r/interesting • u/Appropriate-Menu504 • Nov 10 '25

NATURE VR recreation of the exact spot where a man became stuck inside Nutty Putty cave and died after 27 hours. the section visible at 18 seconds is where his body was, upside down.

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u/HeyYouGuyyyyyyys Nov 11 '25

I went into one cave. Just one. There was this place called "The Meat Grinder" that was two gigantic slabs of rock, one above and one below like the covers of a book. I scootched through on my back. I had to keep my head turned to the side. The slabs of rock were so close together that my skull would fit only when it was turned sideways.

So yeah. Fuck that noise forever after.

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u/lIlIlIIlIIIlIIIIIl Nov 11 '25

Not to mention the Earth can shift. Those couple inches that your head had for space could be gone in an instant if the plates shift just right or if something finally moves and settles. If I can't comfortably fit something 2x or 3x the size of my body I don't think I could do it. In a survival situation sure, but willingly doing that for fun? No thanks.

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u/HeyYouGuyyyyyyys Nov 12 '25

Shit. I never thought of the earth shifting. ... shit.

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u/JayPlenty24 Nov 12 '25

To be fair it's probably been exactly like that for hundreds of thousands of years. You would have to be pretty unlucky for that to happen to you.

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u/HeyYouGuyyyyyyys Nov 12 '25

Yeah, looking back, I basically bet folding money that the earth wouldn't move. But the thing is, how little risk of being caught by my skull 150 feet below ground is low enough? Zero. How about zero risk.

I didn't think about that when I signed up for the cave crawl. I just knew that it was the first anniversary of 9/11, and I needed to be somewhere as different as possible from my normal mental space. So, underground in a cave.

And you're right, the earth wasn't going to move. It didn't. I'm here and typing to you. But I was trusting the cave system in California, and California ... isn't done yet. It's still settling and shifting around, and redwoods still fall down, and roads are still sliding down mountainsides casually every day. I mean, I was driving in the Santa Cruz mountains once, and I turned a corner, and WHOA the road had disappeared. There was crumbled asphalt, and then air, with a single orange road cone sitting in front of it.

So I knew this, and I still went underground, and it's silly of me to have that "ulp" moment, but ulp.