Colonial Coast Girl Scout Cavers

For more than 30 years, the Colonial Coast Girl Scout Cavers have been exploring caves in and around Lewisburg, West Virginia. To raise awareness for caving and to recruit girls to join them on their caving trips, the Girl Scout Cavers hold an annual event known as Cracks, Crevices and Crawlways.
Each year on the last weekend in January Girl Scout Cavers come from all over Virginia’s Tidewater area and Northeastern North Carolina to participate in this special event. The event is held inside the Enmeier Center at Girl Scout Camp Skimino in Williamsburg, Virginia. The Girl Scout Cavers turn the three story Enmeier Center into three levels of fun filled, action packed, indoor caving activities. Girl Scouts ranging from Brownies to Ambassadors come to participate in one of the two sessions; Saturday or Sunday.

No Girl Scout event is complete without songs, so the Girl Scout Cavers open the event with a sing-a-long focused on caving. The tunes are familiar, but the words have been changed to fit the event. Songs such as The Muddy Monkey sung to the tune of Hokey Pokey, Come Crawl to the tune of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean and Caver to the tune of Bingo resonate throughout the building. The girls then play team building games and participate in a gossip relay where they learn about caving gear.

The girls encourage each other and their leaders as they crawl through the bone crusher and maneuver themselves through the stalagpipes. The two favorite activities are always the 20 ft. x 10 ft. cave maze and the corkscrew where girls and adults are given a flashlight and the opportunity to crawl through a maze of boxes, plywood and 2x4s built to resemble two cave passages. If you look closely, you may even see a bat or two hanging in the caves.

This year the Colonial Coast Girl Scout Cavers shared their passion for caving with a total of 256 girls and 86 adults.

“ We were very pleased when evaluations came back with comments such as very organized, awesome, challenging and 100% Fun!” said Theresa Wiggs, Volunteer Coordinator. “Many troops and girls come back year after year until they are 12 years old when they can finally attend a real caving trip. From all of the positive comments, it looks like we will have another full group of rookie cavers for the April trip.”

The Colonial Coast Girl Scout Cavers cave twice a year in West Virginia; April and October.  


Pictures and article courtesy of Theresa Wiggs.  

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Thanks,
Allen