Deathtraps, Hantavirus, and the Other Joys of Caving | Adam Weaver, Caver | Ep. 029

Adam Weaver holds the world record for the farthest anyone has ever traveled from a cave entrance — miles of crawling and climbing into a place no helicopter or rescue team can reach. He edits NSS News, America's only national caving magazine, and was recently tapped by ABC News to break down the Laos cave rescue for the public. In one of the most genuinely unsettling episodes we've recorded (Andrew does NOT like caves), Adam gets into the gear, the 9-inch passages, and the very real ways a cave can kill you — plus the full story of a teenager trapped a mile deep, 24,000-year-old mummified animals, and a quarter-mile traverse with no floor.   In this episode, we talk about: Becoming a Caver: Beyond "Spelunking" The Record: The Farthest You Can Get From Rescue Cave Conservation & the Technical Side of Caving Mummified Animals & 1890s Newspapers The Real Hazards: Lost, Stuck, and Hypothermic A Teenager Trapped a Mile Underground Surface Chaos, Three Agencies & "Lavender Larry" The "Atom Smasher" & Making a Cave PassableWhat Lies Beneath: A Quarter Mile With No Floor Living Underground: Multi-Day Cave Camps Who Owns a Cave? Permits & Land Access Nutty Putty & How Dangerous Caving Really Is Naming Discoveries: "To Boldly Go" How You Actually Map a Cave (and the LiDAR Future) Black Hills Institute: Dinosaurs & a New Plesiosaur Where to Start Caving & Farewell   CONNECT!  Catch up with Hayden on IG, TikTok, and more: https://linktr.ee/Hayden_Sammak Follow TBM on Youtube, IG, and everywhere else: https://linktr.ee/BackcountryManifesto   CREDITS Intro and Animations by Barry Thompson Photograph Contributions for Animation by Carver Weeks Additional Graphics by Andrew O’Neill  Production Assistance by John Stock  “Welcome to the Backcountry” theme song by Logan Roth, Will Brown, Arjun Dube and produced at Treacle Mine Studios, Phila, PA   Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025 #podcast #cave #rescue #cavediving #laos