So in addition to writing about topics that make people angry, I like to tell stories. This one comes from this past weekend. As background information, I am more of an adventure type of guy rather than a sightseer. Rather than a trip to Europe or Yellowstone, I would much rather go backpacking, rafting, or caving. Caving is exactly what we did last weekend.
So to start, I finally bought my first car. It is a 2000 Toyota Celica GTS. It is dark blue and running perfectly. This car is definitely my baby, and I am working hard to keep her happy. Now becuase we didn't have enough cars, I ended up driving over there. Needless to say the car wasn't happy about it. The good news is I was at least able to clean her out and she is back to normal.
For those familiar with the area we went through the New River Cave. If you don't know where that is, we took Prices Fork, to the little village of Prices Fork. Then we took the road to McCoy and turned right at the road that parallels the river. Now when you get there, the cave isn't right by the road. You have to climb half-way up a mountain that doesn't have a trail. This mountain is so steep that you are on all fours most of the way up. Its so wet that at any moment you could slip and slide all the way back down. For me, this was fun.
Now when we got into the cave the story gets pretty simple. Caves have obstacles, and we come up with creative ways to get around them. One of the guys that went with us was quite a bit larger than the rest. He quickly came up for a name for these tight squeezes, "Obese Filters." You must be this skinny to enter. There is one part of the cave where you are army crawling for a pretty good amount of time. In the middle of the path is the mankiller rock. If you didn't know why it was called the mankiller rock you quickly found out. When you get to the end there is a hole in the ceiling that you have to push yourself through. In the words of another caver, "Its like being born."
Next on the itinerary came the plunge. The plunge was about 15 feet straight down rock climbing. Not bad except that we don't have anything keeping us safe if we do happen to fall. Luckily enough, using spotters and helpers, so one got hurt. Pretty soon we came to the slide. The slide is a long reasonably steep incline that is covered with slick dry dust. We decided that the most fun way to get down was to slide and let gravity do the work.
After about an hour and a half of working our way through the cave, we came to the waterfall. As the goal of our journey we stayed for a little while and enjoyed the view. Mark took a shower.
Well its never an adventure until someone gets hurt, and this time someone did. On the way back one of the girls slipped and fell into a 10 foot hole. She laid there for a few minutes and insisted she was okay. We all breathed a sigh of relief. Then she stood up and there was a puddle of blood where she was lying down. It turns out she had split her head open. We were still at least 45 minutes away from the entrance so we really had to make sure she was okay. Buzz did a pretty good job of patching her up. In order to clean the wound we used a lot of water which made it look awful as it stained her entire shirt red. So we went up the assent, braved the reverse slide, and crawled back into the womb in a hurry so she didn't lose too much blood.
Getting out of the cave was interesting too. There really wasn't a good way to get down as it was really steep with mud and small rocks. It was basically sliding down the mountain and trying to grab hold of glass to stop yourself. FUN TIMES!!! So that is the end of my tale!! I hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed experiencing it.
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