Troop 140 Caving Trip

 Jim originally contacted me in June of 2019 through my website, youcave.org. He wanted to take his BSA Troop 140, from Blairstown, NJ, on a caving trip and wanted to know how to do this.

Of course, you all know by now that I can easily plug all my caving resources into your Troop’s program. And, I did just that.

Troop 140 was a big Troop. Bigger than I like, when doing a caving trip. The only logical thing was to split them up and have two trips that day. Not only do I get everyone underground, but I also get to go caving 2 times in one day. Big win all around.

We finally decided on Wind Cave, in Lancaster County, PA, on August 10, 2019. Not my favorite beginner cave, but it does the trick if everyone is careful.

Wind Cave is open access. In other words, anyone can enter. It is strongly suggested you have someone along who actually knows what they are doing. It is easy to get hurt in there and there have been a couple of rescues over the years.

The other problem is that local kids like to party in the cave. This is very disrespectful as they spray paint the walls and leave trash everywhere. Maybe this winter I’ll get a group to go do a clean-up day in the cave. (Let me know if you are interested in a cave clean-up.)

Troop 140 was fantastic. We were able to see pretty much the whole cave on both trips. We did a lot of climbing and squeezing. Yes, we did some of the, not as exciting, walking passages, too. I was lucky to get a lot of video from both my phone and Gopro. I managed to edit it all down to under 20 minutes. Take a look and enjoy what they did.