Gone Spelunking – The Insider Goes Caving, Part 2

“You want to see what this cave really looks like?”

We’re all panting steam, smeared in damp sand– of course, the answer is yes.

“Turn off all of your lights.”

As promised, reporters Jed Kudrick and Geneva Webber from The Insider joined the Outdoor Adventure and Community Service (OACS) club at Laurel Caverns on Saturday, Oct. 14 for a guided spelunking trip. Follow along to unearth their perspectives.

GENEVA:

Our trip begins with an hour-long bus ride to Laurel Caverns. The morning air is thick with water, and around 8:30 a.m. Jed, 10 other students, and I convene at the Bobcat to board. There are three students driving themselves, and one student runs to the bus around 18 minutes late.

While OACS President Dan Weisser acts as a chaperone, mulling over attendance and legal waivers, Jed and I exchange AAA batteries for our handheld flashlights bought on Amazon a few nights before. 

Jed is sporting brand-new boots and what he calls his “adventure pants.” We’re both decked out in an amateur way– I feel lucky I grabbed a zip-lock bag of honey protein granola and dried cranberries before leaving the house, let alone a water bottle.

The bus ride passes before I can open either of the books I brought. We talk about the last times we were on a yellow school bus: the Renaissance Fair, the Steel City Convention, high school. And then we’re stepping off the bus into the misty morning.

JED:

Once inside the Norman E. Cale Visitors’ Center, Dan beckons us to follow him down a few flights of stairs into a room reminiscent of a 70’s log cabin, complete with wood paneling and a carpeted column. We take our seats in the next room over so that our coincidentally-named guide, Daniel, may introduce himself and the caverns. Above all, he advises us to make good use of our helmets and lights to avoid injury.

“If you so much as sprain your ankle, we have to treat it like it’s broken,” Daniel says. “And then I’ll have to drag you out strapped to a stretcher.” 

At this point, Daniel waves his hand to a bright orange stretcher propped against the far wall. He also mentions that going off-trail and getting lost or stuck might warrant a 6-hour rescue extraction and lots of paperwork. 

With that in mind, we don our safety helmets and snap a few pictures before taking our leave. Daniel opens a door behind him which leads to a steep staircase going down into the mouth of the cave. Looking at us all very seriously, he warns us to watch our step and make sure we don’t slip, lest we get off to a “rocky start.”

GENEVA:

Our first destination is rightfully named. The Hall of the Mountain King is grand and open, its ceiling dripping with chandeliers suspended on rusted chains. Daniel points up to sparkling silver bacteria– which supposedly indicates clean, breathable air– and a solitary bat sleeping flush to the rock face. We turn our headlamps down as not to disturb it.

Next comes the Dining Room, named for a now-fractured table-shaped rock which explorers would use to take a break and eat.

“Before it broke, I thought it looked like a grand piano,” Daniel says. His witticism ends with the words “a flat miner.”

After we’ve thoroughly digested the horror of that joke, all it takes is a step over a rope fence onto soft orange sand, and we’re filing one-by-one into a sloping crevice.

JED:

Imagine a gap about two-feet long by two-feet wide and about eight feet down; this is the very first hole we descend into as we enter the unlit portion of the caves. Daniel informs us that this is the easy, “beginner” hole. 

The makeshift paths throughout the caves generally either force us to explore single file or give slightly enough room for Eva and I to walk, talk, and joke with Dan and Daniel. Soon enough, we encounter a forking trail at which Daniel presents us with a choice: the easy path or the hard path. Naturally, Eva and I choose the hard path, because it’ll make for a better story for you guys.

GENEVA:

(And because it’s fun!)

JED:

There are multiple hard paths ahead of us– most more difficult than the last– but we keep on taking them regardless. To make our way through these crevices, we can either army crawl and take it slow and steady, or go on all fours like a rabid animal or a Spider-Man cosplayer. I have my phone and brand new flashlight in my pockets, so I attempt to conserve their sanctity as well as I can by taking the downhill slope on all fours. Whoever’s behind me probably thinks I look stupid. I keep my knees hoisted in the air by crawling around on my hands and feet, but this is not the time nor the place for judging how someone looks while they’re half-stuck in a crevice just big enough to shimmy through. 

After making our way through a couple hard paths and other casual 170-feet-underground nature trails, Daniel warns us that the hard track on this choice involves getting your feet wet (quite literally). 

Never back down, never give up, though, which leads to me doing a balancing act worthy of the circus, with my left hand with my Apple watch on it steady on the left wall, my right hand immersed in the muddy water beneath me, my knee pockets containing my phone and flashlight suspended in the air, my brand new boots dragging through murky depths, and my helmet scraping against the rock ceiling.

We make it out of there a little damp, but thankfully still with everything we came in with (maybe excluding our dignity).

“I love sand,” Eva says.

I look over to see her picking up the muddy sand from the puddle beneath her and squishing it between her fingers, then attempting to wash her hands off in that very same puddle. 

I don’t like sand– it’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. 

Luckily for those of us that want to get our hands genuinely clean, Daniel informs us that there are two “clean” waterfalls on our path up ahead. The only thing in our way is a steep approximately four-foot incline that we have to hoist ourselves up first. 

GENEVA:

I think it’s probably taller than four feet. Not to mention a 20-some-foot drop if you slip.

JED:

Daniel, Dan, and another OACS member are first to go with little to no problem. Then comes Eva’s turn. Eva is more on the petite side, so she takes the help of the guys who have already made it up to secure her ascension.

GENEVA:

Let the record show that I am average height for a woman.

JED:

I, however, am above average height, so as Eva is getting hoisted up to my left, I grasp the top of the incline and pull myself up in one fluid motion. Once Eva has gotten her bearings, she turns around to watch me and is greeted by nothing but empty darkness. She completes her 360 to come face to face with me, staring in disbelief while I smile proud of my meaningless accomplishment.

Once the remainder of the group has scaled the incline, Eva and I make our way over to the waterfall that Daniel notes as the cleaner of the two. Eva volunteers to be the guinea pig and sticks her head under the stream, proceeding to get more all over her face than she does in her mouth.

GENEVA:

It really is delicious when you actually get some.

JED:

 I follow her example, attempting to avoid an involuntary shower in the process, but I end up drenching my beard alongside parching my thirst.

Dan and a few other OACS guys join us after our half-successful attempts. Dan, being Dan, goes for the trickle looking like a werewolf howling at the moon. He gracefully steps up to the water like a dancer preparing to hoist his partner into the air for a mesmerizing finale that would leave them bathed in the audience’s standing ovation. 

Unfortunately for Dan, he gets bathed in questionable cave water rather than a crowd’s thunderous applause.

The second waterfall is slightly less refreshing. Eva takes her turn first, yet again, and then it is my turn to partake in the drinking of the cave water. I squat down and tilt my head so that the water hopefully doesn’t go all throughout my beard this time, but I am greeted with a grittier textured water that leaves a foul coppery taste in my mouth.

Having poorly chosen the dirtier water source for our final taste test, we race to catch up with our group as they wait for us to leave. Daniel explains that this is the end of our journey. All that’s left now is to take that entire trek, again, but in reverse. 

GENEVA:

Your body works differently underground. You have to become a slightly different animal than your everyday human; your muscles shudder as they learn, adapt, to work together in unique ways, to crouch-crawl with long, reaching steps or to heave yourself up by your elbows. You might get a sense of how a snake drags itself along by the muscles of its belly, only slowly and without grace. 

This is our return to the surface.

On the trail back, my sense of direction is distorted enough to make me grateful I’m wearing a helmet. The first “hard path” we squeeze through presses your chest and back to solid earth, and jagged rock closes in on your shoulders. My palms, raw and rust-colored from rubbing sand and stone, slide forward to feel out what I can’t yet see, and all I can hear is the labored breathing of myself and the other cavers.

With my face to the ground, something small and dark catches my eye: a glinting shard of charcoal. It’s a blackened piece of wood no larger than my first knuckle. I pause my writhing progression to pick it up and roll it between my fingers, and it’s soft enough to leave behind streaky traces of black on my hand. 

All around me, half-buried charcoal peppers the sand in scattered crumbles, and I hold the fragment like a crayon to the rock. E-V-A. When Jed clambers up behind me, I wordlessly offer the coal to him, and we leave our mark on the world for water to wash away or for the next caving tour to find.

The whole group is quiet with exhaustion when we arrive back at the lit section. Everything widens out and opens up, and I stretch each of my tired limbs as far as I can. Before we can bolt for the exit, we and the OACS members line up in front of Calico Falls, a 40-foot tall underground waterfall, for an “after” photo.

As we climb up what feels like an impossibly steep hill, Daniel brings us to the final sequence of our tour. The first is a fence-like wooden ramp sloping upward. Daniel holds a golf ball at the bottom of the slope, and gestures for us to gather around and watch. When he releases the ball, it rolls– and rolls– and rolls– to the top of the ramp, where Daniel catches it.

“This is how your perspective changes in a cave,” he says. “What you thought was a steep hill is actually even steeper. We’re already up above Calico Falls right now.”

I stare in awe with what little energy I have left.

Finally, Daniel leads us over to a dark “room” just past the cave exit that tapers off into a craggy tunnel. He instructs us to turn off our lights one last time, provides an epilepsy warning, and pushes a button. The room falls dark. An aged voice recording booms:

“Visible light from the sun is seen as white light,” says the voice. “But these caves never see the sun, and that white light is actually a combination of the whole color spectrum.”

And then the tunnel walls bulge under the weight of a classical symphony and stretch with immense flashes of color: a music-activated rainbow. The low notes fill the room with a heavy red, and the pitch rises along with the color spectrum to a fluorescent violet. At the end of the performance, we clap, although there is no orchestra or speaker to applaud besides Daniel.

Once on the surface, we return our helmets and straps and stamp off sand from our boots and pants. I wash mud down the bathroom sink from my orange hands. Dan, Jed, and I linger in the gift shop, inspecting mini teddy bears and picking out matching sweaters of varying sizes. There, Daniel holds a fluffy black-and-white pomeranian known as the Laurel Caverns Bat Dog. It wears a bat-wing costume and poses for some journalistic photos.

Despite the misting rain, the world seems brighter when we emerge. A coffee truck is parked outside the Visitor’s Center, and Jed and I stop for a mocha and a London fog, respectively. I felt that drink choice was only fitting. And then we plod back to the bus to be counted for attendance a final time.

I sleep so hard on the ride home that I can’t tell you anything about it, other than that I would be as ecstatic as a grade-schooler for lunch time.