I didn’t think I suffered from claustrophobia but yikes. Watching this video would be great exposure therapy.
It was the unsympathetic yokels egging everyone on that really got me freaking.
An acquaintance fresh out of Marine boot camp indicated the same dynamic was in play there.
The worst I ever did was a solid stone block, about fifty feet wide and twenty feet deep, with a gap underneath it filled with chert gravel that you had to crawl on your belly through. It was so tight I had to turn my head sideways to get through. I don’t think I could stomach doing it again.
I’ve done a couple of swim-throughs where I had to remove my tank first and pass it in front of me. Never anything as tight as the gap in the vid though.
Just try not to think about the fact that you could, actually, maintain consciousness for hours even with external pressure on your thorax restricting you to partial lung capacity and shallow, labored, breaths…
Absolutely insane. I would have brought a sledgehammer and some kind of oil to help some of these guys out. Besides widening the hole, the sledgehammer is good for knocking out any idiot who’d try a second time to convince me to go in there. A friend told me years ago about people who go caving and pass through very tight openings where they barely fit. The image has haunted me ever since. I think it’s been about 20 years.
I’ve been to a caving museum that recreated the tighter parts of caves on the museum floor, letting you see if you could worm your way through. It was quite cool.
My personal favorite was a tight switchback immediately after a muddy belly crawl, where the only way to get through was to twist yourself as you went.
I wasn’t expecting people to be so freaked out about this!
I feel badly for anybody who dies like this, but such experienced cavers must be aware of the risks. It sucks that goblinment types can’t ever stomach some kind of waiver to let people do something risky with acceptance of the consequences.
Set and setting are probably just as important to dying as with other big events in life. And even worst-case mishaps of wilderness adventures enable one to die in far more interesting circumstances than most people put up with - laying in a hospital surrounded by sick people, clinicals, and weepy relatives.