Pine Hill Cave, KY

Oh My God!!! Caving is awesome, great, terrific, spectacular, fantastic… all together and more. It is so amazing!! Maybe is the fact that in my 25 years I had never done it before, but I am still amazed of the beauty inside the Earth. I am still trying to find the words to tell you how stunning this cave is, but I can’t find them.

Everything started last Sunday at 7am, there we were, ten people still asleep but ready to face the darkness. After the required introduction to each other, checking batteries and interchanging cell phone number we headed to Kentucky (apparently the best part of it is underneath ;-) ). It took us two hours to get there, and the rain didn’t scare us because we knew we will get wet anyway since we were visiting a wet cave.

Once we got there the cave was just a couple of meters from the road, so faster than I had expected we were in the cave and just after a couple steps we were in completely isolation of sun light, although we didn’t hear the water yet. Soon we couldn’t walk any more, and we had to belly crawl to get to the real start of the adventure. A gigantic room opened in front us after the extremely tight path; this phenomenon happened all the time. I barely crossed these birth canals to get to enormous rooms where we could have held a party, some how that was all I could imagine: a secret party of some sort of sacred community underneath the world (I have no idea why those thoughts came to my mind). During the birth canals my mind went to the dessert in the frontier between Mexico and US. I hope the tunnels the immigrants dare to cross are not as stretched as these one. Furthermore, some memories came to me while belly crawling. The Grupo Andino de Rescate’s confined space workshop. This is a workshop I did a couple of years ago where we had to pretend being in a collapse building looking for survivors in very tight spaces, it was pretty much the same, but this time I felt free of fear because I knew I wouldn’t see any bloody corpse, and I didn’t have to bear electrical harm, and I don’t even want to talk about the tear gas. This time I was just peacefully belly crawling anxious to see how big the new room was.

The water was cold but never too deep. Fortunately it was just in the very open path, this is, when we were able to walk it was in the cold water, the other option was belly crawl in a kind of dry path. It was so much fun!!

We spent five hours in the cave and we didn’t see most of it. However we didn’t miss the water fall, can you believe that? A waterfall deep in a cave. It wasn’t really big, but it was a waterfall after all. We climb it up and kept finding beautiful warterart on the walls and roof, spiders, bats (of course I thought of you Miss Bennett), and more water and more birth canals and more gigantic dark rooms. And at the end guess what? We did everything again in the way back to surface, I can’t stop saying it: it was so cool.

I have to mention that I did this trip with the UCMC University of Cincinnati Mountaineering Club, which I joined about a month ago. So far we’ve done rafting and caving and there’s more coming. I can’t wait.

Pics coming soon.