Getting down and dirty on a kid-friendly wild cave expedition.
The author’s son Kai ascends a sloping rock in a cave near Franklin, W.Va., while Curtis Rigby, guide Lester Zook and Finn Ward follow. Zook chose this cave for its kid-friendly passages and the fact that it rarely floods. By John Briley April 5 In the moist, elemental rind of the Earth, the balance shifts. I am on my belly, twisting through a subterranean, mud-slicked limestone passage in West Virginia, and for the first time legitimately trying to keep up with my 10-year-old son, Kai.
The hole opens to a descending crevice and we down-climb 15 feet of puddle-laden ledges until we reach a relatively level path narrow enough that we can touch the walls on both sides. Most of the world’s caves are limestone, formed over eons as water filtered through the ground and combined with decaying organic matter to create carbonic acid, which in turn bored through seams in the rock. This process has yielded some spectacular systems, like the 400-plus miles of passages and chambers in Mammoth Caves National Park in Kentucky and Vietnam’s Hang Song Doong, which is the world’s largest cave by volume and contains its own rainforest and river.
Around the next bend Zook points out a hibernating little brown bat, about the size and cuteness of a mouse, dangling as if its feet were super-glued to the underside of a ledge. “No clue,” Zook says when I ask the species. “Maybe some bear fell in here and couldn’t find his way out.” “If you feel like you’re getting stuck or claustrophobic, focus on breathing. Next, work on micro-movements; often you’ll find you can move one body part a little, then another. Don’t fight the cave: You’ll only make things worse.” He adds to never pull or push a person in a tight spot, which might get them entrapped.
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