Peter's Blog: Christian visits Tennessee

On the day of my last final exam arrived Christian from Karlsruhe, Germany. After carrying on the tradition of burning the meat on the BBQ with friends, the next day we went to explore a local cave near Tennessee’s northern border with Kentucky. We drove into a dirt road surrounded by sparse forest that had been logged which reminded me of tree planting in the wilderness of northern Ontario. After walking downhill for one hour, past Jimmy Hoffa’s car with bullet holes in the side and through a swamp we reached the base of a large cliff and the entrance to the cave. Unfortunately due to heavy rains, the entrance to the cave was flooded with icy cold water. After considering taking off our clothes to swim through the passage, we decided to first try another entrance, attempting to find the main cave system.
The pictures speak for themselves, but the work was hard crawling on my stomach through passages with sharp rocks on the bottom and spiders falling onto my neck and arms. Like an Indiana Jones movie! As a hydrogeologist I have fair imagination for rock formations, however, within this limestone formation I could not comprehend what I was looking at, there were caves within caves within caves. It was like there were more than 3 dimensions. Terri, our guide, is a local karst hydrogeologist and lifetime caver. She told us amazing stories of cave surveying, people that take off their clothes to fit through the smallest cracks hundreds of feet long, and 18 hour underground expeditions in Alaska!
We had a laugh about measuring the retardation of hydrogeologists traveling through a cave system. Based on size I estimated my retardation at 300 and hers’ at about 20. Retardation is a measure of how well a chemical or colloid is slowed as it moves through groundwater (velocity of water/velocity of particle). This was quite fun, pretending I was a bacteria flowing through a pore space in rock.
After crawling out a hole in the side of a the cliff a few hundred feet above where we entered, I had that familiar feeling of feeling glad to be alive after 5 hours underground feeling completely lost in a three dimensional maze of tunnels and caverns.