Caving at Raccoon Mountain by Susan

One of the benefits of having an older Girl Scout troop is you can let them make arrangements for things without double checking their plans, so I didn’t even look at what we were in for at Raccoon Mountain after Coumbah booked the event. And I’m not sure I would have really comprehended it if I had tried to look it up!
Getting outfitted in the knee pads and helmets with lights was kind of amusing outside of the cave,
but once inside, I realized how incredibly vital these tools are. As in, I can’t tell you how many times
I banged my head trying to stand up. The entry to the cave wasn’t so bad; we carried in our sleeping
bags and gear into a lighted channel of the cave and found relatively dry places for them. Then our
guide indicated a dark, low hole and told us to start crawling – crawling! – 25 feet into it, and then we
would stop and talk. This is when I realized I wouldn’t make it through the cave without knee pads.
There was barely room to crawl in this channel, and when we emerged and I banged my head for the
first time on the 5 foot ceiling (I’m 5’4”), I thought, “That wasn’t so bad!” – but little did I know. Because from that point forward we were in such narrow channels that the each person had to tell the next person the exact right place to put her hands and feet so she wouldn’t fall down a big chasm or slip into oblivion somewhere. Shortly, we were walking sideways on a ledge more narrow than my feet, using our hands for balance on the 75 degree wall opposite so we wouldn’t slip into the 30 foot drop between our hands and feet! Each challenge was met with a next challenge for FOUR HOURS – there were points (many) in which we were wriggling on our stomachs like loggerhead sea turtles through very narrow, long channels, sliding down muddy rocks, climbing up muddy, narrow rocks that required knotted, muddy ropes to scale, and walking through underground creeks full of cold water. Despite my best efforts, I was covered with mud, and some of my girls finished the job on themselves by coating their faces and hair in it. There were points in which two channels could be taken, one just barely enough to wiggle through, the other just enough to crawl through. The girls always took the tight one; I opted for the spacious side. Many times I had to just stop and BREATHE to get the courage to go through the next challenge. Did I mention it was DARK? I mean, we were in a cave! So the experience was even more scary. My main focus throughout the entire thing, I am sad to admit, was personal survival. I did NOT want to slip and hurt myself and have to be dragged out of the cave – how could they do that anyway? This was underlined for me as I was climbing a 12 foot muddy rock with shallow indentations only big enough for my toes when my own daughter went sliding back down the rock beside me, screaming, and I couldn’t even reach out to grab her. It would have taken me down, too. Pitiful, pitiful. At the end of this four hours, it was midnight, and we were left in the lighted channel to sleep in the cave. The girls didn’t want the light out; they wanted to see the cave around them. There was no nice little place to sleep; it was every woman for herself, find a relatively dry rock without too many angles and bumps, and put the sleeping bag down. Poor Donna had a dripper on her head all night, and I woke soaking wet in my sleeping bag – some pop-up stream appeared in the middle of the night and went right under my bag! The girls were so delighted with this trip they voted they wanted to come back every year. Any adult
volunteers?

Mrs. Susan, the most amazing leader ever!!

All the girls

Mrs. Donna best assistant leader ever