MaineMountainMen: Airman's cave. v1

First of all, I moved to Texas to do a Masters in Ocean Engineering at the University of Texas Austin. (HOOK 'EM!) So, this chapter of MaineMountainMen is from Austin.
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This morning, JP (a fellow engineering student) and I got up before dawn to head down to airman's cave. This cave is right in the middle of the Barton Creek greenbelt. For those non-Austin readers, it's only about 5 minutes from downtown.

First picture (above) is the approach, up the creek bed and to the left. It's been dry here for a while. Hot, too. The sun had just coming up around 7AM and it was already ~90 degrees F.

JP is excited that it's only 90° out.

I'm new to this whole caving thing (don't call it spelunking). You need knee pads, elbow pads, lights, helmet, and clothes that can get dirty for this one. It's about a kilometer of crawling on your stomach... sounds fun... right?

After suiting up, we were already sweaty and quite ready to get into the cave. Here's JP going in. Inside it's about 60°. Much nicer. Except...
for a heaping mat of daddy long legs. And I do mean heaping. They were perhaps in some mating school?

Here are the spiders just after the entrance to the cave. The dark mat further back in the picture is comprised of more spiders. See second photo below. The tunnel is only about 2.5 feet high, so we had to slide on our stomachs, hoping not to disturb the herd (by the way, what do you call a mass of spiders?)

Not long after passing what could have been the gauntlet, we arrived at the birth canal. This is a passage so narrow that you have to go through with BOTH arms out in front of you. I didn't have both arms out in front and I got stuck. After squirming around for 10 minutes or so and extricating myself, I decided perhaps a more novice cave would be better for starting off my caving career and I convinced JP we should go eat breakfast. Here's JP in a wider section of the "birth canal". (this cave is old hat for JP, he's been in pretty far before)