Cavers Share Adventures Thursday, March 27

Jackson, WY - Imagine wiggling through a space with an average ceiling height of less than 2 feet, with 39-degree water streaming across your body, for a thousand feet. That's how caver Chris Valiante describes "The Grim Crawl of Death," a featured attraction of Wyoming's Great Expectations Cave.

Valiante will recount the Grim Crawl and other features of "Great-X" during back-to-back slideshow talks when Teton County Library presents Caves from Wyoming to New Mexico from 6 to 7 p.m., Thursday, March 27 in the library's Ordway Auditorium. The program is free and open to the public thanks to the generous support of the Teton County Library Foundation.

The evening will start off with a slideshow talk by Nate Fuller on exploring caves in the Guadalupe Mountains of New Mexico. Fuller first ventured into the caves after receiving an Outdoor Adventure grant in 1999 from "Outside Magazine." He has since returned to the area as a volunteer and also as a U.S. Forest Service employee to assist with the High Guads Restoration Project, an effort to restore the caves by erasing damage left by previous visitors.

"They're really spectacular caves," Fuller says, explaining that the caves are heavily decorated with delicate features. Fuller is a Jackson resident and co-owner of Climbing Skins Direct.

Next, Valiante will turn the spotlight on Wyoming's Great-X, which features not just the Grim Crawl but also the Great Hall, the largest known room in a Wyoming cave. Great Expectations, located in the Big Horn Mountains east of Greybull, contains almost eight miles of surveyed passage with a vertical extent of over 1,400 feet.

"Although it's now the fourth deepest limestone cave in the United States, it is considered the premiere trip through an alpine cave in the country," Valiante says. Valiante lives in Driggs, Idaho, where he is part owner of Twenty Two Designs.

The caving program is being presented in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution's traveling exhibition, "Caves: A Fragile Wilderness," which looks at the unique and mysterious environment of caves. The exhibit features 39 color photographs taken by 23 National Speleological Society members, who have explored and photographed caves from Alaska to Malaysia. The traveling exhibit will be on view at the Teton County Library through April 28.

Whether underground, underwater, or within ice, caves have intrigued explorers since the days of early man. Adventurers have entered these hidden chambers seeking the thrill of seeing an unknown world and finding ornate features sculpted by nature from water and stone. Contemporary cavers often combine spelunking skills with photographic expertise to bring these extraordinary places to light.

Caves, however, can be endangered by human activities both under and above ground. Once destroyed, a cave and its contents cannot be recovered. Working in cooperation with the National Speleological Society, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History developed the exhibit "Caves: A Fragile Wilderness." The National Speleological Society is the largest caving organization in the world with more than 12,000 members in 180 chapters in the United States and abroad. The primary goals of the NSS have been to protect, conserve, explore and study caves. For information, visit www.caves.org. The National Museum of History is dedicated to maintaining and preserving the world's most extensive collection of natural history specimens and human artifacts. To learn more, visit www.mnh.si.edu.

Each year, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) shares the wealth of Smithsonian collections and research programs with millions of people outside of Washington, D.C. The exhibition "Caves: A Fragile Wilderness" is organized by the National Museum of Natural History, circulated by SITES and sponsored locally by the Teton County Library Foundation. For information on this exhibit and related programs, contact the library's Adult Humanities Program Coordinator, 733-2164 ext. 135 or odoherty@will.state.wy.us.

###
Teton County Library offers open and equal access to information, literature and ideas…to encourage a lifetime of learning, to strengthen our evolving community, to inspire us all.