Sagada 2: 600 Feet Under

Jenn and I had been spelunking before.  One of the precious few things to do in Missouri (if you don’t like baseball and meth is too rich for your blood) is to explore one of the Show-Me State’s many caves, caverns, or assorted holes.  I’ve been to Onondaga Cave a number of times and had a generally very pleasant experience appreciating the stark beauty of limestone rock formations and naturally-occurring gift shops.  “Onondaga,” of course, is an Iroquois word for “well-lit, with professionally maintained footpaths.”  In short, we considered ourselves old hands at caving and fully prepared for the two hour tour of Sagada’s Sumaguing Cave (you think we’d have learned by now not to trust any time estimate that we’re given, especially ones that end in “two hours”).

We entrusted ourselves to a guide named Patrick.  Patrick, as will soon be revealed, is an intensely trustworthy guy.  He’s been taking hapless tourists into the caves for nearly fifteen years, and presumably, all of them made it back out alive (though given the preponderance of coffins hidden within, a cave-related death would probably approach The Perfect Crime).  We were well-equipped for a spelunking expedition: the man in the tour guide guild office advised us to wear flip-flops and cautioned us that, while long pants were acceptable, shorts would make us look better in pictures.  I carried the nice camera, trusting that the combination of a zipper and good intentions would add up to something close to “watertight.”

Thus readied for a pleasant jaunt into the hellish bowels of the earth, we sallied forth down the hill towards the cave.  We had a brief break when Patrick went to exchange his kerosene lantern for one that he thought would have a chance of working better -- as far as I’m concerned, this decision qualifies Patrick for instant canonization.  While we waited, we took pictures of some far less camera-shy hanging coffins.

The first stop was the Lumiang Burial Cave, which involved only a brief stop to gawk at an collection of non-hanging coffins.  Up to this point, caving seemed to be little different than hiking, in that I seem to be ill-suited for both and also I forgot to bring water.

Take note of the gear worn by Action Hero Harry.

Pictured: Jenn's last known photo.

Patrick talked us through the caving agenda: as we preferred the two-hour tour (hahaha) to the longer six-hour Cave Connection, we would be encountering three distinct stages.  The first, he told us, we would be scooting down steps on our butts.  The second we would be getting wet up to our knees, and the last would be our choice of the Hard Way or the Easy Way.  Clearly he didn’t know who he was dealing with, this Patrick, and has no idea for our predilection for never, ever doing anything nice and easy.  As we walked to Sumaguing Cave, we passed some rice terraces that were as spectacular as they were downhill.

Down hundreds of steps, really rocks placed in a vaguely step-like pattern, we walked in the officially-recommended flip-flops, one of which Jenn promptly broke.  We passed under several hundred bats congregating on the ceiling of the cave -- I don’t know the proper term for a group of bats, but I’m going to go with an “eew” -- and Patrick helpfully advised us to stop using our hands to steady ourselves on nearby stones lest we coat our hands in guano.

In front of one of the famous limestone formations.  No, I won't tell you what it's called.  All SFW guesses welcome in the comments section!

There’s no easy way to convey the kind of fear that begins to settle into your chest when you’ve descended into an unlit cave in shorts and flip-flops, hundreds of feet below where the bats deign to live, the ceiling gets lower and lower, and your guide tells you to leave your shoes behind from this point.  It is a good way to reacquaint yourself with all of your childhood fears, this Sumaguing Cave: fear of the dark, fear of falling, fear of drowning, and fear of guano.  When it came time to squeeze ourselves through a narrow mouth, a river rushing down our backs, camera bag held desperately overhead, Patrick shouted back to us, “Oh, I forgot!  We started the third stage a ways back.”

In his description of the cave experience, Patrick had neglected to mention the Pitfall Level, in which we were instructed to hang on to a rope that was suspended from the cave wall and to walk ourselves over a deep, possibly bottomless pit filled with stanky cave water (and possibly man-eating salamanders).  “Ha ha!” I suggested.  “Seriously?”  Patrick demonstrated by scrambling to the other side with the casual ease of a Batman.  Jenn and I exchanged a look.  Shit, we thought, shit.  We're in way over our heads here.

There was some dispute over whether the properly gentlemanly thing for me to do would be to allow Jenn to go first, or for me to go first and test the water, as it were.  Jenn decided to attempt it first, summoning all of her courage, and as I fiddled with my flashlight, I suddenly heard a mighty splash!  I looked up into the dimly-lit corridor and Jenn was utterly gone, disappeared into the pit below.

My mind flew to all of the things that would never happen now.  There would be no cycle tour in Japan, no traveling through Cambodia and Thailand.  No children.  She hit her head on the rocks, I thought, she hurt her spine.  Best case scenario, we're going to spend the next ten years getting her walking again.  I was too terrified to say anything, even to call out to her.  All I could do was kneel on the rocks and pray for her to rise again.

Patrick shot his hand into the water and pulled Jenn up by the shirt, clutching her glasses in her hand.  “Can you swim?” he asked coolly.  She nodded, and before I knew it she was back up on the ledge, sopping wet but miraculously unharmed.  Somehow she hadn't hit her head on the stone wall, she had turned herself right-side-up and taken a breath before falling in.  I breathed again.

At last we reached the bottom of the cave.  Patrick invited us to enjoy the pleasures of the cave’s “Swimming Pool,” an offer that we wryly turned down.  We had done it, we had accomplished what we were sure was impossible, it had nearly killed us, but we had successfully made it to the end of the cave!  The smell of kerosene filled the room, and Patrick let us have a break while he smoked a cigarette.  “Are you OK?” I asked Jenn for the thousandth time.  She still was in high spirits, though the prospect of scrambling back over the sheer, slick cliffs quickly filled us with a gnawing sense of dread.  The feeling of success was immediately gone.  There was no way we could make it back up all those sheer rock cliffs, not with how shot our nerves were already.  We didn't have anywhere near the strength of arm to get ourselves back up to the top.  Panic set in.

Really, what carried us out of that cave (besides Patrick) was the knowledge that the alternative was dying alone in the dark.  Each time Patrick had to leave us to grab his bag or to scout out the way ahead, visions danced in my head of whether we would asphyxiate, freeze to death, or be eaten by bats first.  Gone was the confidence that led us down the California coast; all I wanted was to be back at home in bed with a grilled cheese sandwich.

I’m making jokes about this experience here, but that’s by virtue of being dozens of miles away from Sumaguing Cave.  To get some feeling of just how terrified we were at the bottom of the cave, just take a look at this photo.  There were no handholds except invisible crannies in the slick rock walls (which, remember, we were climbing up in bare feet and shorts).  There were many, many occasions when Jenn’s or my hand slipped and we were just a Patrick’s Awesomeness away from death or disfigurement.  If our hand missed its mark, if our toes couldn’t hang onto the rock, there would be no easy transportation out of the cave to a local hospital: we were hundreds of feet down impassable rock, half an hour’s walk from the local (hospitalless) town, six hours from the closest big city.  An error, be it due to nerves, lack of fitness, or simple bad judgement, would be fatal.  Like, no-backsies-fatal.  And we were scared that we wouldn't make it back out of this cave alive.

I mean, look at that.  That's 9 feet of rock and the only way out of Sumaguing Cave.  In rough patches, Patrick advised us to take turns boosting each other's butts up the cliffs or stepping onto his knee.  Not to brag, but we've eaten breakfasts bigger than Patrick -- I was 100% convinced that putting my weight onto his delicate limbs would result in a hospitalization.  More than once our fingers clawed at the top of the rock, struggling to haul our bodies up the ledge or else fall back to our deaths.  We were blindly, pants-wettingly afraid.

Bruised, sore, sopping wet, we trudged back up the rocks, past other tour groups going the other way.  Until that moment, I never knew how happy I could be to see a broken flip-flop and piles of guano.

Once again, we rose through our plight and arrived back at the surface world, thus rising from Mighty up to Mighty Mighty.  I recalled all of the Dungeons & Dragons games I ran that took place in caves and chuckled at the thought of an armored, 300-pound dwarf dodging traps and doing battle with goblins in anything like what we had just gotten through -- 10 minutes in Sumaguing Cave would be enough to off any adventuring party.  Having accomplished the impossible, or at least very difficult, we proceeded to celebrate by not leaving our hotel room for 36 hours.