From the Scribe's notebook:

This month on our campout we went to the Alabaster Caverns near Boiling Springs.  It was a lot of fun.  On Saturday we went on a tour of the Cavern.  That  night we went to watch the bats fly out of a cave. 

There was also a huge storm on Saturday night and we had to sleep in the cars for a little bit.

From the Scoutmaster's perspective:

Our September outing was to Alabaster Caverns.  We had an absolutely fantastic turnout of boys and adults.  We had 31 boys and 14 adults.  Only the Father/Son trip had topped that.

After a great breakfast, we toured the caverns.  We had such a large group, we had to split into two groups.  After the tour, everyone took advantage of some free time for exploring or working on advancement.  We all had a great breakfast so we ate our supper (or dinner depending on where you are from) in the middle of the afternoon and then ate our lunch sandwiches after we got home from the bat cave that night.  

Bat Cave?  No, we didn’t go watch Batman and Robin.  Mr. Harris, a very experienced spelunker, has access to a cave on private land in that area which has one of the highest bat populations in North America.  In order to have the bats come out before dark, we had to maintain silence.

Have you ever seen 31 boys, mostly in middle school, stay quiet for more than 10 seconds?  They did a pretty good job.  We still must have spooked the bats a little because it was pretty well into dusk when they finally did come out.  We had just enough light to see their silhouettes for about 10 or 15 minutes.

It was pretty amazing to see the first floods of 3 million+ bats come swarming out of the cave.  The other amazing thing was that there was not a single biting insect chewing on us.