FIT CITY LOOKS FOR FRESH PERSPECTIVE UNDERGROUND
Participants in REI program rappel into cave, explore underground passages
I’m belly crawling through a rocky passage beneath Colorado Bend State Park, my headlamp illuminating — just barely — a pair of dirt-caked shoes slithering into the darkness in front of me.
Push, pause. Press forward on elbows. Stifle urge to scream when I bash knee on pointy rock.
After 15 minutes of scrambling, I emerge into a low-ceilinged chamber the size of the corner booth at the neighbor- hood diner. I scoot onto a boulder while half a dozen others shuffle into this branch of the Gorman Creek Crevice Cave.
The cave is the longest of about 450 known caves at the park, located an hour-and-ahalf drive from Austin and just west of Lampasas. Exploring it is messy business, and not for the claustrophobic. And did I mention the bats?
We aim our lights around the cozy den, trying to pinpoint the source of incessant squeaking. That’s when we notice a wriggling mass of velvety-looking Mexican free-tailed bats
tucked into a cantaloupe-sized divot in the ceiling.
One flaps out. Four or five more follow. After a minute of frantic flapping, they duck down a dark vein in the limestone labyrinth.
This park is best known for 60-foot-tall Gorman Falls waterfall, riverside camping, mountain biking and the white bass fishing in early spring. But caving offers a whole new perspective on Colorado Bend State Park.
The REI Outdoor School in Austin began offering cave tours here earlier this year. Students ride a van to the park, where they’re issued helmets, headlamps, harnesses and knee and elbow pads. They learn about rappelling and caving safety and spend a few hours exploring the network of passages below the ground.
We hiked a mile to reach the cave entrance, and once we got here senior instructor Cindy Abbott-Wood fastened a static line to a tree about 20 yards from a school-bussized crack in the ground. That, it turned out, was our front door to the basement of Colorado Bend State Park.
After a safety briefing, instructor Sean Moorhead dropped over the edge, rappelling 40 feet into the gorge to the cave entrance. One by one, we followed suit.
First impression? Humid. And damp. A cave feels vaguely like a dark movie theater on a hot summer day, but with lots of inch-long, translucent crickets clinging to the ceiling and no bad trailers to watch.
Abbott-Wood used a cigarette lighter to test the air quality. If it won’t light, air quality is poor and caving is not safe. It lit just fine, so we headed down the first passageway.
This isn’t a show cave, with glittering karst formations. But we do see some interesting stuff, from a tongue of limestone formed by eons of dripping water to grapefruit-sized blobs of rock — fossilized algal blooms, Abbott-Wood says — clinging to the ceiling. A wayward frog hops out of our path.
It’s cool down here, but within a few minutes we’re sweating with exertion. At one point, we turn off our lamps. We’re enveloped in inky darkness. We can’t even see our hands in front of our faces.
After nearly two hours of exploration, we inch our way back down the passageway to the mouth of the gorge. Instead of ascending up the ropes to get out, we scramble up a ladder to a ledge midway up the gorge. Then we duck into a 2-foot-tall horizontal crack in the rock, squirming through the opening for 20 or 30 yards to a back exit. There we pop out like moles, blinking in the sunlight, faces smudged with dirt.
“That was definitely more of a workout than I anticipated,” says Justin Scott, 31, an Austin commercial real estate developer and rock climber who’s more used to climbing rock walls than burrowing underneath them. “I didn’t envision it being as tight of a space as we went in, but I guess every cave is different.”
Rebecca Montalvo, 33, a dentist at the St. David’s Foundation in Austin, says she liked the close encounter with the bats. “It’s also great to think about how long ago this was all formed — and really, it’s right in our backyard.”
I unclasp my helmet, which protected my head when I bumped the cave ceiling, and wipe the sweat from my neck. Time sort of stands still when you’re in a cave, and it feels strange and exposed out here on the cactus-covered savanna.
“I like being down there — it’s a totally different environment than outside,” says Stanley Urbanek, 23, a researcher at Applied Research Laboratories in Austin. “The part that stands out to me was going into the first cave and turning off the lights. You really get the feel for what it’s like when there’s no light and your mind plays tricks on you.”
He wants to try caving again, somewhere with even tighter spaces.
“It’s about being able to control my mind,” he says. “I’m definitely claustrophobic at points, and I kind of wanted to feel that panic come on, then get out and realize everything is OK.”
I’ll pass on narrower passages, though. I like the dirt and the dark and even the bats, but can do without the panic.