Trip Report

by Doug McCarty 

Photos by Dave Moyer, Bob Griffith and Doug McCarty

On Saturday, September 4, 2004 Dave Moyer, Amber Moyer, Bob Griffith, Mary Davis, Jason Thomas, Rich Finley, Jill Pyle, Cara Doud, Marty Mckinley and I left OTR and drove to Backbone Mountain in Tucker County and did the fifty foot drop into Fanchlers Pit. 

Fanchlers Pit is a little known, seldom visited, vertical cave with 1200 feet of passage and several unpushed leads. It is one of the largest known vertical caves in Tucker County. After getting permission from the owner, we parked and then plowed our way through stickers and brush to get to the cave. The drop is somewhat dangerous because of loose rocks. As Mary was coming down, several let loose and drove Jill, Rich, Amber and I deeper into the cave. We were already out of the drop zone, but we all felt better about being extra cautious. The sinuous fissure passage at the bottom of the drop quickly devolves from walking passage into crawls (if you want to go low) or climbs (if you want to go high). Sometimes you have no choice--the cave will force you to go high or low. A stream comes in from an unpushed upstream lead 100 feet or so into the cave, and the floor of the cave becomes stream passage from there on out. This lead was not pushed when the cave was surveyed by members of the Monongahela Grotto in the early 90s, but at that time Dave Moyer squeezed in as far as he could go--without his helmet, boots or coveralls, and with a flashlight in his teeth. He says it gets impossibly tight, but then appears to open up. Back in the main passage, about 300 feet in, there is a very clear carving on the wall--F. Haddix October 6, 1895. There is also an illegible carving of the name of Haddix's companion. Hopefully, the two explorers continued, because after a little more climbing and crawling, the passage eventually opens up into relatively broad walking passage--maybe 10 feet wide at the bottom. The stream covers the entire cave floor, which is black and looks like asphalt. The cave floor through this section is rather slippery. Because this is Tucker County, the passage eventually turns back into fissure climbs and crawls. Formations, which have been sparsely scattered throughout the cave, start getting more frequent and varied at this point.. Eventually, after a fairly long hands and knees formation crawl you come to a low belly crawl through puddled water (see the third picture from the bottom). This leads to the register room. There is no evidence that anybody has visited this room since the register was placed in the early 90s. To our knowledge, the only other people who have been in here in the past ten years have been Doug Moore and Don Ferguson. 

We had been unaware of how wet we were going to get, so we got pretty cold sitting at the bottom of the drop waiting for everyone to climb out. But we lit candles and used "Hot Hands" hand warmers and simply huddled together to keep warm. That worked fine and we had no problems. This was Amber Moyer's second vertical cave. She did it on her twelfth birthday.