Wayne's Cave

  I have heard about Wayne's Cave being a interesting place to checkout with its infamous 1/4 mile crawl and miles of cave passge beyond the army crawl section.  Waynes cave is located in Bloomington Indiana and we were able to get access to visit this day on a cold sunday morning.  We didnt want to spend too much time as we had to get back to chicago that night and some others had to get back to Iowa.  We all met up in bloomington and set out for the property in a convoy of cars upto the gate.  We parked and geared up to enter waynes cave which had a gated entrance.

Right at the beginning of the crawl, Wayne's Cave

We took a before shot before we entered the cave and rigged a handline in case we needed it to get over the steep entrance. We all made it down and found the start to the crawl where we got down on our bellies and pushed our way through the army crawl passage.

Wayne's Cave before we enter



Entrance to Wayne's Cave


Our clothes were ripping apart and the clunkling sound of knee and elbo pads could be heard echoing down this small crawl.  There were spots where we were able to take breaks by sitting up a bit but there was not much room for that.  Eventually, we made it to a slot canyon passage that continued to get deeper until it became a dry fall and the exit to the main trunk passage of Wayne's Cave

Wayne's Cave passage

The passage was maninly a canyon like passage that was interesting to traverse and had some exposure to it. We followed a merry go round room and came back to where we started at the exposed climbdown trunk passage. We continued to follow the trunk passage down and made it to a section where we had to climb up and traverse over a exposed slippery slope.  We rigged some more webbing for this section for safety.  We continue on into some bigger rooms and pass camp one and camp2

Wayne's Cave passage

We made it to camp three and decided to take a break here to chill a bit and get our bearings as to how far we got in the cave and what time we had left to either keep going or start turning back.  We decided that we should start turning back due to the limited about of time that we had so we made our traverse out of the cave in good time.

Liz davis and others in the crawl passage taking a break Wayne's Cave

Going through the crawl we lost almost half of our group so coming back out was a little faster than going in but we all had a blast and were glad we spent a day in Wayne's Cave.

Phil Goldman at Wayne's Cave

Wayne's Cave