The Massachusetts Caver - Boston Grotto

Vol. XXXI No. 4
The Massachusetts Caver
Newsletter of the Boston Grotto Chapter of the National Speleological Society
In This Issue: Survivors Tell of the NSS Convention 2012
July — August 2012

POSTMASTERS OR MEMBERS
Send address changes and all correspondence to:
Boston Grotto,
P.O. Box 380304
Harvard Square Station
Cambridge, MA 02138-0304
Vice Chair
Tom Kinsky
Tomanddeena[at]gmail.com
Trip Coordinator
Keluo Yao
keluoy[at]gmail.com
Website Manager
Morrie Gasser
Grotto Officers
Chair
John Evans
Jcevans.ncrc@verizon.net
Treasurer
Rich Lester
rich[at]alum.mit.edu
Secretary
Kevin Harris
Kharris[at]acm.org
Website
www.bostongrotto.org
Morrie Gasser maintains the Boston Grotto website. Please email
submissions and suggestions for the website to Morrie at
his e-mail address above. Check the website for current information
about upcoming trips and other Grotto events.
E-mail list: Rich Lester administers an e-mail (re-mailer) list at
members[at]bostongrotto.org . You can use this mailing list to
send messages to all Boston Grotto members. To add, remove,
or change your e-mail address on the list, please e-mail your
wishes to the Grotto Secretary. Please remember to keep your
e-mail and postal address current with us.
Editor
Chris Taylor
ctaylor[at]gis.net
Submissions of original material for the Massachusetts Caver
are welcomed. Please submit articles, photos, or artwork digitally,
as email attachment (ctaylor[at]gis.net) or on disk; or on
paper, either hand-delivered at the Grotto meeting, or mailed to:
Chris Taylor, 64 Meeting House Path, Ashland, MA 01721.
Please note: we cannot print copyrighted material without permission
from the copyright holder.
Terms of Use: If you reprint, copy, or duplicate any part of this
newsletter, please acknowledge its source and credit its author.
Membership in the Boston Grotto costs $15 per calendar year
and includes one year of newsletter issues.
Meetings are held the first Wednesday of every month at 7:30
p.m., in MIT's Building 32, Room 124, or a nearby room if 124
is not available.
Inside This Issue
About The Cover
The Massachusetts Caver
July — August 2012
Vol. XXXI No. 4
At the July 2012 BG Meetings 3
Maya-Conned! 4
Jeff Moore took this photo, cropped to fit on the cover, from a
trip to Piercy’s Mill Cave in West Virginia, June 2012.
The Massachusetts Caver
Subscriptions are in digital PDF format free to club members.
To join the club and automatically subscribe to the digital version
contact the Treasurer.
Come to the meetings at MIT’s beautiful downtown Cambridge
MA campus, held the first Wednesday of every month at 7:30
PM! We discuss recent trips, watch some interesting presentations
on caving and related subjects, and plan & organize cave
exploration trips.
ERRATUM: In the previous issue, Jed Breed is the fellow in
the sweatshirt, while the individual identified as Jed is actually
Max McClaren. My apologies for any confusion.
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Vol. XXXI No. 4
At the July ‘12 Meeting Dave Crusoe & Rich Lester
11-July-12, Stata Center Room 124, Attendance: 22.
Presiding: John Evans
This month we had around half a dozen members of the
MIT caving club in attendance, which helped swell attendance
to 22, up from the usual 16 or so.
Recent Trips:
On June 24 2012, Dave Crusoe and Dan Schott led a trip
to the Lanesboro karst in Western MA. Other attendees
included Camille Richman, Ramon Armen and Zhu. The
group poked their heads in several small and tight caves,
and Dave and Dan discovered that one thought not to go
actually continues a couple hundred feet with careful maneuvering
for those cavers not dimensionally challenged.
From June 25 to 30, John Evans, Rich Holub, Chris Taylor,
Aaron and Heidi Tester and former members Steve
and Joanne Stokowski attended the NSS convention in
Lewisburg West Virginia, along with about 1,300 other
cavers. The BG group visited many caves and watched
the Salon photo show, which included MANY awardwinning
photos by former club member and noted photographer
Kevin Downey. At the end of the week-long
convention, a huge storm whipped through the fairground,
causing significant damage including more than
$3,500 in damages to both Steve and Rich’s trucks. See
story later in this issue.
On June 27 2012:, Tom Kinsky, Rich Lester, Leander
Nichols, Morrie Gasser, Dan Schott and Aaron Tester
entered the Ack Shack entrance of McFail's Cave and
attempted to pass through the crawlway. This was heavily
silted up, and required extensive digging. Ultimately
the smallest cavers made it through, but communications
broke down, and Tom Kinsky and several others gave up
waiting and retired to the surface near the Halls Hole entrance
for some much-deserved goofing off. Eventually,
the cavers that made it through the Ack Shack crawl
came arrived at the base of the Halls Hole drop, and the
entire group rejoined,. However, by this time the group
could not pursue the planned bust-ass trip to the far
reaches of the cave. Tom vowed to return in August and
try again.
On June 30, Dave Crusoe led a trip with Dan Schott,
Ramon Armen, Camille Richman and Emily Tencate to
Knox Cave, discovering a section not far from The
Lemon Squeeze that nobody in the group had seen before.
On July 3, Tom, Shawn and Paul Kinsky, Dan Schott,
Morrie Gasser and Glen hiked up hiked up Mount Monadnock
to watch local July 3/4 fireworks and cook boil
up some lobsters they had packed in. Morrie took some
spectacular twilight and night pictures with his new Sony
NEX-7 camera, a rather expensive “bridge camera” that
features a large, high-resolution D-SLR sized sensor in a
compact camera body. Morrie has vowed never to take
this gem of a camera into a cave.
Upcoming Trips:
July 14 2012: Vertical practice, probably at Quincy
Quarry, Quincy MA. Contact Dave Crusoe.
August 4 –5 2012 (tentative dates): Tom’s Return to
McFail's Cave, NY, BUST-ASS CAVE TRIP! Second
day will consist of a visit to Young’s Cave. Contact Tom
Kinsky. Vertical experience (SRT) required for
McFail’s. Wetsuit or partial wetsuit strongly recommended.
September 15 — 16: Fall NRO, and possible Bentley's
Cave Race, New York near Bentley’s Cave. Contact
Dave Crusoe
Business:
None this month.
Presentation:
Attendees watched "Cave People of the Himalaya," a
video by PBS about ancient burial artifacts and human
remains stored in caves perched in cliffs in the Himalayan
mountains.
Fourteen meeting attendees went out for pizza after the
meeting to discuss caves, caving and upcoming trips.
Page 3

Boston Grotto members Rich Holub, John Evans, Joanne
& Steve Stokowski and Aaron Tester and his wife attended
the NSS Convention in Lewisburg WV. The convention
ran from June 23 to June 30. John & Rich and I
arrived in Rich’s truck on Saturday the 23rd, and
grabbed one of the last tent areas with shade, a nice spot
under a black walnut tree part way up a small hill. We
ended a short walk from the Baltimore Grotto and just
below the DC Grotto on the hill. The Met Grotto was
just a ways behind us.
Caver Steve Stokowski and his wife arrived at the State
Fair campground about 45 minutes after Rich, John and I.
Steve commented on the hazards of camping under trees,
but also commented that flooding would be less likely up
on the hill, so he was all for it. The tree immediately
above our tents had recently lost a big bough. Rich and I
sawed up the bough and put the pieces in a pile at the
base of the tree, clearing a nice spot for John and Rich’s
two awnings. The broken bough should have served as a
warning.
On Sunday, we attended the geology field tour led by
George Dasher, who works for the state of West Virginia
as a geologist. The height of the day was probably the
visit by our three bus loads of people to Davis Spring,
which drains a huge valley (Davis Hollow) almost directly
into the Greenbrier River. Davis Hollow has no
surface streams to speak of, but hosts many caves with
more than 10 miles of passage including McLung’s and
Maxwellton Sinks, plus many shorter caves. All drain
into a master conduit that nobody has yet found, part of a
cave system probably longer than Scott Hollow at 32+
miles. Total cave length, if any even one or two of the
long and big caves in the hollow could be tied together
and to Davis Spring, would easily exceed 100 miles of
passage.
Monday most of us attended talks and visited vendors
row. I learned how to build a cave radio with using a
$1.50 opamp integrated circuit and about $35 worth of
antenna wire coiled inside a home-made plastic hoola
hoop, then I spent way too much money on vertical
equipment and T-shirts. Rich Holub scored 38
The Massachusetts Caver
Maya-Conned! Chris Taylor
The WNS decon station at Mayacon 2012. Photo from the web,
by Lawrence Pierce.
“demerits” for destroying formations in the “Cave Sim”
exhibit, which featured plastic stalactites and stalagmites
wired to sensors to register body blows from passing
cavers. The idea was to score ZERO, a perfect lowimpact
score. I accomplished this only by staying out of
this faux cave.
“Cave Sim” faux cave. Photo from the web, by Lawrence
Pierce.
Monday evening the convention volunteers served really
great microbrewed beers including Black IPA and Cave
Monster, and a sort country blues band kept everyone
dancing until the wee hours.
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Vol. XXXI No. 4 July — August 2012
Piercy’s Mill entrance, photo by Jeff Moore. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ for conditions of use.
On Tuesday, Rich and John and I did a self-guided tour
of Piercy’s Mill Cave, owned by a very caver-friendly
family on conservation land. We followed the stream
flowing out of the cave upstream into the cave and soon
found the way blocked by nasty breakdown, but retracing
our steps, found a side passage containing some nice formations
and a room full of huge rimstone dams. At one
point I saw a red candy wrapper and asked John, who
was closer to it, if he could grab it. This turned out to be
a crystal skull (actually a votive candle holder) hidden by
the NSS Convention. The idea was that the Grotto or
group that found all 12 skulls would reunite them with
the 13th on the last evening of the convention. winning
something or other, probably related to beer, thereby
averting the end of the world on December 31st 2012, the
supposed end of the Mayan calendar [hence the name of
the convention, MayaCon].
I’ll cut to the chase. The beer drinking and caving went
on until the banquet on Friday evening. The temperature
Breakdown blocks in Piercy’s Mill, photo by Michael Chu.
on Friday reached the high 90s, and most of us were not
very comfortable sitting in the banquet building across
from the camping area while the air conditioning system
Page 5

struggled to keep up with about 1,300 hot bodies. As the
attendees finished their meals, somebody rolled open several
of the garage doors on the side of the building to let
air into the big event hall. Several dozen people stepped
out for some air as the NSS officials continued to read off
awards and call people to the stage. Rich, John and I
were talking to a woman from the Met Grotto when
somebody ran up from the direction of the campground
and yelled “a big storm with 80 mph wind is headed this
way!!” Sure enough, the sky to the west looked ominously
dark.
Rich and John sprinted for our tent site, intending to pull
down the two awnings before the wind struck. I was a
few minutes behind them and about halfway across the
field to hill and trees where we were camped when the
wind started. At first I thought this was just the usual
precursor to rain. But no rain came, and the wind got
stronger . . . and stronger . . . I started running as fast as I
could. I could see a huge cloud of dust and debris approaching
from the direction of the beer tent and shower
building west of me. Then a massive blast of wind hit —
probably AT LEAST 80 mph, and I had to dodge flying
tents, reams of paper and numerous small objects. The
heaviest wind lasted maybe 10 seconds.
At the moment of the peak wind, Rich, John and Steve
were feverishly trying to break camp and pack the trucks,
when Rich suddenly heard Joanne shouting “THE TREE,
THE TREE, RUN, RUN!!” Rich jumped out the way as
the black walnut tree split down the middle and two
thirds of the tree came hurtling to the ground. One piece
landed on Rich’s truck, another hit John’s screened awning,
from which Rich and John had just removed the
poles, and another section of the tree hit Steve &
Joanne’s truck. About this time John’s tent went airborne
and he almost went airborne with it, but he recovered his
feet in time to stop his tent and catch a second passing
tent with his free hand.
The wind let up to around 40—50 mph, and I resumed
running, but I could no longer easily recognize the way to
go. Most tents were gone. Any awnings (wind shades,
screen porches, flags, tarpaulins etc.) were gone or flattened
to the ground. After I got to our campsite and assisted
in getting our remaining stuff into the trucks, I be-
The Massachusetts Caver
Piercy’s Mill formations, photo by Michael Chu.
Giant rimstone dams, photo by Michael Chu.
gan to take in the tree damage. Our tree, a mere twig of
its former self, was leaning at a crazy angle, and several
large trees behind our tents had fallen down. I saw two
big trees (3 - 4 foot in diameter) that had uprooted and
squashed a car and a truck. The wind continued, now
with light rain, as nightfall approached and it started to
get dark. We were told by a running caver that another
storm burst was just minutes away.
By this time a group of survivors had donned hardhats
and lights and organized search teams to look under
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Vol. XXXI No. 4 July — August 2012
downed trees for injured conventioneers. We decided not
to stick around. Rich Holub pulled his truck away from
the trees and John and I jumped in, and soon we were on
our way to Route 64 East., but not so easily. The electricity
and all traffic signals were out in Lewisburg, with
many trees down across the roads, and we had to use
GPS to find creative ways around the many blockages
that included Route 219, the main north-south road
through town. No gas stations were operating, which
thwarted many from leaving. We phoned Steve and explained
our route to him. On the way East on Route 64,
the damage extended for at least 50 miles into Virginia,
with a few more downed trees blocking highway 64 and
emergency crews working to remove trees and the occasional
squashed car.
Steve and Joanne arrived home in the Washington DC
area at 4 AM to discover that the electricity was out even
in Washington. Steve and Joanne had to tie the doors as
much closed as possible with rope and drive carefully to
keep from falling out. Steve’s truck sustained $3,500 in
damages.
When Rich and John and I reached working street lamps
and gas stations in Virginia, it was immediately obvious
that the tree limb had caused a crack in the rear fiberglass
cap and numerous large and small dents in the top and
side of Rich’s truck. We later learned that Rich’s truck
sustained at least $4,000 in damages. We arrived in Boston
at 9:30 AM the following morning.
Most of us lost at least a few camping items or a convention
beer glass or two. I lost my camera and a weeks
worth of cave pictures in the chaos. The rain fly of
John’s tent got shredded. But, not one of us was injured.
Later we learned that the NSS managed to get the beer
taps flowing around 1:30 AM, and then The Terminal
Syphons rock band found a generator and entertained the
dazed survivors until 4:30 AM. Most were too shaken up
to sleep, if indeed they had any place TO sleep.
I guess this is what happens when cavers trifle with the
Mayan prediction of the end of the world. The storm hit
just a few minutes before the ceremony to unite the 13
crystal skulls, preventing the ceremony.
Post-storm carnage at Mayacon 2012, photos by Michael Chu.
More photos can be found at cavechat.org.
I believe that in reality the Mayans conned us. They
were actually predicting a disastrous end to a certain Mayan-themed
convention, not the end of the world, and
1,300 of us got caught up in the con.
Harr, Harr,
Harr!
Page 7

Newsletter of the Boston Grotto
Chapter of the National
Speleological Society
c/o Boston Grotto
P.O. Box 380304
Harvard Square Station
Cambridge, MA 02138-0304
Mailing Address Line 1
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