Duo acquires Derry Township's Bear Cave

When Kim Metzgar was growing up, she wasn't allowed to go anywhere near Bear Cave in Derry Township because she was a girl.

That ban made her even more curious to see what was deep underneath her grandfather's property near Hillside. So at 14, she and her younger sister, Jackie, said they were going for a hike, and explored the depths of the cave for the first time.

'We were afraid of getting lost, so we just wandered in a little ways and came out,' she said.

Metzgar ventured in a few more times after that, and led an excursion while she was in college.

'I pretended that I was more familiar with the cave than I was, but we ended up following a string that someone else had left because I wasn't sure how to get out,' she said.

Years later, all that has changed.

Kim and her husband Tom, who live in Washington Township, recently acquired Bear Cave from the estate of her grandparents, Albert and Marion Smith.

That purchase has led the duo on a interesting journey.

To date, the Metzgars have discovered and documented 327 caves in Westmoreland County and explored many more in 30 states, including the one and only cave located in Delaware.

The two are members of the Loyalhanna Grotto and the Pittsburgh Grotto, two groups affiliated with the National Speleological Society. In 1997, the couple founded the Mid-Atlantic Karst Conservancy Inc.

'We want to educate landowners, cavers and the general public about the importance of karst resources (caves and sinkholes) and ways to preserve them,' Tom Metzgar said about the conservancy.

His first wild cave experience was in 1974 with a 4-H group near Beaver Run Dam. He later explored Bear Cave, but did not know Kim until they met at a caving program in Indiana later.

'We were both working on a history of Bear Cave, but neither of us knew it then,' she said.

Bear Cave was once owned by a pre-Civil War black man named George Butler. It was first documented in 1839 by Frederick J. Cope, a Greensburg area publisher known for his interest in agriculture and geology. The first recorded rescue was in 1875.

'There was an obit about Robert Flemming, who lived on a nearby farm, that included information that he had rescued many people from the cave,' Kim Metzgar said. Legend has it that Clint Hamilton, a notorious robber from Ligonier, lived in the cave in the 1870s. At the turn of the 20th century, there was also a rumor that a religious group was going to build a monastery there.

'In the 1920s, officials from Derry looked for a rapist in the cave, but he was found on the ridge near Bolivar,' she said. 'There was another story about a gypsy woman dying in the cave and someone finding her bones.'

Those facts, and sometimes legends, are just a small part of Bear Cave's fascinating past. Now the Metzgars are caretakers of its future, and through the non-profit conservancy, they are dedicated to protecting the fate of other caves, too.

The group now owns the half-mile long Billy Clay Pit in Pocohontas County, W.Va. It has a vertical entrance, nearly a mile of passages, multi-drops and a number of pristine features that are relatively untouched.

'Almost every part of the land of the whole surface of the earth has been walked upon or looked at by somebody,' Tom Metzgar said. 'But amazingly, within an hour's drive of where I live, it's possible to go places that on one has ever visited, to explore them and to go into an unknown world.'

The conservancy also has a 10-acre parcel in Huntingdon County near the commercial Lincoln Caverns and Whisper Rocks. It includes Hall Cave and a number of sinkholes in an area Tom Metzgar considers 'geographically favorable' to finding even more caves.

Caves in this area are present in two types of rock formations. Loyalhanna limestone, which may be 60 to 100 feet thick, is frequently exposed in major outcroppings on the Chestnut and Laurel ridges.

'These are usually maze caves found near or on the tops of mountains,' Tom Metzgar said. 'The entire cave tends to be on an angle because of the mountains. The rocks are folded and tilted, probably 10 to 15 degrees.'

The Vanport limestone formations in Armstrong, Butler, Beaver, Lawrence and Clarion counties have more flatlined mazed caves.

There are at least 1,200 documented caves in Pennsylvania, which is fewer than there are in Virginia and West Virginia. According to Kim Metzgar, Kentucky and Missouri each have about 4,000, and Delaware has only one.

'It's just a little rock shelter kind of thing,' she said. 'You can pretty much see the back of it from the entrance.'

While that's not a particularly exciting experience, each cave has its own appeal, whether it's the wildness of being unexplored, its formations or its residents. Cavers often find colonies of bats, from common brown bats and pipistrelles to the more rare Indiana bats. The couple also look for salamanders to report to the Pennsylvania Herpegeological Atlas Project based at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Wood rats, known as pack rats, live in local caves, too.

'They are very curious and interesting to observe, particularly if you sit still and they get used to your presence,' Tom Metzgar said. 'I've watched mothers nursing their young and bringing in food, or working on their nests.'

Those experiences are part of a quiet and dark world that few people ever see. It's what lures the Metzgars and other cavers to go underground.

'That's what I like about going into caves - that you could call it a poor man's adventure,' he said.