Caving, at its core, is a wilderness experience like mountaineering or backpacking or scuba diving. The object is to go somewhere that's hard to get to and see things that ordinary people never see. If you're totally immune to claustrophobia and don't mind getting very muddy, being in top physical shape, and partying hard with similar people, then find yourself a circle of cavers and get down, WAY down, with them.
Exploring a cave is an unforgettable experience. Yes, commercial caves with lights, galleries, and guided tours like
Mammoth Cave National Park are plenty memorable, but I'm talking about smaller, wilder caves. There may be some in your neck of the woods that you never heard of unless you're connected to the network of spelunkers. Earlier in my life, I was, and I squirmed my way through a few of New York state's caverns with no commercial potential.There's a very deep thrill connected to entering the Earth and going beyond the bounds of light and safety. You challenge your limbs and lungs like no other sport, not even rock climbingthough you do need to learn about ropes and rock-bolts. The sights of the underworld, like a row of clean stalactites in a silent chamber flooded with mirror-flat water, rank right up there with moonrises in the woods.
The people in this sport are part of the fun too. Some cavers specialize in photography, others in rescue work. Some crews go out and dig new entrances to known caves. There's even a cadre of folks into
cave radio. But all of them are fiercely devoted to preserving the underground from destruction at the hands of thrill-seekers. And the dangers of caving, which rewards inattention with injury, even death, keep the focus on safety and training. On the whole, cavers are the most clear-eyed, coolheaded romantics you'll ever find. And did I say they're men and women in top physical shape who like to party hard?However, when I went to college and studied geology, not much that I learned had anything to do with caves. It turns out that in the eyes of the geologist, caves are as temporary as beaches. They're essentially an early stage of erosion in limestone country, openings dissolved by groundwater where it meets the air, at the water table. Soon enoughin a few thousand years, that iscaves open up to the surface as sinkholes. If the water table is steady for a long time, you can get a peculiar dry terrain called karst that has no surface streams. (The word comes from
a district of Slovenia with much to recommend it to tourists.)Sure, caves are valuable for geologistsfor instance,
caves have fossils in them, like early human remains. And because they have always been sanctuaries of one kind or another, caves preserve the oldest examples of human art.When I think of caves now, long after my spelunking days, I think of things like the underwater rock formation from
Devils Hole in southern Nevada. It's a piece of cavestone that preserved in its layers a record of the balance of oxygen isotopes in the atmosphere for the last half-million years. It's a scientific treasure, every bit as important to our knowledge of recent climates as the ice cores retrieved from Greenland, Antarctica, and a few places in between. Cavers (or, to be more respectful, speleologists) went into the wilderness and found it for us.