I first really got into caving in 1997. I'd been bouldering for a year already with my friend Rod Williamson, and when he and several mutual friends started getting more seriously into caving, it seemed like a natural progression, in terms of outdoor adventures, to follow them. I'm not what you'd call a natural caver, as I don't particularly care for tight squeezes, tall heights, or places where my slightly impaired night vision and depth perception (see my original post about having had a botched radial keratotomy in 1994) make it difficult to make out the relief of the ground I'm walking on -- which pretty much encompasses the nature of caves. However, my love for nature, my limited-but-extant thirst for adventure, a need to bond with my buds, and Rod's reassuring presence all combined to spur me on, and for several years we had quite a few noteworthy adventures. This photo, taken in 2006, shows me in Ft. Stanton Cave (near Capitan, New Mexico), at the entrance to "Hell Hole," a 1,500'-long passage, mostly a crawl, that leads to the lower reaches of the cave. In the summer of 2003, I was involved in a cave rescue at Ft. Stanton; I won't go into the details here, but a scout who was part of another party had fallen off a ledge and busted himself up pretty badly, and a massive effort had to be mobilized to get him out. It took the rescue party (consisting mostly of serious-but-misfit caver types from local NSS grottos) all night to get him out; we spent five hours getting him through Hell Hole alone. My help wasn't needed once we got to the Lunch Room -- the proximal end of Hell Hole (again, see the picture above) -- and I was getting a little tired of being in the company of so many NSS people (think of Matt Damon being stuck in a van with Scott Caan and Casey Affleck in Ocean's Eleven), so I made a beeline for the cave exit. There I was pressed into being interviewed live on local morning television; I was so tired from having pulled an all-nighter that I have no idea now what I said. 
This photo (which is actually a still-frame from a video) shows me doing a tight squeeze called the "Birth Canal" in Alabaster Cave, near San Ysidro, New Mexico. Skinny guys and little kids just pop right through, but guys my size not only have to remove their shirts, but they also must go through in the correct orientation (and then exhale deeply) to minimize their horizontal profile. Here I made the mistake of going through "right hand up," which caused my left arm to get pinned underneath me, wedging me in the hole. I couldn't go back, so I had to worm my way through in a series of quarter-inch movements, which in turn caused me to lose a fair bit of skin off my back. (The last time I did Alabaster Cave, I waded out the lower passage, through 150' of ice-cold, neck-deep, and extremely smelly water in order to avoid the Birth Canal, which was actually much worse than doing the squeeze!) 
This photo shows me doing the technical traverse over "McCollum's Pit" in Sentinel Cave in 1997, which is located in the Guadalupe Mountains (Lincoln National Forest) of southern New Mexico. (That's Rod, who led the thing -- being a much-better climber than I -- on the left.) The pit is reportedly 70' deep, and there aren't a lot of positive holds on the traverse until you get around the corner; thus I was pretty gripped-up, despite being clipped into the fixed rope. I've been in Sentinel three times, although the last time I was so on-edge about all the exposure that I didn't even bother doing the long rappel to the bottom and climbing up into Shield City. These days, Sentinel is simply too much adventure for me -- I burn up so much nervous energy in the cave that I'm absolutely wasted by the end of the hike back to camp. 
This picture illustrates how cavers get back up a rope after first rappelling down it: by using mechanical ascenders. We've never been sophisticated enough to get into fancy rope-walker set-ups; instead, we've always used the basic "frog" configuration, with one handled ascender and another, non-handled ascender mounted on the chest and attached to the harness. My set-up wasn't well-adjusted on this particular day in Chimney Cave (in Carlsbad Caverns National Park) -- leaving me ascending only about a foot per throw -- but since the ascent is only about 50', it hardly mattered. 
This photo shows me rappelling down the entrance to Helen's Cave, located in Slaughter Canyon at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. I'm using the set-up that most cavers seem to favor -- a rappel "rack" with several brake bars both to create friction and dissipate heat. We don't do much caving these days, outside of taking scouts to Alabaster Cave and Ft. Stanton Cave. Rod wants to go back to Ft. Stanton soon; his son Jimmy is a police officer working on the demolition squad, and he and a couple of his co-workers want to go through "Satan's Shoefly" (a long, tight squeeze that I won't even try) as part of their "confined space" training. Rod has also made noises about going back to Sentinel Cave and Deep Cave (located in Carlsbad Caverns National Park but accessible only through the Guads from the northwest), which has a 300' drop close to the entrance, but I hope he never does; the thrill of doing long vertical caving has long since worn off for me, and all that's left is the sphincter-clenching terror.
