I managed to skip two weeks of writing, which is unusual for me, but I was busy with other business, primarily last week leading an NCRC weeklong class of cave rescue for Level 1 students. I had previously lead such a class over three weekends last year, and have helped teach the Level 2 class multiple times. Originally this past week was supposed to be our National weeklong class, but back in February we had agreed to postpone it due to the unknown status of the ongoing Covid pandemic. However, due to a huge demand and the success of vaccinations, we decided to do a “Regional” Class just limited to Level 1 students. This would help handle the pent up demand, create students for the Level 2 class that would be at National, and to do sort of a test run of our facilities before the much larger National.

There’s an old saying that no plan survives the first contact with the enemy. In cave rescue this is particularly true. It also appears to be true in cave rescue training classes!

The first hitch was the drive up the the camp we were using. The road had been stripped down to the base dirt level and they were doing construction. Not a huge issue, just a dusty one. But for cavers, dust is just mud without the water. But this would come into play later in the week.

Once at the camp, as I was settling in and confirming the facilities, the first thing I noticed was that the scissors lift we had used to rig ropes in the gym last time was gone. A few texts and I learned it had only been on loan to the camp the past two years and was no longer available. This presented our first real challenge. How to get ropes up over the beams 20-30′ in the air.

But shortly after I realized I had a far greater issue. The custom made rigging plates we use to tie off the end of the ropes to the posts were still sitting in my garage at home. I had completely forgotten them. This was resolved by a well timed call to an instructor heading towards the camp, who via a longer detour then he expected, was able to get them. Fortunately, had that call waited another 5 minutes, his detour would have probably doubled. So the timing was decent.

I figured the week was off to a good start at that point! Honestly though, we solved the problems and moved on. I went to bed fairly relaxed.

All went well until Monday. This was the day we were supposed to do activities on the cliffs. Several weeks ago, my son and I, along with two others had gone to the cliffs, which were on the same property as the camp, but accessible only by leaving the camp and accessing from a public road, in order to clear away debris and do other work to make them usable. I was excited to show them off. Unfortunately, due to the weather forecast of impending thunderstorms all day we made the decision to revise our schedule and move cliff day to the next day. There went Plan A. Plan B became “go the next day.”

On Tuesday I and a couple of other instructors got in my car to head to the cliffs in advance of the students so we could scope things out and plan the activities. We literally got to the bottom of the road from the main entrance to the camp where we were going to turn on to the road under construction, only to find a the road closed there with a gaping ditch dug across it. So much for Plan B. We went back to the camp, told students to hang on and then I headed out again, hoping to basically take a loop around and approach the access road to the cliffs from the opposite direction. After about a 3 mile detour we came to the other end of the road and found it closed there. Despite trying to sweet talk the flag person, we couldn’t get past (we could have lied and said we lived on the road, but after 8-10 other cars would have arrived in a caravan saying the same thing we thought that might be suspicious). There went Plan C. We called an instructor back at the camp and headed back.

We got there and turns out an instructor had already come up with Plan D, which was to see if we could access the cliffs by crossing a field the camp owned and going through the woods. It might involve some hiking, but it might be doable. While there are dirt-bike paths, there’s nothing there that worked for us. So that plan fell apart. We were up to Plan E now. Plan E was proposed to further swap some training, but we realized that would impact our schedule too much. Now on to Plan F. For Plan F, we decided to head to a local cave which we thought would have some suitable cliffs outside.

That worked. It would out quite well actually. We lost maybe an hour to 90 minutes with all the plans, but we ultimately came upon a plan that worked. We were able to teach the skills we wanted and accomplish our educational objectives.

Often we wake up with a plan in our heads for what we will do that day. Most days those plans work out. But, then there are the days where we have to adapt. Things go sideways. Something breaks, or something doesn’t go as planned. In the NCRC we have an unofficial motto, Semper Gumby – “Always be Flexible”. Sometimes you have to completely change plans (cancelling due to the threat of thunderstorms), others you may have to try to adapt (finding other possible routes to the cliffs) and finally you may need to reconsider how to meet your objectives in a new way (finding different cliffs).

My advice, don’t lock yourself into only one solution. It’s a recipe for failure.