Caving
I think that surveying and exploring caves is largely an excuse to be a part of a community, spend time outdoors, see new places, and live an adventurous life. I enjoy Mexico caving more and more these days. I spend at least one weekend each month helping to coordinate a joint research project between the Texas Speleological Association and Colorado Bend State Park. I'm a member of the National Speleological Society (NSS #37782), at least I am when I remember to pay my dues. I always maintain my membership to the Texas Speleological Association, the UT Grotto (also known as the University Speleological Society), and the Central Texas Grotto.

Here's a picture that I took in Gruta de Palmito in Bustamante, Mexico.

I have written three caving songs so far. 1. This first one tries to capture the spirit behind caving: It's all about caves, but that's only the beginning.

As Long as We Reach Together

It's dark, and it's quiet. The sun never rises to guide us.
It's damp, and it's barren, but its beauty can always surprise us.

The rains on the limestone below fight gravity for some relief.
A cavern emerges through thousands of moons never noticed.

It starts at the entrance. We surrender control to the timeless
We change it in passing, but we will never change it to serve us.

It grew without plan or desire, and always we've held it as sacred.
Like oceans and mountains, we only can know it for a moment.

CHORUS:
So we reach with explorer's hearts and hope in our eyes
That the depth of this darkness goes back farther through time
It's more than the cave that we see--
We see life like it matters
As long as we all go together

MUSICAL BRIDGE

With the surface above us, we derive our strength from each other
We join as a collective for this is a place full of dangers

We go in awe of the scale for little we know of its future
But here in its darkness we see just who we are


2. I wrote this song about Floyd Collins, the most famous caver who ever lived.

You might not know Floyd Collins
But in '25 the whole country did
In the days of Kentucky Cave Wars
When his name was everywhere in print

All the tourists went to Mammoth
Floyd hoped to steer some of them away
He found an entrance by the same road
And dreamed about the money he could make

So he wiggled through the passages
So tight he couldn't turn his head
He was kicking at the walls
To find some better form of leverage

He worried about nothing
It was part of his routine
So when a rock pinned his ankle
He stayed calm as he struggled to get free

CHORUS
They called him the greatest caver any one has known
I wish I could share with him the way his legend's grown
So I wait
And I listen for him
And I welcome his whispers down below

For six days people argued
About exactly what to do
A stuck man in a tight cave
They tried to think it through

They tied a rope and pulled on him
But he could not bear the pain
They tried a jack to lift the rock
He cried when he knew that they had failed

One reporter kept crawling down/in
With a friendly voice and new supplies
But he never dreamed that the stories
Would win him a Pulitzer Prize

Then the rescue fell apart
In the passage there was a cave-in
Floyd was trapped without supplies
Now they raced against time just to save him

BRIDGE:

When the headlines told his story
Tens of thousands gathered around
It was a media circus like they'd never seen
But he never heard a sound
For lonely Floyd was dying
Like no one could have dreamed
It was a sad time in Kentucky
It still seems sad to me

They started digging a rescue shaft
There were volunteers from all around
They thought they could dig two feet an hour
It kept collapsing but they struggled on

In shifts of three they dug like mad
And prayed that they’d see Floyd again
But it took ten days. It was just too long
He had died a couple days before they reached him

Within 3 months there were 3 books
Later movies, plays, and poems
A hit song that broke record charts
And cavers kept on exploring

They carried on what he'd begun
Sometimes they hear strange sounds
Do his whispers remind them
To respect every inch of the underground?

CHORUS


3. This song is about the disappearing homeland of native peoples in Mexico, which contains a reference to Sótano de las Golondrinas, the most spectacular entrance pit in the world.

Burro trails climb into the denser, darker jungle
Where the Spanish pushed the natives to claim the fertile valleys below.
You'd never know from any map how far the trails go--
Farther than I used to think any road could ever cut through the jagged limestone.

It's no place you could go.
It's no place you could go.

There's native towns in the mountains where the tourists rarely go
Guarded by the distance from the ends of any road,
They'd never know this magic place without the eyes to see
A refuge for a culture where the jungle remains pristine.

It's no place you could go.
It's no place you could go.

BRIDGE:
It's no historic never-never land--
The natives losing ground.
It's just more subtle now.
The ever-growing monster of a dream
To conquer land and sea
Goes far beyond our needs.

News has reached the valley that a cavern has been found--
A giant pit 300 meters deep into the ground.
The route is drawn. The highway will go. The natives will be faced.
I'm thinking they'll be homeless once again if they don't integrate.

There's no place left to go.
There's no place left to go.
There's no place left to go.
There's no place left to go.


The following is an example of the cave surveying that many cavers like to do. This is a map I made of a beautiful cave near Ciudad de Valles in Mexico. First, we went into the cave to sketch the details and to record the survey points that we take with fiberglass tape, a sighting compass, and a sighting clinometer. This is one out of several pages of notes taken over a two-day period of time:

Then, at home, I drafted the map on a computer using a nice program called Xara X:

If you see a sticker on a vehicle that looks like , you have most likely found a caver, and most likely, they're one of the best people you'll meet.

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