Canto VII - Cave Capers 2022 - Friday, August 5, 2022 | Caving | Underground Adventure | Inferno

Canto VII is a privately-owned cave, and currently is blessed with an amazing landowner who loves the fact that he has a cave on his property. If you treat his property with respect, and share with him photos or videos of this cave, he’s ever so grateful. Canto is accessed by waking through a large 2-part open field, bisected by a tree-line. Once in the woods, a straight walking path leads to a large sinkhole that may contain an entrance of another cave. Continue walking, and the gigantic entrance presents itself, much like it did us today. High humidity cause an eerie fog to loom out of the opening, creating an ethereal feel to the area. Despite the huge mouth, the actual entrance is much smaller. We used a small ladder to help negotiate the initial climb down, but the rest is a blind nuisance drop, which looks worse than it is.
The interior of the cave is incredibly muddy, with large amounts of deposits everywhere. If it looks like rock, more likely it’s mud. This is probably where the name comes from. It was initially named Canto V, for the 5th Level of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, where you slip and slide for eternity. Better a name if there ever was one! This cave has all the mud! Thick mud, slick mud, oozy mud, gooey mud, wet mud, silty mud, suck mud. I could go on…
The cave is a violent flooder, with flood depths reaching as high as 65 feet. In some places, flood waters are carried under pressure, wiping any trace of human exploration with it. A new deposit of mud is laid on the layers, and the slate is wiped clean. The same is for any formations. We saw one small cluster in a large room, but that’s it, and they’re on their way to being eroded away.
Overall, inside Canto VII, it’s a neat place to explore! Very unique and very rarely visited, so you get a feel of exclusivity for sure. Once past the third mud slope you have to clamber over, entrance fever is sure to set amongst some.

A note on the name: Canto refers to shorter parts of a longer poem divided to sections. While this cave has the name Canto VII, it describes the Fourth Circle, according to Dante, in which victims are punished for their love of material goods, where the Seventh Circle, in Canto XII, depicts Violence in three sub-rings: Against Neighbors, Against Self and Against God, Art and Nature. Naturally, the name is somewhat confusing, to be sure. Canto VIII, or, the Fifth Circle, represents Wrath and depicts the stinky, swampy and muddy waters of the River Styx, where the actively wrathful fight each other viciously on the surface of the slime, while the sullen (the passively wrathful) lie beneath the water, withdrawn, "into a black sulkiness which can find no joy in God or man or the universe".