bingo.
Yeah, I don’t know anything about caves or cave exploration, but this was my reaction, too. I guess it would be kind of gross to go inside with a dead body tehre, but sealing it up for all time? It would make sense to maybe warn people off going there for a while and then after it decayed, maybe people could go in again.
Boy, you’re testy. Did I claim any great caving experience? No. Are you honestly telling me that two pastimes that involve clambering over rock and 90% of the same gear are not in the least bit correlative? Firstly, it’s impossible to close off a mountain or rock face so that point is moot. You can close off a cave in a day. Secondly it takes far more experience and skill to climb a sheer face than it takes for some drunk campers to stumble into a cave to see what’s in it and get themselves in hot water which requires rescue crews to risk their lives to help them. That was my point, and I thought it was pretty clear.
As for the number of rescues? In Yosemite National Park alone YOSAR made 184 rescues in 2002 which is about 10 below average. Four of those were deaths. Of those 34 were climbing related (most are hiking related) as were three of the deaths. The totals for the rescues were almost half a million dollars for Yosemite alone.
http://www.nps.gov/archive/yose/sar/stats/02stats.htm
The NPS keeps stats on all the major parks if you care to check it out. They don’t have any caving stats that I can find.
LOL. Real Cavers? With capital letters no less? Give me a break.
Thats trade marked by the way. You owe me five dollars.
So is it that caves are danerous or that most people are idiots ?
So, basically, there are lots of climbing and hiking and whatever rescues, but caving ones are so rare you can’t even find some numbers ?
I’m not sure you’d even have to seal off half of the cave. Reading stuff online from people that knew the cave, most seem to think that Jones likely got stuck in a tunnel known as The Scout Eater. Which was so named because two pairs of Boy Scouts got stuck in it in two separate incidences in the past. If that’s the case, looking at this PDF map of the cave, it seems like you could seal off just the offshoot tunnel that leads to the Scout Eater well before where the body would be, keeping people at a respectful distance from the remains while still leaving most of the cave open.
I take it that you all haven’t seen this then?
Caves aren’t dangerous, eh?
Then those cavers who were there are wrong. If this cave were not even remotely dangerous, then this guy wouldn’t have died in it. That’s pretty much what “not dangerous” means.
So, everything anybody has ever died in/near/using/around is “dangerous”. Welcome to planet Earth my good friend.
Really, Chronos, of all people here on the SDMB, I really expected better. Or even at the very least something more insightful.
How many people have boiled themselves in Yellowstone? Is Yellowstone “dangerous” ?
How many tourists have fallen to their deaths in the Grand Canyon? Is it dangerous ?
How many people have been shot to death sitting in a cubicle? Or in a classroom?
Are those dangerous?
If you (all) want to talk stats and at what level something is "dangerous"or not, great. If your threshold for dangerous is someone once died there (perhaps even doing something stupid), then whats the difference between you and the antivacine extremists? Nothing IMO.
Funny, I wish it were that exciting 
Actually, depsite the total cheese of that movie, I like it on some levels.
I don’t think that you will stop shouting to the heavens that it isn’t dangerous, but at least now we’ll all have a reference point to work from when considering your statements.
Also, the slideshow you linked to seems to demonstrate, via pictures and narration, that Nutty Putty Cave is (or was) not a cakewalk. It’s not a huge open cave that Cha-ka could live in. Much of it is tight, twisting chimneys or crawls.
Bob’s Push, where Mr. Jones became trapped, is quite a ways in. It would be expensive, dangerous, and IMO silly to think that it would be a good idea to only block that part of the cave. Why risk anyone else to do that, when the entrance can just be sealed?
Um…yeah. Most of that stuff is dangerous. Not so much the cubicles or classrooms because they are incidental to the dangerous element (the crazy person with a firearm), but large boiling geysers and mile deep holes in the ground are dangerous. If you aren’t careful around those things, you can seriously hurt yourself. That’s what “dangerous” means - being able or likely to do harm.
There is a thing called “risk analysis”. You assess what the possible dangers are for a particular activity, weight them against the benefits and determine the best way to mitigate those risks if you still feel like going ahead with the activity. You don’t approach a scalding hot geyser. You don’t fuck around the edge of a mile deep canyon.
It’s disingenuous to say that spelunking doesn’t have an inherent bit of danger to it (otherwise no one would die doing it). You could crack your head, fall down a pit, get wedged in a crack, trapped by a cave in, caught in a flash flood that fills up the cave, impaled on a stalactite, killed by ancient boobytraps, lost and forced to spend the rest of your life eating bioluminescent fungus or be captured an eaten by C.H.U.D.s, Molemen or Morlocks. A smart person looks at the likelihood of these risks (from the relatively likely if you aren’t careful to the fantastically unlikely) and takes the appropriate precautions.
In other words, you accept a certain element of risk simply by getting out of bed in the morning.
I think it was only dangerous to Brendon Frasier’s acting career.
Really, I did not know that.
Of the population of cavers that actually cave that " I know" or have “known” that have died since I’ve “known” them, most of them have died of things having NOTHING to do with caving.
If you wanna call that dangerous, have at it.
Wow. The amount of silly horseshit posted here by clueless non-cavers is staggering. No ecosystem? Seriously? What the fuck?
Yeah, that was a gem.
What else do you view as horseshit?
What I said was:
And I stand by that. The cave has no ecosystem of any consequence. I didn’t say “has no ecosystem at all”, as mswas and now Ogre have claimed.
If y’all who have been misquoting me and mischaracterizing what I’ve said would like to debate what I actually said, have at it. Otherwise, stfu.
Yeah, I like using subjective qualifiers to make my opinion seem more objective than it is too. ;p
‘of any consequence’ is such a loaded distinction.
Kinda like “dangerous” when you get right down to it.