03/07
Times have changed.
The NCRC Regional cave rescue course was the first real class of any kind I had taken since college. It was training, yes, but I wasn�t expecting a written test at the end or anything. There were skill checks most every day of what was learned, and class went from just after breakfast until well after dinner. There was a lot to take in ... and a written test at the end.
I had done two Orientation to Cave Rescue classes over weekends in the Northeast. There was no rope work there, just patient packaging and practice moving a loaded stretcher through uneven (but horizontal) cave passages.
The weeklongs always came during the summer, when all the other vacation opportunities crowd themselves. This regional NCRC event, held by the Southwestern branch, was in February. So I booked a fight to Austin, and got a rental car to go to Colorado Bend State Park.
No, this is not in Colorado; it�s on the Colorado River. No, not the Colorado that goes through the Grand Canyon. Another Colorado River. This Colorado is the 18th longest river in the country, and fits its entire 862-mile span in Texas. (Colorado means Colored Red in Spanish, which lots of rivers become whenever it rains. There are also Colorados in Costa Rica and Argentina.)
I had been in Texas before, but it never measured up to what I was expecting. Then, I was in a hotel along a strip mall-riddled section of Fort Worth. Where were the horses? The guns? The bar fights? Now, I was camped in the middle of the desert, with a crew of Texas locals. Night and day difference.
Speaking of night and day difference, that desert got cold at night. Mornings were 45 or 50, reaching into the 60s and sometimes 70s by afternoon. The standard uniform was a fleece in the morning, which was shed by lunch, and grabbed again for dinner. When night hit, that daytime heat was shed like a Persian cat with radiation sickness. It dropped below freezing toward the end of the week, making us wake around 5:00 A.M. in our tents and pull loose clothing into the sleeping bag. The all-time low was my final morning, when it hit 18 degrees.
From the moment I got there, I was behind. My plane got delayed at my DFW stopover for two hours, so I missed the vertical skills practice Sunday afternoon. I was assembling my Ropewalker and rack when everyone else had their frogs and micro racks ready for the pre-required changeover skill test.
Here�s one of the first things I�ve learned: a changeover with my gear is physically impossible. I didn�t have a secondary cow�s tail between one of my foot ascenders and my seat harness, for one. And my rack, which is useful dropping big pits like Cass, takes so much rope that you can�t toggle weight between ascenders like you can with little micro racks. (Everyone who saw my 18-inch rack immediately mentioned El Capitan, the longest drop in the U.S., and then mentioned the rack�s other function for beating away muggers. Three or four unconnected times, people saw it, mentioned El Cap, and then mentioned me being mugged.)
It took a long time to sort out, with me eventually switching over to a frog setup - I�ve got one, but hadn�t really used it - and a series of borrowed micro racks.
There were 15 students, 11 level 1s and four Level 2s. Most of them, and I think all of the instructors, came from agency backgrounds. Firemen, EMS, rescue teams. A few lucky people were here on work�s behalf: the rest used vacation time. All of the instructors used vacation time. Very few attendees were expecting to go in caves unless some guy fell and broke his leg. But most of them also had regular practice with rope work, for all the varied reasons they need the rope in the first place.
I was the only person who had flown here. A few drove from Kansas, Arkansas and Georgia, but I was the only person north of the Mason-Dixon Line. I was expecting my fair share of New jersey jokes. Instead, I got Yankee jokes. I was not aware that people still made hard feelings about us northern aggressors. I tried to bring up that the Mason-Dixon Line crosses New Jersey around Cape May, but they jut took that as another Yankee trick.
I don�t know how many of our party was armed. Based on the few people who were joyfully discussing their guns all week, there might have been more guns tucked under people�s seats than at the Alamo. None of these guns helped when the most valuable stuff in the whole camp was absconded late in the week. More on that later.
There was also a knots skill test on Monday, which I put off taking for as long as possible. I've never known knots. My various Cub Scout groups never got into it, and they didn�t have much use until I began vertical caving. And even then, since I didn't own a big length of rope, the rope's owner would always take care of rigging.
They aren�t that complicated, but there�s a fair deal to learn at a clip, and knot instruction is an underappreciated art. After a lot of practice, I squeaked by the checkoff, and by the end of the week I could tie any of the questioned knots in my sleep. It was worth the trip just to finally be able to know butterflys and munter hitches and prussiks.
For a lot of students, this was their first experience in a cave. Monday afternoon we piled into a few cars and drove to Turtle Shell Cave for a talk on cave environment. I brought my cave suit, which no one else had. A few people had special-made overalls, but I was the only full-on jumpsuit. Texas caves didn�t really need them. They were dry, and warm. A sturdy pair of nylon pants with kneepads was all you needed. And putting on the suit takes a few minutes, by which everyone is either on their way to the cave or waiting patiently for you to finally get ready to go. I was getting used to being the slow one in class.
Monday afternoon I saw my first armadillo. None of the Texans cared, but this was a new critter to me. He was poking around the far side of the creek, sniffing for food. Texans don�t throw them on the grill, because they�re known to carry leprosy. Yum, leprosy.
Tuesday was our first chance at patient packaging, inside the horizontal Lemons Ranch Cave. For the whole week, various attendees were volunteered. No one wanted to do it because you got taken out of action for an hour or two, unable to itch your nose or see what sort of knots were being tied at your feet. You were bound from head to toe, secure enough so a potential broken back wouldn�t be jostled even while hanging vertically.
I got volunteered first. Being tied down was one thing, but having those thick blankets and the tarp overtop was another. I was roasting in my suit and polypros, and I could do nothing but lay there and sweat. We were merciful and left the blanket off most subsequent patient packagings. Hypothermia�s still a big concern, but not for the hour we�d have them tied down.
I could just hear commands be given, and then I was tugged a foot or two. "One, two, THREE!" The rocks overhead slid by, tug by tug, and grew closer. At their closest I could probably head butt them. I was being dragged into crawling passage. Better than having to crawl it myself.
There are two types of portable stretchers brought in caves. I was riding a ferno, a big stiff sled. There was also the sked, a thick flexible piece of plastic that wraps around the patient like a burrito. The sked needs a separate spinal support, and makes the patient feel more bumps, but the rolled-up sked fits in lots of places the ferno doesn�t. Needless to say, there are two totally different rigging systems used for each system, which further needs to be modified to keep weight off any broken arms or legs of a patient�s.
Most every day had a skills check-off. Due to all my time fiddling with my Ropewalker and El Cap rack, I was always trying to get tested on the previous day�s events. By the time I got done with yesterday�s tests, the instructors were done testing for that day�s stuff, so I was behind for yet another day.
This was how the slow students in school felt, it would seem. Perpetually overwhelmed, where even nonstop work still leaves you at the back of the class. There was so much stuff to learn that all I did was listen to lectures, practice in the field, practice at the camp, and sleep. The instructors all made time to show me the different knots and hauling systems, but I couldn�t catch up unless I pulled an all-nighter. And I was exhausted every night.
We didn�t go caving on Wednesday, because we could practice our ropework skills on the cliff. The simplest hauling system was the 1-1 setup, also known as a Georgia Haul. It�s easy to set up, but it takes a lot of manpower (referred to here in Texas as Bubbas). More complicated systems use pulleys, so you haul half or one third of the weight on every pull, but have to pull twice or three times as much rope to get the load completely up. Each system needs a belay line, in case the main line fails. Both the haul line and the belay need some manner of progress capture device so once a load gets pulled up, the load won�t drop back down.
When lowering or raising patients along vertical faces, litter attendants can move patients around snags, rocks, and other problems. I got that job on one of the lowerings, and quickly found that it was much better to be secured in to the patient�s feet, where the snags were happened, ten up by his chest, where all I was doing was apologizing to the patient for my vertical gear swinging close to his face.
A quick Thursday exercise was to catch a falling load. A lot of rock climbers and cavers use belay lines, but have never felt what it�s like for a big weight to be shock loaded onto the belay line. A huge rock was hoisted up by a team of Bubbas, and then one by one, we each took in slack on the belay line while the weight was silently dropped to our lines. No one dropped the rock. Part of me was hoping someone would, just so these A student firemen would know what it was like to not excel at everything this week.
I wasn�t able to call home until Wednesday night. There was no cell reception at camp, and I was expecting a three hour round trip for the calls (an hour driving back to civilization, an hour on the phone, and an hour return). But cell phone reception was to be had just by walking a dirt road up to a high point. I made this walk a few times, always seeing other people from the camp also calling home.
Thursday we did our first in-cave vertical rigging, back at Turtle Shell. We did two rounds of this, so people would get multiple tasks to do. We needed a haul line, and a belay line, and the haul line needed to be capable of bringing up 200 pounds of patient in a cramped space where haulers had to sit or lay down.
Fireman physics was doing an in-head estimation of all elements of a haul system, to see if it all could support the weight of the patient. So we needed to offhand know the strength rating of the rope involved, the type of carabiners used, the pulleys the rope ran through, the angles the rope was at, the strength of the anchor and the strength of the haul team. Hauling a 200-pound person up a cliff would seem like a lot of work. But using a 3-1 Z-rig, we were only hauling 67 pounds, although we had three times as much rope to haul. And there were three or us on the haul line, so that weight got divided by three again. That meant that to lift a 200-pound man, I only needed around 23 pounds of lift, which is the same weight as my one-year-old niece Sylvia. And I have no problems lifting Sylvia.
Friday was more patient packaging at Turtle Shell, only we were toting the patient up to the entrance canyon and hauling him to the surface. This was a tight crack, and we reeled two patients up through its narrow crack.
This Friday exercise was called the walkthrough. It was the day before the mock rescue, and was essentially a less involved version of the mock. Level 1 and 2 students were working together, with each Level 2 assigned a few level ones in his/her task force. The job became a lot easier this way, since the big strategic thinking was done by the advanced students. Level 1 students were Bubbas who could tie whatever systems was asked, and haul whatever patient needed hauling.
Coming back from the cave on Friday, we found the porta potties were gone. The cleaning company, which was instructed to clean them and leave them, mixed up their orders and just toted them away. That left just one flush toilet in the camp, hooked up to a septic system that could get devastated by 20 Texas firemen. Plus, we were having steak that night. We got permission to pee in the woods, and to do everything else in the woods if we had a shovel handy.
The porta potties came back the next afternoon. Most of us were not able to hold out. I sure wasn�t going to go into the legendary mock rescue with so much processed red meat banging at the exits.
Saturday was the full-on mock rescue. DJ, one of the organizers of this weeklong, was the patient. We got the call that he was missing at camp just after lunch. We were being a little gung-ho for this given that this was supposed to just be someone that was due out of the cave at noon and hadn�t called back by 1:30. But we knew that he�d be injured, and he�d be in the most remote, pain-in-the-ass section he could find.
The search team ran through the cave, although we all knew DJ would wedge himself in the least accessible part of the cave. Sure enough, DJ was eventually found a few hundred feet down a passage off a 25-foot vertical shaft. The patient had apparently fallen, possibly broken his back, and then crawled a football field�s length into a narrowing passage. Real patients might be just as hard to find if they�re not conscious.
I was on the Med/Evac team. We were told to bring the ferno, but also the OSS for extra spinal stability. one of my fellow level ones on this trip was an EMT, so he took point on patient care. We rappelled down the 25-foot pit, which now had four ropes hanging off it (the haul line, the piggyback line, the belay line, and the original rope DJ used to get down). We followed the strung-out comm wire through the passage, and found DJ.
The other instructors were hanging around the cave, but they all had flagging tape on their helmets to let us knew they were just bats for this purpose. Bats that would yell if we did anything that was actually dangerous, and bats that would get in the way when we got the patient hauling at a good clip, but bats nonetheless.
We got DJ out in about three hours, with another hour to derig all the ropes and get the last guy out. It went smoothly. These were smart people that worked well in teams. I was pretty sure the mock would work out fine, and it did. I saved my worry for how I�d do on this.
The written test, given just before the mock, but tough but fair. There were multiple choice questions, but a lot of them had multiple good options, and a few had no good options. I thought I did fairly well. I got a 76. Everyone else got in the 80s or 90s.
I didn�t know if I was going to pass this course. I had learned a huge amount, but I was not up to par with the rest of the class. I figured there might be some NCRC meeting to see if trying hard and flying in was enough to get you a pass. If I did get a pass, then taking Level 2 in the future would be another week of the same unpreparedness. Maybe taking Level 1 again would be best.
(There was also a mention, earlier in the week, of another regional NCRC giving people passes on Levels 1 and 2 when they didn�t know the material. They showed up for the nationals at level 3, which is only given on a national level, and they couldn�t do changeovers. I do could changeovers fine (so long as I wasn�t using my El Cap rack) but I still didn�t want to be the dumb guy who just gets a social promotion.
I ended up just not squeaking by. I think if I got a whole lot of cave rescue practice in, I could test to get in for Level 2. But I�ve got a very busy life, and not much of that involves vertical work. So staying back a grade might be best.
My goal wasn�t to pass a test, it was to learn about cave rescue. I learned a ton of good stuff. It�s one of those old sports movie cliches that if you try hard and give something your best shot, it doesn�t matter if you win or lose. I worked my ass off during this week, and walked away with a lot of knowledge in case something goes wrong while caving.
Next year Level 1 will hopefully be an easy A.