Hello and Welcome!

 Hi everyone! I'm starting this blog to share my experiences of traveling, caving, rappelling, and many other things. I've always wanted to share with other people what caving is and give others the chance to experience something new! First things first, I'm Rocky Rhodes and I have been exploring caves since before I could walk. No really! My mom would put me in a backpack or carry me through commercial caves until I could do it myself with my two older brothers. I grew up where our vacations were in tents and we were happy if we ended up covered in mud, in fact i would try to get as muddy as possible. I liked to call it my spa treatment because I would bath in mud. As the youngest, and the only girl besides my mom, I got all the hand me downs which made it more fun and toughened me up. My first cave suit was also my mom's first, my brother Trevor's first, and the brother between us, Josh's first. So by the time it was mine, it didn't have much protection, especially in the butt area! I was the smallest and since i got it last I used a lot of duck tape to keep the suit going. By the end of the suits life I was making a duck tape diaper every time I would cave. As my brothers and I got older, we bought our own suits and gear. All three of us went through a dry spell where we were growing up and life got in the way, but all of us came back to caving and will forever be cavers. Comparing bruises became the usual dinner talk and that hasn't changed, but how often we get to cave has been affected by many things throughout our lives, Covid being the biggest road block. I have been in so many caves I couldn't even tell you how many or the names of most of them. I've traveled to many states on the eastern side of the US, Mexico twice, and was in Thailand for a month just for caving! 2018 was a time of growth for my mom and I, since we had an opportunity to go to Mexico for the first time in January 2019 and rappel into pits ranging from 150' to 1200'! We learned to become Vertical, bought all our gear, went to many events to practice, learned knots, and got as comfortable as we could with heights and being on rope. Before learning to be vertical, it was all crawling, climbing, squeezing, and even boating through caves, and adding ropes into the mix opened up so many more caves for us to do. There is a giant caving community and as many events there are for cavers, many people don't understand what caving is. Exploring caves , in its simplest form, is hiking underground with headlamps. There are many necessities required to cave, but mostly you just have to know someone who knows the cave, a leader. For me, it was a lot easier than for most since I grew up in a caving family which is a part of a caving Grotto. There are grottoes all over the US which are a part of something called the National Speleological Society; a group of experts, scientists, geologists, and many others who protect caves, create maps, and expand the caving knowledge and community. The NSS has been around since 1941 and hold a convention every year in a different state and many travel all over the world to be a part of it! This is only the start of what is out there and how my love for caving started. I hope to show how much more is out there and maybe grow my caver community!!