Novice Spelunker

Have you ever been to the interiors of a mountain? Have you ever stepped barefoot into the softest, serene and quiet part of the mountain wild and the undomesticated? Last week I had an extraordinary experience of entering one of the caves of Sierra Madre in Cagayan Valley. The Sierra Cave is one among many mystique caves found in the Philippine islands that continue to capture the imagination of intrepid men and women across the globe.

As a novice spelunker, it came as a surprise for me to witness such underground wonders sealed within subterranean vaults or grand halls of calcareous/limestone formations. They have been deposited there unperturbed for hundreds and thousands of years.

It was my first time to see a living cave. The Sierra cave is closed to the public as a way of respecting the speleothems (cave deposits) that continue to evolve there. They are alive when they gleam like crystals at the touch of light. I was extra careful in not touching the limestone formations because I was afraid of disturbing their growth. I was told that the average growth rates are about 1 cm for every 15 years to ½ inch for every 100 years. The cave ceilings, floors and walls have been riddled with all kinds of formations through thousand years of drop by drop acid rainwater passing through bedrock cracks. Many different speleothems are common in caves including soda straw, the common carrot-shaped stalactites, stalagmites and columns. Nestor, our accredited DENR guide showed us other formations like “baconstrips,” cave coral or “popcorn,” “flakes” and “pretzel.” I became famished upon my first look at such crystalline structures.

Until now I continue to marvel at what I had witnessed. I guess the wonder does not only stop at the sheer sight of it. I marvel more about the fact that within its hushed confines, where the only sounds are those of the trickling water and the shrill chirp of pesky and frightening bats and the fact that for some thousands of years its narrow passages never had a taste of a single ray of sunlight, the cave has been a world of breathtaking wonders and natural beauty. Again, this is a testament to the character of our God of wonders, who work in mysterious and very clandestine ways only to reach out to us.