Caving with Bullwinkle and Bats

When you’re walking hundreds of feet below ground, you could get lost easily. It helps when others who have gone before you have placed markers or signs that point the way. Sometimes, a little bit of humor can help ease the nerves―like the Bullwinkle doll that someone placed on the ground in front of "Bullwinkle Boulevard." That's the name of a passageway inside one of Doug Boyer's favorite caves in Greenbrier County, West Virginia.

Boyer is an Agricultural Research Service (ARS) hydrologist who combines his job with his favorite hobby―walking for hours through caves beneath farmland. As a hydrologist, he checks cave water for nitrate, pesticides, and other pollutants. Many people drink this water from their wells, or from springs when the water leaves caves. The information Boyer collects helps farmers find ways to keep pollutants from getting into this water.

One farmer even went with along with Boyer on a caving trip. The farmer wanted to check out a pipe that supplied water to a well on his property. To get to it, the farmer and Boyer crawled nearly 200 feet down, a trip that took one and a half hours.

Mighty Cold and Dark

Before going into "Hole of the Devil," for example, Boyer puts on long underwear and other extra clothes. Then, he wades into a stream and squeezes through a small opening in the cave. The lamp on his helmet gives off light by burning a smelly gas called carbide.

Without this light, the cave would be pitch black. But that hasn't stopped some animals from doing some caving of their own. Bats, which actually live in the caves, use sonar―a way of using sound to guide themselves. Other animal visitors to the cave, including salamanders, foxes, and raccoons, smell their way around. There are no fish in the cave's streams, but there are tiny wriggling creatures called flatworms. Earthworms can also be found there―survivors of long drops into the cave. Cows, too, have fallen into caves, but farmers rescue them.

Cool Cave Tricks

When Boyer is caving with visitors, he likes to do a magic trick. First, he asks everyone to turn off their lights.  He then reaches for a piece of hard candy. He pops it into his mouth and bites down hard, sending a shower of faint blue sparks into the darkness. First-time cavers are amazed by the trick, an event known as "triboluminescence" ["Try-boe Loomi-nessents"].

Cavers give colorful names to things they explore. Hole of the Devil, or "The Hole," is the cave that turned Boyer onto caving, or spelunking. Different parts of the cave have their own names, like "The Long Room," "Broken Crockery Passage," and "The Maze."

And of course, there's "Bullwinkle Boulevard." It gets its name from a calcite formation that looks like Bullwinkle Moose, a cartoon character from the 1960s who was sidekick to Rocky the Flying Squirrel. 

A Long Way Down

The Hole is one of the longest caves in the world. It twists and turns for at least 23 miles and runs to 750 feet deep.

When Boyer opens the gate to a cave, he always sets a stick in the way. When he leaves the cave he checks to make sure the stick is still there. That way, he knows he isn't  accidentally locking in anyone who entered the cave after him.

Just as safety is a top concern of Boyer's, so too is studying the flow and quality of water inside caves like The Hole. This is important because many cave streams "feed" surface springs and wells used for drinking water.

—By Don Comis, Agricultural Research Service, Information Staff.

Definition: A "hydrologist" studies water, its properties, and behavior, such as when falling as rain or flowing in streams or even beneath the soil. A hydrologist's top interests include where water can be found and the cycle of its movement—from the time it lands on the Earth as rain or other precipitation, to its travels on, through, or under the land, as well as its eventual return to the ocean.

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