One afternoon last December, Robert Brooks saw the unmistakable and eerie evidence of a large cave on the wooded hillside where he walked.
A small crack in the ground put forth a wind strong enough to shake nearby ferns like an approaching thunderstorm.
Brooks and the cavers with him began to eagerly dig dirt away from the entrance.
Once it was large enough to admit their wiry bodies, they saw stalactites hanging from the ceilings like icicles. They saw the crystal interior of a geode as big as a basketball. Clusters of corkscrew-shaped calcite deposits called helictites grew from the walls. A protruding shark tooth had been left from the time when most of the state was underwater.
The thrill was not only being the first person to walk - or crawl - through these passages, but of finding some of the most spectacular underground formations in the state.
"We keep pinching ourselves because we can't believe we've been in there," said Brooks, 29, of Brooksville, who has been caving since he was in middle school.
Though the Brooksville Ridge Cave, as it is called, is smaller, Brooks compares it to Lechuguilla, in New Mexico. The deepest and one of the most spectacular caves in the country, Lechuguilla was not explored until the mid 1980s.
"This is sort of the Florida version," Brooks said.
The cave is stunning enough to have made the cover of the May edition of the National Speleological Society publication, NSS News, with the story calling it "the most decorated cave in Florida."
More accurately, it is probably the most decorated cave remaining in Florida.
Other caves on the Brooksville Ridge - the hump of elevated land that runs from Pasco to southern Citrus County - may have been just as dramatic, said Chester Kwitowski, president of the Tampa Bay Area Grotto, a local caving organization associated with the NSS. But because they have been picked clean by vandals, they are now "basically holes in the ground," Kwitowski said.
The same could easily happen to the Brooksville Ridge Cave, said grotto members and some state employees.
If its location becomes widely known, said Vince Morris, of the state Division of Forestry, "you'll find these formations for sale at the Webster Flea Market within a month."
Cave exploration a secretive subculture
Cavers are, in every way, an underground society.
Far fewer people explore caves than, for example, hike or ride mountain bikes. Some carry a national directory of NSS members so that, wherever they travel, they can find a comrade.
They are suspicious of people who go underground with only casual interest - calling them "flashlight cavers" - and of the public as a whole.
"In case you haven't noticed, cavers tend to be paranoid," said Dennis Dix, a grotto member who works for the Hernando County Planning Department.
Their concern for the Brooksville Ridge Cave, though, is well-founded, said Kwitowski, who, along with other grotto members, would say only that it is somewhere on the ridge and on property that the state is trying to acquire.
The grotto hopes the sale will go through and that admission to the cave can be controlled by a locked gate.
"That doesn't mean people can't get into it," Kwitowski said. "It means you can't get into it with spray paint cans."
In addition to refusing to disclose the cave's location to the Times, the grotto refused to allow the newspaper to print pictures of the cave that, until recently, were displayed on the Internet.
One problem, Kwitowski said, is that most people do not realize underground formations are as fragile as coral. They can be destroyed by even slight human contact. And, though not actually alive, as coral is, they seem that way.
"The key characteristic is that they are wet," Kwitowski said.
"When water is flowing over them they are still being formed. . . . When you walk into a cave, that's why it's really beautiful. That's what brings out the colors."
When removed from their surroundings, and their source of water, this life seems to vanish.
"The first people who visit the caves pluck off all the pretties and think they are going to look just as good in their living room. They do not," Kwitowski said.
The Brooksville Ridge Cave is so rich in helictites, they are said to grow in "bushes." They are so delicate "you can look at them cross-eyed and they'll break," said Dan Straley, the vice chairman of the grotto.
To protect them, some cavers have taken off their hard hats - usually standard caving equipment - when entering highly decorated sections of the cave. Others have declined to enter the cave.
"Even if you touch a formation, the body contact can be the beginning of the end," Dix said.
"Because of the impact, some of us are exploring it vicariously through the incredible pictures these guys have taken."
Cave could be one of Florida's largest
Cavers also guard finds like Brooksville Ridge because of the time spent searching for them.
Florida has one of the most extensive networks of underground passages in the world. The problem for grotto members is that most of them are underwater.
Finding dry caves in Florida requires years of "ridge walking" over promising terrain. Generally, that means elevated land, Brooks said, especially hillsides free of the depressions that are common in Florida and indicate that underground cavities have collapsed.
Caves breathe either in or out to adjust to atmospheric changes, Brooks said. The stronger the wind at the entrance, the larger the cave, which is why the small group of original discoverers were so thrilled when they saw the rustling ferns last December.
"We knew we had a lot of cave," Brooks said.
Though it has not been fully explored, Kwitowski said the cave may well be more than a mile long, which would make it one of the largest in Florida.
Entering was not easy.
Not only did the cavers have to widen the opening, Brooks said, but "it starts off very complicated. There's lots of crawling, lots of squeezing."
A non-caver could easily become lost or stuck, Kwitowski said, which is one other reason the grotto wants to keep it secret.
Brooks and the explorers found no footprints, broken formations or other evidence that the cave had been visited, he said.
"It was totally pristine."
What they did find, almost as soon as they entered, were fossils, crystals and outcroppings.
"Right in the beginning, it threw more formations at us than we knew what to do with," Brooks said.
"To know you're the first person to see it, there's nothing like it."
Actually, he said, he would be just as thrilled by one other sight.
Like other members of the Grotto, he hopes people can learn to respect the beauty and delicacy of caves. He also hopes the state and the grotto can preserve the cave and limit access to geologists and spelunkers qualified to explore it.
"If I went back in 10 years and saw not one flaw," he said, "that would be the same feeling all over again."
- Dan DeWitt covers the environment, politics and the city of Brooksville. He can be reached at 754-6116. Send e-mail to dewitt@sptimes.com
