Silver Waters Cave - 5/31/2026
Scott Buchanan reporting:
On the last day of May in 2026, a fantastical bunch of humans came together on the Silver Waters Farm in beautiful Riverton, West Virginia to do some caving activities. I had recently been given permission to check out a recently discovered, surveyed, and mapped cave called Silver Waters Cave. Fortunately Mark Minton and Yvonne Droms were part of the team that opened the cave up and helped make it into what it is today. They also agreed to come along and act as guides on this trip. Which I very very much appreciated as did everyone else. We also had a very enthusiastic ground team that wanted to come along to learn and see what all goes along with setting up to enter a vertical cave.
We all seemed to have arrived before 10am and we were down in the cave around 11 maybe? We rigged the rope to Will Sciandra’s jeep battlewagon and down the hole I headed. The cave itself is only 58ft deep at its deepest so far however there is the initial drop of around 15ft with a rebelay down another 15-20ft and then one more drop of about 15ft to where you can access the creek level. I rigged the cave and Mark followed me and kept me safe and showed me where they had put the rope previously.
Now I want to make sure everyone knows that this is not a large cave. It’s very tight down in the creek passage. You can’t pass by anyone and in places you cannot turn around. Chris, Brendan, and Will got on rope and came down into the cave. Once they got down ready to do the drop to the creek level, Mark headed back up to hang with the ground team. Once everyone came down, Chris and Brendan headed upstream as far as they could reasonably fit and they reported the air wasn’t flowing as nicely where they were. Their body heat and fog from exhaling was building up in the passage. I had headed upstream to come find them when they decided to turn around. I hadn’t made to where they were and I already was creating fog from my body heat so once I made verbal contact I turned around where I could and headed back to where the passage back up top is.
We each took turns looking downstream and decided we would try and modify the passage to fit into the next area we could see. We all then made our way back up out of the cave where we used Will’s WiFi from his Jeep to communicate with the outside world. We dried off a little bit and we all headed back down with some extra gear.
I drilled some holes and we took turns jamming the leads into the battery. Once we move some spoils, a smaller caver could maybe fit into the next “room”. At this point it was past 3pm so we all decided to head back up out of the cave. Will had set up a haul line to get our gear up faster and easier. We all made our way back up and derigged the cave as we ascended. Once on the surface we talked about making plans to return to keep working and quickly cleaned up our gear.
I believe an excellent time was had by all and we all felt more confident in our abilities. The landowners also deserve praise for being so welcoming and polite.
On the trip were Scott Buchanan, Mark Minton, Yvonne Droms, Chris Meyle, Will Sciandra, Brendan Murphy, Joy Waring, Haley Vaught, Branden Wood, Austin Hawk, Austin’s Dog,
Bonus trip to Kees cave afterwards. Brendan, Branden, Scott.
