Ellison's Cave runs under Pigeon Mountain in Walker County, in the Appalachian Plateaus of northwest Georgia, and it is a serious vertical cave rather than a show cave. It is owned and managed by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.
The numbers are the reason cavers come from across the country. Over 12 miles of passage are known, with a vertical extent of 1,063 feet, making it the 19th deepest cave in the United States. It contains two of the deepest pits in the contiguous states: Fantastic at 586 feet and Incredible at 440 feet, which lie on opposite sides of the cave.
Fantastic is not really a pit in its own right. It is one of several rappel points into the enormous TAG Hall canyon, marking its upstream end, with All-in-One at 374 feet furthest downstream and the Smokey I rig point at 500 feet midway along. Other drops elsewhere in the system include New Pit at 256 feet, Smokey II at 262, Snowball Dome at 265 and Broken Dome at 281.
One thing gets repeated and is wrong: Ellison's is often said to hold the deepest pit in the United States. Fantastic is the second.
The water that carved it comes back to daylight at a spring at the foot of the mountain, called the Blue Hole.
This is rope work in the dark over drops taller than most buildings, and the record is blunt about what that costs. On 12 February 2011 two University of Florida students with no caving experience died of hypothermia after becoming stranded on rope in the frigid waterfall of the 125-foot Warm-Up Pit. The post-accident evaluation found the deaths completely avoidable and solely the result of ill-preparation and a lack of basic knowledge; they were with a group of eight others who did not have the equipment to help them. In May 2013 a caver fell 40 feet scrambling a rock pile and the rescue, complex as it was, still took 21 hours.
The cave is open year round except for special hunting weekends, and anyone on DNR land needs a land use permit or a sportsman’s licence or they can be charged with trespassing.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
