Discovery in the saltpeter cave of Grassy Cove

On a crisp Friday in March 1972, John Wallace checked his four-seat plane at Atlanta’s Charlie Brown Airport for a flight to Tennessee. The plan was for John’s wife, Youlanda, and her children Paul and Erika, along with Art Smith and Jack Pace, to drive to Cumberland Mountain State Park in Crossville, Tennessee, and rent a cabin for the weekend. My wife, Kathy, our six-year-old daughter, Deanna, and I would fly with John to Crossville Memorial Airport in Crossville and spend a day caving the next day.

We would alternate driving and flying to get transportation from the airport to the caves we visited in the southeast. Half of the group would fly and the other half would drive. This drive was quite nice along the interstate and then we followed the state highway to Crossville. It was night when we arrived and the airport lights were not on. The airport is on top of a mountain and we were a bit nervous about finding a place to land. John’s wife was there but she was unable to communicate with anyone at the airport. John finally managed to radio someone and they turned on the lights.

It was a large cabin in the park and we settled in for a good night’s rest before the next day’s journey. We planned to visit Devils Sink Hole with the family and then the four of us would explore Grassy Cove Saltpeter Cave on the other side of the mountain. Kathy and Deanna spent a beautiful day walking in the park while we went caving.

A few miles southeast of Crossville is Grassy Cove, a depression between two mountains that by all rights should be a large natural lake. Rainwater that falls into the cove runs north into a cave, then emerges in Devils Sink Hole, south of the cove and over the mountain. This long mountain contains many caves and a large stream that flows completely under it. Grassy Cove Saltpeter Cave is well known for being a dusty cave and dust masks are helpful in avoiding histoplasmosis, a lung disease common in dusty caves and chicken coops. Came down with a light case of this later and it very well could have been from this cave. The doctor wanted to know if he had been in a chicken coop.

We entered the cave and discussed whether to explore the dry passages to the west or venture down the waterfall at the eastern end of the cave. It was reported that there were more caves below the waterfall. However, ropes would be required and we were not prepared for that. The waterfall room sounded too good to pass up, so we opted to go down the chasm and get to the waterfall.

The Chasm is a short drop that can be climbed if you exit with a chimney to a narrow part of the drop. However, we chose to use the rope for the drop. We continue to the waterfall room and poke around for some easy clue to continue on. John was checking behind a large rock on the north side of the passage when he noticed air coming off the rocks. We all got excited and started helping out with the easy dig.

In less than an hour we had a small hole that seemed to open up underneath. I was chosen to try it, not sure why I was the first, but I was grateful. I went feet first into the hole and took off my helmet to get through. At the bottom was a low craw heading northeast for about 50 feet and then a ledge with a small drop of about 5 feet into a large room sloping down. I studied the floor and couldn’t make out any prints. I sat there encouraging the others to come down. We had found something big.

I felt like Neil Armstrong on the moon when I took that first step downstairs and left that first footprint where no one had stepped before. The mud had a black layer on top and when you lifted your foot it left a very light orange footprint about 1 inch deep. It felt strange to walk into that huge room and then look back at the lonely set of footprints that would soon become a well-trodden path.

We explored the thousand-foot, sixty-foot-wide, nine-foot-high passage for the rest of the day, finding formations along the west wall and crystalline plaster flowers covering the floor as the ceiling lowered near the east. final. We crawled through a breakdown to a much smaller room at the end and couldn’t find a way to continue.

We were all very excited about our new find and plan to re-map this new section the following month. We returned on Saturday April 22, 1972 with additional help from my wife’s cousin, Bill Meier, and mapped the March 18 Discovery. He was working for Eastman Kodak Co. at the time and had access to the latest home theater cameras. He was testing a new model with very low light capability for taking movies in the cave. We used a Coleman flashlight as the light source and the shutter speed was set slowly to capture as much light as possible. These short films can be viewed on my cave website.

When Jack Pace moved to Nashville, he told the group of cavers about the discovery. Three years later, in 1975, a group of Nashville cavers pushed the end of the Georgia Hall and discovered the Nashville Extension, a stream passage that extended the cave far below the mountain. This is why we go into caves, to see what is there.

As of the close of 2013, the largest room in Grassy Cove Saltpeter Cave is unnamed. As the first person to set foot there, I have the pleasure of naming the passageway which averages thirty feet high by sixty feet wide and a thousand feet long, the “Georgia Room.”

Grassy Cove Saltpeter Cave now ranks 11th in the state of Tennessee for longest cave. I’d like to think we made it a little easier for future cavers to discover the miles of cave that followed in this big cave. Great discoveries were made in the years that followed, and then in the late ’70s, the Smoky Mountain Grotto sealed our little hole with a concrete slab marked “SMG.”

1 Blue Spring Cave 33 miles

2 Cumberland Caverns 27 miles

3 Xanadu Cave System 23 miles

4 Rumbling Falls Cave 15 miles

5 Nunley Mountain Cave System 15 miles

6 Big Bone Cave 15 miles

7 Snail Shell Cave System 9 miles

8 Rice Cave 9 miles

9 Cuyler’s Cave 8 miles

10 Dunbar Cave 8 miles

11 Grassy Cove Cueva Salitrera 8 miles

12 Wolf River 7 miles

13 Haws Spring Cave 7 miles

14 Zarathustra 7 miles

15 Gulf Cave Campgrounds 6 miles

This was the first major discovery I was involved with and I am more excited than ever about caving and the challenge of not only exploring but also documenting caves with maps, images, film and articles.

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