Today I took my first caving trip with the Sewanee Outing Program, to Grapevine Cave. It’s just off a part of the Domain called Lost Cove…not a huge cave (no one seemed to know a length, but I’d guess maybe a mile…probably less). Very nice though for a first trip. I’d call it an intermediate level trip, with LOTS of crawls, but very few squeezes. Very active, but not a lot of drip formations. Not sure if that’s due to a sandstone cap or if the cave is just young. Throughout the entire length, I probably only saw a dozen or so speleothems.
The interesting thing to me was that I was able to keep up with the 18 year olds IN the cave without issue. The climb out (several hundred feet of elevation in very little horizontal distance) was nasty, though. I felt pretty good, seeing as how I’m now almost double their age.