My Caving Experience

My Caving Experience

I always liked to do new things. I had never really thought about going into a cave but it was a new experience and there were many caves around Bloomington and I had a friend who was a caver. His name has left me but I think it was Thurman Gladden. There were 4 or 5 of us and we decided to go into a cave that Thurman knew and was not too far from Bloomington. We made our preparation got into the car and away we went.

We arrived at the path to the access to the cave and walked the rest of the way. This was through a lightly wooded area and the walking was easy. As I remember it was on a Saturday morning and the weather was OK but a little cool. I don’t remember the time of year.

The entrance to the cave was on a hillside and was just a slit in the ground. If you didn’t know it was there, it would have been easily missed. It was about 2-3 feet high. Not high enough to crawl on your hands and knees. You had to slide on your belly to for a few hundred feet. It was a damp area but not muddy. There was plenty of room side to side but not much overhead.

This first leg of the journey was pretty much a level crawl straight into the side of the hill. At the end of the belly crawl we had to change direction. There was a somewhat round hole going down at a 45 degree angle. This hole was just big enough for a person to fit into. If a person was claustrophobic this was not a journey to take.

We all slide into the downward hole for about 20-30 feet and emerged into a large cavern. It was really magnificent. Just a huge open hole in the belly of the hill. We had flashlights so we just explored this area from a stationary position for a while. It was quite an experience to sit there quietly with the lights off. It was a darkness that was not easily experienced in the outside world. Also the quiet was to be found in the outside world.

We could see where other explorers had been in the cave. There were some markings…some graffiti and some directional. We decided to move about and walked into the cavern. There were several openings from this large room. We took one and began walking. We were able to walk upright with no difficulty at all. We walked for a while and marveled at the formations. However there is just so long that total darkness is a new experience. After deciding that we had enough stimulation, we headed back toward the main room.

We walked for a while. We had not bothered to check to see how long we had walked away from the main room so after a while it seemed like we had walked much longer toward the main room than we had walked away from it. A little conference determined that perhaps the darkness had caused us to distort time so we continued to walk. We walked for a period of time and suddenly felt that we had seen some of these markings before. Now we walked along very carefully observing the markings as we went. Sure enough after a time we came to the same markings. We had been walking in circles.

Panic started to set in. We were lost! How could that be? Thurman finally confessed that he was not an experienced caver but had only been in caves a couple of times. He had not even told anyone where we were. None of the rest of us knew where we were going so we didn’t tell anyone either. Now we were all going to stave to death or freeze to death or something. We finally came to our senses and looked for markings directing us toward the exit. We were able to find them and finally got to the main room.

Once in the main room we were able to find the entrance to the sloping shaft that led to the outside. We started to shinny up the sloping opening. I got about half way to the end and began to hear this howling noise. I suddenly felt that it must be storming outside and the howling noise that I was hearing was water rushing toward this sloping hole. I was going to be washed back into the large cavern and drowned.

It apparently was not water because I was able to reach the opening and belly crawl out to the outside world. What a welcome relief. I was never so glad to see light. I was never to go into a strange cave after that.