I've been mourning all day.
But Georgia was aweesome. We drove all through the night Saturday and arrived around 10 am Sunday morning to set up camp on Pigeon Mountain. Surprisingly lots of campers there..mostly college students on spring break though, so maybe not so surprisingly. Anyway, there were 9 of us from every class (which I thought pretty cool), and nights around the campfire singing along with the mandolin, harmonica, and guitar, looking our absolute worst, made us a pretty tight group. There were some definite characters on the trip I'm not sure I ever would have hung out with otherwise. It was great. Lots of good memories. Our daytime activities were rock climbing, hiking, and spelunking. Three people in our group are big rock climbers so they did that almost everyday we were there. I think all of us gave it a shot, too. I gave it a bit of a lame attempt, I think because I didn't want to spend my limited time there learning something I won't do for maybe another year or so. That said, I went off exploring on my own, maneuvering over fields of rock and taking every couple of minutes to stretch out on one and doze off in the sun. I even found a flat-ish one to do some yoga on. Very serene. Spelunking was my favorite, though. I had no clue that was the official name, I would've called it 'weaseling your way around a cave.' Which is exactly what it is.
Six of us set off one day to find the cave we had been hearing about. The sign we came up to had us fill out a card with the time we went in and how many were in our group. Just in case we didn't happen to come back out. Looking through the pamphlets, I realized our ill-equipped-ness: no helmet, no knee pads, no first aid kid, no rope. What were we getting ourselves into? After dropping our card into the wooden box with little confidence it would be our saving grace were we to get lost in the abyss, we followed the trail. Shortly after we came up to around a 5 foot opening in the ground, kind of diagonally cut across the side of the mountain. You couldn't see at all down into it. There was no chance that was the opening, I insisted. We're not going down there. With my whining we walked a little further on the trail until the group decided that was definitely the entrance. We returned to it and sent one of our guys down it. He dropped his flashlight down into the dark. Well. I thought. What the heck. We figured out our order and entered the cave. It was very wet and muddy and you had to crouch down to make it through the first tunnel. But it immediately opened up into an incredible room with rubble everywhere. Complete with water dripping in the background. I made everyone turn off their lights for a couple seconds to put into perspective that we were in the pitch dark. It was crazzzy. We picked up a joke of a map where we filled out our card but it didn't help at all. It just added to the terror with names like "Pulverizers Squeeze" and "The Bat Room". We searched the room and dropped down into little passages to look for a continuing tunnel, but with little luck. I finally ventured upward over some boulders and found one and we were off. It was so much fun from there on. We were shimming down narrow passageways, loosing our shoes in the mud, crawling on all fours. Ahh it was so much fun. I want to look for caves closer to do a lot more spelunking in the future.
But now I'm in a different kind of cave. McCave. Which is what our library McCabe is known as. And I'm doubting this one will be much fun.
Love.
