this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
343 points (95.5% liked)
196
17053 readers
848 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us on our matrix channel.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Spelunkers are crazy, out of every stupid thing you could do that has a high chance of killing you of you if you make a tiny mistake you choose spelunking?
But this hole was made for me!
😭
Drr drr dr
Exploring beginner friendly caves is really cool. But tight passages like this and the nutty putty cave one are absolutely terrifying, and I want nothing to do with it.
This IS the nutty putty cave, the pic is just rotated 90 degrees.
The picture makes my skin crawl because I read about the guy.
It gets worse knowing which way is down in that picture XD
Oh god so much worse. Just a nightmarish, horrid way to go. It seriously freaks me out imagining it.
My first and only cave experience was with a friend who had done the tunnel before so he knew where it went and was safe. It was slightly wider than my shoulders and started with climbing a rope up into the tunnel from a river and ended with a T intersection.
Yeah, choose SCUBA spelunking like a real daredevil!
Wingsuit base SCUBA spelunking
LoL, now we're talkin'. Base jumping has gotten soooo booooring.
scuba is waaay less dangerous. if your shit fails you can surface (depending on depth of course) the bends aint fun
I think they meant cave diving. Spelunking, but underwater. Incredibly dangerous.
...cave diving is the most ~~dangerous~~ deadly recreational sport of which i'm aware...
yeah fuck that noise.
ive seen signs at cave mouths that are mostly skulls
But scuba spelunking gives you the worst of both. Easy to get lost, easy to get stuck especially because you have a big tank on your back, if you let silt kick up its easy to get turned around and lost in the cave, and of course you also have a limited air supply.
At least you die faster. If I was in the position of the guy in the picture underwater I would just spit out my regulator.
Also if you have the tanks on your side and you never take them off to go through a hole you can be pretty sure that you can go through anything back if your remove them. Siphons tho, that's a different story
No one calls it spelunking who actually does it, at least in USA
I won't cave to peer pressure, and will always call it spelunking.
Best way to show you don't care about the actual sport imo
LoL. I do have a lot of respect for those SCUBA cavers. I had a friend in school who was so disappointed when I didn't say sphygmomanometer, and I love words so much that I try to use the longer/ less used ones when I can get away with it. :-D
You can use the words you want, although in most situations people will understand you better if you say "blood pressure monitor" -- unless you're in the medical field and need to be more specific.
The caving one bothers me because people talk about a sport they don't do or their friends don't do with a word only outsiders use. It shows you don't want any connection to the actual people who do it and who sometimes die in accidents.
I've spoken with the cave divers at Wakulla Springs, in Florida. They've done a bit of serious research there, mapping it back several miles. The opening of the cave is 120 feet below the surface, and goes deeper still (I'm remembering 300 feet) once one gets inside, with the pressure of the water pushing outward. They compress for 6 hours, can be down there for 6 hours, and then decompress for 6 hours on the longer expeditions. AFAIK no one has died in that one, at least not for a very long time. There are mastodon bones at 90-120 feet, that one used to be able to see from the surface.
http://floridacaves.com/wakullaprofile.JPG
Dude that's awesome!! Cave diving sounds like it's come a long way.
You do this whole thing and never once tell us the super secret proper word for spelunking...
Disregard saw your other post...it's called caving...
Sorry if that wasn't clear. I'm honestly curious how "spelunking" got to be such a popular word.
If you want to see some fun caving content, and also the world's first proto-creepypasta, check out Ted's Caving Page. https://www.angelfire.com/trek/caver/
I have gone to a couple lava flow caves and went to one in Central Oregon that I had to crawl through a tiny hole for about 5-6 feet not too bad but it opened up to this amazing little geode room thing...out of the ten of us only 4 of us went in there it was terrifying but worth it...turning off your flashlights in caves is something else!!!
Dude that sounds awesome!! I've explored one small cave in NY with some coworkers -- was sort of tricky to get into, you had to go in sideways leading on your back, but it opened up into a big room with a way to climb further down a bit. I have some friends who were way more into it, had the gear, made maps, researched living things they found inside, etc, but I didn't get into it at the time.
That thing about going further when others stay back-- or the feeling of turning off the lights and waiting for your eyes to adjust but still you can't see anything -- pretty cool!
Someday I'd like to go to Mammoth in KY or one of those caves in NZ with the glow worms!
We have these caves here that are from volcanic tuff settling and cracking over time. So they aren't solution caves, and are very dry inside. Of course they stay the same temperature inside. It's super fun to go caving in them. I haven't been in a while, and it's like -15C outside, so they would seem warm. Thanks for the speliological conversation, it's inspiring. Maybe I can find time today or next weekend.
You ruined racing and rugby already. Not letting you americans ruin spelunking. Youre propably gonna turn it into a gender reveal thing somehow.
I don't know what any of this means. Is spelunking what the English call it?
Not sure how Americans ruined racing or rugby. Some of my friends play rugby but I never really liked it.
what do they call it, "Get stuck in impossibly tiny hole upside down and die"?
No they call it caving.
Good thing we aren't in the USA then.
Do they call it spelunking where you are? I'm curious if any caving communities actually call it that
I thought the USA was where it was called Spelunking. In the UK it's called Potholing because of the small entrances to vertical caves, or caving.
I don't know anywhere it's called by spelunking by the people who actually do it.
The bougie name