r/caves

I've been doing SRT trips for about a year and a half now and I finally feel comfortable on rope. Rigging a drop, transitioning at a rebelay, even dealing with a stuck ascender doesn't rattle me the way it used to. But last month a buddy talked me into a horizontal system with a couple of squeezes rated as tight for our region, and I basically fell apart mentally about twenty feet into the first one.

It wasn't the space itself. I've done belly crawls before without much issue. It was more that on rope I always have a very clear sense of what's above and below me, and my brain has built a whole set of routines around trusting the gear. In a crawl there's no gear to trust, just your own body reading the rock, and I found myself second guessing every twist and exhale in a way that made the whole thing feel way more claustrophobic than it probably was.

We turned around before the tightest section, which in hindsight was the right call since I was starting to breathe too fast and that's exactly when people get stuck. My partner said the fix is just repetition in easier horizontal cave until it stops feeling foreign, similar to how vertical clicked for me after enough hangs on rope.

Curious if others who came up primarily as vertical cavers had this same disconnect. Did going back to basics in simple horizontal passage help, or was it more about specific breathing and body positioning techniques you had to learn separately. Trying to figure out whether I need more mileage or an actual different mental approach before I go back for that squeeze.

I'm going to be taking a trip soon and wondering if I can get a high-powered flashlight for around $50

I'm guessing I want it to be waterproof for the conditions.

I have been looking for a picture of cave cups online and can not find any. If you know where one is or have one that you are ok with putting on Wikimedia Commons, that would be incredibly helpful.

The only picture I have been able to find is in Cave Minerals of the World by Hill and Forti, but it's a physical book, and I don't currently have a way to scan it in, nor do I have permission to use said Photo.

Been caving for about two years now, mostly guided trips through a local grotto. Recently I've been trying to get more serious about navigation and passage interpretation, so I've started digging into survey maps for caves I've already visited. The problem is I feel like I'm barely literate when it comes to reading them.

Like, I can match up obvious landmarks. A pit shows up on the plan view, I recognize the pit. Fine. But when I look at a complex multi-level system with crossing passages and the profile view next to it, my brain just stops cooperating. I can't seem to hold the three-dimensional shape in my head the way I'm told experienced cavers can.

A few specific things I'm confused about:

• How do you mentally reconcile the plan view with the profile when the passage changes elevation a lot? Do you basically just flip between them constantly, or does it eventually click into a unified picture?
• Survey grade matters a lot for how much you should trust the map, right? I've seen grades 3 through 5 mentioned most often. Is there a good reference for what those actually mean in practice?
• Scalloping patterns on walls supposedly indicate paleoflow direction. I've read this a few times but I've never successfully identified scallops in the field myself. Not sure if I'm not looking hard enough or just not recognizing them.

Part of me wonders if this is just something that takes years of exposure and there's no shortcut. But I'd love to hear how other people developed this skill, or if there were any resources (books, papers, grotto workshops) that genuinely helped it click. The USGS topo work and some older NSS publications have come up in my grotto, but I haven't tracked down anything specific yet.