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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/23/i-survived-by-licking-moisture-from-the-walls-spelunker-saved-after-three-days-in-cave
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| Indiana teenager 'glad to be alive' after spending 60 hours locked inside cave | |
| (4 months later) | |
| A 19-year-old man who spent 60 hours locked alone inside a gated southern Indiana cave says he feels lucky to be alive. | |
| Indiana University freshman Lukas Cavar was on a spelunking trip to Sullivan Cave about 10 miles south of Bloomington when he became separated on Sunday afternoon from 12 other members of the university’s caving club. | |
| When he reached the cave entrance, Cavar found club members had padlocked its gate, unaware that he remained inside. He could not get a cellphone signal and screamed for hours, hoping motorists passing on a nearby road might hear him. | |
| “It took me a little while to wrangle my emotions and sort of approach things analytically, sensibly, to come up with a gameplan to survive,” Cavar said on Thursday, two days after his rescue. | |
| The Bloomington man, whose parents are Indiana University linguistics professors, tried picking the padlock with a paper clip – to no avail. | |
| Dressed in light clothes, hiking boots and a helmet, he had a plastic bag, two energy bar wrappers, two empty water bottles, a cellphone and a wallet. He used the energy bar wrappers to collect moisture and the water bottles to collect rainfall and puddled cave water. | |
| He also licked the cave’s damp walls to quench his thirst. Hunger drove him to consider foraging for cave crickets, although he didn’t eat any of the small insects. | |
| After his parents filed a missing person report with university police, a high school friend informed the Caving Club’s president that Cavar was missing. | |
| Two club leaders immediately returned to the cave late on Tuesday after finding a pile of clothing in a vehicle club members used to travel to the cave on Sunday. They discovered Cavar uninjured and asleep behind the locked gate. | |
| “I’m really glad to be alive,” said Cavar, who returned to classes on Thursday and has no plans for another spelunking trip. “It feels like I’ve been given a second chance.” | |
| A message posted by the Caving Club’s president on a website for Indiana University student organizations said the club’s “rigorous protocols” for accounting for members during cave excursions had failed. | |
| “We had a failure in our leadership to closely follow all these safety procedures,” the message states. | |
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