Preface

Way back in the 1940s, William E. Davies, pioneering cave geologist, best known for writing Caves of West Virginia, casts about for the best locations in the Appalachians where exceptionally large caves might be found. He announced that the most potential was to be found in a small synclinal valley in west central Virginia called Burnsville Cove. The Tonoloway and Helderberg limestones reach their maximum thickness in the Cove, or the order of 800 feet, before they facie into sandstone farther to the south. The geologic structure wraps the limestones around the anticlinal and synclinal axes in such a way as to permit extensive cave development. Most obvious, and requiring less intricate geological reasoning, was the observation that Sinking Creek, the main drainage of the Cove, is underground for most of its route. A number of mostly small caves were known in Burnsville Cove in the 1940s, but an exception was Burnsville Saltpetre Cave, later known as Breathing Cave, certainly a very large cave by the standards of the day. Cavers from the Nittany Grotto at the Pennsylvania State University became interested in Breathing Cave in the mid-1950s and took on the project of producing a high-quality map. One of the Nittany cavers, George Deike, decided to write his masters thesis on a geological interpretation of Breathing Cave. While Deike’s thesis research was underway, I. Kennedy (Ike) Nicholson, his sons, and their friends were searching the Cove for Davies’ hypothetical giant cave system. In May of 1958, as the Breathing Cave work was drawing to a close, the searchers found air blowing from beneath a sandstone ledge on the side of a large sinkhole. The Butler Cave-Sinking Creek System had been discovered. Nittany cavers teamed up with the Nicholson family and their group to produce a map and further explore this spectacular new discovery. The sinkhole containing the only natural entrance to Butler Cave lies on the flank of Jack Mountain, half a mile west and on the opposite side of a ridge from the public road in Burnsville Cove. Access was always somewhat problematic and depended on the good will of land owners whose property must be crossed to reach the cave. There was also the question of controlling access and thus protecting the cave as its size and location became more widely known among the caving community. To solve both of these problems, the Butler Cave Conservation Society was formed in 1968, formally incorporated as a legal entity in the State of Virginia. The BCCS could then lease the cave from the owner and legally install a gate to control access. As time went on, BCCS purchased the Butler farm and became involved with the exploration of other caves in the Cove. There were further major discoveries on the Chestnut Ridge side of the valley, and in due course, additional properties were purchased. Thus, the year 2008 marked the 50th anniversary of the discovery of