We were huddled close on the hard ground of a muddy
crawlway, a space barely tall enough for sitting up, in an Indiana cave system.
Its broad wing, with a 149-foot span, was so big a flight engineer could enter via a
crawlway to make minor repairs while in flight.
But surprisingly, my fellow cavers and I found a previously unnoticed
crawlway. It was wide and flat, but its height was so low I could barely squeeze my head into it.
While humans have known about the cave since prehistoric times, it was thought to be a relatively insignificant structure just 500 feet in length until modern cavers pushed a tight, blowing
crawlway at the rear of the cave in 1989 and discovered miles of phenomenal passages, rooms, and formations.
Both entered the steep
crawlway leading to the Big Cavern.
500 ft from entrance, accessed through short
crawlway. Dogwood Gave Moderate 1000 ft from entrance in main cave passage.
In 1984, Steve was sent to the Stobie Mine to hammer out some sewage piping, which was only accessible through a 400-foot unlit, cramped
crawlway. Dragging his sledgehammer behind him, Steve had to smash a cast-iron pipe only to be covered with "what you would expect you would be covered with," and if that didn't work, a fellow worker would have to use a cutting torch, filling the tunnel with acrid sewage-scented smoke.
Entrance to this small cave of two rooms is via a short
crawlway. The first room measures about 7 by 12 m with 3-4 m ceilings and is the site of our Test Pit A (approximately 17 m from the entrance).
We soon overcame that by putting a couple of cases of empty beer cans in the
crawlway before flight and dumping them into the forward wheel well as we crawled to work.