Quote:
Originally Posted by PJSinger
Yikes!  I've never been that adventurous!
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I've always enjoyed caverns but this particular adventure happened years ago while doing school work and camping in SE New Mexico. A friend and I were driving back to camp on a dirt road back from having picked up supplies in Carlsbad when we saw an old collapse feature several hundred feet off the road out in a field. It was simply an area where the surface had subsided some 10 or 15 feet and exposed some sheered cave limestone. While exploring the area above the collapsed area, I found what appeared to be, a new sink hole that was about four or five feet in diameter. The sink hole went straight down for about 15 feet. All I had was a small manila rope from camp so I tied to a nearby mesquite tree and lowered myself into the hole. At the bottom of the hole, the tunnel took a right-hand turn running laterally a few yards, then it dropped straight down again into darkness. I took a fist-sized caliche rock that I had knocked down into the hole on my descent and tossed it into the lateral tunnel and over the ledge. I never heard it hit bottom! I then lost my nerve imagining myself sitting on a thin ledge some hundreds of feet above a huge underground room supported only by a thin manila rope. I quickly got the heck out of there.
Would I do it again? Probably so back then. Nowadays that rope, the tree or my arms wouldn't support me, or my lack of courage.
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