Calvin’s Outdoor Recreation program ran its first-ever caving trip the weekend of Nov 15-17.
Outdoor Recreation at Calvin organizes events regularly throughout the school year, with the goal of expanding access to wilderness adventures for the Calvin student body. These include wilderness orientation trips each year for new students, regular weekend mountain biking excursions and an outdoor Bible study.
Juniors Luke Coffel and Grace Poortenga, who both led wilderness orientation trips this fall, came up with the idea of a caving trip for Calvin students after leading caving trips this summer with a camp in Wisconsin.
After pitching the idea to Ryan Rooks, Calvin’s director of campus recreation and outdoor programs, Coffel and Poortenga chose Sullivan Cave in southern Indiana as the ideal spot for the trip. In addition to the Calvin students on the trip, several people joined the trip as guides. “They were super familiar with the cave system, and so that made it run really smooth,” Coffel explained.
From the start, the trip was an adventure. Sullivan Cave has more than nine miles of underground tunnels and is privately owned and managed. “We camped near the cave, but I had no idea where the cave was when we were camping,” Zach Kern, a freshman who went on the trip, said. “The guides were like, alright, you’re going to find the cave, we’re going to give you two hints.”
After exploring a ravine, Kern and the others found the entrance to the cave. “Sure enough, there’s a little trap door that was locked—it’s private access—and so the guides unlocked it, and we descended down… and then, boom, it’s a whole world below,” Kern said.
Gabe Wood, a senior studying psychology and philosophy, was surprised by what the cave was really like. “You would kind of expect a cave to be really claustrophobic and scary,” Wood said. “Whenever I thought of caving previously, I thought it would just be crawling in a tunnel the size of your body for hours, but while there were a couple small sections like that for the most part it was really big open caverns and passageways.”
Deep underground, it wasn’t just the rock formations that were impressive. Both Wood and Coffel were surprised at the diversity of wildlife in the cave system. They spotted fish, salamanders, crawfish, and bats living far out of reach of any sunlight. “It was cool to think that things could be living down there somehow,” Wood said.
Coffel and Poortenga were both happy with how the trip went and are hoping to run similar trips in the spring semester and future years. “The group of students we brought, pretty much none of them had been caving before, but they all had a really good time, and nobody got claustrophobic or freaked out or anything,” Poortenga said.
“I would totally do something like this again,” Wood said. “I think a lot of people really enjoyed it and it was a success.”
Coffel emphasized that there will be many more chances for interested students to try out something new with Outdoor Rec. “It really is just so accessible,” he said. “Anyone can just come to the rock wall and sign up for a weekend trip, and we would love to take you caving.”
Poortenga appreciates how the many outdoor recreation opportunities at Calvin “open up the door to introduce people to outdoor recreation and outdoor sports, because I think they can be pretty intimidating.”
Coffel, who transferred to Calvin last year, has been grateful for how easy it was to get involved with outdoor recreation. “Just being outside is good for mental health, and it’s good for breaking up the monotony of school, and I think just the experiential part of [Outdoor Rec], we get to take a group of students out and do something really cool,” Coffel said.
