caving
Always ready to follow the road less travelled, I have a penchant for expeditionary and adventure travel. Since 1986 I’ve gone on as many as five expeditions a year, exploring caves, rock climbing and scuba diving, interspersed with liberal amounts of backpacking, parachute, skydiving and canoeing.
In 1995 I helped survey Lechuguilla Cave in Carlsbad Caverns National Park in the U.S. Our expedition added just over one mile of previously unknown passage to the map of what is now one of the longest caves in the U.S. at over 122 miles. Our 30 person expedition was two weeks long, with teams of five people staying underground for days at a time to explore and survey new territory in specific areas of the cave system.
Entrance - Camp's Gulf Cave, Tennessee
Until the late 1980’s only 500 meters of Camp's Gulf Cave were known, as an extensive ceiling collapse blocked the passage. This image is taken looking out the entrance with the blocked passage behind me. The tunnel is wide enough to drive three city buses through it abreast.
Then some intrepid explorers found a path to the rest of the cave by worming through the pile of collapsed rubble and car sized boulders, into a massive room larger than this. A broad passage like this run through the next room, a middle room and then on to a third room, the largest of the three. Without my photo strobes our most powerful headlamps only lit a small area around us, thus in the days before digital cameras, we had to wait for my film to be developed to actually see the entire room lit by multiple high powered flashes.
Third Room - Camp's Gulf Cave, Tennessee
In this image, the camera is positioned at the base of a huge pyramid of rubble about 7 stories tall. Two friends are standing up there shooting strobe lights multiple times during a long time exposure to illuminate the ceiling, which is about another 5 stories higher. This room is the third in the series of large chambers in this cave. At the time this image was taken, fewer than 30 people had stood in this place and none had seen it with as much detail as in this photo. I’m using my widest lens and the camera is pointing up at a 45 degree angle. The room is large enough to contain a small city block including the buildings.
Time Exposure - Camp's Gulf Cave, Tennessee
The top of this picture is lit by the rapid blinks of my photo strobes (over 50 flashes in total), the bottom was lit in a time exposure by my 2 friends’ headlamps. Over the space of 5 minutes they clambered slowly to the spot in the foreground where you see their silhouettes, because they paused motionless for a few more seconds. Try to imagine the rest of the room as pitch black, except for a tiny pool of orange light near each headlamp, like a flashlight in the forest at night. Now you understand that we worked in almost complete darkness and to get there we had to hike and crawl through spaces the size of a garbage can for half a day.