Interlude: With a Little Help From My Friends 1

I've entered a quiet period in my passion for writing my caving memoirs. I need to do some thinking about how to proceed along the best route ahead.

Fortunately, with a little help from my friends, I can post some additional observations on past events. First up is this edited email from Rodney Tennyson, an old friend from back in the 70's.

My involvement with Janus Pit Cave

by Rodney Tennyson

I met Mike Warshauer about the same time that he became involved with the exploration of Janus; late '75, early '76.  At that time we were both members of the School of the Ozarks Troglophiles; Mike, the seasoned explorer and writer, myself a teenager who, with some high school friends, had spent the past couple of years unraveling more than a mile of passage in Newton Co. Arkansas' Little Bear Cave.  

Together with the Trogs, I learned to rappel and climb rope, and we made a few cave trips together, including a trip to Stone

Co. Arkansas to visit Ennis Cave and the amazing void of Flitterin Pit.

I recall clearly seeing 6 copperheads scattered around the other two guys that were already on the bottom of the pit!  Considering it was Feb. in the Ozarks, the snakes were too cold to be of any threat, but them city boys from the college sure freaked the hell out!  For some

reason, on this trip, I had offered to tote the 400 ft. rope down to the pit so we could rig two lines down it.

Of course, in his enthusiasm, Mike gave us a wide ranging tour of

the countryside viewing large sinks and other sundry karstic phenomenon, before reaching the pit.

My first trip to Janus proper was in 1978, to help survey downstream. Alexia Cochrane, RC Schroeder, Mike and I went downstream as far as the Pictograph Room, where I dug open a very tight connection to the Pantheon. I believe I was the only one small enough to crush

through the crawl. (The Pictograph Room is an  dry, upper level breakdown room just downstreamward from the Pantheon. We later enlarged the tight spot to where it was easy to pass. With that, a semi-loop route was opened but one seldom taken. A good reason was the Arrowhead Drive, a moderately long dry crawl strewn with broken chert blades.-DC) 

I was very impressed by the size of the passages, but the clean washed strollway of Circe’s Canyon was my favorite; blue water and blue stone, a magical combination, interrupted at one point by an inpouring of boulders from the larger upper level, Damocles Squeeze, where I moved a big rock on the way out and made it much easier to negotiate.

That day we surveyed the Pictograph Room and then a deep water passage segment under the Pantheon area, the Razor Bypass.  That required floating in blue-deep water with just enough air space to keep one's head free. (The Razor is the watery slot with limited airspace. The Bypass is the easy way around the normally unnecessary Razor. -DC)

We extended the stream level survey all the way to Omega Lake, the terminal sump, one look convinced me it was surely the home of the 'sucking sump monster' and I declined the offer to pull tape across the pool. Rather, I climbed up a small dome just before the sump and explored a short series of muddy crawls on a level about 20 ft. above the stream passage, a faint breeze suckering us into hammering on a narrow crevice. But as it pinched even more conclusively just beyond, we surveyed that and headed out.

I had borrowed [actually Mike insisted], a thick wetsuit top that had constricted me all day. Once free of the Baffle crawl, I romped on to the the base of the pit, but try as I might, I could not extract myself from that damned wetsuit jacket! So, not wanting to hold anyone up, I just climbed out, wearing it, by the time I struggled up the rope I

had sweated enough to lubricate the inside of the rubber top and with the aid of a tree limb, I was finally able to peel the portable sauna off my lathered body, whew...

My second dose of Janus caving came in 1980, when my high school caving buddy, Larry Flowers, Mike and I made a trip to the far upsteam end of the cave.  A considerable trip, taking a couple of hours of steady travel to reach the final chamber where the cave intersects a major fault zone and the warped and shattered bedrock pinches the cave off. 

Larry and I dug into a very obnoxious lead, the mud so fluid you could crawl through it and it would flow back into the trough our bodies had created in their passing!

 It ended, utterly. We looked carefully for signs of air movement but found none, so we left with little hope of extending the cave in that direction.

(Upstream Janus is so different from downstream as to feel like a different cave: muddy breakdown, slow moving water, dripstones and a fine dome, Vulcan Dome, which is a bit obscure to find and awkward to enter.-DC)

Since that time, I have made only a few trips to Janus. My wife Jeanna and I have made trips to both ends of the cave, savoring this fine cave, just between the two of us.

Our favorite of these excursions was a trip on the eve of our wedding

at the Janus Campground, down to Omega Lake, a very special place.

—RT