On the Intro to Caving tour, the guides inspect us for proper footwear (over the ankle boots only), and we don kneepads, helmets, and headlamps supplied by the park. Our tour is full with twenty people. The oldest fellow is maybe in his sixties, the youngest around 15; most others are 20- to 35-year-olds. One man in a yellow polo shirt makes me remember that a participant’s chest or hip measurement can’t exceed 42 inches, else it’s impossible to get through a couple of spots. This guy’s barrel chest is borderline for sure.We pile into a park bus and ride to our starting point: the New Entrance stairwell that I went down yesterday. This time I’m without my camera and our group is smaller, so I can take in the beauty of the graceful steel-step descent even more.
As an Intro, this 3-1/2 hour tour is about experiencing and learning the basics of cave exploration. Now remember, this is underground. Through rock. In the dark. And nothing about this place is regular or predictable.
Single file, we slither through the passages like a subterranean conga line, with only our bobbing headlamps for light. We crouch, baby crawl, crabwalk, tuck, duck, butt-slide, sidestep, lean, drag, pull, clamber, belly-crawl, pivot, and straddle—all the while joking, oohing, exclaiming, yelping, bonking a helmet, laughing, and keeping track of those ahead and behind so we stay together as a group and can help each other through the tricky bits.
These two miles of cave have been “sacrificed” to the Intro tour, which means thousands of boots have traversed its path. Many of the rocks are worn smooth for footholds and handgrips—great for knowing you’re probably on track, but not always easy to use to balance or haul yourself around. Good tread is useful.
(By the way, all of this is not called spelunking any more. That’s passé, old hat, gauche. Saying you’ve gone spelunking marks you as a cavern hick. It’s called caving. Verb. To cave. I cave, went caving, am a caver, like to cave. Strike all “spelunking, spelunk, spelunker, spelunked” from your lexicon if you want to be known as hip.)
This photo from yesterday’s New Entrance tour gives an idea of one of the less squeezy kinds of paths we are dealing with today. This time we have only headlamps to see by, and all of us are in slacks, boots, and gloves for crawling and clambering around rock.At a widening in the path we sit down for a break and our guide, Cal, gives us more caving knowledge. We learn the 1-2-3-4 Rules for caving, taught in reverse order: four people minimum every time you cave; at least three sources of light per person (preferably various types and not all stored in the same place, like in a backpack that can drop down a hole); two things to tell someone before you go (where you’re going, when you’ll be back); and the one thing to do if you get separated from your group: stay in one place!
He tells us stories of people getting lost—stories I can greatly appreciate because of a particular stop we make en route. He points out a rock behind us—a big lumpish boulder lurching out above the path. “Anybody know what makes that rock special?”
We take guesses based on its possible age, geology, composition, source, likelihood of falling—all wrong. Finally someone ventures, “We’ve passed it before?”
“Yes!” says Cal. “We’ve just done a figure-eight loop and we’re right back where we started, only going the other direction.”
Yikes. And here I had been presuming we were being led down a single, uninterrupted tunnel all the time.
“Be sure to look behind you as well as ahead when you cave,” Cal warns, “to stay aware of landmarks that can tell you where you’ve already been.”
Got it.
We come to another rest point and gather into a rough circle on the rocks. The cavern is barely big enough for all of us to sit in. He checks in on how we’re doing, talks a little more, then says, “Now I want everyone to turn off your headlamps.”
Oh, goody—a chance to really sense what a cave can be like. One by one the lights wink out amid general banter. The last click on the guy’s helmet next to me drops us into darkness.
It is absolute. Absolute black, absolute nothingness. Not one particle of light to bounce off a surface and tell us that it’s there. Not even for that hand we’ve all put in front of our faces.
“You may think you can see it,” says Cal, “but that’s your mind playing tricks on you. You know your hand is there, so you think you can see it. But if I waved my hand in front of you, you’d never know it was there.”
We murmur and chatter over this concept. In the dark he tells us more about the extent of Mammoth’s caverns. “Now everyone sit very still and quiet. Get comfortable, then try not to move or make any noise.”
Everyone settles into place and stops talking. In the initial quiet, someone clears his throat, another gets more comfortable with his feet. The sounds die away, absorbed by rock and darkness. Motionlessness settles on the group.
Seconds pass. Half a minute. And the sound of no-sound comes.
Silence, when total, is physical. It has mass. Pressure. Substance. I can feel its weight on my skin and eardrums.
I tip my head slightly, striving to detect something, anything, in the swallowing dark, tuning my ears hopefully for the shush of clothing, someone’s raggedly expelled breath. But, like me, everyone else has become carefully still. If this lasted long enough, I’m sure I could count heartbeats, my own or my neighbor’s.
The silence holds. Eyes and ears have no input, no frame of reference. Only my body and inner balance tell me something of my situation: sitting on a hard surface, somewhat chilled, elbows on knees, hands clasped, surrounded by velvet-muffled blackness. But I could be anywhere, any time of day or night. Hundreds of feet underground, miles along some crack through a rock. Lost and alone in unrelenting stillness and dark.
Then Cal speaks again from the right. His voice is soft, but it’s almost an explosion after the quiet. “People who have been rescued after being lost in the caves say it’s not the darkness that gets to them. It’s the silence. People will sing, talk, drum the walls with a stone, pound rocks together—anything to stop the silence.”
