I have been proper caving twice. Once, in Budapest, I got stuck in a little hole called the Winnie the Pooh for about 15 minutes. That was nerve-wracking, but I could see other people so it wasn’t so bad.
In Georgia, I went with well trained cavers from my school. We belly crawled through a slot so small I had to turn my head sideways to fit. It was cold, wet, and very scary. I have rarely felt as much relief as I did upon emerging.
A whole lot of nope from me, too. Between what happened to John Jones in Nutty Putty Cave, the (urban legend?) of Masha in the catacombs, horror movies like "The Descent", or even just events like the Surfside condo collapse, I can't do dark underground caves or structures that might collapse.
When my friends went spelunking and invited me to go, I told them I'd take a rain check. Maybe the risks are negligible, but every one of my alarm bells goes off.
Same it really really freaks me out reading about this stuff.
Instant panic attacks. I guess I’m claustrophobic?
The closest freaky / claustrophobic experience I remember was during a hike upon entering into a train tunnel…for some reason…it was pitch black dark.
Once we were probably half way in I realised how insanely idiotic we were for going in. Then I realised the tunnel was really much longer than we anticipated, the light at the end became tiny. There was probably manholes in the side we could jump into if needs be but it was hard to see.
Two things were going through our minds, do we hide in man holes and go slowly, or run? We ran ! Of course my friend hurt his ankle So I was hobbling out of there with him over my shoulder.
I never remember how relived I was we made it out. Not long after, a train came around the corner quite fast, would’ve been a horrible tragedy.
Bring in that tunnel when a huge freight train was in there wouldn’t have been very enjoyable to say the least.
In high school a few friends and I explored a local cave with a passage like that. The ceiling got lower and lower until you had to lie flat and turn your head. The final part of the passage was known as "the birth canal." It wasn't a big deal at the time, but I would not want to repeat it now (some 40 years later).
I initially posted "Airman's?", referring to a cave near Austin with a "Birth canal" passage... but it then it occurred to me that most caves worth mentioning probably have just such a passage, very likely with just such a name.
(If there was a room known as the "Aggie Art Gallery," on the other hand... well, that's the cave I'm referring to.)
Did caving for a bit. I enjoyed the "mind game" bit of it.
When going into small spaces sometimes people enter a bad mental spiral of: feeling a bit squished, have a doubt that maybe the wall/ceiling moved, tense up further etc etc.
It is a weird mental thing because this cave has likely been largely this way for a looooooong time. It wasn't waiting for you to come along... but such are mind games.
People tended to crack more as you get tired. Physical fitness helped as well as being comfortable with your gear.
Rope stuff was easy enough and fun, though a bit tiring.
I went to visit a local cave that has been setup for tours with the kids a few weeks ago. There is a stalagmite/stalagtite pair that are 1cm away from touching and has been that way since the cave was discovered and surveyed in the 1830s, these were 2+ meters each, geological timescales are crazy.
If you want to train yourself by repeatedly exposing your mind to fear of death (and the best part of overcoming it), ie rock climbing is much more approachable way.
Your subconscious mind only partially understands the concept of rope and safety it brings, and being few tens of meters above ground puts out some very real emotions and fear of death out, especially when protection placement is quite apart. But you still have equipment that can handle easily 2 tonnes of static load and few of you in worst possible dynamic fall.
Both of those stories garnered world wide attention, but one of the positive unintended consequences of those tragic events was that they scared many "adventure seekers" enough that they stayed away from cave exploration, which is a "good" thing.
About 30 years ago I became trapped in an alpine cave in a way very similar to Floyd Collins, when a football sized piece of marble fell from the ceiling about 30 feet into a virgin body sized phreatic tube I was exploring.
It landed on my ankle, pinning it so I couldn't move forward or back, and the passage was so tight that I couldn't move my free leg to dislodge it, and yes, Floyd Collins entrapment was the first thing I thought of.
Thankfully, I had two things in my favor, one was I had a caving partner on the surface who knew where I was, and I could communicate with, so if I couldn't self rescue she could hike the 5 miles back to a road end and get help (no cell phone service back then).
And two, I was an experienced caver, so I remained very calm, and kept working my free foot in order to attempt to dislodge the rock pinning my ankle, and after about 10 minutes I was able to somehow with great effort, shift the rock enough that I could move deeper into the cave.
I crawled forward another 15 feet to a pit about 20 feet deep that I was able to free climb into so I could turn around and head back out, and was able to push the rock ahead of me and I got out just fine.
It didn't phase me one bit, as I'd had much more serious life threatening events in caves previously (almost "flat rocked" in Lechuguilla Cave, NM), but I was well aware that it could have been a serious situation as it got down into the 20's at night in that location, so hypothermia was a real possibility.
The lesson here for non cavers is, don't explore caves alone, especially if nobody knows where you are, and get proper training before doing so, from a local "grotto" (chapter) of the National Speleological Society https://caves.org/ .
Yeah. I have low-grade anxiety that at some point dang will retire or something will happen, like when digg imploded and reddit got popular. In the meantime, I enjoy these caliber of discussions here.
/. already jumped the shark for me, back when it got bought around 2013. Around the same time that somebody forked the slashcode and started https://www.soylentnews.org/ which is somehow still going. It just lost its luster. I was glad to find HN after that.
I know it’s not a competition but Nutty Putty still looks worse to me, because of the upside down position and how they seemed to be close to pulling off a successful rescue only to be thwarted by the failure of the pulley system. The diagram[0] fills me with anxiety and makes me wonder if there was any chance of getting mining equipment to the site.
The are brilliant YouTube documentaries about both. After a car accident a few years ago, I became very interested in stories of being trapped, I think as some way of dealing with my own experience. I'd sit up late at night and watch these stories in horror, being so thankful I'd been freed successfully.
No I hadn't heard of it, but I need to now. I adore his work. Really need to read Crash again, loved that book before - will see if it hits differently now.
From being a very savvy, able, and experienced non-professional caver. I knew someone who did cave mapping and even some computer programming along those lines. That's the kind of thing that will get you a professional job. That, or imagine some kind of scientific research.
There are very few "professional cavers", i.e. those who are paid to go into caves.
It's mostly hard core cavers who do the majority of cave exploration, surveying/mapping and biological/archeological inventory in caves around the world.
Almost all of us are volunteers, and arrange our lives around caving, not our jobs, it's a passion that consumes us.
Before retiring from caving due to health issues, I caved with the best of the best for years, and none of us were/are "adventure seekers", not even close, we are pragmatic, calm, and seriously experienced in cave exploration, as opposed to those who are untrained casual cave explorers (what we call "spelunkers", i.e. flashlight cavers).
That's kind of the feeling I had. There's experienced cavers that know what they're doing, but "professional" (at least in the sense of getting paid to do it) isn't really a thing.
Kudos to you and the work you and like-minded individuals put into exploring and mapping these systems.
It was a a lot for a beginner but not dangerously so. These were highly experienced cavers and great teachers. We all had wilderness first aid training, some with WFR. Several of them were part of the regional cave search and rescue.
The problem was that I tagged along on one of their fun trips rather than taking a class, so the difficulty was not calibrated for me. Even so, while it pushed me mentally, it wasn’t physically dangerous.
The one time I did any caving was Chasm of Doom in Joshua Tree[1]. I get the sense that it's rather tame, as far as caving goes, so I recommend it to any visitors of JT. But at times you need to army crawl through the smallest areas to get by. I was slightly ill-prepared in my group, having no headlamp so needing to carry my small lantern with my teeth at times when bouldering was necessary. At the end I recall a wonderful view of the full moon at the top. Highly recommended for that alone.
Don't be like the other group ahead of us, though. They got to the top and decided it was an excellent place to do shrooms. Even though a handful of their people just had a claustrophobia episode...
> “Even if I’m physically impossible to go in a wild cave, surely I can be put in a wheelchair and wheeled to a commercial cave,” he told The Chattanooga Times-Free Press in 2014. “And if I can’t be sitting up in a cave, surely they can put me on a stretcher and wheel me into one.”
FYI: Free climbing is the opposite of aid climbing. I.e you progress upwards only by weighting the rock as opposed to making progress by weighting your gear.
Climbing without a partner is soloing. Technically there's aid soloing, which is sort of a weird discipline wherein you're aid climbing without a partner protected by a rope, which is why the kind of climbing Alex Honnold is famous for is called free soloing.
Confusingly, there's also rope soloing, which is free climbing with a rope for protection. He did a bunch of rope soloing to practice the pitches he did free solo in the movie of the same name.
That was excellent. He found what he absolutely loved to do early in his life, and then managed to keep doing it until death came knocking. May we all be so lucky! RIP.
I was reading about the death at Nutty Putty cave. What I still don't understand is, do we not have power drills like in the movies? I sort of assumed that if we _need_ to dig down, it can be done.
It could be that his life wasn't valued however much it would cost to airlift a drill, and destroy the cave.
His life was very much valued. Reading about that tragedy, I don't think there is any way a drill would have helped. He was so far down the cave, and even just the entrance to that cave is very small. There was no way to get equipment to him in time. Everyone involved tried their absolute best, but there was no solution to even ask for. If there was a solution that would have wrecked the cave and would have saved him, they would probably have taken it, but there was no way to operate on the rock above him without burying him.
Actually, rescuers did use a rock hammer drill to place anchors to attach pulleys to, so he could be extracted, unfortunately, the drill bit broke and they had to return to the surface to get another one.
Then (tragically) after they set the last anchor, one of them broke out from the passage wall, and that's when he slipped back down further than before, it was so damn SAD!
Those drills do exist, and they have been used in a number of mine rescue attempts. They take days/weeks/months to reach the desired depth and size of hole, depending on the type and stability of the rock being drilled through. That's assuming the surface is conducive to drilling - any preparation there (leveling the ground, building access roads, etc) will take even more time.
Silly and curious question. Given he caved so many caves (or however you have to put it, I'm tired at the moment... English... 2nd language. I wanted to say "raided so many caves", lol), does every country have a cave? If yes, did he visit every country in the world as well?
It depends on what you mean by 'cave'. The classic process of cave formation happens in limestone, in 'karst' areas. These aren't evenly distributed, and some countries have tons of them and others not. But there are other ways to form caves too: erosion by the sea can form sea caves, lava tubes are created by volcanic activity, and there are cave-like mines produced by humans in many places with minerals.
So you can probably find some small hole to grovel down in most places, but the good stuff is concentrated in parts of Kentucky, the Alps, the classical Karst, parts of China and so on.
Caves are generally lacking in light, a prerequisite for photogrammetry. Of course one could use artificial light, but that comes with its own challenges.
I'm reminded of a fun little game from Introversion Software; A Scanner Darkly. You explore a dark cave with only handheld LIDAR scanner. A fun little curiosity, but nobody bought the game. I imagine actually scanning caves with LIDAR would be much the same; a fun curiosity, but not commercially viable.
As Mister_X mentioned, in the US, start with the National Speleological Society at https://caves.org/ There is also a sub-reddit at reddit.com/r/caving/ Definitely find a local group - if there are caves in your area, there are probably also cavers who explore them.
Basic safety rules include: cave with groups of 3 to 6 people, some of whom have experience, bring 3 independent sources of light, use helmets and headlamps, avoid hand-held lights (a strong sign of inexperience or incompetence), leave word of your plans - where you are going, expected return time, who to call for help - with a trustworthy friend. Some basic knowledge of geology is useful, as is comfort with physical contortion, sturdy clothing, and an ability to orient and visualize in 3-dimensions in environments that are far from rectilinear.
Respect the culture of secrecy about cave locations, which helps protect them from damage. Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints.
A proper club, who will give you training and supervision and carefully guide your initiation.
In Britain there are a number of good university clubs (I learned with ULSA at Leeds) as well as established local clubs like RRCPC, Northern Pennine Club, and Mendip Caving Group. In the US, the National Speleological Society has a network of local 'grottos'. There are established clubs in nearly all countries with good caves.
Also, caving with other enthusiasts is great fun. Outside of tech, the cavers were the closest I've ever found to 'my people'.
You have to learn it with a club. A good club is the safest option, they will teach you the techniques, the places and the safety. Although it's still dangerous and accident may happen even with the most cautious people, like for diving or climbing
