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Tuesday, Jan. 08, 2008

Into The Depths Of Calaveras

Three-hour tour of Moaning Cavern wondrous and weird

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VALLECITO -- Deep under the wooded hills of Calaveras County, in the belly of one of the state's largest caves, I worm my way through a rocky slot that our cavern tour guide calls the "pancake." It's a rectangular gap 3 feet wide by about

18 inches tall.

Imagine the space under a Volkswagen Beetle. To squeeze through, I lie on my back, raise my arms over my head and push through with my legs.

My headlamp shoots a beam into a darkness so heavy I can almost feel it wrap around me. The air smells of mud.

Halfway through the opening, with cold, wet rocks pressing against my rib cage, panic begins to set in.

I need air. I need space. I need light.

Panic already has claimed one member of our party, a teenage girl who scurried to the surface after briefly getting stuck in a tight squeeze called the "guillotine." I try to stay calm, telling myself that crawling through this hole is nothing compared with the 165-foot free-hanging rappel I made to get into this cavern in the first place.

In the world of spelunking, this is what passes for fun.

The 800-word liability form I signed before starting the three-hour adventure tour of Moaning Cavern should have set my spider senses tingling. I got a bad feeling when they asked me to identify next of kin.

After I filled out the form, I joined seven other visitors on a porch on the side of Moaning Cavern's main building, where we slipped into coveralls, gloves, kneepads and helmets. A bit extreme, I thought.

Then I met our guide, a 22-year-old former roofer from Modesto named Kevin Geary, who has been a cave guide for only seven months.

Our group included a family of three from Capitola, a young couple from San Jose, and a father and son from Ventura. Inside the main building, we strapped on our rappelling harnesses. To get to the main underground chamber, we dropped into a hole about 3 feet in diameter.

Looking down, I saw only a rock shelf about 5 feet below the opening.

Geary latched my harness to the rope, and I slowly dropped down. I pushed past the shelf and peered below to the 165-foot drop into the massive, eerily lighted cavity.

I'm hanging from a rope, dangling above a chamber big enough to hold the Statue of Liberty. I can't tell from this vantage point, but Moaning Cavern is a maze of narrow tunnels that sprout from this giant cavity. It was created over millions of years as acidic water eroded a monstrous slab of limestone under the green, pine-spotted hills of Calaveras County.

'Moan' lured the curious

Before we begin to climb down into this hole, Geary tells us that Moaning Cavern earned its name from the sound created when dripping water echoes off the massive stone walls. He says the noise lured dozens of prehistoric dwellers and curious American Indians into the void and to their deaths.

Now I'm among the curious cave tourists, lured into one of the state's largest publicly accessible caverns to see stalactites, stalagmites and other weird rock formations.

I suppose I could have walked to the bottom of the chamber the easy way -- on a 100-foot spiral staircase built from old battleship parts in the 1920s. But that seems too tame, too much like a Disneyland tour.

I've never had problems with tight quarters, darkness or heights, so I signed up for the three-hour adventure tour, the country's only cave excursion, or so I'm told, that begins with a free-hanging rope rappel.

What could go wrong? My heart pounds like a jackhammer and my tense hands clamp tight to my rope as I hang free from the top of this 16-story chamber. Like a chandelier in an empty concert hall, no rocks or canyon walls within grasp, it's just me, a rope and a lot of wide open space.