Extreme Sport of the Week: Extreme Caving

Last week's post was long.  This one will be much shorter but it will be awesome.  There is only one picture, but stay with me here...

I've been doing some reading into extreme caving.  The really intense caving involves staying underground, often in pitch black to conserve light, for sometimes up to a month at a time.  It involves advanced rappelling equipment to get beyond sheer vertical drops.  Sometimes the passageway becomes flooded, and an advanced piece of scuba gear called a "rebreather" is required to stay underwater long enough to continue.  Sometimes there are flash floods.  Sometimes waterfalls, deafening as jet engines in the enclosed spaces of caverns, will plunge into huge underground lakes.  The temperatures are frequently low, and sometimes freezing.  An added difficulty to the sport is that rescue is nearly impossible in deep caves.  You can't just have a helicopter fly in and take people out.

Unfortunately, due to the darkness of the environment and the harshness of conditions, good photography of hardcore caves is much harder to come by than, say, hardcore mountaineering photography.  Do yourself a favor and do a google image search for Krubera (the deepest known cave, at over 7,000 feet of depth), or maybe try looking through this gallery for an idea of the dirtiness, claustrophobia, and verticality of the sport: http://www.kuleuven.be/spekul/expeditions/spain/pages/image000.html.

Of the very few good extreme caving photographs that I could find in the creative commons, take a look at this one:

(from WBUR's flickr photostream)

Claustrophobia, anyone?  How cool is that?

There are a few things that I find particularly awesome about this sport.  You may or may not agree with me, but here they are:

1.  Claustrophobia.  I think it is very cool how people continue to squeeze themselves down into tiny spaces, thousands of feet below the surface, without chance of rescue if they mess up, completely disoriented due to the lack of light, with the possibility of getting irreversibly lost down there.  People go caving, conquer this fear, or at least learn to live with it, and press on.
2. Colossal Cave Adventure.  You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.  Cave explorers don't have a map, and can't see further than their headlamps will illuminate the passageway ahead.  Who knows how many caverns are up ahead, how many rivers, how many small passageways branch off like the roots of a tree cutting thousands of feet into the Earth.  The entire process is pure exploration and discovery.
3. Journey to the Center of the Earth.  Have you googled for those images of Krubera yet?  If you have, and if you've seen the 1959 film version of "Journey to the Center of the Earth," you'll note the obvious similarity.  How could you hike down into a huge cave and not feel like you were in the movie?  (Yeah, yeah.  Don't answer that.  There are lots of ways, but still!)
4. As always, I am fascinated by humans performing unnatural feats.  The environment in some of the caves looks completely alien, full of mineral deposits and strange terrain.

The article that got me started learning about caves is this interview, which is packed with interesting facts about extreme caving: To the Supercave.

The article also mentions a book about the quest to find the deepest cave.  You can read the first few chapters online, here: http://www.amazon.com/Blind-Descent-Quest-Discover-Deepest/dp/1400067677.  After reading the first few chapters, I have added that book to the end of my reading queue.  It sounds like it will be every bit as interesting as "Into Thin Air" was, but perhaps even more so given how little people seem to know about caving.

If you've made it through this post despite the lack of pictures, I congratulate you... and hopefully you think this is half as cool as I do! :-)