Exploring a cave is great, but I sure as fuck wouldn't try crawling down a tiny hole going down at a 70 degree angle. Some spelunkers are straight nuts though, like they get to the end of a cave and say "wow, the wind is whistling through here!" and try expanding small openings with a hammer and chisel or even explosives. I went caving one time in a well known but very long cave, with experienced people, and that was really interesting. When i got back I read my friend's cave incident journal, which details all the rescues and deaths that happened in the last year, and it was... interesting. Shit like "oh, jimmy got stuck, so we had to break his ribs to get him out". Great.
Jones and three others had left their party in search of “The Birth Canal”, a tight but navigable passageway with a turnaround at the end. Jones entered an unmapped passageway which he wrongly believed to be the Canal and found himself at a dead end, with nowhere to go besides a narrow vertical fissure. Believing this to be the turnaround, he entered head-first and became wedged upside-down.
We had some interesting times on the one expedition I did. It was fascinating and I would recommend trying it at least once... doesn't have to be dangerous. Even going to Carlsbad Caverns, which is a National Park and while not the real spelunking experience, pretty cool. I went to Wolf River Cave in Tennessee. Most of it was just like mountain hiking, but with a ceiling. Questionable parts included crawling in light mud on our hands and knees for 600 feet through an area where the ceiling was about 3 feet high. Also one part, you go through a 'door' and have to drop down ~5 feet onto some rocks... people told me "be sure to go left when you land!!" and wtf was to the right? This giant dark pit of rocks at least 20 feet deep. Okay... then at the very bottom, there was this area with a bunch of trickling water and awesome stalagmites where you could sit on rocks by this weird little stream and ponds. We split up and sat in different rooms... the guy from Kentucky I sat with, who I'd never met before, told me "sometimes when I'm down here... i listen to the water... and it sounds like people talking..." Uh, okay.
But anyway it was an amazing experience and profoundly strange... the 'rooms' and 'hallways' are oddly reminiscent of human construction. And if you get stuck or hurt, if you've done things properly and signed in and people know you're there, experienced cavers will come and rescue you.
“sometimes when I’m down here… i listen to the water… and it sounds like people talking…”
He probably has MES, Musical Ear Syndrome. I got it, it’s really not as scary or weird as it sounds. Basically our brains mistakenly interpret some white noises (running water is a big one) as faint music or voices. But it’s not really a hallucination, because at the same time our brain is aware it isn’t real and it’s just coming from said noise. It can actually be quite pleasant, beaches often sound like a quiet symphony. Only occasionally will I hear voices and mistake it for my girlfriend or something before realizing it.
I could see what he means, and that happens to me sometimes too. I've thought background noise is all sorts of things. it is very quiet down there (we were I think at least a mile underground, having walked roughly horizontally for 5 hours). It's still to me just a classic amusing 'oh great' thing to tell someone in that situation.
I’m slightly claustrophobic, but it has never impacted my life. Elevator? Fine. Tiny closet? Fine. But a cave where you have to crawl for more than a few seconds? I’d die right there.
I’m not the only one who thought it was fucking hilarious, right? I know it’s supposed to be body horror, and I do generally find Junji Ito’s stuff goddamn disturbing and horrifying, but this is the first one I saw and it just looked so funny to me that all his other stuff caught me completely off guard.
Yeah, like all the elements are there its just doesnt hit the horror switch for me. Mind you im the type of person to be playing a horror game and my first reaction to a monster is to call it a bitch and hit it with a shovel.
In horror games, I always try to domesticate the monster by letting it follow me around the map without catching me. Then I have a buddy.
You know what weirdly does fill me with dread though? Space games. I played around with space engine and it doesn’t matter what I’m looking at or where I am, I am just super uncomfortable and want to stop. Those’re my horror games.
Brave people push boundaries so that less brave people can read things in books.
Edit: I assume the people downvoting this obvious truth think I’m calling them cowards. I assure you I will be right there with you curled up reading books about caving. Fuck all that.
“Because it’s there,” I assume. But if you’re gonna have a potentially dangerous hobby, you should at least be sure to take the necessary precautions before risking your life.
Like having a good life insurance policy that pays out even if you die doing something stupid? And maybe having a fake tooth filled with cyanide so you can go out quickly instead of dying of exposure?
Yeah, I was really disappointed to learn it too. It was blatant – the entire script is ripped from a well-written article about the experience, verbatim except for a few words swapped around.
If he had gotten permission from the original author/site about dramatising and animating it I don’t think anyone would have had a problem. But taking someone else’s work and passing it off as your own without permission is what people are upset about.
To his credit, this was the only found bit of plagiarism on his channel. The other channels he calls out are wayyyy worse. But it’s blatant word for word plagiarism.
Not quite, Internet Historian also plagiarized parts of his Costa Concordia video. Did hbomberguy actually say that these were the only examples of plagiarism on his channel?
My god, my stomach hurts and my chest feels tight just from reading that. I went to Cave of the winds in Colorado a few years back and they had a smaller tunnel that you could crawl through to get a sense of what it was like. It was probably like 20ft long and big enough for the pretty hefty guide to get through. I got up to it and noped the fuck out.
I remember seeing a video of a dude exploring a cave and he was crawling through some narrow ass space tighter than under my bed. Why would one want to do this??? What if it was a dead end? How tf are you gonna turn around? Crawl backwards? I just can’t with any of this
How about this, there’s people that do this underwater. They take the tank off their back, push it out ahead of them. If they get stuck, they don’t have 27 hours to try and figure their shit out, they have a couple hours at best
Normal spelunking, minimal vertical work, the occasional belly crawl no smaller than a manhole. That’s actually a pretty good time. You get wet, dirty, have a few laughs with your friends, and then shake it off with some beers back at the campsite. No need to go aggressive with ridiculously tight crawls and/or 100’s of feet of vertical work, etc.
Cave diving? Let’s take an activity where it’s very easy to loose track of time, and add SCUBA which requires time management down to the minute for your health and survival. Nevermind getting lost, disoriented, or wedged underwater somewhere. I get that this is very intrepid stuff, and the very distant corners of cave systems are being explored this way. But it’s a big no for me; the risk does not justify the reward, IMO.
SCUBA is even worse because any movement kicks up sediment, so that visibility quickly turns to nil. Cave diving has a very, very high mortality rate; BASE jumping is safer.
I’ve seen such video. The dude struggled to move because he just barely fit in enough to still be able to breathe. There was water in there, and he said he has to return because it’s starting to fill with water.
Fill with water? Nope. Nope. Why would I go in such space.
I can relate. I did some cave diving in Mexico, and it was incredible. Having said that, there are some locations I would dive again, and some I definitely would not.
Those guys got blessed by the algorithm or something I recognize the channel and video. Don’t know why YouTube decided I would be interested in spelunking but their videos are pretty entertaining at least. Personally I’ll take heights over tight spaces anyday.
I’ve watched quite a few of this guy’s videos, and I’m lead to believe that lots of his “wow this is really dangerous right now” moments are acted up. Maybe he gets into sketchy situations, but whatever he shows in the videos looks more like excuses to add a click-baity title without being outright click bait.
I mean, the moment you see a passage that barely fits a child and you think to yourself “Hey, I should get in there!”, you’re just aiming to be the year’s winner of the Darwin Awards.
I love to watch caving videos: much better for someone younger and foolhardier than me to actually do the climbing and clambering with their gopros. I’ll continue to enjoy things like air, vast open spaces, and vicarious experiences.
People take a lot of safety precautions now, reasonably, but every once in a while the cavers on YT will do something just stupid and it baffles me. “The water’s ice cold and up to my nostrils, but I really want to see where this tunnel goes! Going to turn my lamp and camera off for now to save battery, see you in a few hours!”
Im a fan as well, their videos are excellent and they often do trips with other cavers, so you can find other small channels through them if people want more “cave content.”
What trips me out is towards the end of each video where they’ll be like, “Alright, Brad is heading back so I’m going to wrap up too. We’ve been in the cave for 12 hours, probably a good time to head up.” 8+ hours of squeezing through cold, dark passages sounds like actual nightmares I’ve had!
Some of the stuff describe in the spelunking journal is insane, like "okay, we'll rappel down this giant cliff, then there's a pond at the bottom, so we brought our scuba gear..." Cool to hear there's videos out there! I had never thought to look for some reason. When I went caving (around 2005), it was a 9 hour journey and my digital camera died on the 2nd photo, which sucked.
It is pretty awesome, really. Definitely adventurous. I'm sure for people brave, fit and unwise to enough to do it, that's an amazing experience. People do it under the ocean too. The problem is being hours down in a cave that can only be accessed by experts at rock climbing and scuba diving is just about the most remote location possible.
Well then you dont wanna hear bout my recurring dream about being burried alive unable to move my arm enough to protect my face from the rats gnawing at me
YouTuber HBomberguy just released a video on plagiarism. Another well known YouTube video about that caving incident was wholesale stolen from an article about it (but I don’t think it was either of your articles.) Must be the “vaguely related to caving” time of the year!
Not surprising. I've been watching various relationship and psychology videos on YouTube and ran into a few which seem really sketchy... they're very well written in English, all the imagery is people in Malaysia or something, it seems to be read by an AI, and there's no writing attribution. Kind of suspicious.
Hey, you can name and shame, it’s alright. The video was the wildly popular Man In Cave, by the wildly popular youtuber Internet Historian. He wholesale ripped off Lucas Reilly’s Mental Floss article about the incident, pretended the video was taken down because of youtube’s famously awful copyright strike system, and then re-uploaded a hastily edited version that less obviously (but still obviously) rips off Reilly’s article.
Honestly, they’re pretty neat. I’ve gone through tours of Mammoth Caves that require waivers, and they strongly recommend that you not take that tour if any part of you has a circumference of more than 42", because you won’t fit. There was a spot that was about 12" high, and 72-ish wide that you had to crawl through that took a sharp right; you had to take your helmet off to get through. But then you get out into this enormous cavern filled with rock formations that are seen by less 100 people/year.
But if I didn’t know that that crack was passable, that I’d be able to get through or get back out again? Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck no.
Maybe it’s because I live in a place with a lot of earthquakes, but I think I’m good off putting my head between rocks that could slightly shift and obliterate me.
The Appalachian foothills in Kentucky are pretty geologically dead; there aren’t any fault lines anywhere close by. It’s about as safe as any cave network can be.
I do recommend going to that are and taking some tours, especially in the middle of summer where you can see the inversion layer where the air goes from being 95F to 60F. Even the fully-accessible tours that don’t go through any tight spaces are pretty cool.
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