Post by L Roebuck on Aug 15, 2006 19:05:22 GMT -5
Get Out!! and enjoy the outdoors with us
Weekend troglodytes fear no laundry chute
By Aaron Paton
Tuesday August 15, 2006
Banff Crag & Canyon — Sitting in complete darkness, hands spread out just inches from my face, only the sound of dripping stalactites breaks the otherwise complete silence.
On the ground, back against the cave wall, I catch a whiff of something earthy and familiar. I assume the pile of animal bones to my left is emitting some peculiar odor and I hope the elusive packrats that I’m told dwell in the ‘Rat’s Nest Cave’ don’t make a sudden appearance as I wait for my companions.
Luckily, the first thing to break the silence is the voices of fellow cavers who I just met a few hours ago, followed by a dull glow and finally a bobbing headlamp.
I say cavers instead of spelunkers because spelunking is an unbefitting word that first-time underground dwellers use to describe cave exploration. It’s a bastardization of the word speleology, which is the study of caves and their make-up, structure, physical properties, history and life forms. It’s rarely used among cave explorers because it sounds “geeky.”
An explorer pops her headlamp above the wooden frame of “the box,” a narrow passage that leads down to the bottom of Grotto Mountain where pristine formations and crystal-clear pools of filtered mineral water await first-time troglodytes like myself. The other route to my left is a 60-foot rappel that ends up in the same location as “the box” but is much easier to go down than up.
Upon entering the cave we strap into metal anchors so that no one falls down the fifty-foot pit just a few feet away. After some instruction on how to move and what to expect to experience underground, we begin to shuffle our way down into the deep, all the while clipped to a rope that’s bolted into the wall. Our nine-person spelunk…er… caving team is led by Mark Crapeole with Canmore Caverns caving company, a veteran cavern-denizen and expert on local cave lore. He has spent more than a week in a cave at one time without seeing the light of day and has been exploring the innards of mountains like Grotto for 20 years.
He dispenses such knowledge as how to tell the difference between a stalactite and a stalagmite while making sure everyone is being safe and respectful of the cave.
The oldest formation down here is more than 750,000 years old. Younger stalactites form much quicker -- a mere 3,000 years for some of the smaller ones.
Canmore is an old mining town and it’s befitting that this spectacular underground experience is just a few kilometres from our doorsteps. We follow the Livingston Layer of the mountain to a point 180 feet below the entrance. Encountering ‘moon milk,’ ‘soda straws,’ ‘draperies,’ ‘bacon strips’ and columns along the way and it takes a while to get used to what we’re actually seeing. Depth perception is reduced with only a headlamp to light the path and the conversation is steady to avoid any uncomfortable silence that could lead to a dull panic.
The visual climax of the trip comes at the grotto, where photos can’t do justice to the spectacular rock formations so I don’t even bother to take them. It looks like we’ve crawled into the stomach of some giant red rock-eating beast as we descend into the pit and gaze at the slow formation of this ancient beauty.
It is both psychologically thrilling and terrifying to enter ‘the laundry chute’ which is a tamer version of ‘the psychological squeeze,’ and is about 12 body lengths of extremely tight quarters. We wriggle down into the throat of the beast and emerge near a room that looks vaguely familiar.
We’ve done a complete loop around approximately eight per cent of the cave and it has taken five hours to get back to the start. The experience was incredible to say the least and the newly formed friends share drinks and e-mail addresses before parting ways.
For the record, stalactites cling ‘tightly’ to the roof and stalagmites ‘might’ reach the roof. But the rest of the story will need to be told first-hand by an expert guide.
Article
Weekend troglodytes fear no laundry chute
By Aaron Paton
Tuesday August 15, 2006
Banff Crag & Canyon — Sitting in complete darkness, hands spread out just inches from my face, only the sound of dripping stalactites breaks the otherwise complete silence.
On the ground, back against the cave wall, I catch a whiff of something earthy and familiar. I assume the pile of animal bones to my left is emitting some peculiar odor and I hope the elusive packrats that I’m told dwell in the ‘Rat’s Nest Cave’ don’t make a sudden appearance as I wait for my companions.
Luckily, the first thing to break the silence is the voices of fellow cavers who I just met a few hours ago, followed by a dull glow and finally a bobbing headlamp.
I say cavers instead of spelunkers because spelunking is an unbefitting word that first-time underground dwellers use to describe cave exploration. It’s a bastardization of the word speleology, which is the study of caves and their make-up, structure, physical properties, history and life forms. It’s rarely used among cave explorers because it sounds “geeky.”
An explorer pops her headlamp above the wooden frame of “the box,” a narrow passage that leads down to the bottom of Grotto Mountain where pristine formations and crystal-clear pools of filtered mineral water await first-time troglodytes like myself. The other route to my left is a 60-foot rappel that ends up in the same location as “the box” but is much easier to go down than up.
Upon entering the cave we strap into metal anchors so that no one falls down the fifty-foot pit just a few feet away. After some instruction on how to move and what to expect to experience underground, we begin to shuffle our way down into the deep, all the while clipped to a rope that’s bolted into the wall. Our nine-person spelunk…er… caving team is led by Mark Crapeole with Canmore Caverns caving company, a veteran cavern-denizen and expert on local cave lore. He has spent more than a week in a cave at one time without seeing the light of day and has been exploring the innards of mountains like Grotto for 20 years.
He dispenses such knowledge as how to tell the difference between a stalactite and a stalagmite while making sure everyone is being safe and respectful of the cave.
The oldest formation down here is more than 750,000 years old. Younger stalactites form much quicker -- a mere 3,000 years for some of the smaller ones.
Canmore is an old mining town and it’s befitting that this spectacular underground experience is just a few kilometres from our doorsteps. We follow the Livingston Layer of the mountain to a point 180 feet below the entrance. Encountering ‘moon milk,’ ‘soda straws,’ ‘draperies,’ ‘bacon strips’ and columns along the way and it takes a while to get used to what we’re actually seeing. Depth perception is reduced with only a headlamp to light the path and the conversation is steady to avoid any uncomfortable silence that could lead to a dull panic.
The visual climax of the trip comes at the grotto, where photos can’t do justice to the spectacular rock formations so I don’t even bother to take them. It looks like we’ve crawled into the stomach of some giant red rock-eating beast as we descend into the pit and gaze at the slow formation of this ancient beauty.
It is both psychologically thrilling and terrifying to enter ‘the laundry chute’ which is a tamer version of ‘the psychological squeeze,’ and is about 12 body lengths of extremely tight quarters. We wriggle down into the throat of the beast and emerge near a room that looks vaguely familiar.
We’ve done a complete loop around approximately eight per cent of the cave and it has taken five hours to get back to the start. The experience was incredible to say the least and the newly formed friends share drinks and e-mail addresses before parting ways.
For the record, stalactites cling ‘tightly’ to the roof and stalagmites ‘might’ reach the roof. But the rest of the story will need to be told first-hand by an expert guide.
Article