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Magical Firsts

By Jan Nesset

Naive but together enough to know safety comes first, we pushed deeper into the cave. Behind torso-tight squeezes, crystal-laden crevasses and fantastic rooms of bulbous limestone formations, the cave continued, its core a spiraling passageway that twisted down, down, down until it bottomed out in the ceiling of a giant chamber. To get to the apex of this labyrinth, we would fasten a rope and rappel 60 feet from the ceiling to the bouldered floor. To get out, we would use mechanical rope ascenders to climb to where above we had anchored the rope to a pillar. In and out, those were the options.

My first time caving, also called spelunking, was first-class adventure. Two hours into our subterranean plunge, it was difficult to accept that common folk could get to where we were, at the bottom of a complex cave system that required rope skills and a good level of physicality and guts.

But that kind of bold thinking gets big fish eaten by bigger fish. And there's always a bigger fish. Having rappelled to the bottom of the chamber, there in clear view of our landing spot was a metal cannister. It was a register, one typical of what mountaineers can expect to find on a popular summit. In it, a tablet of paper with dozens of names written on its pages, including a troop of Boy Scouts that had descended the cave the day before ours. Eight in all, Adam to Zack, had signed in along with the scout master. OK.

Finding the register did not deflate our experience but it did illustrate that of all the fish in the sea, we swam among them, neither apart from them nor bigger. Nothing, not even a humbling strike to our egos, could take from the bigness of the experience, one that I'm certain held the same exhilaration and wide-eyed surprises for whomever went before us. A first time doing anything holds a kind of magic that is not easily forgotten - if ever.

For this issue, Kate Siber, curious contributing editor and a self-professed "ninny" in the face of adventure, dove at the opportunity to take a canyoneering class - a first for her - in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. In her story, "Reasoning Through A Riddle," pg. 10, she discovered not only the world of canyoneering but a world of possibility.

So everyone, what's your next first time? And when?