Caving

There are many things that cavers must remain mindful of on forays underground, especially when taking new cavers.  With newbies, the emphasis often rests on safety, but protecting the cave environment should be equally stressed.  As a caver, your motto should be:  ”Take Nothing but Pictures, Leave Nothing but Footprints, and Kill Nothing but Time.”  These ethics clearly ask that you do not disturb anything you find.  You should strive to minimize your impact whenever underground. Often caves have trails marked off with flagging tape.  Besides showing the safest way, this flagging helps protect the cave environment. The flagging marks a trail that every caver should stick to. By containing traffic to small channels there is less disruption of fragile formations and organisms in heavily visited caves.In the United States, a cave’s geological and biological features are protected by federal laws, and here in Colorado, as in most states, state laws also protect them.  Any caver venturing underground should be aware of this, as this is more than just an ethical choice.  Conservation is the law.  Everything you bring into the cave must also be brought out by you, including any human waste, which must be properly contained then brought out of the cave for disposal.  So don’t add anything to the environment, and don’t take anything away from it. Obviously, you are not going to be leaving your garbage down there, but what about your crumbs from your snack break? I typical powerbar contains much more energy than what the organisms adapted to living underground are accustomed to. Leaving even trace amounts of our foods, as in crumbs, we are often upsetting carefully balanced interactions between organisms in this typically starved environment. Many cavers I know have started eating their lunches over their packs, to catch the crumbs.Can our visits be traceless? Even in the best attempts, probably not. But we should strive to have as little an impact on these fragile environments as possible and should always keep it’s protection in mind while caving.

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