You’ve got your helmet, you’ve got your lights, you’ve got your pack filled with essentials, but as you can probably tell, this won’t bring you too far, especially when you need to do more extreme activities like rappelling, so if you aim to do this, what should you bring?
Harness
A caving harness, like other types of harnesses, is a piece of equipment meant to protect an individual from injury. In vertical caving, it would protect a person from a fall from a large height, as an accident may cause a person to slip down.
The caving harness is made specifically for caves, and ideally, it is lightweight and comfortable for the caver. If you decide to buy one, get a caving harness that can be paired with a chest harness.
Chest Harness
As the name suggests, the chest harness is meant to properly fit around your chest and is best paired with a caving waist harness. It is used for ascending up ropes that have been fixed in a specific spot.
Climbing Rope
You can’t do vertical climbing in caves without rope. Make sure to bring rope that you’re sure will hold up.
What you’re looking for is rope that is long enough for you to drop down with length to spare, while also being made of material ideal for static rigging. For that, it means material that has a lot of strength and abrasion resistance, while having as less stretch as possible. Nylon is great in this regard, but it can also stretch more when it gets wet. Polyester rope, on the other hand, has less stretch than nylon.
For length, you want it to be at least 150 feet. It will overcompensate for most caves and still have some length to spare to comfort you.
Ascenders
Caving ascenders are designed specifically to handle the difficulties of a cave environment. Dirt, mud, and whatever might grime your equipment up will do squat against a good cave ascender, as they are designed specifically to resist those things due to them being practically your only way out of the cave.
They minimize friction with rope to reduce wear within the person ascending, while also reducing wear and tear on the rope to ensure that it is still keeping you hanging.
Descenders
If there is an ascender, then it would be natural that there would be a descender as well. Also known as rappel devices, descenders are meant to apply friction to a rope in order to better control the speed of descent.
You may have heard the saying, “The most dangerous thing about a fall isn’t the fall itself, but the sudden stop.” The descender is meant to prevent that, as it allows a person to rappel down at a certain speed without going down way too fast. It also allows them to speed up if they think they’re descending too slow.
Descenders are attached to a caver through a master attachment point. The rope would thus have to go through the descender and cause a lot of friction in the process, helping you control the speed at which you drop.
Cow’s Tail
No, a cow’s tail isn’t literally a tail of a cow. It is actually a certain length of rope attached to your harness. By the end of the rope, it has a carabiner at the end, which is used for hooking and clipping into traverses. A caver should have both a short and a long version, of which they are usually tied from the same piece of rope.
Other than the rope, the carabiner also matters. A key-lock gate is much better than a hook gate, as the key-lock is much firmer in keeping the carabiner shut. A hook gate, on the other hand, can be bypassed with enough force on a specific area.
Important: Don’t use climbing equipment for caving if possible
You might be tempted to use climbing equipment for caving, especially due to how similar some equipment may appear. Some climbing equipment can be used for caving with minor differences, but others are better off unused.
To give an example, let’s look at the harness. A climbing harness will not be able to hold up to the conditions of a cave, as they wear out more easily. Not only that, climbing harnesses are more likely to catch on to things due to their design, while their attachment point in the front is higher than that of a cave harness. Cave harnesses have a lower attachment point for better support, while also eliminating the risk of a fall that might flip someone upside down.
But not all is doom and gloom. For instance, we can take a look at ascenders. Climbing ascenders are designed to be lighter and more easily racked than cave ascenders. Unlike cave ascenders, they are vulnerable and don’t function as well when dirt plugged or if the rope gets wet.
If you only aim to enter a cave once and the cave doesn’t have any difficult formations or technical hiccups to get over, a climbing ascender will do you good. Still, it would be better to switch to a proper cave ascender when given the opportunity to do so.