"Lew Bicking: A Legendary American Cave Explorer." Edited by David W.
Hughes. National Speleological Society; 2011. ISBN: 978-1-879961-40-1.
7 by 10 inches, 324 pages plus plates, hardbound. $36; discounts for
NSS members.
"Solo" Lew Bicking was an enthusiatic and hard-charging caver from his
novice days in 1961 until his early death in a motorcycle accident in
1966. He gave his name to the NSS's annual Lew Bicking Award for the
exploration and mapping of a cave or group of caves. (Originally,
documentation--publishing--was also a requirement, before the secrecy
types got to it.) Bicking was best known for exploration in the East,
especially the Friars Hole Cave System in West Virginia, but he went
west a few times, including for the 1964 NSS convention in Texas and
the 1966 convention in California, after both of which he did some
post-convention caving in Mexico.
David Hughes's recent book on Vertical Bill Cuddington (NSS, 2008) was
written to be read. This book is a compilation that can only be
browsed. It contains what appears to be everything ever written about
Bicking's caving, by Lew or anybody else, mainly trip reports from the
heyday of the Baltimore Grotto News. Included are a number of
obituaries and items concerning the collection of the Lew Bicking Fund
and the creation of the award. There is a section of twenty-nine black-
and-white photos on pages not assigned numbers (shame!). Many of the
articles are well written and interesting, but there are an awful lot
of them. Finding the ones most informative and entertaining to you
will be a matter of supernatural persistence, or luck. My favorite
summing up was written by Squire Lewis on encountering Bicking in
Mexico after the 1966 convention: "Lew's only traveling and survival
equipment consists of a small Kelty pack whose sole contents are the
largest Spanish dictionary every printed--about a 20-pounder--and a
box of Mexican crackers. . . . His only clothes are those he wears,
and he obviously has some warped goal of not taking them off--ever--
for washing or any other purpose. . . . He has gotten all the long way
from Baltimore to California to [Mexico City] with nothing but his
great dictionary and his crackers. We have never seen him spend any
money--not any--he may well not have any. Yet he calmly proceeds
intact through all the chaos of the byways and accomplishes his goals.
He is the true stuff from which cavers are made."--Bill Mixon
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