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.
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.