Hello, I am a new member, and I am a non-caver. :) That is, I've been through a lot of show caves in the western USA and a few unimproved lava tubes and rockfall caves. I'm interested in geology and especially in cave formations, but I am also moderately claustrophobic and don't like the dark. I don't even get into the crawl space under my house. So though I've been in places where I needed a helmet and headlamp and good boots, no belly crawls through the mud for me and no long expeditions. My husband loves that kind of thing, however -- I just let him take our skinny 17-year-old son along on the tight squeezes while I stay behind with our 12-year-old, and everyone has a good time.
I decided to sign up since I have been lurking for months anyway. Since my family had just visited Timpanogos Cave for the first time only a short while before the tragedy at the Nutty Putty cave in the same area, I was very upset by the news reports about the death of John Jones. Although I didn't know anyone who was involved and of course the family and the rescuers went through unimaginably worse experiences than I ever could have, I was having a hard time personally with claustrophobic nightmares. I knew that getting more specific information about the accident would help. Obviously that had to come from real cavers and from people who knew the territory rather than from news reports or morbid speculations, so I ended up here. It was hard for me to read the details, but the facts were what I needed to work through my emotional response to the tragedy. I'd like to thank those who took the effort to keep others informed and to clear up the many misconceptions that circulated in the mainstream media.
I'm very glad that such a wonderful resource is freely available online and is not locked off from the general public. Thank you to everyone who maintains the forum and the site. Since I originally came here I've enjoyed reading all sorts of posts and articles about caving trips and equipment. I have learned a lot about the current issues in caving, even though I doubt I will ever go on a serious caving expedition myself. I'm a fiction writer, and I am now working on a story that involves amateur caving. So I will probably be asking a few technical questions of the experts here -- I can't imagine a better place to get good answers.
-Laura Shelley