Moaning Caverns

I don’t have many fears in life, but one of them is edges where heights are involved. I’m not really scared of heights per se, but I definitely have a fear of being at the edge of a platform that’s high up. Also, it’s kinda specific; I’m fine if there’s a rail or support, but if “don’t fly out into the void” is put solely into my control, that just really gets to me.

No, I’m not interested in dissecting why I’m scared when I have to prevent myself from falling to my doom, why do you ask?

Any rate, we recently went to Angel’s Camp on vacation and decided to go on a tour of one of the caves there: Moaning Caverns. I’d been on a cave tour with my mom years ago and they’re really interesting; the rocks, the idea that someone came in here with candles, etc.

So we went on this tour and were going through some corridors, all fine; sure it was a little close, but that’s not one of my issues. But then we came across this:

Uh… I don’t know if you know this, but a staircase is nothing but a bunch of edges without a railing in front. So, I saw this and while I didn’t immediately get scared, I definitely wasn’t thrilled. I mean, it’s a 100-foot (10 story) spiral staircase down in to… blackness. No, I couldn’t see the bottom, which just means it’s really high.

As the tour started going down, I hung back. I mean, I know I’m gonna go slow, so I shouldn’t go first. Definitely wasn’t because I was hoping they’d forget me up here and I could just wait for them to come back up.

Alas my time to go into the darkness came. No, I don’t have any photos of my descent since my hands were firmly grasped to the cage and the central pole.. No, the fact that, if I fell, I wouldn’t go far because of the cage and the pole in the middle didn’t help at all. I was heart-in-throat terrified the entire way down, and my shaky legs were not fun to deal with as slow as I was going. My wife and daughter, who weren’t scared, tried to not be overly amused at my predicament and, for the most part, succeeded.

Eventually, after approx 100 years, I reached the bottom. It only took about 10 min for me to calm down back to some semblance of normal; of course, my calming was not sped up by the fact that they mentioned the steel to build the staircase had been repurposed from World War I battleships… Any rate, eventually I could look up at the staircase and think “oh, that’s not that bad, why was I so scared?”

And really, the rock formations were kinda worth it; it looked amazing down there

After looking around for a while and after they turned out the light to show how dark it was (spoiler: it was dark), we went back up. Now, because irrational fears are just that - irrational - I had zero problems going back up. Yes, I was just as likely to fall to my death going up as going down (read: not likely), but my lizard brain wants none of them facts and figures.

In all, it was a memorable experience where I faced my fears to spend time with my family and came out on the other side still not dead.