For my 40th Birthday this year I wanted to do something special. After much thought I decided I would like to finally visit the P Passage in Blue Spring Cave and camp out. We've been to Blue Spring a few times in the past but this is a trip that Jason and I have talked about doing for years so it only seemed appropriate that I would visit a 40 mile long cave for my 40th birthday. Blue Spring Cave is located in White County, Tennessee and is the longest in the state of Tennessee. I contacted the landowner and obtained permission and then began to put together a few trips for the weekend. We contacted Marion O. Smith and asked if he would be willing to lead our trip to P Passage and Zeke volunteered to lead a second group to the Root Cellar. Our group met up at the cave on Saturday morning, February 4th, which also happened to be Justin Hydrick's birthday! Trip 1 consisted of myself, Jason Hardy, Marion O. Smith, Sharon Jones, Chris Naugle, Travis Camp, Alan Camp and Kitty Rose. Trip 2 was Zeke, Justin, Teresa Lingerfelt, Frank Maynard, Melissa Harris, Susan Williamson and Jason Lavender. Anne & Blaine Grindle and Jennifer Denton arrived late so went in as our third trip on their own. Once inside while we were all at the cave register, Marion proceeded to tell us exactly what he was doing on the day I was born, quite a story that was! Trip 1 took off being led by Sharon and Marion while Trip 2, which was led by Zeke proceeded behind. To get to our destination we had to go thru the BO Crawl, which also took us past the Jaguar Tracks and the Gypsum Beards. Those are always nice to see again. Once at the Mega Junction we made our way over to the rope for the 90' climb up. We each climbed up and made our into the P Passage. The borehole up there was quite amazing and seeing the blue celestite was pretty amazing too. While we were checking out the blue celestite Marion, Travis & Jason sang Happy Birthday to me! Overall, our team was in the cave about 9 hours and we camped out afterwards on the property
The view we woke up to on Sunday morning in camp.
Mario O. Smith telling us what he did on February 05, 1977