Pocket Profiles: Caving with Your Pocket PC

For those among us who possess the explorer's mentality, the quest to be first to walk on untouched ground continues unabated—it's just gotten a little harder. That's because the remaining unexplored areas on earth are usually found in the most challenging environments. Hey, if it were easy, someone would have already been there.

The challenge only increases when you consider that you have to bring back proof that you've been somewhere that's truly new. In this day and age, a couple of photos won't cut it. Luckily, the heightened challenge of exploring uncharted spots—and charting them—is being matched by new technology that makes the process easier.

Finding and mapping uncharted territory

The actual number of unexplored spots left is dwindling rapidly. Want to bag a new peak? Better head to Antarctica or maybe the Brooks Range in Alaska—and have fun getting to either of those places. Only a small percentage of the bottom of the ocean has been explored, but what's it cost to rent a bathyscaphe? Maybe the wide-open desert is more your style. But it all looks the same, and how would you really know for sure that no one had been there before?

Perhaps the answer lies beneath your feet. Some of the most avid explorers on earth spend their time beneath its surface. Intrepid cavers are on a continual quest to find new caves—and when they find one, they map it. Mapping has a dual purpose. First, it provides a "trail map" for others, letting them know how much rope they'll need and what equipment to bring with them. And, on a more personal level, it delivers the satisfaction and notoriety of being the first to sketch the contours and features of a new cave.

It's a lot of fun, too. Just ask Mark Passerby, a dedicated caver who caught the bug as a teenager in West Virginia. Mark started by going into known caves, but moved on to cave exploring—looking for new holes in the ground. "I wanted to explore new places, and to promote caving to others," he says. On the promotion end he started a Web site (http://www.caves.com) that's devoted to sharing information with other cavers around the world.

Mark Passerby mapping a West Virginia cave with his rugged Pocket PC

Of course, finding new caves meant creating maps instead of following them. So Mark and his fellow cave explorers honed their mapping skills, initially using the time-worn methods. For years, cave mapping had been done entirely on paper. Explorers took measurements based on rudimentary surveying techniques and wrote them down, also hand-drawing contours and features of the cave. Once they were back above ground, they transferred the measurements and drawings to map paper and refined them.

The old way, the new way, and the search for a better way

The advent of computer software that could translate data into maps was helpful. Cavers could write measurements down on paper in the cave, and then later enter the measurements into a spreadsheet and transfer that data to a program that processed it and produced a cave map. But one elemental problem remained: ensuring accuracy in the data transfer. Because the data was taken in humid, muddy, and poorly lit environments, the error rate between data taken and data entered was tremendously high. Wet, muddy paper resulted in smeared ink, and handwriting done under those conditions often looked worse than a doctor's prescription. As he continued to explore new caves, Mark experienced the common thought that has motivated innovations for centuries: There has to be a better way.

So he began experimenting with entering the data onto small handheld computers while in the caves. But his early efforts were not fruitful—the computers available were not built rugged enough to withstand the environment inside the caves.