TAG Caves
October 7-8, 2008

Made my first TAG (Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia) this year with Wendy. Camped and caved quite a bit, had to say I really had a great time. Camped with Nic Domico, one of Wendy's co-workers, and Greg Wilson and Jennifer Burns, both NSS members. Traveled to Howard's Waterfall cave and spent about three and a half hours inside. The profile picture on here is actually the entrance of Howard's Waterfall. Very open cave, lots of places to crawl around in, and many places to climb as well. Went quite a ways back, even managed to find one of the registries, all five of us signed. Ran into two other groups of cavers while in the cave, one entered about the same time we did, never actually ran into them again after the entrance. The other was coming in on our way out, very large group, about eight or nine I believe, including one child that was around 4 years old. Two of the latter group had carbide head lamps.

Cedar Ridge Crystal Cave
The second cave during TAG, Crystal Rock Caverns, fairly small, only around 400' and only one way to go. FULL of formations. Lots of breakdown in the cave, one room completely covered with it, and all the formations made for some complicated squeezes since I was trying to maneuver without touching the formations. The roof was all soda straws in every room and there were rock columns that were around 25' tall. The cave was mainly comprised of five large circular rooms, a few climbing spots on the sides of the third room allowed for some interesting vantage points to take pictures from, however something was wrong with the camera housing and it left a black reflection on the bottom right of all my pictures, so nothing came out so well. There was a group of photographers in the cave as well, spotlighting the rock columns and other various formations.