Don't mistake me. I know perfectly well that given the current
official doctrines among emergency agencies, the city had no choice
about how it responded at Airman's. The point is that if I were king,
the doctrines would be a lot different, and cavers and taxpayers would
be better off. Plenty of people lobby for sparing no effort and
expense to protect people, even from themselves. Expecting people to
chain their children up in the back seat of the car comes to mind. An
occasional dissenting voice, in addition to those "shit happens"
bumper stickers, can't hurt.
Why does one have to jump through hoops to visit, say, Austin's
Midnight Cave? >>>>>Julie Jenkins and a few others deserve a lot of
credit for keeping those hoops as low as they are<<<<<, but
nevertheless one wonders (or at least _I_ wonder) just why one can't
make a spur-of-the-moment visit to Midnight Cave just for fun when one
can go rappel a cliff on Barton Creek twice as high as Midnight is
deep anytime one wants to without permission from anyone. Two answers
occur to me. One is that is was easy to close off access to Midnight
Cave, whereas closing off the cliffs along Barton Creek would be a lot
more difficult (but I'll bet the safety fussbudgets would if they
could). The second is that some cavers encourage governments to
"manage" all their caves, which of course translates mostly into
managing cavers. From the city of Austin up to the US Department of
the Interior, the idea seems to be that cliffs are inherently open,
whereas caves are inherently closed, except when they are gracious
enough to make an exception. This is partly motivated, at least for
those cavers, by the illogical notion that because some caves need
protection, all caves need protection. Lechuguilla Cave needs
protection. There is nothing anyone can hurt in Austin's Midnight Cave.
We could do worse than the Austin city government's caving policy--the
state government's policy about caving at Devils Sinkhole, for
example. (Those who think it's a wonderful idea to have natural
features in public ownership should think about that.) The UT Grotto
recently got several gung-ho new members because they found out about
Airman's Cave (and its location, of course) on their own, loved it,
and tracked down the grotto. Keep it open. Airman's is warm, dry, and
boy is it horizontal; so are the cavers in it. It would be awfully
hard to hurt oneself seriously. There is little in it that can be
damaged, aside from certain unnatural mud sculptures. At least one
person has _died_ kayaking Barton Creek, and I imagine anyone who
follows such things could tell of some serious climbing accidents or
other falls there over the years. Don't freak out over minor incidents
at Airman's Cave.
An additional note relevant to the fuss about locations. _Anyone_ can
add the exact location of Airman's Cave to Google Earth. Some day
someone will post a list of all the known cave locations in Texas on
the Web. Welcome to the world as it is now. -- Mixon
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