"The primal draw of the cave is as undeniable as the primal dread in which it is wrapped. So long as there are holes in the ground, uneasy adventurers will poke into them, candles flickering." Michael Ray Taylor thus describes the beckoning subterranean wilderness in this literary exploration of the sport of caving--a stunning blend of natural history, travel/adventure writing, and personal essay.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Caving is exciting, adventurous, and sometimes dangerous. It's the one true exploration frontier still available to the individual. Michael Ray Taylor's fascination with canyons and crevices hundreds of feet below the earth has taken him from Wyoming's Grim Crawl of Death to Chinese burial caves, the Old Croton Aqueduct beneath Spanish Harlem, and in 1994 to Zacaton, Mexico, where the world's greatest cave diver, Sheck Exley, dies in a dive. In a book of travel adventure, natural beauty, and emotional honesty, Taylor tours the world's deepest and least accessible pits, illuminating the personalities and people whose passion is slithering in the dark.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
If cave diving is the ultimate in extreme sport, then cave exploration is right behind it. Taylor, a veteran caver and expedition leader for the National Speleological Society, points out that because the last frontiers are space, the ocean floor and underground, caving is the obvious choice for most individuals. He gives a vivid account of special adventures?slithering through narrow chimneys, using rock-climbing techniques to descend, and squeezing through passages less than a foot high in icy water. The Grim Crawl of Death, in Wyoming's Great Expectations Cave, is, he says, the ultimate test of skill and resolve; it is the Eiger of American caving. Taylor describes a 1991 rescue?which took four days and involved 170 people?of a woman in the Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico. He chronicles other underground adventures in China, Jamaica and the Old Croton Aqueduct in New York State. Taylor reminds us that caves are exceedingly fragile systems?a careless or clumsy caver can destroy 10,000 years of geologic sculpture. This is an involving introduction to another mysterious world.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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More About the Author
Michael Ray Taylor is the author of the books Cave Passages, Dark Life, and Caves, and has published over 100 feature articles and essays in such venues as Sports Illustrated, Audubon, Outside, Reader's Digest, National Geographic Traveler, The Houston Chronicle and the website of The Discovery Channel. He has served as a consultant on feature films and has worked on documentaries for National Geographic, PBS and The Discovery Channel. He is a professor of communication at Henderson State University and lives in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, with his wife, three sons, his father-in-law, two cats and a rat terrier.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Continued praise for Cave Passages,
By
This review is from: Cave Passages : Roaming the Underground Wilderness (Hardcover)
After finishing this book for the second time, I again felt the pang of loss for having the pages not continue. A blend of caving, philosophy, and caving philosophy, his work gives one pause for finding meaning in one's life. I for one am jealous of the karst regions he has been fortunate to explore. Telling about those exploits is handled with style that doesn't get in the way of the story itself. I'm sure others would enjoy this book. I do.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enter the fascinating world of caving.,
By Lee Pearson(lee-the-magician@rocketmail.com) (Hollywood, Florida) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Cave Passages : Roaming the Underground Wilderness (Hardcover)
Come visit Michael Ray Taylor's underground world and explore some of the last great wilderness on earth without leaving the safety and comfort of your armchair. This collection of short stories on caving takes you around the world to some of the most exotic caving regions. Michael's easy and casual style of writing puts you right in the action. One can easily imagine how tight the Devil's Pinch must be, and what those rocks felt like as they squeeze you from above and below. I liked how Michael made each account personal by letting you get to know the other cavers and the local inhabitants of the region. This book is for anyone with an adventurous spirit.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best books on caving to be published in decades.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Cave Passages : Roaming the Underground Wilderness (Hardcover)
Michael does an excellent job in this book describing what it is like to travel in the subterranean world of caves. He is
able to capture the imagination of the reader and transport them into his real life experiences. At times the reader
actually feels like they are crawling through bat guano in
some carribean cave while realizing that it is safer here than being on the surface where you might get shot at. This
is real life Indiana Jones with a little extra thrown in.
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