In my initial research of Rat’s Nest Cave I read about one of the cave’s main features: The Laundry Chute. Accurately named, The Laundry Chute is a vertical crawl down, then a sharp horizontal crawl, or shimmy, that requires you to shift your body down a tight tunnel that takes on an “L” shape. It takes approximately 2 minutes to complete this tight squeeze and it was worth every second. I can say I was looking forward to this squeeze the most and it didn’t disappoint.
We made our way through chutes and squeezes to a large room called the Grand Gallery. Being the largest room in the cave, you’ll hear the sounds of Earth… I remember staring straight up at the long fault line that leads all the way to Lake Minnewanka thinking, “These two chunks of the Earth formed the cave I’m standing in, shaped by pressure and time.” Max then told us that this fault line leads all the way to Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park, and the water that formed this cave is now the water in Lake Minnewanka.
For the first time in my life I saw alien-like formations. I don’t just mean these things “look” like fossils – they look and feel extraterrestrial. You’re surrounded by speleological features called stalactites and stalagmites; a natural phenomena basically made up of fossilized water and gas, shaped by moisture seeping through the cave’s ceiling and dripping on a vertical line. These formations can take thousands of years to grow, depending on how much moisture comes through the cave’s wall. I don’t believe I’ve ever been surrounded by such an ambient, otherworldly place. To say the cave isn’t alive is a lie. The mountain SWEATS all around you…it’s its own living ecosystem. At one point Larissa and I were both photographing the some of these formations, affectionately referred to as Pig’s Ears and as she lay on her back taking photos, a drop of water from one of these stalactites landed in her eye. It sounds like a mundane thing to bring up, but when you’re down there, all your senses come to life and everything has meaning.
“I watched that drop come down into my eye in slow motion,” Larissa said. “People tend to blink when something’s coming at their eye, but I literally watched it happen. It didn’t feel as it should have – intrusive – and it wasn’t something I wanted to wipe off my face immediately after either. I welcomed it. It was as if that cave wanted to be part of me as much as I wanted to be part of it and with pin-point accuracy, the cave entered my body through my eye. It runs through my veins now, it’s part of me. It was one of the most peaceful moments of true connection I’ve experienced in my life.” – Larissa Roque (@larissarpr) TWEET THIS