Climbing through time

ON THE BAY Magazine

Published: Fall 2008

Climbing Through Time
The caves and crevices around Collingwood offer a fun-filled glimpse into the past

by Katie Bailey, photographs shot by Matt Fimio

It’s as dark as night. Darker, even. The walls are cold, almost too cold to touch. Water drips, drips, drips from somewhere above, its origins unknown. It is eerily quiet. Time and place cease to have meaning. We are definitely somewhere – the rocks are cold to the touch, their surface smooth and damp – but we could be anywhere, at any point in time. There’s nothing in our environment, not even light, to tie you to the modern day. Except, thank goodness, the clothes on our backs, which come in handy in the chill and damp.

There are 10 of us crouched in a crevice about a foot and a half wide, somewhere in the bowels of Metcalfe Rock, the mighty chunk of the Escarpment near Kolapore. We are waiting in the pitch black, headlamps off, for our photographer, Matt, to get a cool shot of us in this primitive landscape. We are caving, an activity that is completely unlike anything any of us expected. The name implies that you’ll be walking through a cavern, probably with high ceilings and a well-worn footpath. Maybe there’ll even be a stream of some sort, or, gulp, bats. Instead what our group experienced on a recent outing with Free Spirit Tours, was an incredibly athletic afternoon of crawling, climbing, squeezing, shimmying, slipping, reaching, pushing and pulling though cracks, gaps and holes in the rock. And laughing like maniacs for the majority of the three-hour session.

To go caving is to experience life as a primitive human might. Only you get to switch on a headlamp to see in the dark. But in every other respect, you are at the mercy of the mighty Escarpment. These “caves” may have provided shelter for one of our ancestors perhaps, but today, they is providing us with one entertaining afternoon.

A unique and somewhat niche activity, caving is a popular local sport thanks to the geological bounty that is the Niagara Escarpment. The attraction is the foreign nature of the experience – when was the last time you crawled through rocks, dirt and muck and had a grand time doing so?

To go caving is to go back in time, in many more ways than one. It is to experience our geography in a completely new way and to learn, first-hand, some of the great stories the Escarpment has to tell.

Caving is done all over the world and has probably been going on for as long as humans have needed a place to crawl into for shelter. Its modern incarnation is for sport and for fun. Unlike climbing, it requires no special equipment besides a helmet and a headlamp, although we do wear climbing harnesses for safety (in case someone takes a tumble and has to be hauled out by a rope). Best of all, you can do it anywhere the geography allows.

In our lovely locale, the Niagara Escarpment allows for all sorts of caving opportunities. Thanks to 450 million years of evolution, we have among us a unique rock formation that has been on the move for millions of years. All of that movement has left behind warrens of crevices, caves and karsts, which are holes formed by dissolved rock. And so into those openings cavers go, searching for new routes through the rocks, new spaces to wiggle around in and just generally being enveloped in a foreign environment.

To go caving is to enter a new world, one that’s essentially right in your own backyard. In a very real sense, the deeper you go in the rock, the deeper you go into the past. For some, caving might just be a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon, but if you stop and think about it – crouched as you are in their midst – these rocks have an incredible story to tell.

The caves and crevices into which we are descending have been a long time getting here. The foundations of the Escarpment go back 450 million years to the Palaeozoic Era, when organic life forms first flourished, only to be wiped out again millions of years later in mass extinction. Their death ultimately led to the formation of the mass of rock that graces the shores of Georgian Bay today – the limestone of the Escarpment found its calcium content from the shells and skeletons of ancient sea creatures that once lived and breathed in a sea that covered this entire area.
The birth of the Escarpment is also geologically interesting because it is not the product of plate tectonics but of erosion. Time and the movement of water continually pushed, prodded and wore the rock away, shaping it into its current form as a wandering rocky range through Southern Ontario.

You only have to look at sections of the Escarpment to see history unfolding right before your eyes. The beautiful layers of rock denote great chunks of time in which things lived, died, crumbled, compressed, and turned to stone. There are fossils littered all over the Escarpment, to the delight of geologists and children alike. Finding a Tribolite fossil, a long-extinct arthropod from the same family as insects and crustaceans, has made many a local rock-collector’s day.

The Tribolite’s disappearance marked the “modern” age of the Escarpment and its slow formation into the shape we see today. Glaciers covered it until as recently as 12,000 years ago and since then it has been on the move, growing and declining in a constant dance that continues to this day.

The fact that erosion, not plate tectonics, gave rise to the Escarpment is almost a letdown. When you look at the Rocky Mountains, it’s fun to picture the Earth’s plates crashing together and bursting into the jagged peaks we see today. (In my mind, this happens within minutes. It’s very dramatic.) The Escarpment, on the other hand, you might picture as a sculpture in the hands of a very patient artist piling various types of rocks slowly on top of one another, the soft ones wearing away while the hard ones remain, subtly changing the shape over time. It is a sculpture that is perpetually on loan to different galleries: it is estimated that the Escarpment has migrated hundreds of kilometres across Ontario thanks to the forces of erosion.

This is an exceedingly simple explanation of its formation, but you get the idea: the Escarpment is not just a chunk of rock, but a living, breathing organism as vital as any body of water or fertile field.

As we commence our little journey into history, our adventure is marked with hands-on experiences of the Escarpment’s past. We cross into the Metcalfe Rock climbing area, and on our way, pass a stream out of which our guide Alan MacDougall of Free Spirit Tours encourages us to drink (we are hesitant, but on the way out, dunk our water bottles right in – there is, as Al says, nothing like “Earth water” after an exhausting afternoon).

Then we hike up into a sun-filled valley and pause to admire a twisted tree root that is, astonishingly, 1,200 years old. This, my friends, is one of the reasons why UNESCO named the Escarpment as a World Biosphere Reserve – there are cliff-side trees here estimated to be 4,000 years old.

Then Al preps us for our first foray into the deep, the aptly named Tunnel Cave. (Al, by the way, is a great guide and looks exactly like what you’d expect a caving guide to look: long hair, big smile, unwavering enthusiasm for all things outdoors.) We will go in one-by-one, he explains, and we must all take care to pass his instructions down the line like a game of telephone. This inspires a legion of telephone-game jokes, like “Watch the slippery rock” turning into “Purple dishwasher monkey soup,” but as soon as we get into the cave, it becomes apparent why teamwork is so important. There is only one Al, and he’s at the front – there isn’t always room for him to shimmy back and help us out individually.

The Tunnel Cave turns out to be a pretty easy go until the end, when we have to take a bit of a ‘leap of faith’ out of what is basically a circular hole in the rock face. You have to back out and there is a brief moment where your feet aren’t on the ground, you are draped on your stomach over a rock, with your hands precariously gripping. Al will let you know that your feet are just one inch from the ledge, but it’s a bit hard to believe when you’re in such a compromised position.

Caving is essentially rock climbing in a very tight space (needless to say, this is not a sport for claustrophobics). The tunnels and crevices are small and we have to constantly climb up and over boulders and then slide back down the other side. Al helps us when he can by pointing out handholds and ledges for our feet, but sometimes he’s up ahead and it’s up to us to search them out ourselves. It’s a mental game in these instances, putting together the puzzle of getting up each obstacle. You have to take your time and although it’s unlikely you will be hurt, you do have to be calculated in your actions to ensure safe passage.

Thanks to Al, and the enthusiastic guide Samantha who brings up the rear, we all make it through the Tunnel Cave and then after that, the even trickier Anvil Cave. But what’s next is what we have all been waiting for: the famous Bat Cave! Al points to a hole in the ground – literally, a hole – and indicates that is our destination. He does so with a huge smile, as we appropriately gasp.

“I love the look of disbelief and the ‘you’re crazy’ reaction that people give me when I point at a tiny little hole and tell them we are going in there,” he later laughs. “Then they see me or another guide go in and the excitement and adrenaline overwhelm them and in they go!”

We are no exception. We scramble in like ducks in a row, crouching and weaving our way through. There are times when it is all quite surreal – at one point some of us have accomplished a difficult manoeuvre up onto a higher rock while we can hear the others beneath the rock, talking.

Aside from the tight quarters and full-body workout, one of the most surprising aspects of the caves is the temperature. It is literally freezing in the Bat Cave even though it’s probably 30° C outside. Even more incredible is that when you are outside hiking along the outer perimeter of Metcalfe Rock, you pass cracks in the rock and get hit with a blast of cold air, like walking by a store with its doors open and air conditioner on full blast in the middle of summer.

The final cave we enter is the Ice Cave. We were supposed to skip it, as we had filled up our time with Al, but he generously acquiesced after some prodding. As promised, there is a big chunk of ice right there in the opening to the cave. And we have to literally slide over it, me on my derriere. Right there in the middle of summer, with winter but a distant memory, we find ice in the middle of Metcalfe Rock. Excellent.

Although you can go caving whenever you like and wherever you are allowed, there are two main adventure-tourism groups that offer caving local excursions: Scenic Caves and Free Spirit Tours. Each offers a different take on caving in different locations: Free Spirit explores Metcalfe Rock, while Scenic Caves offers tours of the caves at Blue Mountain. If you want to see the Scenic Caves firsthand before you go, you can check out a cool virtual tour on their website and see what it’s all about (www.sceniccaves.com/green/virtual-tour.htm).

Whichever part of the Escarpment you choose to explore, caving is a great activity for families. One family in our group – mom Heather Evans and her sons Justin, 14, and Lachlan, 11, are visiting relatives on an annual summer trip from Ohio. And although Heather only went through one cave (she’s claustrophobic), she was thrilled with how the day went.

“I was totally impressed,” she said afterwards. “The whole experience was amazing. I can’t believe that all ages could get through the spaces. I only did the one cave and, although I felt a little short of breath, the accomplishment for the kids was breathtaking in a good way!”

Both Justin and Lachlan echoed her sentiment. “I thought it was really cool,” said Justin. “The small spaces were really challenging to get through. It definitely was not what I was expecting. I thought it was going to be a lot more open and that you could walk though, but instead it was a lot of crawling.”

Added Lachlan, “I thought that it was going to be wider in some places, but others, like the Ice Cave, I though was going to be small and then it wasn’t. And it was really slippery! I fell a couple of times, but it was awesome.”

That aspect of surprise is what really gets people excited, says Jennie Elmslie, co-founder of Free Spirit Tours and an avid caver herself. “A lot of people think you’re going to walk into a big room and look around, and in fact it’s nothing like that at all,” she explains. “It can be quite challenging both mentally and physically, but the reward is making it through. People feel a real sense of accomplishment afterwards and it’s a real thrill going through the caves. I also think people are amazed at what they can do.”

We certainly are. The day has been filled with surprises, but what turned out to be the best part is the camaraderie that we formed as a group. We had to help each other through the caves, sometimes in a pretty physical way, and it fosters solidarity quickly. What were 10 strangers going in were, I like to think, friends on the way out. And if you can’t learn to trust a person while helping them climb, in the pitch dark, over a hole that appears to be bottomless, onto a slippery rock, then who can you trust?

Crouched in the cave, slightly disoriented in the dark, it’s neat to think that at that very moment, you could be a human in any era of time: maybe you’re hiding from a pack of wild animals or maybe you’re seeking cover from the winter winds. But maybe you’re just a group of like-minded people looking to take advantage of a sunny Saturday afternoon in a place unlike any other.

Six months after this article was published, our guide, Alan MacDougall, died tragically in a vehicle accident near Metcalf Rock. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.

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