Outdoors 101: Hard crawl leads to ‘the final frontier’

By Hillary Dobbs, Journal staff | Sunday, April 29, 2007

Previous Page

Share

• del.icio.us
• Digg
• NewsVine
• Fark

Print

Email

PIEDMONT — “Caving: It’s like fun ... only different.”

Shirlee Hall made this remark not long after she, her husband, Carter, and I had started what would be about seven or so hours of crawling — sometimes on our hands and knees, sometimes on our bellies — through some of the various nooks and crannies that comprise Stagebarn Crystal Cave.

At the time, I brushed off Shirlee’s statement as a bit of light-hearted humor that most enthusiasts will make at one time or another about their favorite sport. Only later would I realize that she was only slightly joking.

In the little more than a year that I’ve been writing this column, I’ve come to the not-very-original idea that people will go to some pretty unique extremes to look at things or to have a certain experience.

Rock and ice climbers spend hundreds — sometimes thousands — of dollars on gear to climb a rock outcropping or ice flow, only to turn around and come down again.

Hikers will tackle extreme trails, often in extreme conditions, simply for the view from the top.

Snow boarders and skiers strap fiberglass to the bottoms of their feet for the rush of hurtling downhill.

Ice fishers will endure all kinds of weather to catch a slippery, slimy creature, often only to throw it back.

Turkey hunters ... well, don’t even get me started on those folks. Granted, this might be a bit of a simplification, but it’s not totally off the mark.

But caving — at least for me — takes the whole “let’s go look at something” concept and slaps it around with a six-pack of Gatorade and some knee and elbow pads.

For the most part, the purpose of our trip to Stagebarn was to get to Behemoth, a room about 1,000 feet long about a half-mile from our starting point and several hundred feet underground. We also looked at the cave’s formations and saw a bat or two, but the big room was the piece de resistance.

There is something cool about knowing you are one of the few people — especially true if you are a woman — to ever be in a certain spot on Earth. There are very few undiscovered spots in the world, but a cave, despite being around for millions of years, can have entire areas that no one has ever explored.

There is also something cool about not having to slosh your way through 40-degree water, peppered with bat and rat excrement, just to boldly go where few have gone before. If not a lot of people have been to a certain location, there might be a reason why.

As you may have gathered, caving is hard. It’s tiring, dirty work. Whether or not it’s worth it depends on how much you want to endure to be one of the few people to ever reach the inner recesses of a cave.

But to boldly go where so few have gone before (OK, I’ll stop with the “Star Trek” references now) is an awesome feeling. Although it’s true that you might end up somewhere no one has ever been, you might also just simply have fun crawling in the dirt, watching bats sleep.

For more information

Go to www.caves.org/grotto/psg or contact Carter and Shirlee Hall at blakeboy@enetis.net or 431-5863. Paha Sapa Grotto, a local group devoted to caving, meets at 7:30 p.m. on the first Thursday of every month in the chemistry building on the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology campus.

A note about bats

If you do go caving, make sure not to disturb the bats. According to Carter Hall, a bat will die if it gets awakened when it’s hibernating.

Hillary Dobbs is a Journal copy editor. If you have an outdoor activity you wanted to try but want more information about first, contact her at 394-8426 or hillary.dobbs@rapidcityjournal.com

For a slideshow of Dobbs and her adventures in spelunking, click here.