08 Oct Ellisons Cave’s Blue Hole 2011
Mark Wenner on the left and Forrest Wilson on the right. Photo by DeWayne Hyatt.
Ellisons Cave is pure wonderment, with the data it’s provided failing to fully explain what you must see to believe. This solution cave is located in Walker County, on Pigeon Mountain, in the Appalachian Plateaus of northwest Georgia. The mapped passage in Ellisons is just short of 12 miles, holding two of the deepest continual unground pits in the United States; Fantastic Pit is 586 feet deep and Incredible Pit being 440 feet deep. Just carrying the 600 to 700 feet of rope that’s required for the cave, up the escarpment to the cave’s entrance, from the parking lot is a physical challenge to start your day.
The words “Blue Hole Road” greet you as you enter the Crockford–Pigeon Mountain Wildlife Management area. The fact that a beautiful blue spring pours from this cave’s location is icing on the geological cake. Getting out of the van and seeing the Blue Hole for the first time, I was drawn to it like a magnet. Forrest Wilson and I had been diving another local Alabama spring the day before, so our cave diving gear was hanging wet in our trucks; a diver’s world revolves around diving.
Forrest Wilson mentoring Sierra Melton.
Photo by Mark Wenner.
Previous history of the exploration of the Blue Hole is sketchy at best, but here are a few statements I gleaned from various e-mails from Forrest, “Steve Hudson dived it in 1968, but went in the wrong entrance hole, as I did the first couple times.” Steve told me that in the early 1970s, a “crazy Brit” pushed the right hole to the restriction about 500 feet. Dave Hughes thinks it may have been Mike Boon, as he was in the US at the time. Later, Woody Jasper and Lamar Hires used “go-forth,” (a tool made by Woody), to enlarge the hole enough to get through. Then on another occasion Woody, Wes Skiles, Lamar, Paul Smith, and two guys I don’t know found dry passage beyond the restriction. Wes made a map on a later trip with a group from Ohio (I think). Since then, I have talked to Lamar, and gotten ahold of the maps of Ellisons, and the chances of extending the passage are pretty slim. After all, some of the best sump divers in the country have been back to that airspace, looking for a lead into Ellisons. Not to mention, on one trip they released dye in Ellisons, and it never came out in the spring.
