Learning to Crawl

It’s been a fairly mild winter here in Custer, just like the rest of the Midwest. Because of that I’ve been able to spend a bunch of time outside hiking and climbing this winter. While 50 degree days in Jan/Feb seem slightly concerning, at least it’s good climbing weather!

Near the end of 2023 Kirsten and I went to an end of the year/holiday party co-hosted by the Black Hills Climbing Coalition and the Paha Sapa Grotto. The Grotto is a group dedicated to cave exploration around the Black Hills. I suspect the fact that the party was co-hosted by both groups was no accident, the grotto is always looking for new members (i.e. suckers) who are excited to crawl around underground. Whether intended as a recruiting effort or not, it worked on me and in mid-January I found myself crawling down a repurposed missile launch tube to access a small cave south of Custer.

The cave we were exploring that day is on private land and was actually discovered by the quarry company that owns the land above it. Fortunately we were there on a Sunday and there wasn’t anyone blasting at the quarry that day. The team on that trip was an experienced trip leader, Larry, and 3 novice cavers. The main goal of the trip was just to get us new cavers exposed to caving and see if we’d be interested in other trips. We learned a bit about navigating a cave, moving through a cave and surveying new cave. We ended up spending about 11 hours in the cave I left completely exhausted.

Moving through a cave can obviously be pretty complicated, and each cave has it’s own characteristics. There’s a lot of crawling, climbing and scrambling through rocks. Very rarely are you able to simply walk. And each mode of travel can vary a lot, you might have a long section of hands and knees crawling, or you might have complicated and tight squeezing where you have to fight for each inch. It’s not uncommon for sections to be tight enough that you can’t even move your head to look the other direction. Similarly the climbing in a cave can come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes you’re able to stem up a tube or a slot, and other times you need to make some properly exposed climbing moves.

Following the Reeds cave trip I took away one really important lesson, make sure to bring enough food and electrolytes with. Even though the caves stay at a constant cool temperature (around 50F) you quickly work up a sweat. Having enough carbs for energy and salt for electrolyte loss makes a huge difference.

For my next caving trip I was lucky enough to get a chance to go into Jewel Cave. Jewel Cave has a reputation as the crown jewel of Black Hills caves (no pun intended), and after spending a day exploring it I can confirm it lives up to that reputation. Possibly because of this fact there are a lot of rules about caving in Jewel and sharing information about it publicly. I won’t go into any more details about that trip here, other than to say I can’t wait to get another opportunity to cave in Jewel.

It’s worth spending some time talking about what equipment we use to cave. When caving you spend a long time in the dirt and mud, so it’s important to have gear that can stand up to the abuse. I’ve landed on the following for my personal gear:
-Synthetic t-shirt
-Cargo shorts over long underwear
-Hiking boots
-Knee and elbow pads
-Helmet with two Zebra headlamps
-Rubber dipped work gloves
-Small side pack with food, water and everything else you need for a day in the cave

It only takes one or two trips to destroy an article of clothing you wear in the cave, I think I’ll be getting a lot of use out of my sewing machine to patch all of the holes. Fortunately there’s no such thing as being stylish in a cave. No matter how good looking you may be you’ll be looking as silly as everyone else once you’re covered in dirt, mud and sweat.

Because of how hard caving is on everything you bring in with you (including your body), we usually don’t bring phones or cameras in with us. Even if you do have a camera it’s very difficult to get a good picture, of course there’s no natural light down there. I do wish I had some more pictures to share of all of the formations we see down there. It’s really incredible to see all of the strange and otherworldly formations that occur. There are some good pictures on the Jewel and Wind cave websites.

Speaking of Wind Cave, I just got out of a trip into Wind last weekend. We went in with the goal of exploring a new area at the edge of the map and hopefully surveying some new passages. We did end up finding several new passages, and I had the opportunity to be on point during part of our survey. It’s pretty exciting to know you’re the first person to ever explore that portion of the cave. Once again we ended up having a 12 hour day in the cave and I left covered head to toe in scrapes and bruises.

Wind cave has a few characteristics that make it different than the other caves in the area. One big difference is the prevalence of boxwork throughout the cave. Uncommon in almost all other caves in the world, it’s everywhere in Wind cave. It’s really beautiful to look at, but if you need to squeeze past or climb on boxwork it turns into chossy razor blades. When climbing outside it’s common practice to tap on a hold if it looks like the rock might break. While navigating a tricky climb Chris made a comment that illustrates the difference between caving and climbing:
“I’ve learned it’s best to just not tap on any holds down here”
Why’s that?
“Because then you’ll just break it, and not have any holds left.”
Not exactly confidence inspiring.

I’ve already got another trip coming up in a few weeks, and hopefully many more after that. If you’re interested in reading more about Black Hills caving there’s a bit of info on the Paha Sapa Grotto’s website. There’s also a Youtube account that has some really great caving videos, including a few in Jewel and couple from a really interesting cave in New Mexico called Lechuguilla.