Cavers: Rory, Eugeniya, Vera, Hua, Kailey
By Rory and Eugeniya
Five brave explorers woke up at an early hour to drive out to New York for a day of caving. We bravely drove to Schoharie Caverns, where we encountered cave rescue training that did not seem to want five kids running around, so we bravely reversed the car and drove to Clarksville Cave instead. Here, we also encountered cave rescue training, but they very kindly said that of course five kids could run around in the cave while they were training (as long as we didn’t mind getting wet!).
Clarksville Cave had two parts to it -- Ward and Gregory. We suited up and entered the cave from the Ward Entrance. It had rained in previous days, so we had heard the Gregory side of Clarksville was veryyyy wet and potentially sumped over and unenterable, so we focused on the Ward side. We wandered through the caverns, which boasted some tall ceilings and wide passages with rushing water and lots of interesting fossils (and a person playing injured caver for the rescue training). The fossils here were some of the clearest that I've seen in the northeast. The walls had beautiful scalloping, and the water wasn't too cold (in fact, we were quite warm, or even hot, for most of this trip).
We scrambled and waded our way into the Lake Room, a room that was slightly larger and taller than most of the cave, and, unsurprisingly, contained a ‘lake’ (which can’t really be a lake, given it’s connected to the rest of the flowing river). In the lake, we encountered a rather angry leech wriggling violently through the water. After a little bit of downtime in the loops surrounding the Lake Room, we decided that here would be a fine place to have Darkness Time™, in which we turn off all our headlamps and experience a world underground with no photons. It was extremely pleasant and not too cold, with sounds of water dripping in the background. We tried not to think too much about the angry leech as we sat dangling our feet in the water.
After a bit more exploring, we decided it was getting late, and we should head out. On our way out, we tried exiting through the Thook entrance, a much squeezier adventure than the entrance from which we’d come in. Known for being unpleasant, the Thook entrance has several squeezes of one foot or less. Three brave explorers managed to worm their way above the canyons of the Snake Slipway to find themselves surrounded by spiders, salamanders, slugs, mosquitos, and of course, the eventual sunlight that told them they had found the exit. The other two brave explorers took the Ward Entrance back out, where they watched the cave rescuers rig a haul system to practice removing injured cavers from pits.
At the cars, we were able to talk a little with the people doing the rescue training, and discovered that when we’d found the ‘injured caver’ and left him to be, he had thought that their rescue training friends had abandoned him, and had been slightly confused. But given he was at the surface, it seems that his rescue training friends had come to find him eventually. :)
Eventually, we bravely extracted ourselves from our muddy, wet clothes (albeit with one alarming encounter with an imaginary leech (“it wasn’t imaginary!” - rory; “I stuck my whole ass hand in and there was nothing there” - kailey; “it was real” - rory)) and bravely drove to get milkshakes before heading back to MIT.