Exploring Grotto Cave in Otis Maine

    Yesterday was Jaime’s birthday so today continued her four day celebration. We got together with her father for lobsters and some exploration. A few years ago I read about a cave near his house, where Jaime grew up, but he had never heard of it. He had been to the area it was located though, in fact right on top of it but never knew there was a cave down below. I copied the information into a word document which is good because the geological website it was featured on appears to be gone. With no real directions on how to get there I did some research on Google Earth and got a pretty good idea where to start. Today was the day to begin the search.

    With my research and Jaime’s dad’s knowledge of the area, as well as a couple firsthand accounts he’d heard from local friends, we knew we were heading in the right direction. Boy is it nice to do these sorts of things with a local, we parked at the boat launch and Dicky knew the guy who was washing his truck and we got some directions from him which pretty much matched up to what I had gathered from my research. He referred to the cave as ‘the bear caves’. So we headed up a gravel road that looked like nothing more than a driveway. He told us we’d get a little wet by the swamp this time of year which seemed about right because I knew we had to follow the road to the edge of a swamp before cutting uphill through the trees.

    Sure enough we came to the swamp which was dammed up pretty good by beavers. The road was under a few feet of water with the dam running right along the side of it. We skirted around the first dam, crossing a small brook, but came to another much longer dam that we couldn’t easily walk around. So we tight roped a hundred feet or so across it. We got a little wet but no one fell in. The dam brought us up close and personal with the beaver hut but there was no activity.

    On the other side of the dam we made our way into the woods and off the muddy jeep road. All we knew was that we needed to get to the top of the hill so we made our way up, crossing multiple atv trails along the way. Luckily it was kind of chilly today which prevented the sweat from pouring as we wandered through the woods, eventually making it to the top of the ridge. We followed the ridgeline for a couple minutes before spotting a clearing up ahead. Jaime and I stopped to watch a couple of snakes sun bathing while Dicky made his way through the clearing, yelling back that we’d made it to the top and there was one hell of a view.

    When he was a kid he’d been camping there before, right on top of the hill with a beautiful view looking out over Beech Hill Pond and Graham Lake as well as a few ridgelines of nearby mountains. We hadn’t expected such a spectacular view, figuring trees would surely obscure it, but there was a long ledge we were standing on that towered over most of the trees. We knew we were on top of the cave, we just needed a way down. A safe way down, the way I found was direct but something only a fool would do. Yes I would have done it but opted to find a safer way everyone felt comfortable with.

    While traveling along the band of ledges looking for a safe way down I spotted a hole in the cliff, one of the chimney entrances into the cave I had read about. We found it. Right around here we found a good way down that brought us beside a small cave in the ledges where we assume a porcupine lived, the entire entrance to it was covered with porcupine poop, not even an inch of ground being visible. The cliffs we were just on top of were a lot higher up than we thought, between 30 and 40 feet. We were right in our decision to not get too close to the edge.

    Following the base of the cliff we came to the multiple entrances to the cave I had read about. The main entrance no longer had any steps leading up to it, just an old rotted log that was no longer useable. The cliff walls were too smooth for me to get a good enough grip to climb my way into the crevice so we carried on, finding other ways in. Everything was a little wet from the recent rain but we found a nice dry opening that required a little climbing but no crawling in the mud. That entrance ended up being the only one we could really get into but it was pretty cool.

     I did some more climbing and made it into another chamber but couldn’t squeeze my broad shoulders down into a tight squeeze that lead to another portion of the cave. I explored a bit, figuring out where the different cracks and crevices lead to. It’s a neat little talus cave system, nothing I would consider to be a real cave though. Only one tiny portion really required a flashlight and it was just a little too small for me to fit into. Jaime offered to help me carry over a log so I could climb into the main chamber but it wasn’t really necessary as I had seen it from above and knew which chamber it lead to. It was cool how they were all connected though.


     We bushwhacked our way back down, aiming for the road so we could avoid tight roping across the beaver damn but we came out right at the swamp anyway. This time we picked our way over rocks and logs on the lower side of the dam thinking it might be easier. Turns out it wasn’t but luckily nothing too strenuous. We explored an abandoned boat house along the jeep road we passed on our way out and made it back to the truck with lots of scrapes but no major injuries. Although the scratch a branch had left on the back of my knee was still burning hours later, I realized after my shower that a sliver of the branch was actually jammed in the cut. A pair of tweezers pulled it right out and it still hurts but not nearly as much as it did when the piece of wood was in my skin.

    After our successful adventure we headed into town to pick up supper. We each had a lobster, some corn on the cob and shared a few pounds of clams. Everything was incredible. It more than made up for the disgusting mussels we had a week ago that we ended up throwing out. Dicky’s looking forward to joining us on some of our Acadia excursions this summer.

    We were shocked to have actually found the cave on our first try considering we had no real directions and weren’t even sure if we were searching on the right hill. I figured it would take a few trips to find. Now that I’m looking at the information I took down about the cave off the geological website, there is no question we found it. Everything matches up exactly to their diagram. But I still can’t find any information on it whatsoever online, no pictures, nothing, so it looks like this will be the first.