[4634] in Depressing_Thoughts
frustrating cave trip
jcb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jcb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon Aug 8 16:43:38 1994
I led a Caving Club trip to Knox Cave (in Knox, NY) yesterday. The cave
has a locally famous passage called the gunbarrel, which is a passage
that is approximately 12-18" wide X 18-24" high X 50' long. It starts
lightbulb shaped (with the base at the bottom) and ends rectangular.
The first person into the gunbarrel got stuck about 1/4 of the way
through when his boot got wedged in a crack. I slithered in to free
him. It took me about 15 minutes of working on the boot to free it,
alternately wiggling and pulling very hard. Because of the shape of the
passage near where he got stuck, most of my weight was on my chest,
which was on a convex piece of rock, making it nearly impossible for me
to take anything but shallow breaths.
Since I wasn't getting nearly as much air as I needed for what I was
demanding that my muscles do, my body proceeded to get much of the
energy through anaerobic respiration. By the time I finished and backed
out of the passage, I was exhausted and very short of breath, and my
right arm was painfully sore from all the lactic acid. (For those of
you who've forgotten your biology, anaerobic respiration is 19 times
less efficient than aerobic respiration, so those 15 minutes cost me the
energy equivalent of about 4 hours of equivalent effort in a position
where I could breathe freely.)
I ended up too exhausted to go through the gunbarrel myself, (and, in
fact, had a little trouble getting out of the cave, despite the fact
that it was an easy entrance and the gunbarrel is not too far in), so I
exited the cave and waited outside for everyone else to explore the rest
of it.
It's frustrating because I know I did the right thing, but I had to miss
a lot of caving because of it.
