler, Chrissy Jett, Woody Vinzant, Andy Vinzant, and Matt Vinzant. We stopped at the lower entrance to take pictures, and then hiked the short distance up to the upper entrance. We were greeted by the gate keeper who handed out maps. He warned us to stay away from the right hand side of the Mountain Room and not to go into the lower levels – that’s where all the bats are. Sauta Cave contains probably the largest bat colony east of the Mississippi. The upper level cave passage is absolutely humongous. This is some of the largest cave passage I’ve seen in Alabama – huge square borehole breakdown passage. When we got to the breakdown mountain, we climbed up and to the left (avoiding the bats that were supposed to be on the right.) We went up, over, around, and down the breakdown pile coming out near a large formation known as the Christmas Tree. This area is somewhat reminiscent of Mount Olympus/Pillar of Fire in Tumbling Rock – a huge breakdown pile, circular “rotunda” at the top with a large formation on top. We climbed down and toured much more of the cave, looping back in the dry rimstone dam area. We decided to take an alternate passage on the way out. The map showed a more narrow passage, with 20 foot high ceilings, that comes out near the entrance. It looked like a shortcut and it even had a 70 foot pit near the end. We decided to do it, but had difficulty finding the passage, and spent half an hour looking for it. When we finally found the passage we started down it and the 20 foot high ceilings soon turned to 8 foot, which soon turned to four foot, which then turned to foot and a half belly crawl! The map lied! We pushed on, because we were already 500 feet down this passage and we wanted to see this 70 foot pit as well. I punctured my back on a low hanging stalactite which made me very angry and turned my vision red. We crawled for well over 500 feet and then got into walking passage once again. The only problem was that the passage was blocked by a huge colony of endangered gray bats! This was a very large colony that coated the walls of the passage. I guess this was the colony that the gate keeper had warned us of earlier. We decided to quietly turn around and go back the way we came. Some of us were not very happy with the crawl back. I was especially not happy because I gored my back on the exact same stalactite that I hit on the way in. My years of cave training prevented me from punching the damn thing off the roof. We finally exited the cave and got on the road around 5pm – which put us back in Ocala at 1:30am Monday morning. That always hurts the next day.  (L to R) Brian, Chrissy, Woody, Andy, Cindy, Matt, Stephanie, and Bill.  Bill and Stephanie checking the map.  Bill in a formation crawl.  Stephanie checking a pool.  Bill washing the Princess's hair. |