Outdoor Life
Related: About this forumAny cavers here?
Planning my most challenging descent tomorrow. No maps, an underground river and Zeus knows how many snakes and other surprises.
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OriginalGeek
(12,132 posts)I must need a break- I saw your subject line and thought you were looking for trolls from that cave website! lmao!
I don't think I have any desire at all to go down in a cave but I love watching Hi-Def tv shows about other people doing it. Good luck on your descent!
beam me up scottie
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I needed that!
Thanks for the well wishes, actually haven't gone down it yet, rescued a pit bull and had a horse get all cut up by an old wire fence, after the week I've had, that bat infested, hibernating snake resort looks awful damn good right now.
BobUp
(347 posts)But here's my spouse, Mrs. Humpty Dumpty goin' for it in at cave near Clifty Falls State Park in Indiana, Madison County, it was once a proposed path for the underground railroad.
http://www.in.gov/dnr/historic/4173.htm
http://www.undergroundrailroadindiana.com/
Here's a cave in New Mexico that we found about 40 miles north of Las Cruces, New Mexico on BLM land. Because I wasn't physically able to climb this, my friend did and after returning back to ground level, he told us it was lined with druzy quartz.
X_Digger
(18,585 posts)I was in college at the time, and of course, thought I was immortal.
That cave will change your mind about that. It starts off easy enough- basically horizontal dry chambers with typical ups, downs, and bends. Seems like a cake walk, right? You get to what looks like the end and wonder, "Why are we mapping this little pissant cave?"
At the ass-end of the main chambers there's a great big boulder, and when you climb over it, you feel a breeze of damp cool air. Crawl through a button-hole and you're faced with deep pits left and right with a narrow ledge between them (imagine walking across a muddy balance beam with water dripping everywhere).
Later on, you hit narrow vertical chimneys not wide enough to wedge your knees comfortably. As you reach the top, you hit a series of long muddy slides that you have to belly through (oh, that really narrow one that you wondered if you'd fit through? Well there's a column in the middle of it, so be ready to pull off your pack and push it ahead of you- now exhale.. push with your toes.. inhale (stuck).. exhale.. push with your toes.. inhale (stuck).. lather, rinse, repeat.
Eventually the cave ends in a 50-60 foot waterfall that dumps into a perfectly clear pool so deep that your flashlight can't follow a rock thrown in. Who knows if there's another cave system somewhere downstream.