Everyone needs a little adventure in their lives, something to serve as a relief from the monotony of chasing a paycheck. For most people, this can be experienced only vicariously, for example watching action movies on television or rooting for your team at a football game. Others can have a more active experience, through hunting, hiking or camping, whitewater canoeing, rock-climbing or participating in marathons or team sports, to name a few such opportunities. Real adventures of discovery, however, are limited to only a select few persons.

Borrowing a phrase from Star Trek, there still remain a number of “final frontiers” of human endeavor. The limitless depths of space, of course. Snow-covered mountain peaks. Verdant tropical jungles. The unrelenting darkness of the deep ocean abyss. The polar icecaps. All of these still remain largely unexplored and unknown except in the broadest sense, and are thus potential settings for amazing adventures. Exploration is taking place, to be sure, but who, exactly, is allowed the opportunity to investigate these exotic geographies? Few persons, indeed, can become astronauts with the chance to set foot on an extraterrestrial landscape. Exploration of the ocean depths requires equipment and expertise far beyond the reach of any but a few sponsored scientists from the US Navy or from oceanographic institutions. Mountaineering, jungle and polar expeditions are all very expensive and also require sponsors, such as the National Geographic Society. In practical terms, then, only a handful of elite persons can experience true adventures of discovery.

There is a frontier that remains accessible to the ordinary person. Exploration of the underground wilderness of caves generally requires only a minimal investment in equipment and the application of plain common sense along with informal training in safety and methods. The equipment is widely available, and the training can be acquired through association with one of the many regional chapters, known as “grottos,” of the National Speleological Society (NSS). There are thousands of caves in the United States, thousands in Kentucky alone, and sometimes it is possible to walk in places where no human foot has ever trod. I have experienced this personally several times, and believe me, it is a natural high like no other. I recall sitting on a large boulder with a lady friend in a cave in southeastern Kentucky, surrounded by the darkness of a huge chamber that our lights could scarcely penetrate. We had just dug our way into this cave, enlarging a tiny surface opening distinguished by the cold air pouring out from out, digging out and worming our way through a long tight crawl until our efforts paid off and we broke out into a large passage. Before us, no human footprints had ever marked the floor, no voices had ever been heard echoing through the dark.

Caving changed my life, literally transforming my personality. My mother brought me to Lexington, Kentucky, to live in early 1967, when I was fourteen years old. In that same year I became interested in cave exploration when we visited some family friends in Louisville, where I made a new friend of my own, their son Angelo George. Angelo is nine years older than me and, at the time of my visit, was a college student and a cave explorer with the Louisville Grotto. Despite the age difference, we quickly became friends and his accounts of cave exploration fascinated me. Back in Lexington, I became a member of Lexington’s Blue Grass Grotto (BGG) and joined the NSS.

At that time, the BGG was a student grotto associated with the University of Kentucky, and meetings were held once a month on campus in the biology building. Nearly all of the grotto member were either undergraduate or graduate students; I was fourteen years old and in junior high (middle) school and by far the youngest in the group. I soon found that age did not matter. Attending meetings, I was a young teen surrounded by adults.  This could have been an intimidating experience, if they had treated me as an adolescent intruder scarcely worthy of their attention.  Instead, I found that my interest in caves provided immediate entrance into the group as one among equals.  My ideas, my interests, my questions and curiosity were taken as natural and responded to seriously without condescension.  To me this was an amazing and gratifying phenomenon, since I had fully expected to be scorned because of my age.  Cavers were something altogether new in my experience, willing to accept anyone, no matter how eccentric or socially handicapped, who shared a passion for the underground. 

I had, indeed, found my passion in life, and completely immersed myself in the adventure and culture of cavers.  I had never been interested in team sports, although willing enough to join a pickup game of football or basketball in my neighborhood.  Cave exploration was a team sport in a sense, because you often, literally, placed your life in the hands of other cavers.  Those who lack experience and common sense can endanger others underground, and those with whom we go caving we trust not to abandon us if trouble or tragedy should occur.  At the same time, cave exploration is a very individual, very personal endeavor, in which you test your endurance and skills in a harsh and unforgiving environment.

Cave exploration instilled in me a self-assurance that had been lacking. As an eighth-grader I was tall and thin, shooting upward in height without gaining a great deal of weight to go with it.  I would, in fact, never exceed 130 pounds weight until I reached my mid-twenties. Moving to Kentucky, in less than a year I changed schools three times, and being somewhat introverted, had as yet made few new friends.  Anxiety about social acceptance by one’s peers is invariably a source of considerable teen-age angst.  Worse, since I wore thick eyeglasses, was rather shy and bookish, in school I appeared to be the natural prey of school bullies.

From a raw neophyte caver at age fourteen, I was leading trips before I was sixteen, and my growing confidence was reflected in my school life. I was being treated as an equal by a group of adults for whom I had great respect and who considered me to be a competent caver. I excelled in a sport which required skill, coordination, and nerve and was able to go places where few others could and see marvelous things experienced by no one else at my school. At fifteen, I took a job at a local nursery, working Saturdays during the school year and full-time in summer. This job entailed considerable heavy lifting, and over a four-year period I spent many hours in the fields on the business end of a hoe, chopping weeds from around the plants. I grew taller, and although still rail-thin, my body mass was all muscle.  Still shy, but more confident and far less concerned with the youth culture and social anxiety that is the invariable focus of the teen-ager.  My true peer group was not the young people with whom I attended classes, but the cavers with whom I shared adventures underground.  While I still encountered unpleasant people in high school, I would not allow myself to be bullied.

Becoming involved in cave exploration truly was a life-altering event. For more than fifty years, the exploration and study of caves has been the focus of my life. I have seen some truly amazing things in those hidden depths. It has been the determining factor in my intellectual development, in my choice of friends, and on my career path. In my early thirties, I was employed by the Groundwater Branch in the Kentucky Division of Water for eleven years as an environmental technologist, and from there went to Morehead State University for twenty-three years. I taught a course on caves at MSU and took my students on numerous field trips to regional caves. I like to think that I inspired a few of my students with the same passion for underground adventures that shaped my own life.