Exploring a cave is great, but I sure as fuck wouldn’t try crawling down a tiny hole going down at a 70 degree angle. Some spelunkers are straight nuts though, like they get to the end of a cave and say “wow, the wind is whistling through here!” and try expanding small openings with a hammer and chisel or even explosives. I went caving one time in a well known but very long cave, with experienced people, and that was really interesting. When i got back I read my friend’s cave incident journal, which details all the rescues and deaths that happened in the last year, and it was… interesting. Shit like “oh, jimmy got stuck, so we had to break his ribs to get him out”. Great.
We had some interesting times on the one expedition I did. It was fascinating and I would recommend trying it at least once… doesn’t have to be dangerous. Even going to Carlsbad Caverns, which is a National Park and while not the real spelunking experience, pretty cool. I went to Wolf River Cave in Tennessee. Most of it was just like mountain hiking, but with a ceiling. Questionable parts included crawling in light mud on our hands and knees for 600 feet through an area where the ceiling was about 3 feet high. Also one part, you go through a ‘door’ and have to drop down ~5 feet onto some rocks… people told me “be sure to go left when you land!!” and wtf was to the right? This giant dark pit of rocks at least 20 feet deep. Okay… then at the very bottom, there was this area with a bunch of trickling water and awesome stalagmites where you could sit on rocks by this weird little stream and ponds. We split up and sat in different rooms… the guy from Kentucky I sat with, who I’d never met before, told me “sometimes when I’m down here… i listen to the water… and it sounds like people talking…” Uh, okay.
But anyway it was an amazing experience and profoundly strange… the ‘rooms’ and ‘hallways’ are oddly reminiscent of human construction. And if you get stuck or hurt, if you’ve done things properly and signed in and people know you’re there, experienced cavers will come and rescue you.
“sometimes when I’m down here… i listen to the water… and it sounds like people talking…”
He probably has MES, Musical Ear Syndrome. I got it, it’s really not as scary or weird as it sounds. Basically our brains mistakenly interpret some white noises (running water is a big one) as faint music or voices. But it’s not really a hallucination, because at the same time our brain is aware it isn’t real and it’s just coming from said noise. It can actually be quite pleasant, beaches often sound like a quiet symphony. Only occasionally will I hear voices and mistake it for my girlfriend or something before realizing it.
I could see what he means, and that happens to me sometimes too. I’ve thought background noise is all sorts of things. it is very quiet down there (we were I think at least a mile underground, having walked roughly horizontally for 5 hours). It’s still to me just a classic amusing ‘oh great’ thing to tell someone in that situation.
Jones and three others had left their party in search of “The Birth Canal”, a tight but navigable passageway with a turnaround at the end. Jones entered an unmapped passageway which he wrongly believed to be the Canal and found himself at a dead end, with nowhere to go besides a narrow vertical fissure. Believing this to be the turnaround, he entered head-first and became wedged upside-down.
I’m slightly claustrophobic, but it has never impacted my life. Elevator? Fine. Tiny closet? Fine. But a cave where you have to crawl for more than a few seconds? I’d die right there.
Exploring a cave is great, but I sure as fuck wouldn’t try crawling down a tiny hole going down at a 70 degree angle. Some spelunkers are straight nuts though, like they get to the end of a cave and say “wow, the wind is whistling through here!” and try expanding small openings with a hammer and chisel or even explosives. I went caving one time in a well known but very long cave, with experienced people, and that was really interesting. When i got back I read my friend’s cave incident journal, which details all the rescues and deaths that happened in the last year, and it was… interesting. Shit like “oh, jimmy got stuck, so we had to break his ribs to get him out”. Great.
Yeah…I’m OK with going my entire life without doing any of that.
We had some interesting times on the one expedition I did. It was fascinating and I would recommend trying it at least once… doesn’t have to be dangerous. Even going to Carlsbad Caverns, which is a National Park and while not the real spelunking experience, pretty cool. I went to Wolf River Cave in Tennessee. Most of it was just like mountain hiking, but with a ceiling. Questionable parts included crawling in light mud on our hands and knees for 600 feet through an area where the ceiling was about 3 feet high. Also one part, you go through a ‘door’ and have to drop down ~5 feet onto some rocks… people told me “be sure to go left when you land!!” and wtf was to the right? This giant dark pit of rocks at least 20 feet deep. Okay… then at the very bottom, there was this area with a bunch of trickling water and awesome stalagmites where you could sit on rocks by this weird little stream and ponds. We split up and sat in different rooms… the guy from Kentucky I sat with, who I’d never met before, told me “sometimes when I’m down here… i listen to the water… and it sounds like people talking…” Uh, okay.
But anyway it was an amazing experience and profoundly strange… the ‘rooms’ and ‘hallways’ are oddly reminiscent of human construction. And if you get stuck or hurt, if you’ve done things properly and signed in and people know you’re there, experienced cavers will come and rescue you.
“sometimes when I’m down here… i listen to the water… and it sounds like people talking…”
He probably has MES, Musical Ear Syndrome. I got it, it’s really not as scary or weird as it sounds. Basically our brains mistakenly interpret some white noises (running water is a big one) as faint music or voices. But it’s not really a hallucination, because at the same time our brain is aware it isn’t real and it’s just coming from said noise. It can actually be quite pleasant, beaches often sound like a quiet symphony. Only occasionally will I hear voices and mistake it for my girlfriend or something before realizing it.
My brain starts playing the theme to Super Mario Bros when I stay up really late.
I could see what he means, and that happens to me sometimes too. I’ve thought background noise is all sorts of things. it is very quiet down there (we were I think at least a mile underground, having walked roughly horizontally for 5 hours). It’s still to me just a classic amusing ‘oh great’ thing to tell someone in that situation.
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I’m slightly claustrophobic, but it has never impacted my life. Elevator? Fine. Tiny closet? Fine. But a cave where you have to crawl for more than a few seconds? I’d die right there.