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Books : Outdoors & Nature : Outdoor Recreation : Spelunking
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In the decade since its original publication, On Rope has gained worldwide recognition as the most authoritative book on single rope techniques (SRT). Like its predecessor, this new edition is a practical approach to North American vertical ropework. This book contains 384 pages with over 700 detailed drawings and the new edition has been extensively revised and expanded to include detailed descriptions of other ropes users including: arborists, river rescue, window cleaners, and circus riggers among others. Coverage of European SRT rigging techniques and climbing systems has also been greatly enlarged.
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The Huautla in Mexico is the deepest cave in the Western Hemisphere, possibly the world. Shafts reach skyscraper-depths, caverns are stadium-sized, and sudden floods can drown divers in an instant. With a two-decade obsession, William Stone and his 44-member team entered the sinkhole at Sotano de San Augustin. The first camp settled 2,328 feet below ground in a cavern where headlamps couldn't even illuminate the walls and ceiling. The second camp teetered precariously above an underground canyon where two subterranean rivers collided. But beyond that lay the unknown territory -- a flooded corridor that had blocked all previous comers, claimed a diver's life, and drove the rest of the team back. Except for William Stone and Barbara am Ende, who forged on for 18 more days, with no hope of rescue, to set the record for the deepest cave dive in the Western Hemisphere.
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"When Floyd Collins became trapped in a cave in southern Kentucky in early 1925, the sensationalism and hysteria of the rescue attempt generated America's first true media spectacle, making Collins's story one of the seminal events of the century. The crowds that gathered outside Sand Cave turned the rescue site into a carnival. Collins's situation was front-page news throughout the country, hourly bulletins interrupted radio programs, and Congress recessed to hear the latest word. Trapped! is both a tense adventure and a brilliant historical recreation of the past. This new edition includes a new epilogue revealing information about the Floyed Collins story that has come to light since the book was first published.
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Poems about Caving, Exploration, Panic, Humor and Self Improvement.If you would like to motivate yourself and get out of your comfort zone, then this collection of poems may be for you. Pushing The Limit is about exploring the last frontier and more. Pushing the underground world of wonder and mystery was one of the author's greatest physical challenges. Life throws a lot at us, making experience a great teacher. The author shares some of his experiences so that others might try to get just a little more out of life. We only have one shot at life, so why not push the limit in everything that you do. You will feel much better and get more enjoyment out of all the challenges that life has to offer.
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A FalconGuide® to Mammoth Cave National Park covers in detail all of the aboveground and belowground activities in this 50,000-acre national park, including hiking, biking, scenic driving, camping, paddling, fishing, and of course, caving.
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Narrow passages, twisting upward or dropping precipitously. Huge vaults filled with fantastic shapes. Tunnels twined in tangled mazes. Over centuries, underground rivers can carve holes and rooms in solid rock; drips of water build walls of stone. Natural caves shape another world beneath our feet. Dangerous and beautiful, these places remain unknown--until someone decides to investigate.
In 2004, businessman and caver John Ackerman drilled an entryway into Goliath Cave, a huge and unexplored complex in the karst region of southeastern Minnesota. Squeezing through tiny openings, scuba diving through silt-filled waters, scaling walls, and traversing crevasses, he and his fellow cavers painstakingly mapped ever-further reaches of the complex in an exploration that continues to this day.
But man-made caves that do not breathe can be even more dangerous than their natural cousins. In St. Paul, also in 2004, five teenagers entered an area where intermittent fires robbed the air of oxygen. Only two emerged alive.
Cary Griffith, author of the acclaimed Lost in the Wild, intertwines these two incidents, showing the dangers experienced by both groups--one highly prepared and experienced and the other tragically ill equipped. With equal parts of suspense and caution, Opening Goliath never leaves readers alone in the dark.
Cary J. Griffith, who specializes in writing about the outdoors, is the author of Lost in the Wild: Danger and Survival in the North Woods.
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In Beyond Mammoth Cave: A Tale of Obsession in the World’s Longest Cave, James D. Borden and Roger W. Brucker provide gripping first-person accounts of the discoveries, including Roppel Cave, that made Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave three times longer than any other cave in the world.
Borden, a relative newcomer, and Brucker, a veteran explorer, bring a personal and sometimes conflicting view of their roles as adversaries in a race that lasted from 1972 through 1983 to find “big cave.” They describe hazardous adventures, precarious climbs, and close calls from falling rocks. The perils are many and the trek arduous as they squirm through muddy tubes, wade in neck-deep cold water, and crawl over sharp rocks and gritty sand. Theirs is a tale of agonizing endurance spiced by spectacular discoveries.
But the cave was not the sole obstacle. The explorations were complicated by political intrigue and the rivalry between the Kentucky-based Cave Research Foundation and the Central Kentucky Karst Coalition, each seeking to make discoveries and hide secrets. Extreme stress, of course, evoked extreme behavior, ranging from selfishness to sacrifice, from outrageous humor to the deadly serious response.
Beyond Mammoth Cave includes maps by Patricia Kambesis that show the progression of cave discoveries in relation to the topography. Original line drawings by well-known illustrator Linda Heslop capture the dark mystery of the exploration. The book features five black and white photographs as a color gallery of photographs.
A sequel to The Longest Cave by Brucker and Richard A. Watson, this book is a comprehensive update of the speleological investigations in the Mammoth Cave region. Brucker’s involvement provides continuity to the investigation.
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Barbara Hurd begins her foray into the increasingly popular pursuit of caving as we all would -- with a panic attack. Nevertheless, as her hunger to understand caves and caving increases, she lures the reader in deeper as well, to the extraordinary fascination of these dark spaces.
Hurd illuminates the natural history and spiritual territory of caves as powerfully as Kathleen Norris portrayed the Dakotas and Barry Lopez the Arctic. She ranges from sacred caves in India to secret caves in Arizona and, with passionately informed prose, makes these places -- with their stalactites and blind cavefish and ancient galleries of white flowstone and soda straws -- come alive. Characters weave in and out of her story as well: a childhood friend dying of cancer, a wildlife biologist who specializes in bat guano, an elderly Indian guide, and the disembodied voice of a fellow caver, never seen, with whom she spends a profoundly illuminating half-hour.
Entering the Stone is both a rich and a compelling natural history of some of the most extraordinary places on earth, as well as a stunning investigation of dark interiors, both terrestrial and human.
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In 2004, two great scientist-explorers attempted to find the bottom of the world. American Bill Stone took on the vast, deadly Cheve Cave in southern Mexico. Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk targeted Krubera, a freezing nightmare of a supercave in the war-torn former Soviet republic of Georgia. Both men spent months almost two vertical miles deep, contending with thousand-foot drops, raging whitewater rivers, monstrous waterfalls, mile-long belly crawls, and the psychological horrors produced by weeks in absolute darkness, beyond all hope of rescue. Based on his unprecedented access to logs and journals as well as hours of personal interviews, James Tabor has crafted a thrilling exploration of man’s timeless urge to discover—and of two extraordinary men whose pursuit of greatness led them to the heights of triumph and the depths of tragedy. Blind Descent is an unforgettable addition to the classic literature of true-life adventure, and a testament to human survival and endurance.
Includes a 16-pg black and white insert
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This intructional guide to cave exploring will help readers select the right gear for a caving expedition and understand the proper techniques for exploring safely and with minimal impact. Cave Exploring also discusses the very important topic of trip leadership, something most other caving books give only passing treatment to if any at all.
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Underground cave systems have a unique fascination for explorers, with their soaring caverns, breath-taking formations, and potential for finding uncharted passageways. Illustrated throughout with stunning photographs and explanatory diagrams, The Complete Caving Manual is a comprehensive guide to safe, responsible caving for novices and experts alike. Topics covered include: how caves and cave formations develop; modern caving equipment; planning and preparation for a caving trip; party leadership; horizontal techniques; vertical techniques and rope work; dealing with emergencies; exploring underground; cave flora and fauna, and where to cave.
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This newly-revised edition of a classic introduction to speleology covers the latest discoveries about the mysterious world of caves. Drs. Moore and Sullivan are among the founders of modern cave research. They present here the principles of speleology in language that anyone can understand. The authors show how cave processes involve biological as well as geological, chemical, and physical processes, and they examine such topics as the origin of caves, the structure of cave food chains, and the evolution of blind cave animals. The book was a selection of the Science Book Club and is widely used as a textbook in high schools and colleges.
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In 1925 the geological connection between Flint Ridge and Mammoth Cave was proved when dye placed in a Flint Ridge spring showed up in Echo River at Mammoth Cave.
That tantalizing swirl of dye confirmed speculations that were to tempt more than 650 cavers over half a century with the thrill of being the first to make human passage of the cave connection. Roger Brucker and Richard Watson tell not only of their own twenty-year effort to complete the link but the stories of many others who worked their way through mud-choked crawlways less than a foot high only to find impenetrable blockages.
Floyd Collins died a grisly death in nearby Sand Cave in 1925, after being trapped there for 15 days. The wide press coverage of the rescue efforts stirred the imagination of the public and his body was on macabre display in a glass-topped coffin in Crystal Cave into the 1940s. Agents of a rival cave owner once even stole his corpse, which was recovered and still is in a coffin in the cave. Modern cavers still have a word with Floyd as they start their downward treks.
Brucker and Watson joined the parade of cavers who propelled themselves by wiggling kneecaps, elbows, and toes through quarter-mile long crawlways, clinging by fingertips and boot toes across mud-slick walls, over bottomless pits, into gurgling streams beneath stone ceilings that descend to water level, down crumbling crevices and up mountainous rockfalls, into wondrous domed halls, and straight ahead into a blackness intensified rather than dispelled by the carbide lamps on their helmets.
Over two decades they explored the passages with others who sought the final connection as vigorously as themselves. Pat Crowther, a young mother of two, joined them and because of her thinness became the member of the crew to go first into places no human had ever gone before. In that role, in July 1972, she wiggled her way through the Tight Spot and found the route that would link the Flint Ridge and Mammoth Cave systems into one cave extending 144.4 miles through the Kentucky limestone.
In a new afterword to this edition the authors summarize the subsequent explorations that have more than doubled the established length of the cave system. Based upon geological evidence, the authors predict that new discoveries will add another 200 miles to the length of the world’s longest cave, making it over 500 miles long.
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"Texas has about three thousand known, explored caves, ranging in size from small crawlways to huge caverns. Most of these caves, however, are generally restricted to exploration by trained, experienced cavers, geologists, and biologists."--BOOK JACKET. "Texas Caves introduces this seldom-seen world, providing basic cave geology and biology, a description of the seven show caves that have been opened and developed for public visiting, and information on state speleological parks."--BOOK JACKET. "The text along with a hundred full-color and black-and-white photographs reveal the glories of Texas caves, "wild" as well as commercial, showing different types of cave formations, the creatures that live in them, and the people who explore them."--BOOK JACKET.