Monday, January 14, 2008

Video from Alabaster Cave

Here's some video from the last bit of Alabaster Cave, shot by Brent Peterson for a series called "Off the Clock," covering the recreational pursuits of employees of Sandia National Laboratories. (I wish I could upload the entire four-and-a-half-minute edited feature that Brent came up with, as it's very well-done, but the site has a size limit.) You can see that the traverse to get out the upper passage, after the Birth Canal, is a little highball, though not technically complex despite my obvious caution in making the moves. The water you see down below is the last part of the lower passage, which currently consists (as I mentioned in my post on caving, below) of 150' of neck-deep, ice-cold water, which, when you stir up the material rotting on the bottom, smells very bad. (The person climbing out at the beginning of the clip is Rod Williamson, my main caving partner.)