Word: caving
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When you're in a big group, the moving lights and the sounds of other people talking can make the cave seem to be just a dark room. But when you get off by yourself, the darkness starts to close in. A drop of water splashing down from the ceiling puts out the lamp, and no night was ever this black. Deep down the cave echoes lowly to a distant river, somewhere below. A spot of limestone drips onto the floor. You can hear the cave growing, and it can scare...
Maybe you light a candle to find something familiar. You can't Rock is rock, but in a cave it assumes strange shapes -- hollow tubes or bursts of crystals. The fish in pools of water are eyeless and are nearly transparent. Brown bats, squeaking as they zip around you, are the most common animals. Often they carry rabies...
...many cavers, it's this gruesomely different kind of environment which makes the sport fascinating. In Ward's Cave, N.Y., one of the easiest, there may be as many as sixty people inside at one time, stumbling around each other. As soon as a new cave is discovered, the crowds head...
...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...