UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT

The entrance to Leigh Cave doesn’t really look like much. Set beneath a large limestone overhang in a quiet wood off Route 31 in Hunterdon County, the natural entrance to the cave has been cemented up to prevent unauthorized visitors, and ingress is through a gated metal tube, a pipe really.

Not a big natural opening to begin with, the tube gives it the impression that, in entering, one will be inserting oneself into solid rock. “It’s about 24 inches wide,” says Paul Steward, as a Times writer and photographer look on a little incredulously. It looks a lot narrower.

Steward and fellow caving veteran John Tudek have agreed to take us through Leigh Cave, at 800 feet New Jersey’s second longest. We are about to be initiated into the clammy claustrophobic world underground, the exploration of which obsesses a small, select—some would say slightly unbalanced—group of men and women.

Steward will lead the way and Tudek bring up the rear. Tudek wears a traditional carbide lamp on his helmet, derived from old miners’ lamps, which has a real acetylene flame. Steward turns on his own electric headlamp and, pushing his canvas sack ahead, agilely wriggles through the tube. I’m next, and in I go.

On the other side darkness envelops us except for the little beams emanating from our helmets. The cave, big enough only to crouch in, slick and muddy, curves down and sharply to the right. As we wait for the others to enter, our breath curling up like cigarette smoke in the 53-degree air (all caves in New Jersey maintain this temperature year round), Steward points out a tiny bat that clings to the cave ceiling literally a foot from our faces. The diminutive creature just hangs there, apparently unperturbed by this loud interruption of its dark solitude.

Once everyone is in we move ahead, descending slowly, squeezing through tiny apertures, looking for footholds and gripping wet knobs of worn limestone, heading down into what seems like an incomprehensible warren but to Steward and Tudek is familiar territory.

Steward has traversed Leigh Cave more than 40 times in the 10 years since he began caving. In fact it was Leigh Cave where he took his own inaugural cave trip, inspired by his brother’s tales of caving adventures.

“It is kind of hard to explain it,” he says of that first trip to Leigh Cave a decade ago. “It grabbed me. I was hooked from that first day, and it has become an obsession,” muses Steward, 41, a compact man with longish salt-and-pepper hair and the pale complexion one would associate with someone who likes to spend so much time underground in the dark.

“I’ve gotten a little mellower with age. I was probably going twice a month for the first couple years. But I’ve mellowed out some. I don’t need to see every crack and hole like I used to,” he says.

Steward lives in Ewing with his wife, Diana, and his two children, Danielle, 10, and Bryan, 7. He works in production control at the Lockheed-Martin satellite manufacturing facility in Newtown, Pa., and drives a late-model Toyota with a bumper sticker of bats flying over a glowing gold backdrop, the universal symbol of caving. He has taken his children to small caves and on commercial cave tours, and his wife has caved with him, but it is clear he is the family caver. “I don’t know if we could stand having two obsessed cavers in the family,” he says.

At 5 foot 9 inches and 150 pounds, Steward is of a size where “you can basically go anywhere you’d like to in a cave,” and in the past 10 years he has visited many subterranean places, often in the company of Tudek, a vigorous 28-year-old geology student at Rutgers University.

Steward has traveled around the country, taking part in hundreds of caving expeditions. He is active at the National Speleological Society, the 12,000-member umbrella organization for the hundreds of local “grottos” as local caving clubs are called, and is part of a team that is mapping Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, which at 350 miles long and growing is the largest cave in the world. Locally, Steward is a past president and member of the Central New Jersey Grotto and a member of the New Jersey Cave Conservancy, an organization which seeks to preserve area caves. He writes regularly about caving and is the author of a book of caving stories in the Stephen King vein. “I swear they’re fiction, but . . .” he says, his voice trailing off mischievously.

These “cave horror fiction” stories grew out of Steward’s embellishments of what he calls “boring trip reports.” He decided to add a dead body here, a wild exaggeration there “and they kind of took on a life of their own,” growing popular first amongst cavers locally then nationally thanks to the Internet. “A lot of them are really far out but a lot of them are based on real fears of mine,” says Steward.

He doesn’t recommend them for noncavers with any interest in trying the sport in the future.

Although New Jersey is a small caving state, with only about 150 caves (other states such as Pennsylvania and West Virginia have thousands), it is well located for out-of-state caving excursions, says Steward. Most of the caves in New Jersey are up north, in Warren and Sussex counties, he says. The Central New Jersey Grotto (New Jersey hosts three local grottos, as well as the tri-state grotto) has about 75 members, says Steward. While membership has been steady for years, he does believe that the upcoming release of an IMAX movie on caves and caving is bound to increase awareness of and interest in caving here and elsewhere.

With its reputation as an exotic and dangerous hobby for daredevils, there are many misconceptions about caving and cavers, says Steward.

For one, cavers are not known as “spelunkers,” a bastardization of the word speleology, which is the study of caves. Spelunkers are the unprepared amateurs who, like Tom Sawyer, venture into a cave with little knowledge and perhaps one light, courting disaster. Cavers are organized, careful and prepared.

“Cavers rescue spelunkers,” is how Steward puts it.

Caving tends to be a highly self-selecting sport by its very nature. Those fearful of heights and claustrophobics need not apply. A good sense of direction and no qualms about getting muddy from head to toe are positive caving attributes.

“And it does require a lot of stamina,” says Steward. “You usually don’t find big, heavy, out-of-shape people in caving.”

On the other hand, the equipment requirements are small compared to other sports. Good shoes, warm clothes, a headlight and several backup lights, and you are basically ready to go. And the rewards can be huge.

“The dream of every caver, of course, is to find a cave or find a passage that no one has ever been in, that is the ultimate. I mean if you find a virgin passage, at that point there’s been more people on the moon than have been in this place you are standing. It really is the last uncharted place on this planet,” says Steward.

Steward says his own greatest thrill was being part of a team that discovered more than 500 feet of unknown tunnels in a North Jersey cave, doubling the cave’s size and making it the largest cave in the state. “It’s a really eerie feeling, to be standing there and there’s no footprints in front of you and you know that no human being has ever been here,” he says. It is also eerie because “no one knows you are back here” if something happened, he adds.

Other than bats, wildlife in caves is rare and human relics almost nonexistent. Steward says he has run into skunks, raccoons and possums on occasion, and knows people who have encountered bears. Snakes, that cave staple in people’s imaginations, are a misconception. “I’ve never seen a snake [in a cave] in my life,” says Steward. And running out of air or underground earthquakes are occurrences that exist only in noncavers’ imaginations. “I’ve never been in an earthquake in a cave yet,” he says.

That is hardly to say caving is without danger. Serious falls into pits can and do occur, caves flood after rainstorms, rock falls happen, and cavers do get stuck—which is not life-threatening in itself, according to Steward, but becomes serious because of the risk of hypothermia as body heat is drawn out by the cold rock. Organized cavers never take a trip with fewer than four people, so if someone gets hurt, one person can stay with them and the other two can go get help, says Steward. The intent is to never have anyone in a cave alone, even in an emergency.

“With the proper equipment, proper training, knowledge and expertise you can really eliminate just about all the dangers,” says Steward. His own biggest scare, he recalls, was when he made a wrong turn in a cave and came across a flooded passage. Not knowing he had deviated from his route going in, Steward thought the cave was flooding. “That kind of fear can stay with you for a long time,” he says.

We creep steadily across slabs of rock, sliding and twisting through fissures and traversing 20-foot drops into the darkness. With mud covering most of our bodies, we are now approaching our goal, Leigh Cave’s innermost space, the high-ceilinged dome room. But first we have to squeeze through the “Mail Slot” and the “Birth Canal,” named for obvious reasons, says Steward.

Coached by Steward, sliding head-first on my belly and inclined steeply downward I move surprisingly easily through the mail slot’s tiny opening. Next, feet first, we push ourselves down, around and up through the final passage. “Welcome to the dome room, one of the largest cave rooms in New Jersey,” says Steward. I look at my watch.

It has been an hour and a half since we entered the cave, although it feels like we can’t have been underground more than 15 minutes.

The dome room at Leigh Cave is awe-inspiring. It is 45 feet from our entrance at the floor to the top of the dome and 25 feet wide. Three “balconies” can be climbed up to along its walls. Compared to the spaces we’ve been in, it is palatial. “You have to learn to crawl before you walk and that’s particularly true of caves in New Jersey,” says Steward.

As caves go, Leigh Cave is quite heavily utilized (Steward says he once escorted 27 Boy Scouts through it, quickly deflating any puffed-up sense of accomplishment held by this writer), but sitting in the dome room it feels like we have found the last refuge of tranquility in the crowded state of New Jersey.

Maintaining this pristine quality requires diligence, however, and Steward is adamant about the importance of proper preservation of and respect for cave environments. Cavers abide by the rule of leaving no trace of themselves but their footprints, and are active preservationists. Leaving litter and chipping off souvenir rocks are cardinal sins, as is in any way upsetting the habitat of the many bat species living in the caves. Respect for the caves also extends to respect for cave owners, says Steward, as many caves are on private property (Leigh Cave is on state land). Landowners regard cavers warily at best and do regularly close access to caves when conduct by visitors upsets them.

All of which is why Steward and Tudek strongly discourage simply grabbing a flashlight and heading for the nearest dark hole in the ground. Contacting the National Speleological Society to find out the nearest grotto club in your area, then attending a meeting, and taking a commercial cave tour to see if you enjoy the dark and close quarters are first steps they recommend.

If discovering virgin passages is the caver’s biggest thrill, emerging back into the open air has got to be a close second, at least in this rookie caver’s mind. Retracing our steps from the dome room, we have inched our way back through Leigh Cave, deviating from our original route part way and taking a separate tunnel out to a second cave entrance. A brown leaf on the tunnel floor provides the first clue that we are close. Before I know it, I’m back through the narrow tube and standing in the sunlight and crisp air again. Somehow the trees dappled with sunlight seem more beautiful, the air sweeter, the bright afternoon more languid than when I last took them in nearly three hours ago.

“Inside, all you do is focus on the cave. Did the outside world even exist there?” says Steward rhetorically, describing the full immersion experience of caving. He’s right, it didn’t.

We start to strip off our mud-saturated outfits. “You’ll be sore tomorrow,” says Steward. “If not, I didn’t do my job.”