Adventures In Spelunking Or How I Got Lost In Fern Cave

In 1973 when I was a teenager living in Huntsville Alabama my friends and I would frequently explore the many caves that were in the area. Since northern Alabama is composed of limestone there are caves and tunnels that were carved by underground rivers over millions of years. The majority of these caves are simply a tunnel that can snake around for miles underground.

We would even camp out in these caves and spend a night as bats would fly overhead. We thought we were experienced spelunkers and that we could handle anything underground but we would soon learn that was not entirely accurate.
My friend had researched this cave at the local library and was amazed that a cave with one of the deepest vertical shafts in the U.S. at 437 feet was located a short distance from where we lived. This cave was known as Fern Cave in Paint Rock Alabama. It is 15 miles of winding tunnels.
We decided to go and check it out. We didn’t take any food or water as we were just going to make an initial trip to try and locate the entrance and maybe go inside a short distance before an in depth exploration would take place.
We rode motorcycles to a dirt road that wound up a mountain. At the top of the mountain there were huge ferns in a wilderness forest that supposedly marked the cave entrance. We searched for a while and finally found a small hole that was the cave entrance. We squeezed through and it opened into a larger room.
We noticed that someone had tied string to mark the entrance and the string was about 100 feet long. We had our flashlights and started to proceed to locate the deep vertical shaft. We hiked for hours through tunnels where you could stand erect. What we soon discovered was that there were holes in the roof and floor of the tunnels that were randomly space out and were large enough to climb up or down into where we would then enter another tunnel that was running parallel with the original tunnel.
It soon became apparent that the mountain was honey combed with tunnels that comprised a maze of possible routes to take. We eventually found a large hole in the ground where if you dropped a rock into it to listen to the sound of it hitting below you can get an idea of how far down it goes. When we dropped rocks into it we couldn’t hear any sounds so we knew we had finally found the shaft. We didn’t bring any climbing gear as this was just an initial exploration of the system.
We entered one huge cavern where the ground became mushy. When we looked up we could see hundreds of bats hanging from the ceiling. The mushy ground was from bat poop or guano that had accumulated there over the centuries.
We decided to return to the cave mouth to depart the cave and return home. That is when it became apparent that we were lost and had no idea how to get back. We had travelled through several large rooms that were huge along with many tunnels and had moved up and down through them on several levels. We were in a 3D maze that was vertical and horizontal inside a massive mountain with miles of tunnels.
After several hours of trying to retrace our steps my flashlight sputtered and went out. We continued for a while and then my friend’s light also went out. We were lost and now we had no light.
A cave has absolutely no light. It is so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face. It is like being blind. So we got down on our hands and knees and crawled while we felt ahead to make sure we didn’t fall off a cliff. I kept thinking that at some point we could be at the edge of that really deep hole. Every minor drop of the ground of even an inch felt like it might be that deep hole. Eventually we did come to the edge of what felt like a large drop off. We threw rocks into it and couldn’t hear them hit the bottom so we knew we were at the big hole. We carefully crawled around it and I felt relieved that it was now behind us.
We were in the cave for what seemed like forever. Not only were we blind but time seems to stand still as well. At one point we had crawled into a nook where the ceiling and floor were only a foot apart and were forming a dead end. I was ready to give up as it appeared to be an impossible task.
Then we noticed what appeared to be stars in the distance. I thought I was hallucinating because we were in a closed system and there was no access to the sky. We crawled in that direction and observed that the stars were actually forming a circle which seemed weird but I was desperate and kept crawling toward them. Eventually we came to a rock wall and reached out and touched the little lights only to realize that the stars were actually little drops of water that contained some type of phosphorescent organisms and were gathered around the small hole that was the entrance to the cave.
I found out later that many experienced people had become lost in this cave that required rescuers to locate them and bring them out. There was even at least one death reported of a cave crawler accident. We were lucky and fortunate that we made it out with no injuries.