Editor’s Note: I’m happy to share our first “guest blog,” written by an old friend and caving mentor, Bob Addis. He shares his thoughts on one of caving’s greatest folk tales, that of the Howe “Garden of Eden.” (Incidentally, both Bob and I have put in time searching for the lost cave. We’ll keep it a secret. Photo by Art Palmer.)
By BOB ADDIS
The best and most often told tale-yarn-legend in northeastern caving circles is that of Lester Howe’s long-sought “Garden of Eden Cave” and the “Finger of Geology” that points to its location.
Learning the tale is a prerequisite for every new adventurer who takes an interest in NY’s Cave Country. The Garden of Eden legend has encouraged more cave hunting activity—ridge walking, digging, and hard pushing in the most dismal low, wet and muddy crawls and impossibly tight crevices—than anyone could imagine. It’s also been good for the advancement of NE cave science and “building the character” of the cavers who move on to states with more, and larger, caves.
How it All Began
The story begins like this: On his death bed in July 1888, Lester Howe is rumored to have sat up and said, “I have discovered a cave larger and more beautiful than Howe’s Cave, but I will reveal its location to no man.” He flopped back and died. Good one, heh?
A lesser repeated subset rumor, but without an exact quote, is that two men learned of the location from Howe at this time. The pact they made was that after one of them died, another new man would be entrusted with the secret. In that way, at least two men would always know the cave’s location.
Of course, both men died without passing along the secret of the Garden of Eden.
Lester was a rascal, self-promoter, and well known for blowing smoke.
For example, Lester guided many of the early tours through Howe’s Cave and numerous newspaper accounts varied on the details given them by Howe. He may have simply “made it up as he went along!” (I won’t attempt to prove this point here since both Thom Engel’s book and two by Dana Cudmore do an excellent job on the subject.)
From about 1928-31, Arthur Van Voris, a Cobleskill merchant, led a group of young men around the cave country and recorded their underground adventures in a series called The Lesser Caves of Schoharie County. Separate editions were held in five loose-leaf, three-ring notebooks. Some articles also appeared in the local papers.
The five notebooks were continuously updated and expanded by Van Voris and given to what he considered reference facilities. As a result of his updating habit, the notebooks didn’t all have the same content and by 1980 they all had been lost or stolen. Fortunately, the regional Mohawk-Hudson Grotto of the National Speleological Society borrowed one notebook in 1970, retyped it, and put out a limited edition of the publication, thus saving its important contents.
Van Voris’s brother-in-law, Edward Rew, was one of those early cavers and most likely no stranger to smoke blowing. One or more of the notebooks had Rew’s account of a solo trip he took one night during a dry season when water levels were extremely low. He explored Veen Fliet’s Cave on the Schoharie Creek near the village of the same name, and he claimed he went on and on a great distance only to turn back when he realized he was alone with only one flashlight, or some such. He never could get back to the cave and delayed telling the story for years. (More about this later.)
Was Lester’s deathbed description of finding a “larger and more beautiful” cave his own? Interestingly, Howe’s last utterance only first appears in Van Voris’s newspaper articles in the 1930s and hadn’t been found previously. But remember, Lester was a rascal and could have said it only to perplex future generations!
And now, the Finger of Geology
The northeast has raised many speleologists who have gone on to national and international acclaim. Geologists are quick to note the lineal nature of the fractures and fissures in the area’s bedrock limestones, and how cave passages were often created from them. That they “lined up” hints the passages might continue beyond any obstacle that blocked them along these major and minor joint patterns. Could new cave passages—maybe even the Garden of Eden—be found by following the joint patterns?
The most obvious case was roughly a mile of large trunk passage in McFail’s Cave, collectively the NW and SE passages, lining up closely with about a mile of similar passage in Howe Caverns, i.e., Lester Howe’s Cave.
On a bearing of N47W, these two large passages are truncated by a valley cut by glaciers 100,000 years ago.
Extend that bearing to S47E and it points at a geological feature called Terrace Mountain. This a plateau of mostly limestone left after twoseparate streams cut around it. The south is bound by the Schoharie Creek and the geologically younger east side is bound by the Cobleskill Creek.
Terrace Mountain has another important link to our story. It was home to Lester Howe’s Garden of Eden farm, where he settled sometime around 1870 after selling his beloved (first?) cave, and the site became an epicenter of Lester weirdness and other tall tales and rumors we won’t get into here.
Extending that compass bearing from McFail’s through the trunk of Howe’s Cave through Terrace Mountain, with some imagination and a slightly flexible straightedge, it leads to Rew’s findings in Veen Fliet’s Cave. And it comes close to some smaller caves and pits on Terrace Mountain as well.
So naturally, one could assume this is the Finger of Geology pointing out where cavers should go to look for the fabled cave! Rew, also known for some good-natured prevarication, hinted that it was.
By the 1950s, a group of enthusiastic cavers in the Tri-County Grotto from Oneonta in neighboring Otsego County, worked the Schoharie County caves hard and produced amazing and strange discoveries. A young Cliff Foreman was making a name for himself as part of that group. Again, I refer to Cudmore’s books documenting this.
Forward to the “Golden Caving Age” of the 1960s in the northeast and the presence of three brilliant pranksters: Dave Beiter, Steve Egemeirer and again, Cliff Foreman. To the urban, sophisticated new cavers coming out of New York City and New Jersey, these rural “Super Cavers” appeared to be easy sources of information on the caves and geology of Schoharie County. The newcomers assumed they could simply flatter their rural experts and pump them with questions to find their way around the cave country.
The game wasn’t going to be that easy.
Dave would pull out his topographic maps and Steve, a professional geologist with the USGS, would run his finger from McFail’s to Howe and on to Terrace Mountain and Veen Fliet’s, all the time chattering on about “the Finger of Geology” and tapping along the line on the map. (I witnessed this procedure several times and apparently none of the newer cavers ever got the joke or the information. I was 22 at the time.)
And the fun part of this “game” was for Dave, Steve, and Cliff to take on different roles in the farce. Any one of them was capable of spinning the yarn or asking leading questions to hint at the fabled cave’s possible location. Dave went so far one year as to indicate a fabricated location for the Garden of Eden on a map, and then leave the rolled-up map where the other group might find it. Sure enough, next year a dig was underway at the very spot.
Dave, Steve and Cliff have passed, but the rumor they helped spread persists 135 years after Howe’s death. True or not, it certainly has been a driving force in caving the northeast. I think Cudmore in his book, Underground Empires, expressed the dream and drive best. “There, in a vast room miles into the hillside, set among abundant crystal-like formations, the explorers may find chiseled in the limestone wall or written in soot from an oil-burning lamp: “Garden of Eden Cave. Discovered 1855 by L. Howe.
Bob Addis, a retired engineer living is Scotia, New York, is a long-time northeastern caver, former Howe Caverns tour guide, and past member of the board of governors of the National Speleological Society. His MBA thesis on the management of Knox Cave in Albany County led to the creation of the Northeastern Cave Conservancy in 1978. One of the conservancy’s three founding members, he served as president of that organization for 38 years.
He has managed several caves open to the public, and explored wild caves across the US, and in Germany, Mexico, and South Africa.