“You can’t trust me because I can’t trust you.” My friend Dylan screamed at me as his foot was lodged between jagged rocks.

In the weeks prior to this my friend Dylan and I have been meticulously planning to go caving at Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico. This cave has been Dylan and I’s bucket list to explore for a long time now. It is notorious for being one of the longest and deepest caves in America, as well as one of the most dangerous.

Ever since we’ve been in middle school we’ve been exploring together. At first, it started with just exploring our backyards but the craving for adventure and the feeling of an adrenaline rush that came with exploring dangerous places quickly shifted us to search for more treacherous places to explore.

In our sophomore year in high school, we started exploring nearby caves.
Week by week and year by year, we explored more and more caves, with them getting increasingly riskier to explore. All of this led up to us discovering the Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico. As soon as we read about it, we were hooked, our minds were set that we had to go someday. So we started saving up, and after a year and a half, we had enough money saved to road trip down to New Mexico from Missouri to see if the cave lived up to its expectations. We bought all of the necessary supplies for it the next day and headed down. Three days later, we finally made it down to Carlsbad, New Mexico, the town neighboring the cave. We checked into a hotel to get all our gear ready for the day that was ahead of us. First by inspecting all of our harnesses and ropes making sure they’re still intact, then we got enough water and food for us packed up. With everything packed up we tried to get as much sleep as we could, our excitement holding us back.

Through the night I kept tossing and turning, not being able to fall asleep. In the few moments that I actually did sleep I kept having a recurring nightmare of getting trapped, I jolted awakened in sweat. I couldn’t get myself back to sleep so I decided to just wait. This wasn’t the best start to the big day, I was excited nonetheless. So I waited a few hours until Dylan woke up making sure he could get some sleep if I couldn’t. With both of us awake we got breakfast, grabbed our stuff, and headed out.

The cave was daunting even at the start; the entrance really lived up to its name of Misery Hole. But our curiosity got the better of us so we started descending down the 90 foot hole. After a couple hours we reached the hardest part that we’ve faced yet. It was a 300 foot vertical descent that we had to do. When we got to it Dylan was the first one to go in. A few feet in he flicked his flashlight on and pointed it down the descent and noticed that it got extremely narrow in some parts. So he asked “Are you sure that this is the right path?”
“Of course it is,” I was quick to assure.I thought to myself I had been carefully planning our path for three weeks now there’s no way I would’ve misplanned our route, right? Either way, I was confident in myself and joined him in his descent.

A hundred feet down Dylan was right; it was starting to get extremely narrow. Enough so I could feel the heat of my breath bouncing off the wall back at me. I was just praying to myself that the cave would eventually open back up. The next thing I heard was an almost visceral scream that came from below me. It was Dylan.

Dylan had slipped and lodged his foot in between a crack in the rock. I slowly made my way down the hole to catch up with him. Once I got to him I tried yanking him to set his foot free. After an hour of being stuck Dylan reached his limit and started to take it out on me. He threw insult after insult at me and I just sat there speechless. Wondering if I will ever be able to get Dylan out of here. After a while the insults just flew past me until he screamed, “I knew I could never trust you!” These words hit me like truck. After years and years of knowing and adventuring together, Dylan didn’t trust me. Despite how hard this was to hear, I had to move on since I couldn’t just leave Dylan here. We tried everything to get him out, yet after three hours, he was still in the same spot we got stuck in.

“I’m gonna try to get back out and I’ll get us some help,” I told Dylan. He responded with a half-hearted “Sure you will.” Even though he was starting to annoy me, I moved past it and did my best to get out of there. Eventually, I got back to the start, Misery Hole. I could now see that it had turned to nighttime. I hooked my harness back up to the rope and started to climb up the rope. Halfway up, I started to hear a strange sound. The rope was snapping… I was falling…