Posted on 09/23/2017 2:31:18 PM PDT by red flanker
A 19-year-old man who spent 60 hours locked alone inside a gated southern Indiana cave says he feels lucky to be alive. Indiana University freshman Lukas Cavar was on a spelunking trip to Sullivan Cave when he became separated Sunday afternoon from 12 other members of the university's Caving Club. Cavar is an enthusiast of spelunking, the exploration of caves as a hobby. When he eventually reached the cave entrance, Cavar found club members had padlocked its gate, unaware that he remained inside.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Complacency. Always count before and after, each participant needs a battle buddy. The group leader should be fired.
Assumption is that is didn't work or no signal. Don't know.
The man nearly DIED because he couldn’t play Bejeweled!
Uhm, no. The last line has to rhyme with the first line, not the third line.
I’ve got to see the eye doctor. At first I thought he had been raped in a cave for 60 hours, oh my.
A caver who hailed from Terre Haute,
Fell in love with a she-mountain goat.
..The daughter he sired
..Was greatly admired
For her beautiful angora coat.
No way would his cell phone work. Went to I.U. Had friends that did the cave thing, and your under several feet of rock.
My mom lives in the N.C. mountains and has no cell phone service and I think most of Nevada doesn’t! (LOL! but that was awhile ago.)
Read that he survived by licking water off the cave walls and didn’t see a doc. Lordy. From what I’ve heard from the spelunkers, I knew is the walls are covered with bat guano.
If that was my kid he would be medically evaluated immediately and placed on an anti-fungal for
Histoplasmosis.
At least one of the parents is a prof at I.U. I guess stupidity rules at college campuses.
Been there twice. Once as a Boy Scout (way, way pre homo friendly days). Again with college buddies.
Also did Wayne's cave in Southern IN, which has a 150 ft crawl, called the torpedo tube, to get from the entrance to where the cave opens to huge rooms! Once in the torpedo section, there's no place to turn around. You either crawl forward or if claustrophobia gets you, ya crawl backwards to get back to the entrance!!! Beautiful cave when it opens up.
Another cave I explored, (not sure bout the name) Spencer's cave not far from Sullivan. Anyway, it's killed several people.
There's a rule: don't go into a limestone cave when it's raining outside!!! Almost found this out the hard way, exploring Spencer's.
It wasn't really raining, more like a mist/drizzle.......went in, worked down to a lower level, saw a 10 inch wide stream flowing along the passageway but paid no mind, kept walking till we heard what sounded like a waterfall.
Decided to backtrack to the entrance....meet a guy with wife & kids coming along the passageway.
Said Hi & told them what was ahead, found the place where we climb up to a higher level, at the higher level we could see the entrance AND a heavy rain coming down outside.
Decided to wait a while, for the rain to stop........ about 10 min later, suddenly there was a commotion at the fissure where we had climbed up...... we could hear the family we had seen earlier, frantically scrambling up out of the hole in the cave.
What shocked us was they were ALL WET.......the mom & dad were wet from waist down......the kids were wet too but not as much, cause mom & dad had been carrying them through the rising water. My buddies and I suddenly realized what we heard that sounded like a waterfall was surface rain water coming in to fill the cave. The cave had to fill some nearby basin before it would fill the passageway we had explored and the family must have raced just ahead of the flood before the passageway completely filled!!!!
Scarier still, a year or so later, someone my sister-in-law knew, was in the same cave (again during a rain) and drowned with a couple of others.
Sounds like Mr. Cavar almost became a Mr. Cadaver.
Maybe they thought ManBearPig got him, and were waiting for Algor to show up?
I went to IU in the late 70s. My friends and I went to just about all of the caves of the Garrison Chapel Valley: Wayne’s Lost, Grotto, Coons, Buckner’s, Ellers... Up until a few years ago I still had the book of cave maps. I hear most of them are now closed to the public. We spent about ten hours in Wayne’s and that wasn’t half of what you could explore.
No way we would ever have left someone behind.
I was surprised by Sullivan's cave having a gate. Although in this day & age I shouldn't be. Last time I was there, no gates.
I don't remember how long we were in Waynes cave but I think we were all dreading the torpedo tube return. So, we delayed the trip out.
Do you know the name of that cave of that I spoke of in my post, where kids have drown? In I might have misremembered it as Spencer's cave.
It was in 1976-1978 time frame when those kids I spoke of died.
The cave may have been Salamander. Usually it’s a very non-challenging “beginner’s” cave. However, the entrance has a low ceiling and a stream that runs out of it. If there is a heavy rain and it floods, the stream will rise and block the entrance, although the main part of the cave will still be above the water. I vaguely recall the incident you’re talking about, which happened about one or two years before we started caving. The kids went into the cave, the stream flooded, and then they panicked and drowned trying to get out. People still talked about it when we were caving.
While we were at IU, we went to Eller’s Cave two or three times. Among other things, Eller’s featured a “straddle passage;” a narrow stream cut, where you could straddle the cut to get back to the Gypsum Room. There was a waterfall and a bunch of pink and rose colored gypsum crystals on the wall and ceiling. But doing the straddle it was about 25 feet up and 50 feet down. About a week before one of our visits, somebody slipped in the straddle passage and broke their back falling to the stream level below. They dynamited the entrance about a month later.
My friends marveled at how I could quickly wiggle through the tightest passages without any fear or hesitation. Part of it was I took up a lot less space back then. The other part is that when I was a kid, I used to crawl through the storm drains in the neighborhood. It was great when we were playing army or capture the flag. Caves didn’t bother me at all. LOL.
cool story bro.
Thanks for the memory jog......that's the right name.
As I've said before.......natcho bro......hell you're not even human!!!
not "natcho"
"nacho."
half-wit.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.