Twice I went on spring afternoons equipped with general directions. I had first "been taken" to many of the nearby Sipsey Wilderness′ special places: to Bee Branch Hollow, Fall Creek Falls, the Valentine Pool, Keyhole Bluff, to Quillen and Borden Creek Canyons. I wanted to find the Indian cave myself.
It could be found, they said, in the hollow of a certain creek in the de facto wilderness above the Sipsey boundary. Walk out an old dirt roadbed and look for a good, wide trail to the right, I was instructed. I chose to hope that some guide had not ruined my adventure with arrows on rocks or an assembly of oriented stones.
Three times I hunted up and down the creek canyon, and I found plenty: capillary side hollows with stunning, waterfall beginnings, venerable eastern hemlock, white oak and cucumber magnolia with its white megaflowers. I spotted a coyote, bobcat and deer tracks, a pair of turkeys, and a copperhead just in time. Certain points on the floodplain of the creek I found gloriously overstrewn with trout lilies, Virginia bluebells, rue anemone, and trillium. I saw crags and bluff faces robed in spectacular mountain laurel. Once I discovered a stand of spiderworts on the top of a sheer cliff face along with reindeer moss so fragile and tenuously located it crackled and crunched beneath the weight of my hand. An October morning not long after daylight I sat in the canyon and listened to the staccato busywork of woodpeckers - those wildwood roosters - from every direction.
I didn′t find the Indian cave.
I began to dream about it: That I stumbled onto it, egregiously relocated to the Sipsey Wilderness, that it featured a great vertical opening, with a ghastly siren at the entrance, the stuff in a phobic′s nightmare.
When I stopped looking was when I found it. Walking a trail that followed the top rim of the canyon on my fourth trip to the area, I noticed a faint path leading to the left and off the rim, one I should have seen twice before when I went that way.
It turned out to be, as I expected, a great amphitheater overarched with stone, its front fortressed by large boulders and young poison ivy plants. A spring that fed the hollow was formed by the confluence of several drips that fell over the front edge and through the roof. The shelter contained a central recess with a boulder at its egress (no siren). Another boulder at the left end of the shelter displayed petroglyphs highlighted with chalk. (Though archeologists actually say the oils in the chalk may damage the petroglyphs.)
It has been said that the progress of a civilization is best measured not by what it overruns and alters, but what it can afford to leave alone. We cannot unearth a single aboriginal experience. We can perhaps enrich our own understanding.
When I am asked about the cave by people I don′t especially care for, I say, "Sure, I′ll be glad to take you there sometime."
When it′s someone I love, I lean close and whisper, "The cave is high in the Hubbard Creek drainage above the wilderness boundary and northwest of Kinlock Falls, in an area that was left out of the last wilderness bill for reasons only agency people fathom. Go find it."
From Double Springs take Hwy 195 to Rabbittown, turn right on FS Road 210, cross Hubbard Creek on a low water bridge, ascend a long hill and park at a gated gravel road to the left. Start looking. Refer to the Bee Branch quadrangle for topo guidance.