A recent graduate of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock celebrated the new year with a bang – by helping to rescue a caver in distress in a remote part of Arkansas. 

On Dec. 30, 2018, a woman took a hard fall and sustained injuries in a cave in a remote part of Newton County in northwest Arkansas. Dr. Kayla Sapkota, who graduated UA Little Rock last fall and is a business instructor at Arkansas State University-Beebe, answered the call from one of her friends who was caving with the injured woman and rushed to join the rescue effort.

After traveling three hours to the cave, Sapkota and three others entered the cave around 3:30 a.m. on New Year’s Eve. They joined the first rescue team, who entered the cave a few hours earlier to prepare the trail. After locating the patient, it took nearly 13 hours to arrive back at the surface .

“There was a group of skilled cavers who went into a challenging cave, and one woman fell from a ledge that was about 20 feet high,” Sapkota said. “They were about four hours travel time into the cave. She had a fractured humerus, a broken pinky, and acromioclavicular separation (shoulder separation). We got to her, assessed her injuries, and made sure she was fed and kept warm. We discussed a plan together to extract her. She could walk and was willing to try to get out on her own. It was challenging to get her up the ropes and through some of the squeezes in the cave, but she was very dedicated to getting out. She was underground for over 30 hours.”

Sapkota and the other cavers involved in the rescue are not part of any official caving rescue team. They are members of a tight-knit community who came together to help a fellow caver in need.

“We are people from different parts of the caving community that came together. It’s not a big community,” Sapkota said. “We utilized an unofficial network of cavers from Arkansas and Missouri to organize a rescue. The county sheriff was there as well as local search and rescue teams. They were open to allowing people with caving experience to help in this work. It was really a community effort. It was a bunch of people who are like-minded with the same experience working together to accomplish a goal.”

At the end of the day, Sapkota was relieved that the rescue teams were able to make it out of the cave safely with the injured caver.

“I was certainly relieved,” she said. “I didn’t start getting tired until maybe the last hour of being in the cave. It’s amazing what adrenaline can do. When I got to the top of the cave, I realized I was pretty tired by then. I got some food and changed into some warm clothes. I was also thankful to my husband, Pradeep Sapkota, also a UA Little Rock alum, who drove me home,.”

Sapkota graduated from UA Little Rock in December 2018 with a Doctorate in Education in Higher Education with a concentration in faculty leadership. She also has an MBA from UA Little Rock and bachelor’s degrees in economics and finance and Spanish from Arkansas Tech University. Prior to attending UA Little Rock for her doctorate, she worked at Philander Smith College as director of institutional research and assessment and as an instructor of business administration and computer science.

She first started caving more than a decade ago with her friends while attending Arkansas Tech. Today, she has cave rescue training and serves as the national vice president of the Cave Research Foundation, where she regularly maps caves and inventories their biological life to fulfill the foundation’s mission to document cave life and habitat.