In late 1995 quite an odd endeavor took place on an otherwise quiet windswept mountaintop on southwestern Pennsylvania. It was a lonely spot, standing out behind the visitor center in the dark, watching the lights of Uniontown flicker far below. Soon a tremendous roar interrupted the serenity...the beast was groaning it's way up out of the woods, once again piercing the night with brilliant white search beams and red flickering emergency lamps.

Aliens! What? No, it's the Laurel Caverns fire truck, retired from the prestigious duty of fighting fires and now used for, well, another duty of sorts. A brief history story is needed to fully understand the events which led to the discovery of Cale's Canyon.

Above: David Cale, owner of Laurel Caverns, the largest commercial cave in Pennsylvania.
Story and photographs by John Chenger

When Laurel Caverns opened it's doors in the mid-1960's the regular walking tour was much shorter than it is today. The cave did not really "grow" but workers slowly excavated sediment out of the floor to extend the tour route. These efforts declined over the years as the tour route became roomier. A modern map of the cave was drafted and as the cave system became better understood certain people began to think that there might be more passages undiscovered inside the mountain. David Cave at the time was a young tour guide who whose father owned the site, and spent countless hours underground probing each dead end. Convinced that more passage might lay along a major fault cutting through the middle of the cave, he began a major excavation in hopes of breaking into air-filled passage. This dig was excavated by hand off and on for more than a decade.

Cale began using a high-pressure water hose to clean some of the walkways, and quickly applied it to flushing out a few sand-filled passages near the cave's entrance. He even buried permanent water lines hundreds of feet down twisting passages to aid walkway maintenance. The hoses proved effective but tended to "drill" into the sand instead of flush, and much more volume of water was needed to do the job.

About this time the Fairchance Water Authority noticed quite a sediment load appearing in their reservoir. Cale invested an incredible amount of time and money physically routing his cave water around the reservoir. With this groundwork laid, all he needed was water, lots of water, and a better way to deliver it.

His ship, or truck, came in mid-1995. A used 70's vintage fire truck went up for sale at a local fire department and Cale picked it up for under $10,000. I suddenly became in charge of the entire project, opening the commercial trail to a room called the Stomach, and fro this room probe Cale's dig along the fault he began so many years ago.