Aside from a good public school system, South Fayette Township, in Allegheny County, has some of the very worst stuff that suburban life has to offer. It's not the "leafy suburbs" with elegant homes and tasteful shops, brewpubs and creative restaurants. No, South Fayette is where sprawling new developments of bland McMansions creep further and further outward each year, devouring what few fields and pastures remain in the county. These grand-looking-but-cheaply-built homes sell for about half a million, and they're gathered into stifling subdivisions with Anglophilic names like Hastings, Canongate, or the Berkshires... In the valleys between these vast swaths of suburban sprawl, there are old mining villages, railroad tracks, patches of woods. A few embattled farms remain, but not for long.
The public park bears a name as uninteresting as you'd expect, and every bit as charmless as its character: Fairview Park. It's mostly a treeless space with ballfields. As an anomaly, there is an old cemetery in this park where inmates from the now-demolished Mayview Hospital (a once-notorious insane asylum) are buried in unnamed graves. That might be the subject of a future post. I never would have believed that a place so banal would be home to a large, hidden cave.
My daughter found out about the cave from some friends. Local teenagers seem to know about it. The way is very steep and slippery, but someone has tied ropes to the trees to use in getting up and down the hillside. There's also graffiti, beer cans, and even a little furniture to prove that the cave sees its share of visitors.
The cave is in the valley wall on a tall rise overlooking Chartiers Creek. From the top of the same hill, you can see the public park in Upper St. Clair--which is the next suburb over. The mouth opens into a large chamber with tunnels going off in four directions. The two passages to your left open onto smaller rooms but eventually come to a dead end. The two passages to your right also open to smaller chambers, but they join up and form a loop back to the main chamber.
There are old mineshafts in this area, and when my daughter told me about the cave, I was pretty sure that it was really just the remains of an old coal mine--which alarmed me a little. I don't want her going to places like that. But it's not. This is a real cave.
This is the main chamber, looking toward the entrance.
If you take the second passage from the right, it leads to the cave's most distant room, where someone has set up a little underground hangout. There's a folding chair, some cushions, some strings of fairy lights, and many, many old beer cans.
I was afraid that on such a beautiful Saturday in the spring, I'd find teenagers in the cave, but I had the place to myself.
The opening is maybe ten feet high.
But this is standard South Fayette, pictured here: miles and miles and MILES of green lawns and newly-planted trees. It's not the kind of place where you'd expect to go spelunking. (Then again, South Fayette is home to a few ancient farmhouses, one of which serves as both the bane of my worldly existence as well as a beloved, cantankerous character in the drama of my life.)
To find the cave, go to Fairview Park in South Fayette Township, then walk up to these water towers from the parking lot by the baseball field. Turn left at the towers and find two mowed, grassy trails. The leftward trail has a sign announcing that it leads to a leash-free zone for dogs. There are SO MANY reasons not to take that trail: 1) other people's dogs are annoying, and 2) it's the wrong way. Take the trail to the right and then take another right where a smaller trail leads into the woods.
You'll come to a spot where an ersatz bridge crosses a shallow culvert. It's just two narrow logs laid across a dip in the trail. Very shortly after this "bridge," you'll see a steep scrambling trail off to the right; this leads to the cave. There's pink graffiti on a tree at the spot where you begin your downward climb---pictured here. The way wends between tree roots and rocks. Be careful! It's very steep and slippery. You'll need to use the two ropes that someone has tied to the trees--both descending and ascending. I believe that if you take the same trail further downhill past the cave, it leads to the banks of Chartiers Creek.
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