Been there twice. Once as a Boy Scout (way, way pre homo friendly days). Again with college buddies.
Also did Wayne's cave in Southern IN, which has a 150 ft crawl, called the torpedo tube, to get from the entrance to where the cave opens to huge rooms! Once in the torpedo section, there's no place to turn around. You either crawl forward or if claustrophobia gets you, ya crawl backwards to get back to the entrance!!! Beautiful cave when it opens up.
Another cave I explored, (not sure bout the name) Spencer's cave not far from Sullivan. Anyway, it's killed several people.
There's a rule: don't go into a limestone cave when it's raining outside!!! Almost found this out the hard way, exploring Spencer's.
It wasn't really raining, more like a mist/drizzle.......went in, worked down to a lower level, saw a 10 inch wide stream flowing along the passageway but paid no mind, kept walking till we heard what sounded like a waterfall.
Decided to backtrack to the entrance....meet a guy with wife & kids coming along the passageway.
Said Hi & told them what was ahead, found the place where we climb up to a higher level, at the higher level we could see the entrance AND a heavy rain coming down outside.
Decided to wait a while, for the rain to stop........ about 10 min later, suddenly there was a commotion at the fissure where we had climbed up...... we could hear the family we had seen earlier, frantically scrambling up out of the hole in the cave.
What shocked us was they were ALL WET.......the mom & dad were wet from waist down......the kids were wet too but not as much, cause mom & dad had been carrying them through the rising water. My buddies and I suddenly realized what we heard that sounded like a waterfall was surface rain water coming in to fill the cave. The cave had to fill some nearby basin before it would fill the passageway we had explored and the family must have raced just ahead of the flood before the passageway completely filled!!!!
Scarier still, a year or so later, someone my sister-in-law knew, was in the same cave (again during a rain) and drowned with a couple of others.
I went to IU in the late 70s. My friends and I went to just about all of the caves of the Garrison Chapel Valley: Wayne’s Lost, Grotto, Coons, Buckner’s, Ellers... Up until a few years ago I still had the book of cave maps. I hear most of them are now closed to the public. We spent about ten hours in Wayne’s and that wasn’t half of what you could explore.
No way we would ever have left someone behind.
cool story bro.