Last spring, a Boston Grotto party, in upstate New York, discovered a new passage with excellent formations, leading from a well-known cavern. I joined a trip three weeks later to photograph and map the new section. But as we were returning to the known part of the cave at the end of the day, we saw the lights of another party just outside. Going back to the new passage would have made too much noise. Instead we doused our lamps and for forty minutes crouched in a stream in the dark, until the party had moved farther on.
Acting like this just to avoid company would be absurd. And cavers do have other reasons for their secrecy. Too often when a cave's reputation spreads, its owners turn it into a commercial attraction and close it to further exploration. Or farmers dynamite their caves shut if careless cavers leave carbide lying around the cave's entrance, poisoning livestock. Those who know the Garden of Eden Cave say that this would happen to it as soon as people began to visit it.
Knox, Ward's, Mitchell's -- these are the easy ones. There are harder ones--like McFail's. Just to get into McFail's you have to slide down a rope through a 45-foot pit, wearing a diver's wet suit. Then, you squeeze down a slim 55-foot vertical fissure, with your back pressed hard against one wall, your feet against the other, in turn lowering each a little.
Under the fissure, the passage becomes horizontal, and you crawl 100 feet on your belly, pushing a pack of equipment ahead of you. Further beyond, the passage leads to a shorter Gunbarrel that ends in a "sump": a low tube nearly filled with water, with only three of four inches of breathing space at the top, in dry weather. Then the cave becomes high enough to walk in and leads to miles of unmapped passages. But this is only New York. In West Virginia, or Kentucky, or Mexico, the dimensions are much more fantastic.
Crowded Caves?
These caves will never be crowded. They demand skill in mountaineer- "The Last Frontier: The Strange World," as one Grotto flyer puts it. When every last mountain has been ing, plus thorough experience with the special problems of mud, darkness, and water. Any accident in a cave is doubly serious, so the advanced caver has to be a first aid expert. Often cavers participate in rescue programs such as the Boston Grotto's Cave Rescue Communications Network.
It isn't formations, or marble walls, or fossils of extinct animals that make such torture delicious. To a caver it's climbed, the caver'll still be exploring; and as long as extraterrestial opportunities are limited, caving is the one chance anyone then will have. Every weekend, someone opens up a mile of new passage somewhere. At best guess, only a tenth of all the American caves have been discovered, and these are not fully explored.
It can feel good to have made it through what the map calls an "impassable passage" or one that isn't on the map at all. Even as a beginner, you feel you've accomplished something when the Grotto inducts you into its "Order of the Gunbarrel" for having "successfully negotiated that curious passage." And when you get outside of a cave and feel the solid ground underneath you, you really know how solid it isn't