I used to never be claustrophobic. Went in many a confined space and never an issue. For some reason now that I'm getting on in age, just watching those videos makes my skin crawl and heart rate rise. No particular incidents or anything would cause this, it just went from "no big deal" to "no friggin way" for me.

I'm not that claustrophobic but I can't watch that. Nope

Nope.....

Nope

Nope

Nope

Nope

Nope

Nope

Nope

Nope

He's not blocking the real passage, he's off in some corner he was not supposed to be in from what they described.  


I agree though.  If the thing becomes a source of nuisance rescue calls I can understand sealing it up.  You can't realistically tell people they are truely SOL if they get stuck because the families will be all over you to help 'just this one time' and once on TV the pressure becomes impossible to weather.    


I'm completely and totally uninterested in being underground in any place a crowd can't walk around in upright.  Fuck every last bit of wiggling down some one-way hole in ground.

i used to do that stuff all the time in high school,no sense of mortality back then.
i had a 25" waist and probably weighed a buck o five so i ended up going in all the tight spaces.
the lead guy always told me if i get in a jam you panic you die.

I very much enjoy those walking cave tours

I worked in the Bay Area doing refinery shutdowns in a previous life.  Fresh air entry certified on Scott and Draeger equipment. Had a job entering a vessel that required removing my air pack and passing it in front of me to enter a confined space.  That was my last entry.
I also formerly climbed radio and television towers.
I’ve lost my nerve for such undertakings.

Nope

I've skydived, soloed rock climbing, snowboarded through an avalanche, surfed with sharks, completed confined space training with smoke in full bunker gear/SCBA, been shot at, mortared, rocketed and driven past IEDs.

Fuck having to exhale so you can squeeze though a 10 inch high spot while having to rotate your head so you'd (maybe) fit...while slithering though cold mud halfway up your neck....in the darkness. And you have to do it again to get out. I did that once and failed to see the fun.

Fuck
that        
noise

I once explored a cave system, with friends, in Alachua, Florida. One of our group knew what he was doing but I quickly felt I was operating outside my personal skill set. That was back in the 1980s. However, there was evidence of Human use of the cave going back to the 1920s (graffiti, empty bottles, etc.). I remember we had to be careful because their were a bunch of used needles around. It was a series of chambers that who had to crawl on your belly to get between.

Are y'all primed for this?

In The Divine Comedy, aka Dante's Inferno... one of the levels of Hell involved the damned souls being stuffed into holes headfirst... one after another... to burn there forever.

Dante was a sick fuck.

Sweet dreams.

No-no-nope!

Same. Poor guy.

Not gonna watch, I know how it ends. What happens to you if you are trapped upside down? Pass out?

See, if I was doing this, I would make sure I have something like a fent syringe on me or in my boot. If I get hopelessly jammed, just have guy behind me slip my boot off and jab me...instant lights out...

I put the Nutty Putty Cave incident just slightly higher on the NOPE scale than the guy that had to cut his own arm off to get free from a boulder inside a crevice.

Ah yes, mask confidence training.  Embrace the suck as they say.  I went through one particularly tight maze and when I came out, my bottle was frozen.  I was sucking down my bottle so fast it froze at the valve.  The instructor said he’d never seen that before.

Same and Same.  No thanks.

Yeah, maximum nopes.

Same

#fuckthat

I'm a industrial confined space rescue tech and not claustrophobic at all but that cave shit is a big hell no for me dog

It wasn't just a hole. He was also stuck in a way his body couldn't bend to navigate the way back out. IIRC, They could have broken his legs/ankles to get him out, but he would have died from the shock before they got him to a place wide enough to treat him.

Was there ANYTHING the rescuers could have done to get Jones out alive? Were they limited technologically or would another option than ropes and pulleys have been available to them? I seem to remember a similar ending for a mountain climber that fell into snow covered crevasse or sinkhole years ago. He was wedged in upside down and they couldn't pull him out either. One of the rescuers sat up there talking with him until the end. Unlike the other details, the finality of that conversation always stuck with me.

It's strange. I have done some caving over the years. I was always bothered more with the potential for bugs and other critters more so than the confined spaces. Never got myself into any overly dangerous situations that I knew of. I guess many things could have easily gone wrong though. It's difficult to consider that you're in a situation where rescue is simply not possible. When someone is young, it probably doesn't register. I know it didn't with me in many cases. There are times now where I wonder how Im even still alive.

Good thread.

This is an interesting read.

Mossdale tragedy

The link leads to a download of a booklet from a UK caving site.
It's well written.

Hard pass.

Apparently nearly a day later when you die.

Texas size 10-4!

Maybe, but the rescuers were fiighting not only an extremely difficult working environment but also the clock, given his extremely awkward positioning.  The only thing that would have been worse was if the cave was slowly filling with water.

What a stupid way to die!

Closing it is appropriate as a sign of respect. It's now a gravesite.

Concrete ?
Blow it in place.

I do not fit in small spaces ( 6" 2" / 250lb) but have scuba dived some tight spots that is not exactly fun.


Everest is littered with bodies and gear , mother nature always wins.
RIP.

There's definitely an adrenaline dopamine rush from it. You just have to control it until AFTER you're through.

Used to go caving/spelunking when I was younger.

Been through ONE squeeze that required first hyperventilating to hyperoxygenate my blood, then exhaling FULLY to be able to squeeze through. The hyperoxygenation was necessary for the ~10-20 seconds of effort to make it through.

Panicking in the middle and trying to inhale = getting stuck and asphyxiating, so it required the breathing to hyperoxygenate while simultaneously trying to remain calm, (not think about the fact that if I took too long, there was NO room to take a breath) and not elevate my heart rate too much so I didn't burn through the oxygen too quickly.

I absolutely never explored 'new' sections. I only ever went through sections that were already explored and that other people had been through.

Even with THAT precaution, I came to a few realizations:

1) don't be the biggest person in the group. When people who are 40+lbs lighter tell you that a section is "No problem", it might be for them, but may be a completely different story for you.

2) even if you aren't much heavier than the heaviest person in the group, being significantly taller can also pose problems shorter people don't even have

3) lifting weights to get bigger and stronger run counter to caving. That made it an easy choice.


*** The ONE time I actually got claustrophobic while caving was related to #2.

I was the tallest person in the group, and we came to a crawl that was tight enough, we had to remove our helmets and turn our heads sideways.

In the middle of the crawl, I came to a section that made an 'S' bend. Tight sections like this are like solving a puzzle. You need to figure out how to contort to make it through when you can't just squirm through.

I twisted. I squirmed. I bent in all sorts of weird ways. Then I got stuck. Tight. I was lodged with my body twisted one way, my legs bent and twisted in another part, and my legs were stuck fast. I couldn't pull them forward, I couldn't push back and straighten them out.

It was quite an uncomfortable position, and as I tried to gain some movement, my legs being wedged and not moving at all, with my shoulder also wedged hard against on side and my head turned sideways, was what triggered the claustrophobia. I started to panic and try to 'muscle it'. Yeah, you can't push solid rock to make room. All the pump does, is wedge you a little tighter. I thought, "I can't move. I'd have to break my leg(s) to get free!".

Somehow, I managed to scream in my own head, "STOP AND CALM THE FUCK DOWN!!! Control your breathing. You're twisted like a pretzel, but you need to relax. You managed to squirm your way into this position, which means you can squirm your way back out of this position. Worst comes to worst, you'll have to back out the way you came in. Relax. Slow your breathing. Loosen your muscles, then try different movements, bit by bit, one at a time. Find the one that allows movement".

It worked. Took a few minutes of controlled breathing to calm down, and I began testing movements. I eventually managed to get one leg a little room.  Just an inch or 2, which allowed me some room to maneuver the other leg. I had to turn a different way to slowly get my body and long legs through that S-bend. Got stuck a couple more times, but stayed calm and worked through it, solving the puzzle.

Finally made it through, and the others were like, "You get stuck in there? You took a long ass time".

"I thought you said there was nothing to cause problems through there. I got stuck at the friggin S-bend".

The others look around and shrug, "that bit's not that bad". That was when it hit me that I was about 4" taller than the next tallest person in that group.

*** the difference in me getting stuck, was that the section was level. The unfortunate Nutty Putty incident was a steep decline. Every movement made him slide deeper, with less room to maneuver. He solved the puzzle to get his legs through the one bend, but didn't have the strength left, to maneuver back out while fighting gravity, and because of that, the rescuers also couldn't pull him out.

Haven't been caving in decades. Don't really miss it.

ETA

Nvm.  Already posted.

Well, for starters, practically everyone uses the freeway so it's not a valid comparison.  Not only that, but it's essential for our economy.  So because of those very important details we as a society allow some (quite often dumbassed) people to suffer and die because many, many, many more people would suffer and die if we shut it down.

The cave, OTOH, is frequented primarily by fit young males for recreational purposes.  It didn't produce any significant economic value other than being a place to play, and had real public costs in the form of paying for rescues.  They shut it down and 99.99% of the population of Utah didn't even notice.

But I would be willing to leave it open IF people who used it were willing to take financial and practical responsibility for their own rescues.  That simply isn't going to happen in Spencer Cox's Utah -- or anywhere else, for that matter.

Yep, portable phones have emboldened irresponsible persons to take risks they never would have taken had they been on their own.

Similarly, the GPS has created a generation of outdoors enthusiasts who have no clue how to read a map or navigate using the stars or sun or land features.  Rescues are almost a weekly occurrence during the summer in just the canyons east of Salt Lake City.

There has been some really bad ones here in the UK.

I think the worst was the mossdale caverns tragedy. All still in there. 6 people died one wedge his head in a hole so small to try and get air that he shattered his own skull.

To get to where they died  they had to go through passages called things like the knee breaker and the marathon.

I will scroll no further than post #2. I know someone posted the pic of what happened to that poor guy. It makes me almost vomit from anxiety just SEEING it.

No thanks.

I've been in nutty putty before it was shut down. It was very tight. Once entering the cave if you hang left it's not so bad, but dropping straight down the slide to the area where the guy died was VERY claustrophobic and I only did it because girls were with us. Being a bit older now, no way I'd go back down that way even if it was open. It was hella tight and not fun. That poor guy died in one of the worst ways imaginable.

That would be terrifying, but at least drowning would be fairly quick. Nutty putty dude was stuck upside down for like a day and a half before he died.

Local to me but all of my caving has been underwater

Like Gettysburg?

I have a theory (I just made up) that those who like spelunking were in their mama’s womb when mom got an adrenaline rush or went through a near death experience.

Yep sweaty palms again. Fuck all of that. All of it.

Who does that? Those are VERY tight openings. There are some things that common sense just tells you not to do.

What if they had used a ton of lube?

I’ve done that training as well. They blacked out our masks, lowered tank pressure to where the bell was going off, and then dropped us off in a building where we didn’t have any clue of our location.

It wasn’t fun.

As detailed in my post above, it can take a lot of contortion to get past certain bends in a very tight passage. I'm talking turning at the waist so your chest is 45 degrees of more from your hips, then sliding one hip up an inch to allow you to bend one leg at the knee juuuust right to be able to slide the knee up an inch or two. Twist again, find a small movement to advance. Twist, bend squirm, twist, bend squirm...

By the time the rescuers got to him, he'd been upside down for a day. He'd managed to 'solve the puzzle' to get his legs past the bend that unfortunately, allowed him to get upside down. If he'd never 'solved the puzzle' he'd likely still be alive, as he would've had to backtrack and find another way.

The problem was that he DID solve the puzzle to get past that section the first time, but once he passed that point, he was in the steep decline which tightened to the point of impassability.

It can be incredibly tiring to 'solve the puzzle' when it's horizontal, but you can move, rest, move, rest some more, move, rest...

When you're trying to 'solve the puzzle' backwards, upside down, while fighting against gravity, with minimal traction to resist the gravity pulling you deeper? That's how he died. The first person to reach him, he mentioned that every time he gained a bit of ground and tried to rest/relax, he'd lose the ground and slide back down/deeper, and kept doing it, until he was exhausted.

If you've seen the photo of his legs, the thought most people who've never done this kind of thing before, have, is, "How the heck did he get his legs PAST/THROUGH that bend without having to break them first?".

If he'd still been relatively fresh and composed, and the rescuers were able to rig some kind of rope setup to help hold him from sliding back down, he could have tried to help extricate himself by trying those movements to 'solve the puzzle' in reverse, but he was too exhausted and unable to think clearly by that point.

It's why highly experienced cavers explore new/ unfamiliar downsloping passages backwards/feet first. If they find that it tightens too much, it's easier to solve the puzzle forwards to climb back out, after you've done it backwards to enter it. I've never been comfortable doing that, hence I didn't explore passages that other folks hadn't already been through (and still could encounter issues).