Never thought I'd get sweaty hands from reading a Hacker News comment but here we are. I'm not claustrophobic at all but no way in hell I'm ever doing any spelunking voluntarily.
I'll _never_ understand how "And then we had to take off all our gear and scoot forward by pushing with our bare toes for 30 minutes to reach the next cave" is perfectly normal for some people...
And the guy swims through an underwater cave and gets stuck for a moment.
just a silly animated scene.
...but in that moment I went from relaxed to heart in my throat.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/544782/1925-cave-rescue-...
And then we lived through a dozen or so Bay Area earthquakes, including '89. I was able to get a ballpark estimate of the speed of the waves by counting the seconds it took them to move through the grasslands on the Bay side of NASA Ames (I was jogging, ground fell away from my feet). Measured the distance, and the result (I forget now), was within 20%.
Gotta different perspective now about how stable rocks are.
I remember wondering why I was having to put such a huge amount of conscious effort into the process of turning around to head back to the cave entrance. Feeling stuck, clamped between huge slabs of rock is just not that fun to me. And while someone is saying "you can do it, you got this," describing to you how your limbs are arranged, so that you can even figure out how to move at all...
I had traveled there at age 18 with a few other teenagers. This factor also kind of blows my mind. Another one of the complicating issues was that we were going at the pace of the most experienced among us, who was very much a risk taker. Phew, major respect to spelunkers but I think I got off to the worst start possible, at the worst place possible for a guy like me. Every time I would hear about a tragedy in that cave it made me regret even the idea of cave exploring.