(soft music)
(truck engine)
- This box is going all beyond the rabbit hole.
I'm going to start on drills and grinders.
- Okay.
- I'm Ray Keeler,
I'm the president of the Central Arizona Grotto,
it's the local chapter of
the National Speleological Society.
We're about cave exploration, conservation, science,
and just a better understanding of the caves.
Today we are starting a three-day effort.
Friday is set up, Saturday there'll be about 20 people here.
All day, cleaning tags, and Sunday we'll work until noon,
and then bring all the equipment out of the cave.
- In we go, let's do it.
The sign outside has four rules.
No spray paint.
Pee before you go into the cave.
Have at least one light per person.
And then take your trash out with you.
(clattering)
(grunting)
- [Man] Air is blowing in.
(sloshing) (clattering)
The second room is one of the most graffiti-ed rooms
in the entire cave.
Reds, yellows, greens, blues, blacks, whites.
Names, symbols.
This room here had another 30 to 40 tags on this wall,
and that wall,
there are another 40 or 50 in that passage here,
it's a crawl-through.
So with all the teams working,
we just keep progressing into the cave.
(breathing heavily)
When we got here, there were five or six spray paint tags
with lots of colors, we've cleaned those off.
25 or 30 tags on this side that went clear in here,
through back into this passage,
and then another 50 scratches along this wall.
It was bad.
And we've cleaned it all out.
That was three people for three hours to do this.
Somebody wants to leave their mark,
same as 40,000 years ago
only they have spray paint and stable lights.
This is flat out unnecessary vandalism.
(drill whirring)
- The draw for me is the work.
I do a lot of conservation work,
this isn't the only cave I do.
It's tough when you gotta clean up other people's stuff,
it's bad enough cleaning up our own stuff.
And we try to be very, very careful when we're caving
so we don't leave even breadcrumbs on the ground.
(drill whirring)
So then to have to do it for other people, it's tough.
But it's what we do,
because we want to keep our environment.
- I participate in this project because I think caves
are one of the last places on Earth that are
really something special, really unexplored.
Something that most people never get a chance to see,
anything so out of the ordinary.
And this cave, it's great because it's really accessible.
A lot of people from Tucson,
from all over the place can come here
and really see what caving is all about.
But unfortunately over the years,
people have decided to vandalize it.
- We put in reflective arrows so you can see one,
to the next, and if you miss that one,
we've got another one pointing to the right.
So this one's pointing down underneath,
and that one's to the right.
The idea is to make sure people can get out,
the easiest way of the cave.
People were putting in arrows themselves.
Some people marked their arrows going into the cave,
we went this way,
instead some people marked the arrows
going the opposite direction.
So sometimes the arrows are pointing in,
some are pointing out.
So now you're doing multiple tags, multiple arrows,
with different colors, so you have your own color.
We've solved all that, we've made it easier.
There's no need for it anymore.
- [Woman] Wow!
(laughter)
- I'm from New York City, I live in Harlem.
I'm here with some family friends.
They took me to the cave, and I guess,
is the word spelunking?
Because we're going around in the cave
and we're just climbing all through
and exploring everything.
(shutter clicks)
It's been completely amazing.
I have never done anything like this before.
And I had no idea what to expect.
It's been a lot of fun.
- I really think things like this,
like volunteer work for natural areas,
are just phenomenal people.
And someone's gotta do it.
And it's grueling work
and I respect people that take their time to do that.
- [Man] Five hundred dollar--
- We enjoy caves, so this is just our way of paying back
to the community and to the forest service.
For allowing us the opportunity to go in the caves.
- Solvent, drill, solvent, drill.
Brush, brush, brush, solvent,
and we got it to a point where it's,
can mud it over, but...
(footsteps)
(group chatting)
(piano music)
(thunder crashes)
(rain pattering)
- And unless you literally go behind the formation
and put your head down or just look at the water,
you don't realize there's air blowing out.
(cackles)
You bleed, you sweat, you get dust everywhere, and mud,
and just you have good times and you have bad times,
but at the end you come out and you laugh,
and you're just like,
this is what we did, we did this.
Cavers, we do this in our spare time.
We're all volunteers, none of us get paid.
- The reason we're doing this is because
people go through the cave and they say,
somebody should take care of that graffiti.
Somebody should do something about that.
We decided we were gonna be the somebody.
(group chatting)