Marion Smith

Think you know what’s beneath your feet? Well, sure — depending on where you’re reading this, it could be hardwood flooring. Maybe carpet. The roadway beneath a bus you’re in. The grass under your feet in a park. But what about below that? Below the surface soil and the bedrock. Know what’s down there? Our understanding of the space around us is generally pretty limited to everything above the ground we’re standing on. But that’s only half of the picture. There is an entirely different world right beneath our feet.

This was the world explored by Marion Smith, a cave-obsessed explorer unlike any the world has ever seen. Nobody, that we know of anyway, has gone underground as much. Between 1966, when he first stooped into a cave entrance and caught that unique scent of dank, mineral earth and rock and water, and his death at age eighty, Smith made 8,291 separate cave explorations. He ascended and descended over two