Spelunking Otherwise Known As Caving

SPELUNKING: The hobby of practice of exploring caves

(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spelunking)

Yes, Yes...I know it has been quite a while since I have posted... And I'm very sorry!!! But as I recently had quite a bit of fun exploring the Clarksville Caves in Clarksville, NY I thought it would be fun to post the pictures from the experience! Hope you all enjoy!!!

This is the before picture. We're all still nice and clean and dry!

And here's the after picture. We're soaked and filthy and gross!

This is the hole we had to go into in order to get down into the caves. Only slightly larger than me I think.


Once down in that hole we were in the actual cave. The entire ceiling of the first cavern was all fools gold. Doesn't it look so beautiful!!! It was stunning and this picture doesn't even begin to do it justice...

This was a bit further into the cave. There was a little underground stream running down the middle of the cave for almost the entire way. At first we were able to hop on different rocks and avoid getting wet but eventually the rocks thinned out and we ended up having to just walk right through the stream. And boy was it cold!

Just another picture in the cave. The ceiling was higher here but at some points it was very close to your head...other points you had to squat and shimmy or crawl.

Joy and her friends Hollan (green jacket) and Vartan (blue jacket) in the cave.

This is actually a shot of the group walking ahead of me although it's hard to tell because of the fogginess. The fog/mist effect was caused by our breath. I was very damp and cool in the cave and there wasn't much air flow so whenever we breathed out it created a mist that did not quickly dissipate. It was kind of a cool effect though because your breath just kind of hung in the air and then slowly moved away still almost in formation.

So the story behind my hand is this. Bubba attempted to climb up a piece of the cave wall behind us and a massive clump (bigger than my head) broke off of the wall where he was holding on. After it broke off though, we realized that it was actually a massive lump of clay and that there was a ton of clay in the actual wall of the cave! It was super moist and got on my hand because I felt the need to play with the clay...What can I say, it's the child in me!

This picture was taken after we as a group decided to go further up the tunnel/underground stream. We knew that the water got pretty deep (about waist high) but we wanted to go for it anyway. We started heading into the water and by the time we got as deep as we did it hurt so bad. We were all yelling "Ahhhh, it hurts...Pins and needles...Go back...Go back!" So we turned around and headed back...Appearantly there was a new tunnel a bit further up but we would have had to be in up to our waists...We decided to save that for a warmer day and plan on going back in couple more months.