A New York City man spent six hours stuck in a small crevice inside a dark, bat-filled cave in upstate New York before a rescue team was able to drill him free earlier this week, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
The Brooklyn resident got trapped Sunday evening in a small opening between rocks inside a cavernous marble structure known as Merlin’s Cave in the small town of Canaan, about 45 minutes from Albany, on the Massachusetts border.
Forest Ranger Lt. John Gullen said the man was exploring with a group of people when he got stuck while trying to navigate a portion of Merlin’s Cave known as the “Bear Trap” — which the ranger described as a tight crawlway that gets progressively narrower and has a stream running underneath.
“The rock is very slippery, and he just had a slip in the wrong spot and then fell in,” Gullen said in a video released by the conservation department. “And as he was falling, he just kept sliding a little bit further, and then as he was trying to get out, it was just making him wedge further down until the point where he was completely immobilized.”
“It was like his full body was stuck in a crevice that was basically designed the exact shape as him,” the ranger continued.
The Brooklyn man was just 400 feet from the entrance to the cave, but it takes about 20 minutes to navigate because of the extremely tight quarters, Gullen said. On the other side of the Bear Trap is a series of canyons, rooms, domes, waterfalls and plunge pools, according to the Northeast Cave Conservancy, which owns the cave.
After some members of his party exited the cave and called 911, a rescue team was able to reach the man around 9 p.m. By that point, three other members of the party who stayed behind with the man had found a hammer in the cave and were able to chip away some of the rock.
Gullen said he and a member of the Albany-Schoharie Cave Rescue Team worked for nearly two hours to free the man and were able to move him 6 to 10 inches. At that point, they retrieved a hammer drill to chip away at the rock — drilling inches from the man’s head and following up with a hammer before they were finally after to extricate him.
The ranger said the man was cracking jokes and giving rescuers a thumbs up while he was stuck, even as he was slipping into hypothermia. He was freed just after 2 a.m. Monday.
“He did a phenomenal job staying calm,” Gullen said in the video. “I don't know very many people who could stay calm. He was stuck for a total of six hours, unable to move basically in any direction. For most people that's like their worst nightmare.”
The Department of Environmental Conservation didn’t release the name of the Brooklyn man and blurred his face in photos, citing a policy of not outing the people rescued by its rangers and officers.
The man was treated for hypothermia but did not have any other injuries, according to the agency.
