Carter Caves kicks off Winter Adventure Weekend

DAVE LAVENDER
The Herald-Dispatch

Just about anything you ever wanted to try in the outdoors, you can learn next weekend as Carter Caves State Resort Park hosts its inaugural Winter Adventure Weekend with 77 different trips featuring cave tours of all types, rappelling, ziplining, hiking, canoeing, winter survival classes, technical tree climbing and exploring natural bridges.

Set for Friday, Jan. 29, through Sunday, Jan. 31, the weekend is open to anyone 6 years old and up.

A list of the guided trips, along with registration information and other details about the weekend, is available at www.winteradventureweekend.com. All participants must register online at this site.

The nonrefundable fee for adults (13 years old and older) is $25 and the nonrefundable fee for children ages 6-12 is $20. (Some trips have age requirements.)

Park naturalist and one of the event organizers, Coy Ainsley, said they're excited about the weekend, which is a replacement event for the park's famous Crawlathon, which ran for 27 years and had become the world's largest winter-time caving event with up to 700 cavers coming from all over the United States and Canada to cave.

Ainsley said he and the Crawlathon volunteers were devastated last year when the perennial favorite event was canceled with a week's notice in January 2009 due to the White Nose Syndrome, a disease killing bats but that has not been found in Kentucky. Several caves at the state park have been closed as a precaution but two caves remain open for tours.

"About six to eight weeks ago, we were really undecided on what to do so we put out some ideas out there with the past Crawlathon staff members and other folks interested in adventure-type activities and we've come up with a pretty cool weekend," Ainsley said.

Captaining some of that cool will be Winter Adventure weekend's guest speaker, Benjy Simpson, the founder of Passages to Adventure, in the New River Gorge, and veteran whitewater guide, caving, rock climbing, high ropes, wilderness emergency, and kayaking instructor.

Perhaps best known for overseeing the New River Gorge Bridge Day Rappel, Simpson is setting up a cliff-to-cliff high-line zip available for trips Friday through Sunday and is also delivering the keynote speech called, "I Chose to Play," at 8:30 p.m. Saturday (Jan. 30) following an update on white nose syndrome from biologist Brooke Slack, of the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Simpson, who has been over the Bridge Day rappel since 1992, will share memories from his days as an adventure entrepreneur (i.e., Outward Bound, Encounter Four, his adjudicated youth program, Passages To Adventure, New River Gorge Bridge Day Rappel and his upcoming adventure Bridge Walk).

Simpson will set up a 50-feet-high, 300-feet-long highline for folks to zip cliff-to-cliff through the park.

That's just one of the on-rope highlights to the new Adventure Weekend, which is carrying on many aspects of Crawlathon that it can.

With many experienced climbers and rappelers on staff such as Bruce Bannerman and Jerry and Lisa Brandenburg, the new weekend will feature such popular beginner rappels such as "Down for Dummies" and "Up for Idiots," as well as advanced rappels such as "the Bridges of Carter County -- on Rappel," rappels down Carter Caves' three largest natural bridges, Smokey (25 feet), Natural (50 feet) and Fern Bridge (80 feet).

"We have some cave trips just not the normal Crawlathon ones, but we have a whole lot of above ground adventures that will take place and some things we've brought back from Crawlathon," Ainsley said. "It's hard to find a place to where you can rappel off a cliff with no experience at all."

Ainsley said a couple of the new things they've added include winter survival classes as well as recreational tree climbing tours, which are filling up fast.
Folks will be harnessed in for tree climbs not unlike the rigs used when arborists climb trees for tree trimming.

Although the threat of White Nose Syndrome has closed all but X Cave and Cascade, there will be multiple trips to those caves and some unique ones as well including historical lighting trips, flashlight tours and educational tours above and below ground.

Crawlathon fans will also be happy to hear that the infamous indoor crawling events, the timed Squeezebox and the lodge basement labyrinth known as the Corrugated Cave are both part of the weekend.
Registration started Jan. 9 and Ainsley said about 80 percent of those registering so far are folks who have been to one of the Crawlathons past.
Ainsley said they're making the best of it while the park, and the state, waits to see what happens with White Nose Syndrome, and what impact it will have on the bat populations and on caving activities at the park home to about 20 caves, and to about half a dozen caves that were open to the public.

"We have such a great core group of volunteers many who have been here for decades with the event (Crawlathon) and I think it's important to keep that tight-knit group focused on the park and on an even similar to the nature of Crawlathon," Ainsley said. "After e-mailing back and forth and getting things rolling since November, the excitement is building up and we went from having a handful of trips and ideas to having 77 different trips. It is up there and definitely going to be a comparable event to Crawlathon. ... I think that this event will keep us going on until we get the cave access back and bring Crawlathon back to life."