Mark Jenkins, journalist and national geographic photographer, explores Hang Son Doong in Vietnam, the largest cave ever discovered. Jenkins is scheduled to appear on a nine city tour of Wyoming during the month of march beginning on March 3 at UW, to discuss his most recent adventure.
Mark Jenkins has been mountaineering since his teens. Growing up in Wyoming it became natural for him to be in the sun and finding his way up towards it. Recently, he found himself in an opposite scenario. The mountaineer spent a week in a cave so vast he calls it the Mt. Everest of caves.
Tonight, Jenkins, a UW writer-in-residence and National Geographic writer, will be giving a talk on his time spent in Vietnam on the first descent in the world’s biggest cave with a team of spelunkers.
Jenkins’ exploration with a team of British cavers was atypical to the common thought of caving. It’s like essentially being inside a mountain, Jenkins said, you’re not crawling through little muddy holes.
“To put this in perspective for you, dorms are what, 100 feet tall?” said Jenkins. “So this is a cave in which you can stack six dorms on top of each other inside it. These caves are so big that you don’t actually know how big they are until the photographer’s flash lights up the cave wall. Your headlamp only goes 100 feet.”
Jenkins’ presentation will include and overview of Vietnam history since war in the 70s. He will discuss how the very cave he explored and many others were used as hideouts during bombing raids.
He will also talk about his team of cavers he lived with underground for a week. Jenkins said his team liked to be in the dark while most people would find that terrifying.
“The darkness in a cave is unbelievable. I mean we think of darkness here, but we always have some kind of moonlight or starlight and you can’t see a thing,” said Jenkins.
His team doesn’t have a problem with the darkness as long as they have headlamps.
“Every caver carries 4 or 5 extra headlamps,” said Jenkins. “If you lose your light, you lose yourself, you’re dead, you can’t get back out of that cave.”
One of Jenkins teammates, Sweeney, has sold everything to finance caving all around the world. When Jenkins and the cavers had to overcome a 200 foot wall of mud Sweeney led the whole thing. Jenkins said the team had great camaraderie that is similar to that of mountain climbing despite the basics caving is opposite.
“The actual experience of caving is the opposite of climbing. In caving you’re going down and you’re going into the dark,” said Jenkins. “In climbing you’re going up and you’re going into the sunshine.”
Jenkins didn’t graduate college and immediately go on unprecedented adventures like this and get paid to write about them.
“I believe in a long apprenticeship,” said Jenkins. “I had all types of jobs.”
Between working on oilrigs and being a ranch hand, Jenkins used his spare time to hone his writing. After many years of spare time writing and holding various positions throughout newspapers and magazines, Jenkins landed a job with National Geographic.
Today, he gets to go on adventures around the world and he then gets paid to write the stories.
Tonight, Mark Jenkins will present his story of a once in a lifetime adventure in the largest cave on Earth in the Education Auditorium at 7 p.m.
