On a list of things you can count me out of, cave exploration sits firmly near the top. Still, someone people enjoy the outdoor recreation activity, and if you're one of them, you better know how to survive. A seasoned cave spelunker explained the crucial key you need to know to survival and avoiding death.
Class is in session so listen up. According to cave spelunker Juan Laden, each cave is different, but they share one crucial common trait. You need light if you're going to survive. Otherwise, exploration is impossible.
"It's darker than the inside of a cow," Laden told Cowboy State Daily. "When I have novices in a cave, I will joke that we are in one of the darkest caves in the world. On the darkness scale of 10. It's a nine. They will believe me and then, we will turn off the lights and let them experience the pitch black that you can only find in a cave, and they will realize it is much darker than anything they have ever experienced before."
Without proper lighting, the spelunker stresses you can get injured and die. He always brings multiple light sources.
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"I turn off my light as much as I can, just to conserve it," he said. "It's important to remind novices that you are not going nowhere if you don't have light. The standard in caving is three separate sources of light. I know of one death where a caver was doing a climb and his light failed on him. He was in total darkness and ended up falling trying to get it into his pack with one hand."
Meanwhile, Laden said he always has an extensive safety system. He would keep people outside of the cave to perform a rescue if need be.
"We had a safety plan where we had to have at least three cavers on the surface at all times," he said "That way we were ready to perform a rescue if need be. The cave is a 15-foot diameter hole, and it goes down 82 feet into a room that's about 180 by 80 feet. It bells out and the people have to rappel down to the drops in the drop zone, basically where the animals are falling in."
He also said, "The cave is a natural trap. These ancient animals were traveling along this ridge and would not see the hole. They slid into this drop-off 20,000 years ago and now they're digging up the bones. There's mammoths, camels, horses, cheetah, sheep, wolves, and last year they thought they might have got out a wolverine."
