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Break testing my homemade caving harness

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I use a homemade harness for caving, rather than any commercially available one. This tends to alarm some people, as one's harness is a critical, single-point-of-failure piece of life support equipment. It tends to alarm more people from the rock climbing world than from the caving world, as caving has much more of a DIY/homemade gear culture due to its niche nature, with fewer large gear manufacturers mass-producing any and all gear that a caver could ever want. The other week, back in May, I had the chance to pull my harness to failure and determine its breaking strength. AKS Tower Supply , a local business selling rope access/work-at-height equipment in Albuquerque, has one of these break testing machines, and opened it up to the public for one night for members of the New Mexico Mountain Club to come and break test all of their old, worn out, or otherwise questionable gear. I was super eager to test a bunch of my old and worn out caving gear, especially the homemade gear,
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Caving in the Grand Canyon: Silent River Cave

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This past Memorial Day Weekend (May 24-28), I went on a caving trip in the Grand Canyon. We had 8 people: Jason Ballensky (who organized the trip), Rachel Saker, Justinn James (JJ), Stan Allison, Hailey Galit, Robin Thomas, Sam Marks, and myself (credit to all of them for many of these pictures!). We backpacked in the afternoon of Friday the 24th after meeting up at midday at the north rim of the Grand Canyon, camped above the cave and caved for 3 days, and hiked out the morning of Tuesday the 28th. Many people are surprised to hear that the Grand Canyon has caves, since people associate the towering red cliffs of the Grand Canyon with sandstone, not cave-forming limestone. But in fact one of the major cliff-forming rock layers of the Grand Canyon is the Redwall Limestone, which is naturally grey but is stained red by layers of red shale and sandstone above it. The Redwall Limestone is a great cave-forming rock—it is from the Mississipian era, the same geologic era as other cave-form
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Snowy River passage in Fort Stanton Cave—scientific sample collection and exploration

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The other weekend, May 18-20, I did a 3 day camp trip in Fort Stanton Cave, just 3 hours away from Albuquerque. I went with some Massachusetts caving friends who were in the area because they come to Fort Stanton for caving once or twice a year: Riley Drake, John Dunham, and Ramon Armen (much credit to them for many of the photos in this trip report!). We camped at Midnight Junction, which is an established camp in the cave in the Snowy River passage, 10.2 miles of underground travel from the entrance. Fort Stanton Cave is notable for having passage that is extremely remote from the entrance in terms of distance and travel time. While other caves are longer in that they have more total passage, those longer caves tend to have densely connected passage that doesn't get too far from an entrance. The furthest point from the entrance in Fort Stanton is a whopping 13 miles of underground travel from the cave entrance. When you're all the way back there, you are extremely isola
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