Word: everests
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Brucker, 47, and Watson, 45, are cavers of the first rank. For nearly two decades they belly-crawled toward what they call "the Everest of world spelology," a presumed connection between Kentucky's vast Flint Ridge cave system and neighboring Mammoth Cave. The possibility of such a connection must have occurred to Floyd Collins, the solitary caver who discovered Great Crystal Cave under Flint Ridge in 1917 and who died in nearby Sand Cave in 1925, after being trapped there for 15 days. Collins' grisly death stirred the nation's curiosity, and for years tourists in Crystal...
...finds were spacious passages and great, vaulted limestone halls, but far more often the explorers tried to keep their nerve intact and their carbide lamps lit while jammed into mud-choked fistulas less than a foot high. The authors' implied comparison of Kentucky caving with the climbing of Everest is a mild hype, neither necessary nor justified; Everest is far deadlier, and an expedition there requires several arduous weeks, not the 24 to 36 hours of a Flint Ridge cave crawl. But caving is difficult enough to call for a rare sort of courage and endurance. A common technique...
...SKIED DOWN EVEREST...
Moreover, the material showing how to stage a climb up Mount Everest has the fascination of any well-organized body of how-to information. This segment of the film forms an interesting contrast to the spectacularly beautiful footage of Miura's practice runs at the lower altitudes and the wildly scary stuff at the end, when he is literally in danger of sailing right off the top of the world (only a parachute allows him to retain a measure of control...
...should go to this film for the same reason Miura went to Everest-because it is a clean and clear experience of the sort that neither the movies nor life offers in abundance these days...