The title is a rife on a favorite folk song of mine, “Railroading on the Great Divide”, apparently first made famous by the amazing Carter Family. In this case, the Great Divide is a feature of a local cave known as Knox Cave in the town of Knox NY.

So, what do you get when you take 2 Canadians, a number of students who are just starting in college and a pair of cavers who have been caving for over 50 years each, two medical students, a fire chief, and a mixture of other people and toss them into a classroom and then a cave? You get an excellent teaching and learning experience.

I again had the privilege of working with a great group of people teaching a 2 day class on cave rescue. On the first day we test the students patience by seeing how many Powerpoint slides they can sit through. If they successfully survive that, we then unlock the doors to the classroom and let them outside. We then do some patient packaging and patient movement.  We end the day with a large quantity of food.

Often I’ll spend the Saturday night at the fire house (our typical location for these classes) but this time I had to head home. On the way one of my fellow instructors texted me to let me know that the student who was staying with her had not arrived at her house. We started to worry.  About an hour later the missing caver had shown up. Turns out she and several other students had decided to take advantage of a baseball backstop and practice their SRT skills and spend some time teaching each other. Even after a long day of teaching, the students were still eager to share their skills with each other.

On Sunday, we spend less than 1/2 an hour in the classroom, essentially just enough time to grab some breakfast and handle some housekeeping chores. We then start a practice rescue. In this case it was at nearby Knox Cave. While the students had known that the practice would be at Knox, they had no idea what the actual would actually involve.  So when the first group showed up, including the local fire chief who was also part of our training, they sprang into action. The reporting party told them that two cavers were in the cave. Both were at the Great Divide, one with a broken leg, the other taking care of the injured caver.

Very quickly the students found the the injured caver but quickly learned that no plan survives the first encounter with reality; the non-injured caver had wandered off and they had to go find her.  The apparently simple rescue had now become a search problem.

After a few missteps, the students found the missing caver and assisted her to the surface. And shortly later the injured caver was also brought to the surface.  It was a successful practice.

At the end of the weekend, instead of 22 students with very little if any cave rescue experience (including at least one student who had never been in a wild cave before) we now had 22 students who had gained a bit of experience and I would actually trust to call if a real rescue was called. From the reports I got back, everyone had fun and more than one person is now very eager to take our weeklong class next year!

For me, it was a long weekend with not enough sleep, but I ended it more energized than I started it. This is typical when I teach courses like this. It’s because I love the aha moment students often have when they’re learning, and this weekend was full of those.

I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by great groups of people over the years and I must say my cave rescue family is among the best, and I’m proud to welcome even more members to that family.

P.S. Don’t forget to check out my latest article at Redgate’s Simple Talk: How to Use Parameters in PowerShell