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Hello everyone.

My name is Michael, and I live in the the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. There are surprisingly few good caves in my local area, but some amazing caves are located to the north. Most of them are commercial caves, such as Luray Caverns.

It is probably fair to say say that my experience is fairly limited. Perhaps a dozen cave trips under my belt.

What I really love to do is to make films. I have made four films of trips into a local cave. Here is the latest:

[YouTube]https://youtu.be/4BhsSngOIHI[/YouTube]

Hi Michael. Welcome to Cave Chat! Glad you caught the cave bug. I think you'll be able to get lots of advice here and suggestions for gear.

Hello Michael, welcome. I don't know exactly where you are, but if Luray is north of you there's some pretty spectacular caving just to your west and southwest. I started caving when I was living in northern Virginia, then in Warrenton and in Charlottesville. While I lived east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I spent most of my time caving west of there, Highland, Bath, and Allegheny counties have oodles of caves, and if you hop over to West Virginia, there are a bunch more. In addition, there are lots of fellow cavers and caving groups in the general area.

Hi! Your video was... entertaining. You may be confronted with a long list of observations and suggestions and scoldings from the "experts", and if so, many of them will be warranted. Suffer them well. I'll give just one. That lantern is great for strolling through easy walking cave, but there are much better options for most caving situations.

As Spider said, there are a ton of caves all along the west edge of VA; in a solid path from Lee to Highland counties they are plentiful, with a few bazillion more in SSE WV. I understand the desire to cave close to home, but if you're willing to travel a little I may be able to direct you to some areas of interest. Where do you live?

Hey man!

Glad you've found a passion not only to cave, but to film yourself caving! I film all my caving trips, except the one that I forgot my SD memory card for...

Any who capturing what your seeing is an awesome experience and you get to share it with others like you're doing now.

I will say though, you should probably wear a helmet.

I have this one piece of footage that I'm filming whats going on in front of me and if you listen to the noise, you hear this THUD, slip, and slide. One of my best friends who was following right behind me, stood up, thought he had plenty of head room, but ended up putting a crack in his helmet with the sheer force of standing up. He hit the ceiling with such force that he also kind of slipped and graciously fell to the ground.

If he didn't have his helmet on that day, without a doubt he wold have been in some serious trouble. Cracked skull, concussion, bleeding... God knows what.

Cave safely so you can make more videos brother!

I also cave in Virginia, and trust me, there's over 2,300 hundred caves in VA, and out of that 2,300 more than 250 are considered Big caves. Bath County is a honey hole for them.

Best of luck man!