Nope nope nope. Even the video is cringe, I'll keep my caves to pictures other people take. Drowning to death or being lost to all knowledge in a hole that is unlikely to ever be found is one of the worse way to go.
This is the first video in a LONG time that I just wasn't able to watch. I'm not claustrophobic in any other way, but the thought of getting stuck in a tight spot and not being able to move until I starve to death has always been my biggest fear. Screw Dat - I'd much rather burn.
That's a whole lotta nope right there! Crawling around the mud caves in Borrego Springs is about as far as I'll go spelunking these days.
As a kid, monkeying around in the limestone caves on the Mississippi river was fun, but you never went too far in those either. Had a friend who lived five miles off the river in suburbia and they had a small cave you could get to through a kitchen cabinet.
I was born a couple years after that incident. But it was talked about in Quincy where I grew up as a general reminder to stay the heck outta the caves in that area. The limestone caves on the Quincy-side of the river were mostly used for storage but you still didn't go wandering too far into them.
I've been through Mark Twain caves more times than I can count and that's a good reason why I don't go spelunking!
The mud caves out here are a different matter, they're formed by seasonal rain in the loose sandy soil of the Borrego. They constantly change and usually you can see light from above as the rain carves out the soft sand. Very few are true caves.
When I was younger I did some of that. One time crawling about 100 yards using nothing but lit matches and the glow of the sun at the end of the space. But after way too many MRIs I can't even watch that on video. Hell now I don't even like having a person on either side of me.
Every year, bout this time, my son's Trail Life USA Troop just *has* to go to a local private cave and do this stuff. It's not that tight, by any means, but a big snuger than a 43 year old guy wants to crawl through. Very soon, I need to do this for a 4th time. Not looking forward to it. But this is his last year in that grammar-school aged boys, so I'm just about done. Never again, I tell you! -Just A Chemist
Spelunking is NOT for me. What's the point? I can find a dark place to be alone at just about any bar within 20 miles of me, and I would never get irretrievably lost there.
My wife and I used to go spelunking like that every year back in the day. We would go down to the Kentucky Crawl a Thon with our local outdoor club. Olive Hill KY, home of Tom T Hall. They would have a couple dozen caves open with varying degrees of difficulty. We always would pick the challenging ones to explore with guides(no roping though). Belly crawls and underground streams. Bats and cave crickets galore. We loved it. Lot's of tight spaces like the video, one was called the birth canal, it was like the one where you were upright but had to squeeze through. One of our bigger guys just couldn't make it and had to take the back up route. Also tight places where you had to belly crawl and squeeze through. In one very tight spot in particular, you had to wriggle your shoulders though one a time time, I looked back at the guy behind me and he was having a full fledged panic attack. I have never seen such fear on a persons face as I saw on that guy. Lucky for him there was another way out and the guide took him that way. Now that we are both retired I would love to do it again sometime. Last time we were looking to go they were not doing the Crawl a Thon because of the problem of spreading the fungus that was killing the bat population. Last time we went we found out later that my wife was pregnant at the time, but we didn't know yet. Good times.
Heh, heh...I used to do exactly that when I was younger - much younger. You have to be athletic and without a trace of claustrophobia to crawl around in places like that. I was a qualified submariner so no claustrophobia in me, but I'm now in my sixties, so there's no way I have the strength or stamina for that kind of crawling anymore. Too bad. It was fun.
I remember going into a wild cave near Chattanooga Tennessee where the entrance was underneath a boulder the size of a small house that had slipped a few feet down the mountain. You had to shimmy down between the boulder and the hillside about ten feet. Then you had to crab your way underneath the boulder while partially submerged in mud and leaf litter. Once underneath, you turned and dropped down a few feet and were soon into a very nice walking cave.
If you have any interest in spelunking, there is a very good book about a bunch of college kids from Ohio who set out in the 70's to connect the Mammoth Cave system with the Flint Ridge system in central KY. It's called "The Longest Cave", and it's a good read. When they finally made the connection, the Flint-Mammoth system became the longest known cave in the world and it is a record that still hasn't been beat - almost 500 miles of surveyed cave.
I still have my carbide lantern that I carried as an emergency backup from those days.
Y'know, I keep thinking that there are reasons why this cave sat unoccupied for 79,000-250,000 years (all that flowstone takes a while to form at 0.1cm/century). This is one of those reasons. Brrr.
I use to do this all the time, when I was young, in Southern Indiana, Bloomington/Monroe Co., it was a hell of a lot of fun. The best was rappelling into the caves. My father taught Spelunking 101 at a college and the final was to go caving and I always tagged along.
I am quite claustrophobic and literally 4 seconds into this one I knew I was in trouble. I made it 30 seconds in and had to click out because my chest was tightening up. And yeah, like Chris Mallory, me and MRI machines do not get along, which really sucks because I have had a lot of MRI's.
I know some people that do that in underwater caves. Having to take your gear off, push it through a hole and then wriggling through after it is not my idea of fun.
I belonged to a spelunker club many years ago. I would never ever even try that but we had members that were so limber and calm that this is what they loved. Today my big toe wouldn't fit in the cave entrance.
Jewel Cave in South Dakota has a bench out front for anyone wanting to join a splunking tour. You must be able to crawl under that bench. They have rangers standing by to remove the top when people get stuck. First time I tried it, I crawled off with the stone on my back. They said I couldn't go on the tour, they didn't need the mountains moved just yet.
I must confess to starting this habit when I was very, very young. Squeezing through very tight, wet passageways was just what we did back then. Then, after a twenty-year hiatus I found myself completely absorbed by the desire to revisit other, tight, wet, slippery passage ways. I just couldn't get enough.
Fortunately, now that I am in my early sixties, my libido is slowing down and I can now go for five, sometimes even fifteen seconds without thinking about sex...especially when sleeping.
Good on you. I was 20, 6'1" and a little, weighed 190 or so. Nobody expected me to go into a tunnel, and that was good. You got a double issue of brass ones.
Am I the only one that thought: "This must be what it looked like for the gerbil trying to escape Richard Gere's colon." ? Yeah, that's what I thought......
Yup! Still got the carbide lamp too. It was our main light as flash lights didn't seem to survive long. Wish we had those tiny LED ones then. A few of those spots looked like the 'exhale -more-More!' type holes.
Used to be a qualified submariner on diesel boats, no problem. I've listened to tails of men on battleships crawling the 16" guns. I was 6'1" and 155lbs in my early twenties. I've flown an open cockpit ultralight to 7000 ft. No way would I do what these guys are doing.
Used to do a lot of that in the mountains of West Virginia...when I was much, much younger. My buddy would always get claustrophobic and we would have to exit the cave. Fun times. Couldn't put a gun to my head and make me do that now though
I was 21 last time I went into a wild cave. I had 2 people in front of me and it was a hole with a 90 degree turn, like the first one in the video. I was 6'3", 220. Got stuck in the hole. Couldn't go forward or backward. Was able to keep it together and exhale all the air out of my lungs while wriggling backwards. It was close enough to the entrance that there was still dirt on the floor, so that helped. Got out and went to the entrance to wait for the other guys and found a bunch of rattlesnakes. After that, if I couldn't crawl into a cave on hands and knees, I didn't go in.
Nope.
ReplyDeleteDitto. That kinda stuff, like jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, is just asking for bad things to happen to you.
DeleteNemo
I have skydived 3 times. On #3 I realized what a bad idea it was when someone landed on someone's house.
Deleteyou don't get stuck jumping out of airplanes. and if the parachute fails you die quick.
DeleteNope nope nope.
DeleteEven the video is cringe, I'll keep my caves to pictures other people take. Drowning to death or being lost to all knowledge in a hole that is unlikely to ever be found is one of the worse way to go.
-arc
I think I'd rather climb El Capitan.
ReplyDeleteSame. I'll climb all over the *outside* of a mountain.
DeleteWhy?
ReplyDeleteThis is the first video in a LONG time that I just wasn't able to watch. I'm not claustrophobic in any other way, but the thought of getting stuck in a tight spot and not being able to move until I starve to death has always been my biggest fear. Screw Dat - I'd much rather burn.
ReplyDeleteThat would be a big nope
ReplyDeleteNo fucking way. Ever.
ReplyDeleteThat's a whole lotta nope right there! Crawling around the mud caves in Borrego Springs is about as far as I'll go spelunking these days.
ReplyDeleteAs a kid, monkeying around in the limestone caves on the Mississippi river was fun, but you never went too far in those either. Had a friend who lived five miles off the river in suburbia and they had a small cave you could get to through a kitchen cabinet.
Remember those three boys that went missing in Hannibal Missouri in 1967? I've always thought they were down in those damn caves somewhere.
DeleteI was born a couple years after that incident. But it was talked about in Quincy where I grew up as a general reminder to stay the heck outta the caves in that area. The limestone caves on the Quincy-side of the river were mostly used for storage but you still didn't go wandering too far into them.
DeleteI've been through Mark Twain caves more times than I can count and that's a good reason why I don't go spelunking!
The mud caves out here are a different matter, they're formed by seasonal rain in the loose sandy soil of the Borrego. They constantly change and usually you can see light from above as the rain carves out the soft sand. Very few are true caves.
Props to the guy who discovered it.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was younger I did some of that. One time crawling about 100 yards using nothing but lit matches and the glow of the sun at the end of the space. But after way too many MRIs I can't even watch that on video. Hell now I don't even like having a person on either side of me.
ReplyDeleteEvery year, bout this time, my son's Trail Life USA Troop just *has* to go to a local private cave and do this stuff. It's not that tight, by any means, but a big snuger than a 43 year old guy wants to crawl through.
ReplyDeleteVery soon, I need to do this for a 4th time. Not looking forward to it. But this is his last year in that grammar-school aged boys, so I'm just about done.
Never again, I tell you!
-Just A Chemist
5 seconds.......and nope.
ReplyDeleteEd357
Oh hell no.
ReplyDeletenonononononono...the distillation columns on our unit are tight enough for me thank you very much
ReplyDeleteSpelunking is NOT for me. What's the point? I can find a dark place to be alone at just about any bar within 20 miles of me, and I would never get irretrievably lost there.
ReplyDeleteNope. Went through the whole city storm sewer as a kid. But not any more. No wAy I would go through some of those holes.
ReplyDeleteMy wife and I used to go spelunking like that every year back in the day. We would go down to the Kentucky Crawl a Thon with our local outdoor club. Olive Hill KY, home of Tom T Hall. They would have a couple dozen caves open with varying degrees of difficulty. We always would pick the challenging ones to explore with guides(no roping though). Belly crawls and underground streams. Bats and cave crickets galore. We loved it. Lot's of tight spaces like the video, one was called the birth canal, it was like the one where you were upright but had to squeeze through. One of our bigger guys just couldn't make it and had to take the back up route. Also tight places where you had to belly crawl and squeeze through. In one very tight spot in particular, you had to wriggle your shoulders though one a time time, I looked back at the guy behind me and he was having a full fledged panic attack. I have never seen such fear on a persons face as I saw on that guy. Lucky for him there was another way out and the guide took him that way. Now that we are both retired I would love to do it again sometime. Last time we were looking to go they were not doing the Crawl a Thon because of the problem of spreading the fungus that was killing the bat population. Last time we went we found out later that my wife was pregnant at the time, but we didn't know yet. Good times.
ReplyDeleteNope, nope, nope - didn't even finish the clip.
ReplyDeleteThat's the nitwit Limey Steve Backshall and friends who appear on PBS
ReplyDeleteHeh, heh...I used to do exactly that when I was younger - much younger. You have to be athletic and without a trace of claustrophobia to crawl around in places like that. I was a qualified submariner so no claustrophobia in me, but I'm now in my sixties, so there's no way I have the strength or stamina for that kind of crawling anymore. Too bad. It was fun.
ReplyDeleteI remember going into a wild cave near Chattanooga Tennessee where the entrance was underneath a boulder the size of a small house that had slipped a few feet down the mountain. You had to shimmy down between the boulder and the hillside about ten feet. Then you had to crab your way underneath the boulder while partially submerged in mud and leaf litter. Once underneath, you turned and dropped down a few feet and were soon into a very nice walking cave.
If you have any interest in spelunking, there is a very good book about a bunch of college kids from Ohio who set out in the 70's to connect the Mammoth Cave system with the Flint Ridge system in central KY. It's called "The Longest Cave", and it's a good read. When they finally made the connection, the Flint-Mammoth system became the longest known cave in the world and it is a record that still hasn't been beat - almost 500 miles of surveyed cave.
I still have my carbide lantern that I carried as an emergency backup from those days.
Y'know, I keep thinking that there are reasons why this cave sat unoccupied for 79,000-250,000 years (all that flowstone takes a while to form at 0.1cm/century). This is one of those reasons. Brrr.
ReplyDeleteI use to do this all the time, when I was young, in Southern Indiana, Bloomington/Monroe Co., it was a hell of a lot of fun. The best was rappelling into the caves. My father taught Spelunking 101 at a college and the final was to go caving and I always tagged along.
ReplyDeleteI am quite claustrophobic and literally 4 seconds into this one I knew I was in trouble.
ReplyDeleteI made it 30 seconds in and had to click out because my chest was tightening up.
And yeah, like Chris Mallory, me and MRI machines do not get along, which really sucks because I have had a lot of MRI's.
Tim in AK
Nope, nope, nope, nopity fucking nope.
ReplyDeleteI know some people that do that in underwater caves. Having to take your gear off, push it through a hole and then wriggling through after it is not my idea of fun.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere my bad back and fat ass won't be going.
ReplyDeleteJeremy P.
I belonged to a spelunker club many years ago. I would never ever even try that but we had members that were so limber and calm that this is what they loved. Today my big toe wouldn't fit in the cave entrance.
ReplyDeleteJewel Cave in South Dakota has a bench out front for anyone wanting to join a splunking tour. You must be able to crawl under that bench. They have rangers standing by to remove the top when people get stuck. First time I tried it, I crawled off with the stone on my back.
ReplyDeleteThey said I couldn't go on the tour, they didn't need the mountains moved just yet.
I must confess to starting this habit when I was very, very young. Squeezing through very tight, wet passageways was just what we did back then. Then, after a twenty-year hiatus I found myself completely absorbed by the desire to revisit other, tight, wet, slippery passage ways. I just couldn't get enough.
ReplyDeleteFortunately, now that I am in my early sixties, my libido is slowing down and I can now go for five, sometimes even fifteen seconds without thinking about sex...especially when sleeping.
Nineteen and twenty I climbed around in a lot of holes and tunnels. Then blew them up. Another time, another life. Today, aint no way.
ReplyDeleteThat took big brass ones. Thank you for your strand welcome home, brother.
DeleteGood on you. I was 20, 6'1" and a little, weighed 190 or so. Nobody expected me to go into a tunnel, and that was good. You got a double issue of brass ones.
DeleteReminds me of the first time I had sex.
ReplyDeleteAm I the only one that thought:
ReplyDelete"This must be what it looked like for the gerbil trying to escape Richard Gere's colon." ?
Yeah, that's what I thought......
Leigh
Whitehall, NY
Yup! Still got the carbide lamp too. It was our main light as flash lights didn't seem to survive long. Wish we had those tiny LED ones then. A few of those spots looked like the 'exhale -more-More!' type holes.
ReplyDeleteAnd when they get stuck, other people have to risk their lives for their stupidity.
ReplyDeleteUsed to be a qualified submariner on diesel boats, no problem. I've listened to tails of men on battleships crawling the 16" guns. I was 6'1" and 155lbs in my early twenties. I've flown an open cockpit ultralight to 7000 ft. No way would I do what these guys are doing.
ReplyDeleteShit nightmares are made of!!
ReplyDeleteUsed to do a lot of that in the mountains of West Virginia...when I was much, much younger. My buddy would always get claustrophobic and we would have to exit the cave. Fun times. Couldn't put a gun to my head and make me do that now though
ReplyDeleteI was 21 last time I went into a wild cave. I had 2 people in front of me and it was a hole with a 90 degree turn, like the first one in the video. I was 6'3", 220. Got stuck in the hole. Couldn't go forward or backward. Was able to keep it together and exhale all the air out of my lungs while wriggling backwards. It was close enough to the entrance that there was still dirt on the floor, so that helped. Got out and went to the entrance to wait for the other guys and found a bunch of rattlesnakes. After that, if I couldn't crawl into a cave on hands and knees, I didn't go in.
ReplyDelete