Aidan Kaminer found himself suspended sideways for six hours in an upstate New York cave.<\/p>\n
“The rocks were holding me up, but I was also kind of tensed up and holding myself to keep me from sliding further down,” Kaminer said.<\/p>\n
Two weeks ago, the 26-year-old Brooklyn resident spent the weekend exploring caverns during the northeast regional cave fest.<\/p>\n
He crawled through three caves, saw beautiful formations, and in the last one, 15 minutes away from the exit, he found himself trapped.<\/p>\n
“It’s very possible to not get stuck in this section. It’s called the bear trap. I guess I’m the bear, but basically, you just have to crawl along the rock slab that was to the right of me, but it’s a little bit slippery, and I underestimated how tight the cavern, that squeeze was,” Kaminer said.<\/p>\n
Rescuers spent hours chipping away the rocks encasing him.<\/p>\n
“There was a rock directly pinning my chest and my hips like I would have broken my ribs if I had tried to go through it,” Kaminer said. “So they were trying to use a sledgehammer to break the rock that was pinning me, essentially. And then just saying, ‘Okay, can you pull out now?’ And I would try again, and I would go, ‘no, not yet.’ And then they would break some of the rock behind me. They would go, ‘okay, now?, I would say, ‘no, not yet.'”<\/p>\n
Kaminer says once rescuers made just enough room, he wiggled himself out of that narrow space inch by inch like a caterpillar until he was free.<\/p>\n
“I think the first thing I said was, ‘Howdy folks,’ coming out of the cave. I think people clapped. It was kind of a, ‘oh, my God, thank you so much.’ And every single person who came that day stayed the entire time, which was kind of emotional for me to see,” Kaminer said.<\/p>\n
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