I'm Donovan and I joined the Huntsville grotto in August 08'. I have truly been caving only once so far, Mammoth wild cave tour (Carlsbad caverns doesn't seem to count to me although it was fun to experience). I hope to begin caving regularly with the Huntsville grotto, perhaps the Sept. horizontal trip. I'd also like to take vertical training to see if I'm cut out for it. There are two work buddies of mine who are also interested, but they have not officially joined yet.
Mammoth cave was a blast! I invited two of my brothers down to Kentucky from Michigan and rendezvoued with them at the park along with those two from work, so we had a party of five(we arrived from the Huntsville area). We set up our tents at the campground in the middle of the night and set out the next morning for the self guided tour and the two main tourist tours back to back. That pretty much took up all of Saturday.
That evening we went to the amphitheater and listened to ranger Kevin give his "Let's go caving" campfire session. He is really a natural actor and puts on quite an entertaining show. That was the first time I got to see how a carbide lamp works and an explanation of the mechanism. He also told the story of Floyd Collins and his unfortunate mishap.
Bright and early the next morning we made it (barely) in time for the wild cave tour. We started off the tour with some crawls and belly crawls followed by a pretty tight squeeze through the bear hole. Everybody made it through with some moral support from the rest of the team (13 cavers plus two guides). We tromped through some really nice canyons followed by some crawls of perhaps 150-200 feet.
When we finally got to lunch in the snowball room, they told us that we were a pretty capable group and listened well to commands, so they would take us to some areas in the cave where the tour doesn't normally go. The only catch was that we would have to get wet up to our knees walking in flooded passages. Nobody had a problem with it, so off we went.
The second half of the trip was more climbing than crawling. We learned some nice ascension chimneying techniques in the "man hole" and descension techniques in another area. My waterproof hiking boots didn't do me much good in the knee deep water, but it was worth it to see some often unvisited passages.
Overall it was a great trip for learning some horizontal caving basics and seeing a truly impressive cave to get us all hooked. I really enjoyed some of the gypsum flowers and "cotton" formations.
After the trip we bought a Kaempfer map (circa 1908) and had our route outlined and signed by the guides.
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