Cave Exploration: Beginning With The End In Mind

Building complex adventures on simple skills

- Julien Fortin

In an age of omnipresent social media, where everything is translated into easily digested snapshots, we often only see the final result of a given project, shiny and polished, and more rarely the slightly messier road that led there. While it can be truly inspiring to look, for instance, at stunning cave diving exploration photographs, a beginner diver might feel entirely disconnected from the reality of these images. How could there possibly exist any link, let alone a path, connecting the recreational diver to these framed perfections of extreme adventure?

But beneath every step of every exploration project lies the accumulated practice of countless hours spent rehearsing procedures until they become a mere tool used for a broader purpose – and each of these procedures can be broken down into simpler bits and pieces, all the way to the very basic training we all experienced when we took our first breath underwater.