Rat’s Nest Cave

It’s tough to snap a decent photo while crawling on your belly through a crevice too dark and tight for a sane human to negotiate. It’s also difficult to focus a camera (or one’s mind) when confronted by an oversize rodent cornered in a cavern.

Welcome to Rat’s Nest Cave.Though few Albertans know about it, this spelunking adventure is remarkably accessible. The trailhead is a mere ten-minute drive from Canmore.

We stretched our legs (and emptied bladders) on a bright winter morning after the drive from Red Deer. Our exuberant guides Nick and Darren distributed the gear required for our journey into the bowels of the earth. We signed the obligatory release forms and struggled into our cumbersome outfits – coveralls, mining helmets (with headlamps), heavy-duty gloves, kneepads and rock-climbing harnesses – before beginning the half-hour trudge up the steep, frozen watershed to the locked cave entrance on Grotto Mountain.

The first of our group ready for adventure. The red sign reads: “warning KEEP OUT blasting in the quarry could cause the roof to cave in”. An inauspicious welcome to the underworld.Nick offered last-minute instructions and warned us, “It’s dusty, dirty and dark in there. Leave your good camera in the car.” Sound advice. Halfway through the adventure my cheap point and shoot gave up the ghost, lens stuck half open like some poor creature lost in a cave, lifeless eyes staring into blackness.

Oh well. Some things are better experienced in the dark, unrecorded.

The web site warns prospective spelunkers that a reasonable degree of physical fitness and openness to small, cramped spaces is recommended. No shit.

The guides unlocked the gate and our large group of family and friends climbed into pitch black. Barely accustomed to the darkness we began a steep, rump down, slip-sliding descent. Carabineers secured us to a rope, which was in turn anchored to the cave wall. Nick had given us careful instructions on how to detach and reattach the carabineers to this lifeline. This was a clever idea since a misstep meant certain death – a plunge off the ledge into the aptly named “Bone Bed”.

Like most caves Rat’s Nest formed inside a limestone mountain over millions of years, influenced by the on-again, off-again effect of flooding water. Small internal faults in Grotto Mountain eventually developed into an enormous serpentine underground cavern. Later, dripping water containing calcite slowly shaped into stalagmites, stalactites and a multitude of other unique cave features. These delicate mineral formations known as speleothems can take tens of thousands of years to grow but can be destroyed in an instant by a careless human footfall.

That’s why the cave, a Provincial Historic Site, is locked, accessible only by guided tour – and for exploration by scientists. Chas Yonge, a PhD in geology, to whom the cavern’s care is entrusted, has been probing the reaches of Rat’s Nest since the 1980s.

The cave is named for the packrats who inhabit its damp interior. Carbon dating suggests that these hamster-size rodents have been nesting comfortably (if somewhat darkly) in the safety of the cave for thousands of years.

The year-round cave temperature is a constant 5°c, a reflection of the ambient external climate in this neck of the woods. On the day of our December adventure the weather was crisp and wintry. So it felt strange entering the cave and being greeted by warm, moist and surprisingly fresh air.

Edging my way down into the abyss and wary of the Bone Bed I hugged the cave wall. Unfortunately this is where the rats nest, tucked amongst neatly stacked bones gathered from the remains of unlucky critters that strayed into this warren of dark hidden cliffs. I came face-to-face with one of these rodents but she quickly scurried off.

Regrettably the “safe” side of the path was also inhabited by thousands of squirming spiders. (I later found out that these were daddy-long-legs from the “harvester” family. But this is small consolation.)

And this was the easy part of the adventure.

Minutes later we were rappelling down a 20-meter cliff into vast, dark emptiness. Dust particles scattered my headlamp’s beam, obscuring what lay below. I pushed off into the abyss, reliant upon a thin tentacle of rope and our guide’s reassuring nod.

When I finally touched terra firma on the cave floor my face expressed the same emotion as my fellow novice cavers waiting at the bottom: relief, and an “I can’t believe I just did that” sense of joy.

But the truly frightening part of our spelunking was yet to come: the “Laundry Chute” awaited.

In caving parlance the Laundry Chute is known as a squeeze. A squeeze entails squirming and manipulating one’s body – underground in the dark – irreversibly through a tight opening that may not have an exit. My admiration for the person who first navigated the Laundry Chute is irreversible. What a nut.

But as oft happens, peer pressure prevailed. All of us were foolhardy enough to squeeze our coveralls through that tight chute. I can barely breathe reliving the memory.

Deep in a cave there is no light. Nada. When headlamps are extinguished one is blind. Wave a hand in front of your face from now until eternity – you’ll never see a thing.Nick was giddy with excitement at the pluckiness of his recruits and decided to offer us a special treat: crawling a cave channel in absolute darkness. For a few minutes we bumped and bruised our way along the uneven, narrow passage, ineptly following his voice, intensely grateful for our kneepads.

We’d been underground for four hours when we finally worked our way back to the surface. The cold, snowy late-afternoon winter light was ethereal but welcome. Some, relieved at being out of the cave’s confined space, slid happily down the frozen trail to the parking lot.

Are you claustrophobic? Scared of heights? Does the thought of crawling on your belly in pitch-blackness around the nest of a large rodent sound unappealing? Are you unwilling to negotiate a precipice hanging from a thin lifeline? Then avoid Rat’s Nest Cave. But if you are looking for an exhilarating underground experience, slap on the coveralls, turn on your headlamp and carabineer your way down into one of Alberta’s natural wonders.

Gerry