To a lot of people, the thought of crawling in the pitch black hundreds of feet below the earth doesn’t really sound appealing. Caving is a dirty, dangerous sport. And I love it.

I ventured out to Laurel Caverns in western Pennsylvania this past weekend for my first, but certainly not last, caving adventure. I swelled with excitement as the guide explained to my group that rescue would take up to 12 hours should anything go wrong on our expedition. I stared down at my map, trying to envision what all of those miles of passage ways underground actually were like. Decked out in clothing head to toe, a hard hat, multiple flash lights, and a very heavy back pack, I started my trip through the caverns with eight other fearless souls.

The first part of the trip was easy. It was well lit and stairs were built into the rock. This was the section that most people came through. Those are the people sensible enough not to go hiking through small spaces 47 stories down into the dirt. As I climbed and crawled away from the lights, the blackness increased as the temperature did just the opposite. I thought of that horrible movie, ‘The Descent‘ (Editor’s Note: SCARIEST movie EVER), as I scurried over the huge rocks. Would there be monsters living in the pits of these caves like there were in that movie? I didn’t know, but I didn’t care.

All of the fallen rocks everywhere should have alarmed me. I mean, they obviously fell…proving that the rocks above my head (and all around me) were very capable of falling. But I marched on, un-phased. Read More »