Adventures in Caving and the Great Hound Rescue
Title: Adventures in Caving and the Great Hound Rescue
Medium: Multi-media; a true story with pictures in two parts
Author: Riverbella
Summary: Caving is fun, exciting, and a little scary. And sometimes the unexpected happens!
Note to Mom: No worries here. May even be a little educational (shhh!)
Note to tk: I hope you enjoy this. Caves are cool.
Part I: Caving
Here’s an experiment for you to try sometime. Pick a closet big enough to hold you and go inside, preferably at night with the lights out. Get someone to stuff a towel or something along the crack at the bottom so no light can get in at all. Don’t stay in there long; it will get pretty creepy. But sit there for a minute or two just to see what it is like to be in pitch darkness. So dark you can put your hand right in front of your face and not see it. And your eyes never adapt. It never changes.
Now you know what it is like to be in a cave!
Of course, when people go caving they have flashlights or miner’s lamps or both. But every caver, at least once, turns off the lights and breathes in the darkness for a minute or two.
I grew up mostly in my mom’s hometown of Somerset, Kentucky. Somerset is a smallish town southwest of Lexington near the Cumberland River. It is in Pulaski County where the land rolls through a lot of small hills we call “knobs.” The geology of Pulaski County is heavy on limestone, and where there is limestone, there are caves. Pulaski County is riddled with caves and sinkholes. In fact, we had a huge sinkhole in the back yard of the house we rented, and a sinkhole in my mother’s neighborhood once opened up and swallowed a car!
You have probably heard of Mammoth Cave, which is the longest cave system in the world. Mammoth Cave National Park includes a part of the cave system that has been developed for visitors. You can take tours of varying lengths and see some of the wonders of the cave. Here is a link to the web-site if you’d like to check it out for yourself. Maybe you can take a trip to Kentucky someday and visit the cave.
Mammoth Cave National Park
But there is a lot of the cave that is not developed, and only experienced cavers are permitted to go into the “wild” cave and explore. The caves in Pulaski County are “wild” caves as well. If they are not on private property-or even sometimes if they are-cavers have explored many of them and made maps. Cavers love to explore caves, and they especially love to “push” caves, which means exploring parts that haven’t been mapped and see where they go and whether or not they connect up with some other cave system. Connecting cave systems is sort of the Holy Grail for cavers. They can then say “I have explored where no man (or woman, of course!) has gone before and I have proved that this cave is bigger than anyone knew.”
Cavers don’t, by the way, tie string to a rock or tree when they start out. That would be cheating. Instead, they make maps as they go along-sort of like you would in a game world-and sometimes they make chalk marks to indicate where they split off one way rather than another. Here is what a cave map looks like:
A Cave Map
After my husband and I got married, we lived in my hometown for a couple of years. He was a reporter for the newspaper and he took his own photos. He even had a small darkroom in our house. This was in the dark ages, you see, before digital cameras. For fun, we both liked to go hiking. One day a friend of ours asked us if we ever thought about caving. My husband got very excited about the idea. I was excited, too, but a little scared. We decided to go for it, and my husband-his name is Sam, by the way-started doing research to find out what we needed.
This was the equipment we needed:
1. Clothes rugged enough to stand up to the wear and tear, and the mud, and also warm enough for the constant 55-60 degree temperatures in caves. (They never get any warmer than that. It’s like natural air conditioning.) We decided on long-sleeved coveralls. I think we got them at an Army-Navy surplus store. They aren’t very fashionable, but they work! In addition, sturdy gloves, good hiking shoes, and knee pads. You can spend a lot of time on your knees, or even your belly, in a cave and the knee pads help a lot.
2. Helmets. These are critical, not just to protect your head but as a place for one of your main forms of light, which is…
3. Miner’s Lamps. In the old days, these were actually flame-lit. They had small reservoirs of flammable liquid and you lit them like a lantern. Carbide miner’s lamps are still used today. Ours contained small lightbulbs and were powered by battery packs we carried in the pockets of our coveralls. The lamps strapped on to the helmets. This way you can have both hands free and still have light.
4. Caving Kit. You don’t need a lot of equipment for caving, unless you are cave-diving or doing vertical climbs. But there are a few essentials: water, food, flashlights, extra bulbs and batteries, a first aid kit, matches, pencil and paper and chalk for mapping, and camera gear. We found small bags like soldiers carried their rations in that had long straps so we could carry them over one shoulder and across our chests.
Cave Kit
Doesn't look like much, but it's sturdy and you can get more in it than you'd think.
That was pretty much it for the basic caving we were doing. Light is by far the most important thing. That’s why we always had our miner’s lamps, flashlights and matches all three. The rule of thumb is that you take what you need to provide light for three times the length of the planned trip.
Like almost anything fun, caving can be dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing and don’t practice common-sense safety. It’s funny, but the most frequent mishaps that occur in caves are drowning and hypothermia. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? But there are many caves that can fill completely with water when heavy rains come along. Flash floods can happen very fast, and sometimes people who don’t pay attention to the weather get caught and can’t get out in time. Almost all caves have underground water sources, too. Water is what makes caves after all. The temperature in a cave is just low enough that if you get wet, you can easily get hypothermia before you know it is happening. Well, just don’t get wet, you say? Sometimes you can’t help it!
Some of the caves we visited in Pulaski County after we got our gear together were Wind Cave, Cave Creek Cave, and Sloan’s Valley Cave. Sloan’s Valley was a very large cave system. At the time we went there, about 9 miles of it had been explored. Now more than 25 miles have been explored. Some cavers hoped that it would eventually be possible to connect Sloan’s up with Mammoth Cave, even though they were hundreds of miles apart. Who knows? Maybe they will someday.
Here are some pictures of Sloan’s Valley Cave. Sam took some of them. (There’s even one with me in it, but you can’t really see me very well, thank goodness!) Some other pictures came from the internet, posted by other cavers who have explored Sloan’s Valley. It is pretty spectacular.
Sloan's Valley Cave
That tiny little white dot in th darkest part is the lamp on my helmet. Yep, that's me!
Sloan's Valley Cave Passageway
Kind of a scramble to get through this passage.
Big Stalagmite in Sloan's
This is a monster stalagmite. Lots of calcite makes it look so white
Cave Pool in Sloan's
An underground pool of water in Sloan's Valley Cave. The cave is highly prone to flooding in the spring rains.
A Caver in Sloan's
This is a friend of ours caving with us, photographed exploring a cavern.
Caves have lots of different types of formations, also called speleothems, all made from the effects of water and the minerals in water. The speleothems vary depending on how much water gets in, what minerals are in the water, whether or not there is good airflow in the cave and the geology of the area in which the cave is formed. Underground rivers carve huge caverns and tunnels in the rock. Water rolling or dripping from above deposits minerals that build gradually into stalagtites (hanging down from the ceiling) and stalagmites (growing up from the floor), or columns where the two meet. Here are some other speleothems that can be found in caves in various places.
Stalactites over a Reflecting
The water may only be inches deep, but the reflected stalactites make it look deeper.
Fried Eggs
This odd formation is in Luray Caverns in Virginia, a cave open for visitors. My husband took this picture on our visit there.
Cave Crystals
Also called Anthodites, these are like tiny stalactites in thin needle shapes.
Pretty cool.
Bacon!
Different types of minerals, such as the iron oxide that provides the red and brown colors, deposited in thin sheets by water over time form this speleothem. Well named, wouldn't you say?
Cave Pearls
These speleothems form from calcium carbonate deposits in small amounts of water. Rolling around against each other makes them round. If the water dries up, the pearls can't hold together and they break down into powder.
Caves also contain many living creatures. Some live near the entrances and take advantage of both the cave’s environment and the world aboveground. Others live deep in the cave and never see the light of day. Bats are probably the best knows of all cave-dwellers. Here is a bat we saw on one of our caving adventures:
Bat!
Often whole colonies of bats will live in caves, sleeping during the day and venturing out at night to hunt for food-like insects-using their unique echolocation abilities. At Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, which I visited when I was about 10 when my dad was stationed on an army base near Albuquerque, there is a gigantic colony of Brazilian free-tail bats that lives in the cave from April to October and every evening they pour out of the cave to feed. There are so many of them that they look like a great dark cloud rising out of the ground-or maybe like a demon being exorcised from a possessed person!
Twilight Hunters
Salamanders are also found frequently in caves. We saw this one on one of our trips to Wind Cave. If this Salamander had lived deep inside the cave and never came out, however, chances are it would be pure white and eyeless. Eyeless, albino creatures-mainly insects, fish and reptiles-are often find in the depths of caves, where they have adapted to the perpetual dark. A pool far down inside Mammoth Cave has schools of eyeless white fish that do quite well in that strange environment.
Salamander
Eyeless Fish
Because caves vary so much in size and configuration, there are many techniques involved in caving. At the far end of what you might call Xtreme caving, lie cave climbing and cave diving.
Some caves have great vertical shafts running down for hundreds or even thousands of feet. Exploring these caves involves the same techniques used by rock climbers, only in reverse. In other words, you might rappel down into the cave and climb back up to get out. Ropes and pitons and carabiners would come into play.
Cave diving includes exploring underwater caves or moving through the underground rivers in an earthbound cave to see if the cave opens out into dry tunnels again. Cave divers use equipment like scuba divers-wetsuits, re-breathers, masks and fins. Cave diving is probably the most dangerous form of caving and requires years of training and experience.
The sort of basic caving Sam and I did didn’t use special equipment, but there were still techniques we used to traverse the different types of spaces in caves. Sometimes you can just walk upright like normal. Other times you are scrambling over rock falls. You may find yourself on your knees crawling along because the ceiling is too low for standing. For me, one of the scariest things was belly crawling. You do that when you are “pushing a crack.” You need to move from one part of a cave to another, and the only way there is through a tight horizontal crack in masses of rock. You literally push through on your stomache, pulling with your fingers and pushing with your feet. Sometimes you have to tie your cave pack to your ankle and drag it along because you just don’t have enough space to carry it on your chest or back. It is very claustrophobic. I never pushed a crack unless someone who had done it before could tell me about how long it was and that it definitely opened up on the other side. But expert cave explorers will routinely crawl into cracks and go for long ways, only to find themselves at a dead end and have to go backwards because they don’t even have enough room to turn around!
Chimneying is another technique we had to use a few times. Sometimes there is no way down to a lower level that opens out except by a drop-off with walls on either side. So you plant your right hand and foot on one wall and your left on the other and kind of skootch down bit by bit. Or you can sometimes put your back against one wall and your feet against the other and shift your way down that way. One time in Sloan’s Valley Cave we had to chimney down a vertical crack. Sam did great, but I was less confident and a lot less sure-footed. I slipped down about the last 10 feet. But it turned out all right because Sam and two other guys we were caving with kind of gathered together and caught me. It was scary, but it was worth it, because it brought us down to an amazing underground river running through the cave.
Caves are beautiful and fascinating. It was funny, but no matter how many times we went in caves, even in the same ones over and over, I was always really nervous the first few minutes when we entered the cave. But then after we got inside and it turned cool and dark and strange, I felt like I was in another world, and I wasn’t afraid any more.
Next Up: Part II - The Great Hound Rescue
Medium: Multi-media; a true story with pictures in two parts
Author: Riverbella
Summary: Caving is fun, exciting, and a little scary. And sometimes the unexpected happens!
Note to Mom: No worries here. May even be a little educational (shhh!)
Note to tk: I hope you enjoy this. Caves are cool.
Part I: Caving
Here’s an experiment for you to try sometime. Pick a closet big enough to hold you and go inside, preferably at night with the lights out. Get someone to stuff a towel or something along the crack at the bottom so no light can get in at all. Don’t stay in there long; it will get pretty creepy. But sit there for a minute or two just to see what it is like to be in pitch darkness. So dark you can put your hand right in front of your face and not see it. And your eyes never adapt. It never changes.
Now you know what it is like to be in a cave!
Of course, when people go caving they have flashlights or miner’s lamps or both. But every caver, at least once, turns off the lights and breathes in the darkness for a minute or two.
I grew up mostly in my mom’s hometown of Somerset, Kentucky. Somerset is a smallish town southwest of Lexington near the Cumberland River. It is in Pulaski County where the land rolls through a lot of small hills we call “knobs.” The geology of Pulaski County is heavy on limestone, and where there is limestone, there are caves. Pulaski County is riddled with caves and sinkholes. In fact, we had a huge sinkhole in the back yard of the house we rented, and a sinkhole in my mother’s neighborhood once opened up and swallowed a car!
You have probably heard of Mammoth Cave, which is the longest cave system in the world. Mammoth Cave National Park includes a part of the cave system that has been developed for visitors. You can take tours of varying lengths and see some of the wonders of the cave. Here is a link to the web-site if you’d like to check it out for yourself. Maybe you can take a trip to Kentucky someday and visit the cave.
Mammoth Cave National Park
But there is a lot of the cave that is not developed, and only experienced cavers are permitted to go into the “wild” cave and explore. The caves in Pulaski County are “wild” caves as well. If they are not on private property-or even sometimes if they are-cavers have explored many of them and made maps. Cavers love to explore caves, and they especially love to “push” caves, which means exploring parts that haven’t been mapped and see where they go and whether or not they connect up with some other cave system. Connecting cave systems is sort of the Holy Grail for cavers. They can then say “I have explored where no man (or woman, of course!) has gone before and I have proved that this cave is bigger than anyone knew.”
Cavers don’t, by the way, tie string to a rock or tree when they start out. That would be cheating. Instead, they make maps as they go along-sort of like you would in a game world-and sometimes they make chalk marks to indicate where they split off one way rather than another. Here is what a cave map looks like:
A Cave Map
After my husband and I got married, we lived in my hometown for a couple of years. He was a reporter for the newspaper and he took his own photos. He even had a small darkroom in our house. This was in the dark ages, you see, before digital cameras. For fun, we both liked to go hiking. One day a friend of ours asked us if we ever thought about caving. My husband got very excited about the idea. I was excited, too, but a little scared. We decided to go for it, and my husband-his name is Sam, by the way-started doing research to find out what we needed.
This was the equipment we needed:
1. Clothes rugged enough to stand up to the wear and tear, and the mud, and also warm enough for the constant 55-60 degree temperatures in caves. (They never get any warmer than that. It’s like natural air conditioning.) We decided on long-sleeved coveralls. I think we got them at an Army-Navy surplus store. They aren’t very fashionable, but they work! In addition, sturdy gloves, good hiking shoes, and knee pads. You can spend a lot of time on your knees, or even your belly, in a cave and the knee pads help a lot.
2. Helmets. These are critical, not just to protect your head but as a place for one of your main forms of light, which is…
3. Miner’s Lamps. In the old days, these were actually flame-lit. They had small reservoirs of flammable liquid and you lit them like a lantern. Carbide miner’s lamps are still used today. Ours contained small lightbulbs and were powered by battery packs we carried in the pockets of our coveralls. The lamps strapped on to the helmets. This way you can have both hands free and still have light.
4. Caving Kit. You don’t need a lot of equipment for caving, unless you are cave-diving or doing vertical climbs. But there are a few essentials: water, food, flashlights, extra bulbs and batteries, a first aid kit, matches, pencil and paper and chalk for mapping, and camera gear. We found small bags like soldiers carried their rations in that had long straps so we could carry them over one shoulder and across our chests.
Cave Kit
Doesn't look like much, but it's sturdy and you can get more in it than you'd think.
That was pretty much it for the basic caving we were doing. Light is by far the most important thing. That’s why we always had our miner’s lamps, flashlights and matches all three. The rule of thumb is that you take what you need to provide light for three times the length of the planned trip.
Like almost anything fun, caving can be dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing and don’t practice common-sense safety. It’s funny, but the most frequent mishaps that occur in caves are drowning and hypothermia. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? But there are many caves that can fill completely with water when heavy rains come along. Flash floods can happen very fast, and sometimes people who don’t pay attention to the weather get caught and can’t get out in time. Almost all caves have underground water sources, too. Water is what makes caves after all. The temperature in a cave is just low enough that if you get wet, you can easily get hypothermia before you know it is happening. Well, just don’t get wet, you say? Sometimes you can’t help it!
Some of the caves we visited in Pulaski County after we got our gear together were Wind Cave, Cave Creek Cave, and Sloan’s Valley Cave. Sloan’s Valley was a very large cave system. At the time we went there, about 9 miles of it had been explored. Now more than 25 miles have been explored. Some cavers hoped that it would eventually be possible to connect Sloan’s up with Mammoth Cave, even though they were hundreds of miles apart. Who knows? Maybe they will someday.
Here are some pictures of Sloan’s Valley Cave. Sam took some of them. (There’s even one with me in it, but you can’t really see me very well, thank goodness!) Some other pictures came from the internet, posted by other cavers who have explored Sloan’s Valley. It is pretty spectacular.
Sloan's Valley Cave
That tiny little white dot in th darkest part is the lamp on my helmet. Yep, that's me!
Sloan's Valley Cave Passageway
Kind of a scramble to get through this passage.
Big Stalagmite in Sloan's
This is a monster stalagmite. Lots of calcite makes it look so white
Cave Pool in Sloan's
An underground pool of water in Sloan's Valley Cave. The cave is highly prone to flooding in the spring rains.
A Caver in Sloan's
This is a friend of ours caving with us, photographed exploring a cavern.
Caves have lots of different types of formations, also called speleothems, all made from the effects of water and the minerals in water. The speleothems vary depending on how much water gets in, what minerals are in the water, whether or not there is good airflow in the cave and the geology of the area in which the cave is formed. Underground rivers carve huge caverns and tunnels in the rock. Water rolling or dripping from above deposits minerals that build gradually into stalagtites (hanging down from the ceiling) and stalagmites (growing up from the floor), or columns where the two meet. Here are some other speleothems that can be found in caves in various places.
Stalactites over a Reflecting
The water may only be inches deep, but the reflected stalactites make it look deeper.
Fried Eggs
This odd formation is in Luray Caverns in Virginia, a cave open for visitors. My husband took this picture on our visit there.
Cave Crystals
Also called Anthodites, these are like tiny stalactites in thin needle shapes.
Pretty cool.
Bacon!
Different types of minerals, such as the iron oxide that provides the red and brown colors, deposited in thin sheets by water over time form this speleothem. Well named, wouldn't you say?
Cave Pearls
These speleothems form from calcium carbonate deposits in small amounts of water. Rolling around against each other makes them round. If the water dries up, the pearls can't hold together and they break down into powder.
Caves also contain many living creatures. Some live near the entrances and take advantage of both the cave’s environment and the world aboveground. Others live deep in the cave and never see the light of day. Bats are probably the best knows of all cave-dwellers. Here is a bat we saw on one of our caving adventures:
Bat!
Often whole colonies of bats will live in caves, sleeping during the day and venturing out at night to hunt for food-like insects-using their unique echolocation abilities. At Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, which I visited when I was about 10 when my dad was stationed on an army base near Albuquerque, there is a gigantic colony of Brazilian free-tail bats that lives in the cave from April to October and every evening they pour out of the cave to feed. There are so many of them that they look like a great dark cloud rising out of the ground-or maybe like a demon being exorcised from a possessed person!
Twilight Hunters
Salamanders are also found frequently in caves. We saw this one on one of our trips to Wind Cave. If this Salamander had lived deep inside the cave and never came out, however, chances are it would be pure white and eyeless. Eyeless, albino creatures-mainly insects, fish and reptiles-are often find in the depths of caves, where they have adapted to the perpetual dark. A pool far down inside Mammoth Cave has schools of eyeless white fish that do quite well in that strange environment.
Salamander
Eyeless Fish
Because caves vary so much in size and configuration, there are many techniques involved in caving. At the far end of what you might call Xtreme caving, lie cave climbing and cave diving.
Some caves have great vertical shafts running down for hundreds or even thousands of feet. Exploring these caves involves the same techniques used by rock climbers, only in reverse. In other words, you might rappel down into the cave and climb back up to get out. Ropes and pitons and carabiners would come into play.
Cave diving includes exploring underwater caves or moving through the underground rivers in an earthbound cave to see if the cave opens out into dry tunnels again. Cave divers use equipment like scuba divers-wetsuits, re-breathers, masks and fins. Cave diving is probably the most dangerous form of caving and requires years of training and experience.
The sort of basic caving Sam and I did didn’t use special equipment, but there were still techniques we used to traverse the different types of spaces in caves. Sometimes you can just walk upright like normal. Other times you are scrambling over rock falls. You may find yourself on your knees crawling along because the ceiling is too low for standing. For me, one of the scariest things was belly crawling. You do that when you are “pushing a crack.” You need to move from one part of a cave to another, and the only way there is through a tight horizontal crack in masses of rock. You literally push through on your stomache, pulling with your fingers and pushing with your feet. Sometimes you have to tie your cave pack to your ankle and drag it along because you just don’t have enough space to carry it on your chest or back. It is very claustrophobic. I never pushed a crack unless someone who had done it before could tell me about how long it was and that it definitely opened up on the other side. But expert cave explorers will routinely crawl into cracks and go for long ways, only to find themselves at a dead end and have to go backwards because they don’t even have enough room to turn around!
Chimneying is another technique we had to use a few times. Sometimes there is no way down to a lower level that opens out except by a drop-off with walls on either side. So you plant your right hand and foot on one wall and your left on the other and kind of skootch down bit by bit. Or you can sometimes put your back against one wall and your feet against the other and shift your way down that way. One time in Sloan’s Valley Cave we had to chimney down a vertical crack. Sam did great, but I was less confident and a lot less sure-footed. I slipped down about the last 10 feet. But it turned out all right because Sam and two other guys we were caving with kind of gathered together and caught me. It was scary, but it was worth it, because it brought us down to an amazing underground river running through the cave.
Caves are beautiful and fascinating. It was funny, but no matter how many times we went in caves, even in the same ones over and over, I was always really nervous the first few minutes when we entered the cave. But then after we got inside and it turned cool and dark and strange, I felt like I was in another world, and I wasn’t afraid any more.
Next Up: Part II - The Great Hound Rescue