Word: caving
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...cave was man's first natural home: some atomic-age pundits fear that it may also be his last. Oddly, however, though man has probed earth's atmosphere, mapped its surface, scaled its highest peaks and scraped its ocean bottoms, he has largely neglected the myriad subterranean realms. In alpine cliché, a mountain is climbed "because it is there." The spelunker's incentive is that a cave is never even "there" until it is found and its depths are plumbed and proved. Mountaineering has its classic literature−Annapurna, The White Tower, etc.−but caves...
Last Frontier? Poet-Novelist Franklin Folsom, a Rhodes scholar and onetime lettuce packer, may be just the agent to swell that number. He has illuminated his gloomy subject with literary style, and Exploring American Caves−with its scores of enchanting photographs and its bold plunge into virtually virgin writing territory−may prove to be classic cave literature. "Caves," proclaims Spelunker Folsom, "are, in a sense, the last frontier. [Those] who explore the underground night have yet to reach the end of even the best-known caverns in this country...
...permanent night underground is not for sissies, as many a bruised alpinist knows after haughtily trying subterranean slumming. The most rugged U.S. cave, West Virginia's hellish Schoolhouse−featuring such obstacles as "bottomless" (down to 70 ft.) fissures and sheer-rock faces that long defied human spiders, 180-ft. dropoffs past receding walls in thin air−can be negotiated by the most skilled mountaineers in eight to ten hours, round trip. As the bat flies, Schoolhouse is a mere 1,600 ft. long, but the rate of travel for the best spelunkers is less than...
...different challenge is presented by Arizona's Colossal Cave. In 1922 four explorers, bearing packs averaging 76 Ibs. apiece, took six days and seven nights to plod through an estimated 39 miles of labyrinth. They ran out of supplies, but did not reach the end of the main passageway. Nor has anyone reached it since...
...Some caves are moneymaking sites for the individuals or government agencies that happen to own them. Otherwise, are caves good for anything? Some have been sources of saltpeter for munitions (Kentucky's Mammoth); others provide guano fertilizer from bat droppings (100,000 tons still lie in New Mexico's Carlsbad), cool storage for beer and cheese, ready-made railroad tunnels (for the Southern Railway in Virginia), chicken pens with below hen-killing summer temperatures, cesspools for at least five Pennsylvania towns, factories for moonshiners and counterfeiters, prisons (Marvel Cave, Mo.), natural air conditioning for surface buildings. Kentucky...