Learning to crawl through Oregon caves
Spelunking is a lot like crawling under your bed, looking for a missing sock.
Except that after you find the sock, you have to stay under the bed.
The off-trail tour is nothing like the regular cave tour, the kind with handrails and paved pathways and little kids in T-shirts looking for the bathroom.
The off-trail tour is the kind with kneepads and hard hats and miner’s lamps.
Back, joint and muscle strain from stooping and crawling.
If the headlamp starts blinking, the battery is about to die.
The off-trail tour turns out to be something like an obstacle course.
There’s a reason the U.S. government issues you a set of knee pads.
The 11-by-19-inch place is an impossibly small hole close to the ground that leads into a 10-foot-long tunnel smaller than the one that made Charles Bronson go berserk in “The Great Escape.”
Be careful, and watch out for the boots of the guy in front of you, he added, or you’re going to get kicked in the face, which was not a hazard listed on the waiver but a real hazard just the same.
All The Chronicle could do was lie still in the Charles Bronson tunnel and wait.
Being buried already, The Chronicle was in a position to reap considerable savings on the undertaker’s bill.
The darkness of the dead headlamp would be a handy harbinger of the longer darkness to come.
Jake, the guy whose boots were in this reporter’s face, wanted to know what the laughing behind him was all about.
Sure it was OK, what’s not OK about being a few hundred feet underground, jimmied into a suck-in-your-gut crawl space with back, joint and muscle strain from stooping and crawling that the U.S. government was not going to do anything about, especially because it couldn’t keep a lousy couple of batteries going.
No need to panic, said the wise inner voice.
[...] Jake starting moving, the helmet light stayed on, The Chronicle somehow found a way to suck in its gut even more and kept crawling.
About 20 minutes later, the off-trail tour had made its way back to the paved cave trail, then up the stairs and out into the sunshine.
Phillips, who teaches college science classes when he’s not crawling through the science himself, said the scary part of caving is not the cave but what people are doing to the cave.
For eons, the average temperature inside Oregon Caves was 42 degrees.
Freelance writer Anna Rubenstein contributed to this story.
Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.
