The Rapture?
- Thread starter Joe Duxbury
- Start date
Joe Duxbury
Member
maxf said:
But the single event Tabor uses as an example of the existence of this phenomenon didn't happen to someone who had been 'underground for several days'. I think he's just churning out psycho-babble.
David Rose
Active member
I understand from someone who knows him that Tabor was encouraged to "sex up" his text by his publishers to make caving seem more extreme, and cavers even tougher than we actually are (hard though it is to imagine this could be possible). In any event, the passage about The Rapture and its context deserve reading in full. Apparently you get this nasty condition worst in what the author calls "supercaves". These passages are possibly the most risible things ever written about underground exploration. Unfortunately, there are other parts of this book that are just as bad.
Two years ago I went on an expedition to Huautla led by the indomitable Bill Steele, a really great guy. It was a hugely enjoyable - and very successful - experience. But what was weird was that some of the younger members of the team had read this book and believed this rapture thing might be real, and before big trips discussed whether they might be afflicted by it with some anxiety.
Anyway, here is what to expect in supercaves, which
"present more hazards than any other extreme exploration environment. Just descending into and climbing out of them is exorbitantly dangerous. Recovering a body, dead or alive, from deep within any cave is even worse, increasing that danger by an order of magnitude."
What might those perils be? According to Mr Tabor, they include:
"drowning, fatal falls, premature burial, asphyxiation, hypothermia, hurricane-force winds, electrocution, earthquake-induced collapses, poison gases and walls dripping sulfuric or hydrochloric acid. There are also rabid bats, snakes, troglodytic scorpions and spiders, radon and microbes that cause horrific diseases like histoplasmosis and leishmaniasis. Kitum Cave in Uganda is believed to be the birthplace of that ultragerm the Ebola virus. Caving hazards related to equipment and techniques include strangulation by one?s own vertical gear (primary and secondary ropes, rappel rack and ascender connections, et cetera), rope failure, running out of light, rappelling off the end of a rope, ascenders failing on muddy rope, foot-hang (fully as unpleasant as it sounds) and scores more that, if less common, are no less unpleasant. One final hazard, so obvious that it?s easy to forget, deserves mention: getting lost."
Foot hang, eh? Very nasty. Interesting that when Mark Sims and Sandy Wright made a breakthrough in the cave known as 27/9 in the Picos last year to find and descend a big pitch, they called it Foot Hang. I wonder why?
No wonder supercavers risk going bonkers - and are hence prone to the rapture:
"Supercaves create inner dangers as well, warping the mind with claustrophobia, anxiety, insomnia, hallucinations, personality disorders. There is also a particularly insidious derangement unique to caves called The Rapture, which is like a panic attack on meth. It can strike anywhere in a cave, at any time, but usually assaults a caver deep underground. And, of course, there is one more that, like getting lost, tends to be overlooked because it?s omnipresent: absolute, eternal darkness. Darkness so dark, without a single photon of light, that it is the luminal equivalent of absolute zero.?
Not a single photon of light. Strewth, we are brave. Or suffering from "personality disorders".
Below you can see Mark about to descend Foot Hang, fighting off The Rapture with every ounce of his strength.
Two years ago I went on an expedition to Huautla led by the indomitable Bill Steele, a really great guy. It was a hugely enjoyable - and very successful - experience. But what was weird was that some of the younger members of the team had read this book and believed this rapture thing might be real, and before big trips discussed whether they might be afflicted by it with some anxiety.
Anyway, here is what to expect in supercaves, which
"present more hazards than any other extreme exploration environment. Just descending into and climbing out of them is exorbitantly dangerous. Recovering a body, dead or alive, from deep within any cave is even worse, increasing that danger by an order of magnitude."
What might those perils be? According to Mr Tabor, they include:
"drowning, fatal falls, premature burial, asphyxiation, hypothermia, hurricane-force winds, electrocution, earthquake-induced collapses, poison gases and walls dripping sulfuric or hydrochloric acid. There are also rabid bats, snakes, troglodytic scorpions and spiders, radon and microbes that cause horrific diseases like histoplasmosis and leishmaniasis. Kitum Cave in Uganda is believed to be the birthplace of that ultragerm the Ebola virus. Caving hazards related to equipment and techniques include strangulation by one?s own vertical gear (primary and secondary ropes, rappel rack and ascender connections, et cetera), rope failure, running out of light, rappelling off the end of a rope, ascenders failing on muddy rope, foot-hang (fully as unpleasant as it sounds) and scores more that, if less common, are no less unpleasant. One final hazard, so obvious that it?s easy to forget, deserves mention: getting lost."
Foot hang, eh? Very nasty. Interesting that when Mark Sims and Sandy Wright made a breakthrough in the cave known as 27/9 in the Picos last year to find and descend a big pitch, they called it Foot Hang. I wonder why?
No wonder supercavers risk going bonkers - and are hence prone to the rapture:
"Supercaves create inner dangers as well, warping the mind with claustrophobia, anxiety, insomnia, hallucinations, personality disorders. There is also a particularly insidious derangement unique to caves called The Rapture, which is like a panic attack on meth. It can strike anywhere in a cave, at any time, but usually assaults a caver deep underground. And, of course, there is one more that, like getting lost, tends to be overlooked because it?s omnipresent: absolute, eternal darkness. Darkness so dark, without a single photon of light, that it is the luminal equivalent of absolute zero.?
Not a single photon of light. Strewth, we are brave. Or suffering from "personality disorders".
Below you can see Mark about to descend Foot Hang, fighting off The Rapture with every ounce of his strength.
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mrodoc
Well-known member
The one time this happened to me I was in Morocco in a tube at the bottom of a stream sink surrounded by rotting vegetation. My breathing rate shot up and I scrambled out in a blue funk. The thing that nearly did for me that I was in such a tizz that I skidded on a slippery boulder nearly falling backwards off it which would have unpleasant to say the least.Joe Duxbury said:
Mike Hopley
New member
David Rose said:
That might actually be a real thing. Some American ropewalker systems suspend the caver upside-down from their feet, if the chest-roller fails. Obviously that's due to bad practice, as they should be using a third safety jammer -- but it's something their books warn about.
I can clearly see the abject terror and sense of impending doom in his eyes.
I think I've mentioned this elsewhere on this forum, but I can't find it, so I'll post it again:
In an old edition of American Caving Accidents there is a first-person account by a guy who had a bizarre accident when on a solo trip.
It seems that he was prusiking up a ~70-feet entrance pitch using the Texas Prusik, which is a little bit like the Frog System but which uses a jammer to a sit-harness and another to foot-loops, which is relatively short and is installed on the rope below the harness-jammer. When he was nearly at the top of the pitch:
?My [harness] karabiner flexed and came undone; I tipped upside-down, and for a short time hung there in my foot-loops, before my feet slipped out and I fell ~65 feet to the bottom of the pitch. When I came to, I thought I?d broken my neck.?. (He hadn?t, fortunately.)
Well, there was a pile of branches and stuff at the bottom of the shaft that cushioned his fall. By the half-light filtering down the shaft (his lamp being broken) he managed to cobble together some sort of rope-climbing system and get out.
What could he deduce from this? Well, ?My karabiner had failed on two previous occasions, (my italics) but I had a sentimental attachment to it? (pity it wasn?t reciprocated) ?so I guess I?d better get a new krab. Also, had I had ?chicken loops? round my ankles, I?d have hung upside down until I could sort out the problem.?
In an old edition of American Caving Accidents there is a first-person account by a guy who had a bizarre accident when on a solo trip.
It seems that he was prusiking up a ~70-feet entrance pitch using the Texas Prusik, which is a little bit like the Frog System but which uses a jammer to a sit-harness and another to foot-loops, which is relatively short and is installed on the rope below the harness-jammer. When he was nearly at the top of the pitch:
?My [harness] karabiner flexed and came undone; I tipped upside-down, and for a short time hung there in my foot-loops, before my feet slipped out and I fell ~65 feet to the bottom of the pitch. When I came to, I thought I?d broken my neck.?. (He hadn?t, fortunately.)
Well, there was a pile of branches and stuff at the bottom of the shaft that cushioned his fall. By the half-light filtering down the shaft (his lamp being broken) he managed to cobble together some sort of rope-climbing system and get out.
What could he deduce from this? Well, ?My karabiner had failed on two previous occasions, (my italics) but I had a sentimental attachment to it? (pity it wasn?t reciprocated) ?so I guess I?d better get a new krab. Also, had I had ?chicken loops? round my ankles, I?d have hung upside down until I could sort out the problem.?
andybrooks
Member
I believe that the fatality in Swildons in 1959 was caused by hypothermia, aggravated by hanging upside down on a ladder on the Forty.
