In looking at the disappearance of Kristopher Zitzewitz it's which one of the
things I was curious about is Big Cave, the cave that he was looking for when he
went missing and it's actually not where he was looking it's a long ways away
from here. I wanted to go ahead and take a look at it and see what its features
are like and talk with somebody about caving and safety and what that is like
in this area. We are at dig cave and this is the trench that comes to it and when
the lava initially hardens it's weak and so where it's weak it'll collapse and so
it yet behind me is weak lava and it's collapsed and like right after it formed,
so there should be a cave here but it was a weak ceiling and it just collapsed
right away. I got indicating because my dad had old
forest service map and he we thought it was exciting to go try and find these things
and Forest Service later took all the cave entrances off all the maps because
they don't want people getting in them, so back in the 60
my dad had a log map that showed where a lot of caves were, and if you get ahold
of maybe a really old map you can see some of them.
We plum run that one out. That was dead. Oh this one is.... I pretty much know where
every single cave in this area and Mount Saint Helens, and there's like at
least 600 and I know where they all are so... if you cave enough and join the
grotto you get shown them all and so... there's big caves, little caves, crawlers,
lava tubes, cracks, vertical, talus slope. What's another kind of cave? There's also
some erosional so all sorts there's no limestone ones around here though so if
you're in the limestone don't come to the Pacific Northwest. You ain't going to find any.
I would say falling in them is a very unique hazard in these ones
because this lava is, if you felt lava, it's very abrasive and it'll cut you
right open like a razor blade, and you could... my twin brother almost bled out in
a cave because it sliced his hand open and..... there's nothing you can do when
you're in a cave let me put some pressure on it. But, yeah, lava is very,
very prickly. Uh bumping your head, rock, I have never known to many people to die
from.... first of all, in the Pacific Northwest there hasn't been too many
people dying in caves because they either, like, they're old enough.... lava is
very strong. It's not going to fall, unless there's an earthquake maybe.
People have gotten hurt falling off ledges in caves up here and that's just
like freak acciden. I mean if you're claustrophobic some of these caves, I
mean the chance of getting stuck in one might happen, but I've never heard of it
up here. I mean, I got a big old list of all the caving accidents that have
happened around here and there's only nine and all the time people have been
caving that have been documented, so, rarely happens up here.
You can't see it right underneath this hole, this rock here, is a 10-foot drop
right down below.
Caves... caving in general, is a guarded secret because people like to trash
caves and that's why people don't let people know where they are. If you've
ever been to Ape Cave, that's the public one, which the Forest Services, they.. we' like
to call it the sacrificial lamb, is what they call it. You ever go in there people,
graffiti it. There used to be something called, like, formations in the floor
called sand castles, which took thousands of years of water dropping forming these
cool like features. They've been trampled on because people don't care.People
take craps, or go to the bathroom in that cave. If you walk in there, there's human
feces sitting on the ground because somebody couldn't hold it, and I was in
there once and somebody must took a five-gallon bucket of paint and spelled
his name in the cave. And the sad thing about it is paint doesn't stick very
well so all that effort that you did to put your name on there it I can wash off
with water. So it's like what's the point? Other formations are, like, it's
called a lavsickle where the lava drips and just drip drip and they'll
keep getting tall, and there's caves that the lava sickles are this tall, and
they've closed some of them because people break them I want to take them
home. And we've done cave cleanups where somebody tossed 300 bags of bear grass
into a cave to get rid of it... like... was it that hard just to throw it in the
back of your truck or did you want to just come out to the middle of nowhere
and throw your trash in a cave? Like, the dump is like 10 bucks to dump
the trash or free.
We're not going to go through the whole cave today it's about
3,000 feet long. Is that right Oscar? Yeah. But, just want to give you a flavor for what it's like.
This is indeed a big cave. It just keeps going.
I can't specify enough how important it is to, if you get want to get into caving,
is to join a grotto. I caved for 20 years before joining the Oregon Grotto and I
just ran out of places to look, and once I joined the grotto, and started getting
relationships with people that knew where these things were, I can get to a
cave, what took me two months trying to find someone that knows where it is,
thirty seconds, five minutes, and you wonder why you didn't do it before. It's
like you just get to know people that know where the caves are and if they
trust you, they will show you. This cave in particular is right next to the road
yet somebody lost their life looking for it. I mean join a grotto...you...
people will take you to it.
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