TimB wrote:Can a guy do it without gas, though??

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD5rxVHfAlo[/youtube]

ExcitableBoy wrote:Is it just me, or does cave diving sound insanely dangerous. So many ways possible points of failure.

I saw some fatality stats on cave diving-it is extremely dangerous. Seems like it made mountaineering look sort of tame!

TimB wrote:I saw some fatality stats on cave diving-it is extremely dangerous. Seems like it made mountaineering look sort of tame!

They are each different and challenging in their own way. I watched a Nova Program on Extreme Cave diving two weeks ago and it looked fun, but also ballsy. Its on net-flex btw.

TimB wrote:

The Chief wrote:Sorry. This has it all beat.

Olympus Mons, Elevation, 68,897' from datum




Let's add a little scale to this hill....





Over and Out!

Wow. Over 68,000 ft?
Can a guy do it without gas, though??

Do we know what the elevation gain would be to this climb and IF the route was directly up one slope what the length of the trail would be?

There's a bit of a route description here http://www.summitpost.org/south-slopes/157838

well it's 340 mi across, and the crater is 50 mi wide, so it would be about 162 miles from the bottom to the crater rim. You would climb 16mi in elevation so it's about a 10% grade avg the whole way.

Furthermore, its so tall, and so wide that you wouldn’t be able to see the top of the mountain from any point on its flanks. Mars is also much smaller, so its horizon is only a few miles away.

rockthrowjoe wrote:well it's 340 mi across, and the crater is 50 mi wide, so it would be about 162 miles from the bottom to the crater rim. You would climb 16mi in elevation so it's about a 10% grade avg the whole way.

Furthermore, its so tall, and so wide that you wouldn’t be able to see the top of the mountain from any point on its flanks. Mars is also much smaller, so its horizon is only a few miles away.

And just think- someday somebody will climb that mountain...

ExcitableBoy wrote:Is it just me, or does cave diving sound insanely dangerous. So many ways possible points of failure.

I've done a fair amount of cave diving; even moved to FL for a few years so I could do it several days a week. Cave diving is in fact extremely dangerous if you don't get proper training. Some of the early cave explorers (most notably Sheck Exley) analyzed the hundreds of fatal accidents that occurred in caves from the early 50s (when scuba first became available to the public) until the late 60s, and concluded that all the accidents up to that point could be attributed to violation of a very few principles. E.g., failure to run a continuous guideline to the surface, failure to bring at least 3 lights (a rule from dry caving), exceeding the maximum safe operating depth for the gas you're using, failure to turn the dive when you've used 1/3 of your gas supply (the idea is that you then have 2/3 of your gas left, so that each member of a buddy team has enough gas at the turnaround point to get both team members back in case one member of the team has a catastrophic failure and loses all gas), etc. This analysis led to development of a formal cave training curriculum in the early 70s.

Up until the 90s at least, the two training agencies then in existence were able to claim that nobody who had taken a formal cave class, observed the safety rules derived from accident analysis, and dived within the limits of their training, had died in a cave. Unfortunately, that is no longer true, I believe due to the increased popularity of "extreme" sports in general and "technical" diving in particular. In the old days, most cave divers lived in Florida, where most of the underwater caves in the US are. Cave divers were a relatively small fraternity, most knew each other, and most were committed to the sport and dived every weekend. They kept their skills honed, shared information on best practices, did not call attention to themselves and did not try to actively recruit people to the sport, and tended to monitor (and mentor) their own community. They knew it was important to maintain good relations with the authorities, and with the landowners on whose private property most caves were found, so that they could continue to get access to the caves.

In the 90s, cave diving started to become commercialized, and many divers interested in "technical" diving started to get into cave diving as the next merit badge they could sew on their jackets. This led to development of commercial cave diving resorts in FL, Mexico, and elsewhere, the mass manufacturing and marketing of cave diving equipment (those doubles and all that gear looks really sick on a 30' deep beach dive!) and an ever increasing number of tourist cave divers, who would get their C cards and go cave diving once a year. In any technical sport, if you don't do it regularly, your skills are never honed, and in particular your emergency management skills are forgotten, and your ability to keep your head straight when things go bad is compromised. So it's not surprising that the perfect record of no fatalities for trained cave divers is no longer perfect. But it's still true that if you get training, strictly observe the well-established safety principals, and dive within your limits (taking into account the fact that your skills might be rusty if you haven't dived in a while), it's not that dangerous a sport. Sounds kinda like climbing...

JHH60 wrote:... an ever increasing number of tourist cave divers, who would get their C cards and go cave diving once a year...

That would be me!

I dunno, I've never been frightened cave diving, even when squeezing my tanks through little holes 1/2-mile back in a cave...

On the other hand, climbed had me crapping in my pants regularly.

As far as the "Final Frontier" is concerned, for your average Joe I think cave diving is it. I can't get to Mars, or the bottom of the Marianas Trench... but for an investment of a few thousand dollars I have been able to get back into places like the Blue Abyss, Eagle's Nest, and other famous cave dives.

I vote Siberia

Sierra Ledge Rat wrote:

JHH60 wrote:... an ever increasing number of tourist cave divers, who would get their C cards and go cave diving once a year...

That would be me!

I dunno, I've never been frightened cave diving, even when squeezing my tanks through little holes 1/2-mile back in a cave...

On the other hand, climbed had me crapping in my pants regularly.

As far as the "Final Frontier" is concerned, for your average Joe I think cave diving is it. I can't get to Mars, or the bottom of the Marianas Trench... but for an investment of a few thousand dollars I have been able to get back into places like the Blue Abyss, Eagle's Nest, and other famous cave dives.

Hey, I'm a tourist cave diver myself these days. Not too much local cave diving here in NoCal, though I do get in the water most weekends, and do at least a few cave dives a year. I've been pretty scared at least a couple of times in underwater cave (I'd be happy to share the stories offline). I do agree with you that caving in general and cave diving in particular provides an opportunity for an average person who's willing to invest time, effort, and money to see parts of the planet that no other human has laid eyes on before.

JHH60 wrote:...I've been pretty scared at least a couple of times in underwater cave (I'd be happy to share the stories offline)...

No, please share online.

Sierra Ledge Rat wrote:

JHH60 wrote:...I've been pretty scared at least a couple of times in underwater cave (I'd be happy to share the stories offline)...

No, please share online.

I don't want to undermine my assertion that cave diving is basically a safe sport if you follow the rules.

Two specific instances that come to mind were when I had been fairly deep, and was in exploratory sections of the caves. I.e., the line was thin white line, not the relatively thick kermantle laid and prepared so as to be easy for inexperienced divers to follow, had Ts in the line, was not always in good shape, didn't have line arrows pointing the way out, etc. In one dive my buddy and I went to the end of the exploratory line in the "New Deep Section" of Little River. The passage was a low, silty major restriction area (single file, "tank bangin', belly draggin'" as one friend used to say) about 2500' in at 130' depth and the line was laid on the ceiling. When we hit the end of the line, and discovered there was only a few feet of tunnel left, we turned around and exited by touch (with hand on line), since we couldn't help stirring up silt on the way in and visibility was close to zero. After a few minutes of groveling our way out, I discovered by feel that there was an unmarked T in the line which we hadn't seen on the way in (and which we hadn't marked because we hadn't seen it). I assume we didn't see it because the line was overhead, vis was low, and we were probably a bit narced at 130'. I guessed which way to go, kept going, and found another unmarked T that we hadn't seen or marked. I guessed again, and then hit a third unseen, unmarked T. I guessed a third time, but after several minutes of following that, the line ended. At this point I was still at 130', past thirds (the safe turnaround point) on gas, still single file and in a low viz, hand-on-line situation. It took me twenty minutes of trying various passages and branches on the lines before I finally was sure I had found the way out. Twenty minutes is a very long time at 130' (you are using gas five times faster at that depth than at the surface) especially if you are trying to stay calm, keep your breathing under control, and not listen to the little voice in your head that is telling you that you are lost in an underwater cave and you will soon need to pull out your Wetnotes and start writing the farewell message to your family.

The other dive was about a year later when the same buddy and I decided to dive Cheryl Sink in the Tallahasee area, and use scooters to head upstream towards Sullivan sink, seeing how far we could go with backgas, and four stage/deco tanks. The full dive from Cheryl to Sullivan was a record for an underwater traverse only a few years earlier, and though we didn't expect to make it all the way on our first try, it was the biggest dive either of us had done to date. The depth in that section was between 230'-240', so we planned to use 17/35 trimix. At the last minute, the leader of an exploration project on which my buddy and worked heard about our plans, and advised us to bring an extra stage of bottom mix, since another diver he knew had gotten entangled in a restricted area of the tunnel, panicked, and ran out of gas. In those days helium analyzers weren't widely available, and as I was away from home had to borrow a stage from another diver. While I checked the O2 I think he shorted me on the He because I was buzzed on the way into the cave, until I switched to backgas. In addition to being deep, the Sullivan system has howling current ("flow") and very dark walls that absorb light and make it difficult to see very far ahead even if the water is clear. On scooters of course, everything goes fast, and you have to navigate very carefully to avoid losing the line. The dive went reasonably well on the way in, but on the way out, when it was my turn to lead, I came to an area where the line I was following crossed another line that I hadn't noticed on the way in. I assume I didn't see it on the way in because I was following vs. leading, because I was on a stage that may have been more narcotic than I had planned, and because we were scootering fairly quickly in a cave. I stopped, looked around, and realized that there were several other lines criss-crossing the area and heading off into unseen directions, most likely placed by divers on air who really narced. Although it was for less a minute, I lost confidence that the line I was following was the correct way out of the system, and was briefly frozen by the thought that I might be lost at 230'+ several thousand feet from air. Given our experience in Little River the previous year, I had been making it a point to be extremely careful about navigation and line management, and so was temporarily un-nerved by the possibility that I could have done everything right (so I thought) and still gotten confused. Suffice it to say that I recovered my composure, and the line we chose did in fact lead us out of the system, but the brief feeling that I might be lost again, this time in a much more serious cave, scared me pretty badly.

Came across this while researching a new page, first crossing of the Cordillera Darwin on Tierra del Fuego during a month long expedition in 2011:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... climb.html