not OP, but I just find caves fascinating. You can be wiggling through small passage for hours and hours, and then suddenly find yourself in a cavern large enough to fit an airliner that not even the most powerful lights can see the other side of. There are passages that are completely white with flowstone, others with enormous crystal pools, others with formations that seem to defy gravity, and others with bones of prehistoric creatures (and of course most of them which are just boring old rock\sand\mud).
Also, cavers are just fun to be around. It takes a certain type of person to want to go and get wet, cold and muddy in the dark for hours or days at a time.
That sounds incredible! (Even though I could never do any spelunking) I have only been in one cave really, and what amazed me was the supreme silence. Like hear your own heartbeat silent.
Caves are a major frontier right in our (karst) backyards. They were discovering huge new caves in the 2000s in WVa. Major mapping efforts were a lot of fun. Project cavers would dig all weekend hoping to open up a new passage (and they did). I stopped when white nose syndrome showed up in the bats and it was possibly spread by cavers.
white nose is scary. I’d imagine this happens to the bats a lot. they live so densely that these kinds of epidemics are almost inevitable. looks like this time it was cross-oceanic human contact that kicked it off though