History
Swecker Cave was reported in WVASS Bulletin 1, Caves of Randolph
County (Medville & Medville, 1979) as being fifty feet
long and ending in a low room. In 1979 Doug Medville and Bill
Storage mapped the 50' of known cave and published the map with
a much better description in WVASS Bulletin 13, Caves and Karst
of Randolph County (D. & H. Medville, 1995).
The Swecker cave valley seemed suspicious on the topographic map and so we checked the area in May 1995. Several unrecorded cavelets were found then Swecker was relocated with classic cold air issuing from the entrance. Within weeks Chenger returned with Silas Witzemann with intents of mapping all of the small caves found on the earlier trip. They picked Swecker Cave to start with since it was furthest down the valley from the truck.
After enlarging the
entrance, Silas entered the cave and reported strong airflow in
what appeared to be a feasible dig in the floor of the low room.
Chenger joined in and together they dug at two potential leads.
After twenty minutes, Silas finished his opening and pushed through
a sloping squeeze into a comfortable crawlway. A nasty corkscrew-like
squeeze was barely negotiated and quickly modified so Chenger
could follow. Exploration was stopped shortly when the floor dropped
thirty feet away into a borehole.
Another trip was organized to survey and explore the bottom the drop. Chenger, Witzemann, Jennifer Hempel, and Jim Kennedy mapped over 700' that day, most of it trunk passage. The next day, a team brought the total passage to nearly 1,300'. More importantly, this group opened the Sand Mine, a two hour long dig by hand which started as a breezy four-inch high lead. Because of this effort, now there is an excavated passage three feet wide, fifteen feet long, and maximum three feet high leading to another squeeze.
In July 1995 Chenger, Witzemann, Kennedy, Hempel, and George Deike returned to the Sand Mine. Silas and Jennifer enlarged 70' of very tight sand crawl up to another major constriction. Chenger dug through this obstacle and squeezed out into a continuation of the trunk passage and finally into the elusive stream passage.
In September of 1995 survey work progressed upstream by Kennedy and others. At this time Keith Christenson, Doug Medville, and John Milroie assaulted the adjoining valley southwest of the cave entrance to see what other holes might be along the continuation of the Swecker Cave fault. Building on Chenger's previous ridgewalk before Swecker went big, this group managed to find Swecker Upper Decker. The next day Christenson and Jeff Bray returned to the area and logged another half dozen or more entrances, including Bubblebutt Cave which turned out to be a mile long. All of these finds are physically unrelated to Swecker Cave, with the exception of Swecker Upper Decker.
The upstream end was sketched in the winter of 1996. During this time several trips attempted to complete the upstream end of the cave. These trips were routinely foiled by a intermittent sump at the Sand Mine dig. Frustration set in and attention was drawn to survey in other caves in other areas. During one of these aborted trips dye was placed at the entrance and found to resurge at an obvious spring 2,000' southwest of the cave entrance. This sump problem allowed some of the small caves in the Bubblebutt valley to be finally mapped by WVUSG members. The Swecker map was eventually drawn by Kennedy and Chenger in 1997. Some low stream passage and one formation-ridden side lead near the upstream end of the cave was never surveyed.
