Caving
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Caving is defined as the sport of exploring caves. But caving is so much more than mere sport. Caving enables you to go where no one has been before, to explore the last unknown worlds to humankind. Caving, particularly exploration caving, requires you to become a climber, mountaineer, hiker, rope expert, surveyor, prospector, explorer, contortionist, rock expert, geologist, hydrologist, and most importantly, team player. Caving challenges you and makes you realize how small you are and how little you can achieve on your own. Caving teaches you the 3Ps: Persistence, Perseverance, and Patience, and to respect and value your team. Most importantly, caving lets you learn about the Earth’s history and the valuable resources caves can provide, such as potable water. Keep on reading to learn what drives us to go where several don’t dare to go.
Surrounded by walls and darkness, you listen to the silence. You hear a drop of water falling in the distance and making an echo that would put the breaking waves to shame. You turn your light off to save the power and wait. Suddenly, you detect a shimmering of light in the distance. Is it a light, or is it your imagination? Then you start hearing voices in the distance? Is that all in your head? But the voices grow louder, and the glistening of the light tells you that your team is returning and your rest time is over. It’s time to take your pack and continue your journey.
When asked why caving, most cavers emphasize that it takes you where no one has been before, enables you to explore the ultimate frontier in the world, and discover what no one has seen before. Although these are fair reasons, there is so much more to caving.
Caving, particularly exploration caving, requires you to become a climber, mountaineer, hiker, rope expert, surveyor, prospector, explorer, contortionist, rock expert, geologist, hydrologist, and most importantly, team player.
Why Caves?
Often stereotyped as the underworld where evil resides, caves are, in fact, the complete opposite. They serve as time capsules, mostly untouched by external influences; caves are our only window into the underground. They provide us with potable water, valuable insights into Earth’s past, species that inhabited this world way before us, and even resources that can aid in healing our ailments.
Once you enter a cave, you discover a parallel world of pristine, untouched nature. Humans have been connected to caves since the beginning of our existence. Initially used as shelters and refuges, caves soon became objects of intrigue due to their mysterious nature and the unknown they offer, drawing people to explore them. Even today, the allure of the unknown continues to be one of the main reasons that cavers embark on their caving journey. Caves, as oceans, remain the unexplored frontier on Earth.
Caves are unique environments on Earth that provide the ultimate escape from the chaos of the outside world, allowing you to leave the noise behind and immerse yourself in a realm of silence and pristine beauty. Phones and GPS units don’t work here. Once you enter an unexplored cave, you rely on yourself and the team.
Caves offer shelter to those who seek it, natural refrigeration and storage to those who need it, a connection to the spiritual world for those who believe, and a space for contemplation for anyone who ventures inside. Plus, they provide invaluable information about our world to those who observe.
Why Caving?
As you enter the cave and switch on your light, the bright sunshine outside quickly fades, replaced by the enveloping darkness. Soon, you find yourself surrounded by damp, earthy air. The narrow beam of your light guides the way as you venture deeper into the cave. Though you feel on your own in this vast underground world, the breaths and movements of your fellow cavers remind you that you are not alone.
Before long, you must become a climber, mountaineer, hiker, rope expert, surveyor, prospector, explorer, or contortionist. The cave’s passages dictate your movements, and adapting is the only way. If you are familiar with the cave, your muscles instinctively remember every move to make and every hold or ledge to rely on. However, if this is your first experience in caving, you are stepping into the unknown.
Cavers can be split into two main groups: sport cavers, for whom entering a cave is a satisfaction of its own. They aim to see as many caves as possible or enter caves to pursue personal challenges, like descending deep shafts. Almost everyone starts as a sport caver as entering a cave that has been previously explored and mapped enables you to follow a known path and learn appropriate movements and techniques without the additional challenge of dealing with the unknown. But some are soon drawn to the mystery of the unexplored. They live to find new caves, exploring, surveying, and mapping them. These are exploration cavers. As an exploration caver, you usually focus on a couple of caves and aim to explore and map them completely. Such an endeavor is time-consuming and can take decades, depending on the length and depth of a cave. That is why the exploration cavers often don’t visit many caves but instead focus on a few projects and dedicate all their free time to them.
Despite their differing objectives, both groups are captivated by the experience. They crave the smell of the earth on their gear and are eager to discover what lies beyond the next bend, and once they enter a cave, they realize that caves offer much more than just mystery:
EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY
A newly discovered cave offers you a brand-new world and a brand-new challenge. Once you enter this three-dimensional world, the unknown awaits: a crawlway, a canyon, meandering passages, a stream, muddy slopes, breakdowns, waterfalls, hills, sand dunes, extensive chambers, shafts, downclimbs, upclimbs, speleothems, and crystal-covered galleries. The possibilities are endless.
Now, it’s up to you and your body to figure out the best way forward. The way that leads deeper into the dark unknown while also enabling you to make your way back out. The way that will preserve the cave and leave minimal trace of your visit. Though majestic caves are fragile environments that took millennia to develop. Sometimes, a step you take leaves a mark that might never disappear and will remain a reminder for the next person venturing in. Moving carefully and cautiously through the caves is essential to preserve these pristine and mostly untouched environments. Unfortunately, even previously untouched caves suffer from human impacts even if no one entered them, as the microplastics, trash, and contaminants from the surface get washed into the caves and stranded in them.
You never know what a newly discovered cave will do. The cave could lead to another muddy crawlway or a sketchy, butt-clenching climb, or a small room full of raccoon poop. However, sometimes a crawlway opens into a massive gallery adorned with white speleothems and crystals, a scenic water canyon with crystal-clear turquoise water flowing past, a gigantic shaft that echoes endlessly, or a glittering meander covered in gypsum crystals. You might encounter a critter that has been part of the ecosystem for millennia and has never been documented before or discover a skeleton protected by the cave for centuries or even millennia.
MEDITATION and MINDFULNESS
Your perspective changes once you have spent over 15 hours in a cave, kilometers in and hundreds, if not thousands, of meters deep. You feel cold, hungry, and exhausted—so tired that lifting yourself becomes a chore. Carrying your cave pack, which contains all your necessities and gear, requires substantial effort. During these moments, the strength of your mind becomes far more important than the strength of your body. The only way to get out of the cave is to find a positive or motivating thought, to ignore the pain and exhaustion, and to keep moving forward.
The sounds of the cave—be it the silence, the roaring of a waterfall, the bubbling of a stream, or the echoes of a fellow caver’s breath—along with the repetitive motion forced on you by the passage, create a meditative experience. You immerse yourself in the here and now, which helps you maintain your focus and drive. You focus on your next move until you finally emerge, feeling the fresh air on your face.
With caving, you will learn the 3-Ps: Persistence, Perseverance, and Patience.
EXERCISE
Caving provides an exceptional, often torturous gym experience (almost) for free. To navigate cave passages, you must become a climber, mountaineer, hiker, rope expert, and sometimes even a contortionist. The cave’s passages dictate your movements. You learn how to use the three-D environment created by cave walls so you can move almost effortlessly through the cave, at least for the first couple of hours. Caves can be hundreds of kilometers long and over thousands of meters deep. Such caves require long trips, and long cave trips require a lot of gear. Carrying over a 20 kg pack while negotiating tight, floorless canyons, waterfalls, streams, crawlways, and shafts is not unusual. Sometimes, you will end up in a tight, low passage where you can only use an arm or a leg to move forward and still need to get your pack through. You are often subjected to a cold and extreme environment for prolonged periods. Your entire body works. You use muscles that you didn’t even know existed. Your body burns everything you eat so fast as a wood stove devours dry kindling.
It can take several hours just to reach the limit of your exploration. Once you get there, you continue exploring, surveying, and mapping the cave further, prolonging the exit travel time. This means you are exposed to intense physical activity for over 12 hours. I don’t recall when I was in a gym for 12 hours, do you?
But the exercise doesn’t end in the cave. For cave explorers focusing on so-called Alpine caves, the approach to the cave is almost as challenging as the cave itself. Cavers use the term Alpine caving for the caves on high mountains. Named after the Alps, such caves can be found worldwide on high mountain ranges developed in carbonates. The cave entrances are often high up and off the beaten path. To reach them, cavers must carry their personal and group caving gear off the trail while negotiating cliffs, rivers, boulders, and scree slopes before reaching a cave. Caves located in the mountains are often best explored during the winter when the lack of snowmelt keeps the caves dry. In such cases, cavers must hike in the snow and ice, using crampons and ice axes to safely reach the entrance.
An Alpine caver conquers a mountain twice in one trip: First, they must get on the mountain, then descend into the mountain. Once finished exploring the inside of the mountain, they must ascend to get out, and then they can hike back to the valley.
As you learned by now, caving requires your entire body to move in all possible ways for prolonged periods. The best thing to do if you want to stay in a caving shape is to keep caving. However, sometimes that is not possible. That’s why a caver often needs to rely on other exercises to stay in shape.
TEAM
If you like it or not, caving is a team sport. If you want to reach the limits of exploration, you often need a lot of heavy gear, which you won’t be able to carry on your own. Once you are deep in the cave, there’s no giving up. You are the only person who can get you out of there, but the team can help you stay motivated and regain mental and physical strength when you lose them (yes, there will be times when you lose it, no matter how strong you are).
Every caver, seasoned or fresh, experienced a bad day in a cave. Getting sick, feeling tired, hurting yourself, being cold or overheating, and several other reasons force you to rely on your team to help you continue by cheering you up, giving you food and water, lending you extra layers, and even carrying your gear out if you are exhausted. A good team will never rush you and will gladly take a break to recharge and make a plan to get everyone out safely and with a smile on your face. Sometimes, the entire team will get exhausted, so you need to work together to get everyone and everything safely out.
One bad day in the cave is enough to humble you and make you realize how small you are and how no amount of experience and knowledge can substitute a team member helping you and standing by you while you regather your strength. As you learn how much you rely on your team, you also learn to respect and value every team member.
Often, cavers will want to have at least a three-member team. That enables quicker exploration, surveying, and mapping and splits the weight of the gear needed. Plus, if something goes wrong and someone gets hurt, one person can get out and get help while the other stays with the fellow caver.
Science
Another thing you cannot escape if you become a caver is science. As soon as you enter a cave, you are surrounded by science:
Geology
Knowing the area’s geology will help you evaluate where you can find caves and where you can find big or deep caves. Understanding the cave’s geology will help you know what the cave might do, its potential, and its character. Understanding these factors can help you pack appropriate gear and prepare for the next trip. Sooner or later, you will want to understand the geology as it will enable you to become a successful exploration caver.
Hydrology
Understanding a cave’s hydrology enables you to estimate the cave’s potential and development. Most importantly, it keeps you safe as observing the character of a stream or a shaft helps you observe if the stream floods the entire passage or if a shaft is active during rain events and should be rigged to avoid climbing up a waterfall in high water levels. Such observations not only ease travel but also keep you alive. If you know that a passage floods and you see the water rising, you can find a dry spot you identified by observing the cave during the exploration. Some caves, and even more so cave passages, are true time capsules, and their environment hasn’t changed for centuries if not millennia. Other caves are active and extremely responsive to the outside elements. Such caves can flood in a couple of hours, and only knowing their character helps you understand how far you need to go to avoid the flooded passages and whether you can exit the cave or prepare to shelter in it until the waters recede.
Biology
Caves appear lifeless to a lot of people, including cavers. Yet, they are filled with cave fauna. Once you stop, adjust your eye to millimeters-sized critters, and look around you, you will start seeing life everywhere. Some cave critters were introduced to the underground over 10 million years ago. They adapted to these harsh environments by adapting their morphology and skills to thrive in these habitats. Cave animals or troglobites don’t need eyes, so they developed elongated antennae and limbs to feel the cave. Despite over 300 years of studies of subterranean worlds, we constantly find new species and even genera in the caves. Caves are also used by other mammals; bears, bobcats, jaguars, wood rats, raccoons, possums, mice, and bats. Depending on where in the world you are, you need to educate yourself about which animals use the caves to avoid hurting them and yourself. I imagine not many of us want to encounter a bear or a jaguar in a cave. By observing the signs, you can evaluate whether a larger mammal uses a cave. However, more often than not, the best approach to assess if an animal is in, is for someone soldiering up and sticking their head in.
PALEONTOLOGY/ARCHEOLOGY
Humans and other animals have been using the caves since the beginning. Caves were sometimes used for burials, sacrifices, or eliminating your enemy during war. During the wars, they were used as shelters, bunkers, storage, and hospitals so the enemy could not find the injured soldiers. Even nowadays, they are used as cellars and refrigerators to store wine and food. Therefore, finding artifacts and even human remains in caves isn’t unusual. In caves around Europe, people can still find ammunition from the First and Second World Wars, which is particularly dangerous when a fire hits a landscape with such caves and causes the ammunition to explode. During such fires, the firefighters suddenly deal with a war zone, but the enemy is hidden from sight.
Caves were used to tell stories about people living in the area at a specific time. Mudgliphs and cave paintings help us learn about the culture and habits of the people who lived here before us.
Other animals have used caves as shelter and homes; some fell into a shaft, couldn’t get out, or were brought into the cave by flooding water. Regardless, they await discovery preserved by the cave for thousands of years.
These resources are valuable as they tell us the story of the past. They help us better understand the world of today and the world of yesterday. Moving carefully and slowly through a cave and observing is essential so you don’t miss and damage these resources. We almost missed Petra when exploring Burja Cave because we weren’t focused. We were fortunate that we followed each other steps and didn’t step on it, as we passed it on the way in and only discovered it on our way out.
