Word: caveness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...result, some cavers get incredibly secretive about the best places. For years rumors have circulated about a certain Garden of Eden Cave in Schoharie County, N.Y. -- a cave which is supposed to be three miles long and filled with formations--but only a handful of people know where it is, and they won't talk. The attempts to keep a new cave or tunnel's location secret sometimes go to ridiculous lengths...
Last spring, a Boston Grotto party, in upstate New York, discovered a new passage with excellent formations, leading from a well-known cavern. I joined a trip three weeks later to photograph and map the new section. But as we were returning to the known part of the cave at the end of the day, we saw the lights of another party just outside. Going back to the new passage would have made too much noise. Instead we doused our lamps and for forty minutes crouched in a stream in the dark, until the party had moved farther...
Acting like this just to avoid company would be absurd. And cavers do have other reasons for their secrecy. Too often when a cave's reputation spreads, its owners turn it into a commercial attraction and close it to further exploration. Or farmers dynamite their caves shut if careless cavers leave carbide lying around the cave's entrance, poisoning livestock. Those who know the Garden of Eden Cave say that this would happen to it as soon as people began to visit...
...your belly, pushing a pack of equipment ahead of you. Further beyond, the passage leads to a shorter Gunbarrel that ends in a "sump": a low tube nearly filled with water, with only three of four inches of breathing space at the top, in dry weather. Then the cave becomes high enough to walk in and leads to miles of unmapped passages. But this is only New York. In West Virginia, or Kentucky, or Mexico, the dimensions are much more fantastic...
...These caves will never be crowded. They demand skill in mountaineer- "The Last Frontier: The Strange World," as one Grotto flyer puts it. When every last mountain has been ing, plus thorough experience with the special problems of mud, darkness, and water. Any accident in a cave is doubly serious, so the advanced caver has to be a first aid expert. Often cavers participate in rescue programs such as the Boston Grotto's Cave Rescue Communications Network...