Hello,
I’m in the Quad Cities, Illinois / Iowa area, near the Mississippi River. I just joined the NSS, but I haven’t got my membership info yet, so I haven’t really looked into finding any local grottos so far.
As for caving experience, not so much. I’ve been through Maquoketa Caves (Iowa) a few times and really enjoyed the place. I hear there are some more adventurous caves in the park, and I’d like to check them out in the near future. Also went to Spook Cave (McGregor, Iowa). That whole tour takes place on a boat, as you check out an underground river.
Illinois Caverns sounds fantastic, but you need four people, and I’m not sure if I can come up with three other friends who think that crawling around underground would be fun. :) We’ll see.
Anyway, I have two books on order (Iowa Underground and Wisconsin Underground) and some basic equipment headed my way. I also just caught a Naj Tunich documentary called "Journey to the Center of the World" on DVR, and have seen it three times now.
What got me into this? There’s the odd-but-true answer, and the other answer.
The odd answer is The Descent. I saw that movie in the theater and it hit me pretty hard. It’s a brutal, creepy horror movie that had me on edge. But when I bought the DVD, I noticed that I was more intrigued with the parts of the movie that take place before the creepy stuff starts to happen. The look of the cave, from the huge chambers to the tight squeezes, and the exploration aspects were really something. Then I checked out The Cave, which wasn’t as good of a movie, but it still had some great underground scenery. But the special features on The Cave got me. It’s all about cave diving, and the folks from Karst Productions show off some incredible images. And some sobering ones, like the grim reaper sign at the entrance to an underwater cave.
The other answer is that I’ve been into astronomy for many years. Could there be a more opposite pastime? One's up and one's down, but that hobby also has the exploration aspects, and the “seeing things most people never see” vibe that I get from reading up on caving. To know that there’s so much unknown territory here on our own planet, really makes me wonder what could be up there- Valles Marineris on Mars is much bigger than the Grand Canyon, so how big are the caves on Mars?! Also, some of the most alien images I've seen have been from caves here on Earth- draperies, canopies, bottlebrushes, flowstone- I saw some really wild stuff on the Virtual Cave website.
So that's my story.