Knox Cave

The entrance to Knox Cave

The ladder that gets you in

One of the many tight crevasses

I think they were taking some samples

Tight squeeze

Taking a look up at the dome

The view of the dome, highest in NY

Time to get dirty

The Gun Barrel

Nice use of some mud

The gun shoot, for small girls only

The waiting room

More crawling and climbing through some tough spots

Sitting room only and it's barely that

The climb up

The tough stuff comes next

Snack time

Yes, I'm having fun

A real tricky spot here leading to the Alabaster Room

The football field

Thankfully at the end of the football field

Climbing down to the stream

Good spot to chill

The stream

The look of exhaustion

Like Clarksville, Knox Cave is owned by the Northeast Cave Conservancy.  Unlike Clarksville, Knox is a far more physical or sporty cave.  I would be caving with the Hudson Valley Hikers and would be led by Caysey who has over 20 years of caving experience.

With an overcast sky and the threat of rain, it would be a good day to be in a cave.  A 30 foot ladder leads one into the cave.  Caysey led us into the old tourist section of the cave.  This part had steps and benches to chill out on.  It didn't seem like much of a tourist cave as the are was quite small.

After messing around in a small crevasse, we left the tourist area to the "wild" part of the cave.  It started out friendly enough, with a little crawling mixed with a walk in a narrow crevasse.  We then reached what is called the waiting room.  This was appropriately named.  The waiting room precedes the gun barrel, an extremely narrow passage which requires a massive amount of effort and that the average american could not fit through.  Luckily enough, today there is a fairly recently opened passage called the by pass.  The by pass was challenging enough.

Once out of the by pass, the most challenging part of the cave awaited us.  Chris Hiker has problems with heights and exposure.  This would challenge those fears more than I have in the past.  We faced a crevasse that we had to ascend about 40 feet.  We did rope up.  The rope was a bit sketchy though.  The lower portion of the climb was far harder.  The rocks were wetter and the crevasse was wide.  As the crevasse narrowed it became easier to press your body on one side of the crevasse and have you legs pressed to the other side.  I eventually made it after much agony.

Above the crevasse there was quite a bit of real tough crawling.  Very similar to the Thook in Clarksville with a little bit more room.  The end of this led to a spot with a bit of exposure.  Getting myself down this section required a bit of direction from Caysey.  Once down, we could relax and take a nice break in what's called the Alabaster Room.

From here we went through the football room.  It gets it's name since it's wide and long as a football field and  has the height of a football.  An exaggeration, but gives a fairly accurate image.  Though tough, I had a lot of fun going through here despite it being one of the sketchier parts of the cave.  One couldn't help but thinking the ceiling may come down at any moment.

The football field led to a muddy slide which brought you to a stream.  Knox Cave was quite dry in comparison to Clarksville.  One could crawl through the stream for a few hundred feet.  I passed on this, but one girl went in a little ways.  It was a nice scene.  I has not heard the sound of running water at all in this cave up until that point.

Leaving the Alabaster Room would be extremely challenging.  Thoughts crept into my head, "I'm really in over my head.  I'm not doing this again."  I eventually was able to maneuver myself and shimmy my self over the ledge.  The cave started to narrow again and soon I was physically exhausted.  Then one of the girls ahead got herself stuck in a crevasse.  Fortunately myself and another guy were able to keep her from panicking while we waited for Caysey to lift her out.  That was a somewhat tough moment, waiting about 45 minutes in tight quarters.

By the time I reached the top of the crevasse to repel down my physical exhaustion was complete.  Luckily, there also was a group of cavers from Colgate who went down a different way, called the lemon squeeze.  Caysey was able to help repel the others and I was able to drop the rope down and so I followed the college kids down the lemon squeeze.  It lived up to its name, but it was a much safer route for me to do at that point.

The rest of the way out was pretty much straight forward, with a good bit of crawling.  Looking at my watch, I was astonished to realize I had spent over 8 hours inside a cave.  The walk out to the cars in the rain revealed the amount of soreness I most likely would be feeling the next few days.  I'm most certainly going to be bruised on my legs, hips and arms.  It was a physical day.  Despite all this, I most certainly would do this again.