As an experienced organized caver, Thor Bahrman teaches beginners the skills associated with “vertical” caving, similar in many ways to rock-climbing, which allow cavers to safely descend and ascend in pits.

Often, it’s the moments and experiences of our childhoods that stick with and resonate with us throughout adulthood the most. For one Kentucky man, one of his fondest memories had a larger impact on him than he even expected.

“Around the age of six or so, I began making these little tunnels throughout my grandparents’ house, with every single cushion off all the couches, chairs, and loveseats, and I’d crawl through them,” said Thor Bahrman III, “but I had no idea that caves had imprinted on me.”

Today, Bahrman, a native of Middlesboro, Kentucky, is an active caver and scuba diver as well as the morning DJ for a radio station about an hour away in Corbin, Kentucky and a local coordinator for Academic Year in America, where he places international exchange students with American host families.

But it’s the caving that he said forms part of his earliest memories.

“When I was an infant, I have these incredibly vague memories of my parents taking me into caves, what was then called Cudjo’s Cave, now called Gap Cave, and also Mammoth Cave. And that must have implanted something within me,” he said. “Then later on, I got a chance to go into some caves as an adult, one of them with my father, who decided to take some classes at [Lincoln Memorial University] when LMU owned Cudjo’s Cave. It was a wild cave. We used flashlights and went with one of the college professors.”

According to Bahrman, it wasn’t until some years later that he saw organized caving on television and started the process of training for that kind of experience.

“I saw a show called ‘National Geographic Mysteries Underground,’” he said. “It was one of their specials, and it showed people doing cave activities properly in organized caving, we call it, and they had helmets, and they had very specific gear, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s the way to do it.’ And I found out that here in this area, there’s a local group called Pine Mountain Grotto, and Pine Mountain Grotto is part of the greater organization within the United States called the National Speleological Society, and it operates under some guidelines to keep people who do it as safe as possible and the cave environment itself as protected as possible.”

Organized cavers, like those in the local group, train for caving safely and responsibly. They use specialized safety gear and commit to the ecology of the caves they enjoy and the caves’ inhabitants.

According to Bahrman, “cavers have a saying as part of the ‘Leave No Trace’ ethic, and it is ‘Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time,’ which means formations are really pretty, but they stay where they are. We don’t take them out. We don’t spray paint on walls or anything disgusting like that.”

In efforts to preserve the integrity of the caves, Bahrman said that cavers do cave clean-ups to try to undo the damage that other people do, and also try to take care of the life forms underground.

“One of the big ones in this day and age is bats, especially with white-nose syndrome that’s killing millions of bats. So cavers volunteer a lot of hours to help biologists and researchers check for bat populations to find out if they’re declining, to do bat counts and try to clean up caves that people have used as dumps…because it’s already hard enough for the bats. We want to make it a little bit easier for them to live.”

Bahrman also has cave rescue training because the general public, he said, doesn’t always follow the same safety protocols that organized cavers do.

“We really are safety nuts, so I’ve never really been scared (while caving). I’ve been nervous when I’ve seen people who were not in organized caving taking coolers of beer underground. We love a good beer after caving, but never before or during,” he said.

Cavers like Bahrman differentiate between “tourist caves,” which are set up for the general public and “wild” caves, which are those that haven’t been approved for the general public and can require special skills to navigate.

“There can be crawling involved,” he said. “There can be a lot of vertical rope work involved, very tight squeezes, water, that sort of thing…In fact, sometimes they can be highly dangerous for the public to go into, which doesn’t necessarily stop them.”

As an experienced caver, Bahrman himself teaches classes for beginners in ascending and descending cave pits, a skill similar to rock climbing and rappelling.

In 2008 and 2009, Bahrman’s caving experience allowed him to meet Mike Rowe and appear on two episodes of Rowe’s popular “Dirty Jobs” television series.

Bahrman is also NSS cavern certified, the first step to cave diving, an area where his love of caving intersects with another love – scuba diving.

Though he has done most of his scuba diving in the U.S., he has been caving all over the world, in wild caves as far away as Switzerland and the Czech Republic and Slovenia, home of the olm, legendary baby dragons.

Like his other passions of scuba diving and working in radio, he can trace his love of travel back to his family roots. His first trip out of the country was with his family to the Bahamas. Since then he’s traveled to so many countries that he can’t remember them all, although he said that some have been more memorable than others.

“Every time I try to think of a favorite I can never think of one favorite country, but I can think of favorite aspects,” he said. “I got to go to Dubrovnik, Croatia, to the walled city where they’ve shot several scenes from ‘Game of Thrones.’ It’s really beautiful…When we were exploring the walled city one day, we went up a staircase mountain and happened through a little portal and found ourselves in the coolest bar in the universe, one that Rick Steves (NPR’s European travel correspondent) recommends but says is really hard to find. And we stumbled in it, and so we had a beer and watched the sun set from just outside the wall, looking across the Adriatic Sea. Also, being in the Cancun area of Mexico and visiting several of the Mesoamerican sites was great. Seeing an Egyptian pyramid. I got to go to Auschwitz and Birkenau, which was not a happy place, but still it made a lasting impression.”

Bentley writes for the Corbin, Kentucky Times-Tribune.