by Beyond Mammoth Cave- A Tale of Obsession in the World's Longest Cave (epub)
Sure enough, the next month the promised details appeared. As I began to read the dramatic account, I was shocked to find the name Roger Brucker as an author. Roger Brucker! It had been nearly twenty years since The Caves Beyond, and I thought he would surely be dead by now. Not only had he spent a lifetime exploring the Flint-Mammoth System from its very beginning to this culmination, but he had also realized what must have been his dream, a dream that was evident in his writings almost twenty years before. And he was still going. Wow, twenty years in one cave—that guy must be a relic by now.
I was jealous.
As I read with envy the account of the discovery of Hansons Lost River through a hopelessly tight, long-overlooked side passage miles into Flint Ridge, my jealousy slowly gave way to anger, an anger that boiled from deep within me. Hansons Lost River had led the explorers to Echo River in Mammoth Cave, the connection. Yes, a great discovery, but this event was being compared to the first ascent of Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world. To complete the metaphor, the link between Mammoth Cave and Flint Ridge was being hailed as “the Everest of Speleology,” the pinnacle event of cave exploration. This was something, they said, that would never be exceeded. This was an obvious tieback to the year 1954, the birth of organized Flint Ridge exploration just one year after the first ascent of Mount Everest.
Bullshit!
This was sheer arrogance. The explorers I had been casting as heroes were instead self-indulgent egotists who thought that they had the greatest thing going anywhere. More than once in the long history of exploration, discoveries had ceased because of smugness that all had been done. Blinded by glory! The pedestal I had placed the explorers on turned to dust. I was determined to shatter their comfortable complacency. I would strike out and discover a great cave of my own, a cave to rival Mammoth Cave.
But how? Where?
As I sat in the darkened library listening to Joe Saunders spin his droll tales of sprawling prostrate on his belly, scooping out sand and gravel the consistency of chunky stew to enlarge crawlways too low to pass through, I started to see beyond the horrors that were flashing before me on the screen. To go on, you had to have a vision! I began to respond to Joe’s dream. He, too, had visions of a great cave that would sprawl across the vastness of the Mammoth Cave Plateau. One of his maps showed the many ridges next door to Mammoth Cave, an area that dwarfed the aerial coverage of Mammoth Cave and was devoid of any known cave. I could see what he was really describing, his arms flailing in enthusiasm as shadows across the bright slide screen. Caves, vast and seemingly endless, waited to be found. But only the diligent and patient would find them. I now realized that I needed to find them. I became a born-again caver. I now was looking to the caves of Kentucky as a holy grail in my quest to satisfy my thirst for adventure and discovery.
In the short time that Joe and I chatted after his presentation, we forged a friendship that would link me to the caves of the Mammoth Cave region of Kentucky. In the room full of cavers who sat listening intently to Joe that night, I doubt that anyone else saw beyond the slides that he had used to describe his passion for the caves, seeing only the belly crawls and the mud.
Joe never presumed that a new recruit was hooked. In the following months, my mailbox filled with trip reports from a dozen excursions into Crump Spring Cave. The narratives vividly described a trail of discoveries that had led to finding “the” large passage called Crump Avenue. Cavers, after crawling for hours, had dug in blowing crawlways that led to the discovery. These were the true heroes, not the arrogant cavers that thought they had a monopoly in Mammoth Cave. Joe’s letters kept coming. Joe was not going to let his promising prospect get away.
In March 1974, I drove to southwest Virginia to meet Joe Saunders. This was the beginning leg of my first trip to the caves of south-central Kentucky. My route led me down the farm-studded Shenandoah Valley where the bright, warm sun forced the spring buds to burst. Joe lived on the east side of Blacksburg, a small college town nestled in a cave-rich valley in southwestern Virginia. The university there, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, had a rich caving tradition of its own.
Joe lived in a motel. How could anyone live in just one small room, especially with muddy cave gear? I was looking forward to seeing this arrangement for myself.
I arrived at the motel at noon and drove slowly along rows of parked cars, squinting to read the small brass numbers on the doors. My hastily scrawled directions wove around the crumpled scrap of paper like a snake coiling to fit in a confined space.
“I should learn to write so I can read it,” I muttered as I struggled to decipher the scribbles.
Among the last few doors, I spotted a likely prospect for the correct room. The first number had fallen off, but the unweathered paint approximated the shape of the missing numeral.
I pounded on the door, hoping I was not disturbing a stranger. If Joe was in his room (if this was his room), he would be glad to see me. The door swung wide. Joe was twenty-seven years old, stocky, and over six feet tall. He beamed at me with his cheerful smile.
Besides working on his doctorate in agronomy, Joe was employed as night manager at this motel. Fringe benefits included his quarters, a room in the back of the complex overlooking the main highway. Stacks of papers, magazines, and rolled-up maps filled his room. Off to one side was a small kitchen area. Discarded empty cans, half-eaten bags of cookies, and an open jar of peanut butter evidenced a bachelor’s diet: simple, quick, and cheap. And no cleanup! He spent his time and probably most of his money on caving. Joe also loved cave science. He prided himself as a self-taught, practical hydrologist.
“Look at this map,” he said as he reached deep into a stack of paper and unrolled a dog-eared diagram of a nearby drainage basin. He pointed out the catchment areas, the swallow points where the water went underground, and the springs where the underground streams reemerged. Joe explained that he used fluorescein dye to trace the water.
“Tracing underground streams is like detective work.” Joe glowed with excitement. “You never know what you are going to find! One time, I didn’t know if the sinking stream would come out here,” he pointed to a spring shown two thousand feet away on the map, “or way over here,” now pointing five miles distant. “So, I decided to use ten pounds of dye—ten of those bottles over there.” He pointed to a corner where containers of red powder were stacked. “Well, the dye came out in the nearby spring and I had to buy some woman’s wash because I turned it all bright green! I didn’t realize that was her water supply, but I found out.”
Joe rolled out more maps, lovingly explaining each in detail. I felt honored and lucky to be accepted as a caving companion by him. This big, enthusiastic caver wanted to take me on a trip to Crump Spring Cave. Inside, I was beaming. Later on, I realized that he was just as pleased with himself to have so easily sucked in a new recruit!
Joe broke the bad news: We could not leave yet. He had some unfinished business to attend to, and we would not be leaving for several hours. The good news was thrust into my arms: a stack of United States Geological Survey (USGS) topographic maps, cave location data, and cave maps.
“Here, keep yourself busy by doing a bit of caving the next few hours. You might like these caves,” said Joe. “We’ll be leaving around six o’clock, so don’t be late.”
He had marked each cave entrance on the topographic maps with a dot surrounded by a small circle. These topographic maps were two-dimensional representations of the three-dimensional hills and valleys that make up the surface of the earth. Contour lines connected points of equal elevation, making features such as valleys, sinkholes, and ridges easily discernible. Joe annotated these maps to record the locations of long-searched-for and obscure cave locations.
Dumbfounded by his suggestion that I go solo caving, I said, “Sure, I’ll wander around and take a look at them.” I actually intended no such thing. On the other hand, I did not want to lie. Above all, I did not want to appear chicken. One of the first rules hammere
d into my head as a caver was never to cave alone. To do so was to invite disaster, for an incapacitating accident offered no margin of safety. Something as simple as a loss of light could spell doom if one were alone. It was just common sense to have a companion. Better yet was a party of four (one could stay with an injured caver while two left the cave to summon help). This was a rule I was not willing to break—well, not yet.
No beginner to caving, I had been involved in a large caving project for almost a year. Our D.C. Grotto project of exploring and surveying the Organ Cave System in West Virginia was big-time caving. We had charted more than thirty-five miles, and I had led many survey trips myself. The camaraderie of our group effort pleased me immensely. We relished the feeling of familiarity that came from systematically exploring the growing cave month after month. We enjoyed the surveying. Consequently, I hated the idea of wandering around in just any cave—it seemed a waste of time. No tourist trips for me!
Nevertheless, I had become restless. I had entered the Organ Cave Project in its twilight and wanted new cave, a project to call my own. The lure of virgin cave was too much to resist, and Organ Cave offered limited opportunity for new discovery. I soon found Lewis Cave, a mile from Organ Cave. A few companions and I charted seven thousand feet of water-filled crawlway leading to a waterfall. The cave was terrible, but we gleefully conspired to keep it secret from imagined cave pirates eager to scoop our newly found prize. We were proud but then later dismayed when nobody wanted to go in the cave, even when we leaked its secrets! Keeping the cave under wraps had prevented the necessary critical mass of enthusiastic cavers from forming. There was no pool of cavers from which to recruit. The short-lived project died, a valuable lesson to me.
To kill time, I drove around the Virginia countryside looking at the scenery, parked, and napped. When I returned to the motel room around five o’clock, Joe was back, stuffing a duffel with dirty cave gear while talking to someone sitting on the floor. I learned that we would be joined by this third caver.
Joe’s red ’69 Opel Kadette was piled high with gear that rearranged itself around us as we squeezed in. His buddy, Keith Ortiz, shoehorned himself in the back while I eased into the front next to Joe. My feet were jammed uncomfortably beneath the dashboard with two rolled-up sleeping bags. Keith was a student at VPI and had been a member of the local NSS Grotto for several years. While Joe engaged me in continual conversation about cave hydrology, Keith slipped into a fitful slumber. My eyes drooped and my neck ached. Joe’s words became a meaningless drone. When Joe and Keith swapped places and Keith began his conversation from the driver’s seat, I realized that sleep was not on the agenda for me on this twelve-hour drive to central Kentucky.
In the early morning, while fog hung low over the Kentucky hills, my exhaustion and heavy eyelids made the surrounding rural countryside appear surreal. Towns with names such as Cave City and Horse Cave showed how important the caves had been to the area’s economy. As we drove into ridge country, we passed old farmhouses with smoke lazily drifting from their chimneys in the still morning air. Occasionally, I spotted a farmer starting his morning chores. It was a new day. We turned off the main road onto a mile-long narrow, rocky, rutted road that jarred all of us to weary consciousness. The car’s muffler and pipes scraped and clanked as we jounced over bumps to Crump Spring. My head was pounding from lack of sleep. A loud ear-grinding noise emanated from the underside of the severely overloaded car.
Scr-aaa-pe!
“Crap! That was Oil-Pan Rock—always gets me,” Joe swore to himself as the car continued to lurch and bounce into the valleys edging the Mammoth Cave Plateau. After many years of traveling this route, he knew all the hazards, rock by sharp rock.
We paused while I opened a gate in a barbed-wire fence and looked around. Cows grazed in pastures dotted with clumps of barren, leafless trees in steep-sided sinkholes. Patches of bleached, white limestone made this bottomland unfit for farming. This was real cave country. Anyone could see that miles and miles of cave had to honeycomb the earth beneath this tranquil countryside. There were no creeks draining these valleys, no water anywhere. Just minutes after arriving, I knew I belonged here in Kentucky. Yes, this was home. Couldn’t I feel in my bones the energy of the vast caves of Kentucky? It was 1974—to me an eternity after the modern exploration of Mammoth Cave had commenced in the early fifties. But now, the real exploring could start. I was ready to go. Although Mammoth Cave was 150 miles long, this was just the beginning. There would be a lot more than 150 miles!
We turned the last corner at the bottom of the hill to come upon a small, neatly kept house with green shingles for siding. The yard was well manicured. Such a yard was seldom seen in rural Kentucky. Its beauty struck me, more evidence that this was “home.” But we were not alone. Sleeping bags filled with cavers were sprawled everywhere on the front porch. They had driven from Illinois and Indiana to be a part of the adventure. The owners occupied the house only during the summer months and allowed cavers to use the porch the rest of the year.
Down the hill to the left of the house was a small, tree-rimmed sinkhole. On one side, a spring formed a noisy waterfall. Water fell into five-gallon buckets before flowing across the sinkhole bottom to disappear into a dark recess in a small cliff. This was the entrance to Crump Spring Cave. To me, this was the Garden of Eden. Could this incredibly beautiful place lead to the hellhole that Joe had described?
Part of me felt petrified. I had never been in any cave with such a bad reputation. My longest cave trip until now was “The Seventeen-Hour Fiasco” in the Organ Cave System near Lewisburg, West Virginia. On that trip, I had felt farther out than ever before. During the exit, I had accidentally dropped a rock on somebody’s foot, breaking the caver’s big toe. The trip out seemed to take an eternity. My exhaustion tortured me as I ascended the series of ropes leading to the surface. I was horrified a week later to see my victim in a full foot cast. It had been a trip to remember and a trip that many would never let me forget.
Crump Spring Cave would be different. This trip would be longer, and I would be on my hands and knees or, worse, belly for most of the trip. There would be hardly any walking cave here. For the first time, I would wear knee-crawlers, unruly looking hard rubber pads that would strap around my knees. Would I measure up against these hard men?
After napping for a few hours, we prepared our gear and crouched into the low entrance. A couple hundred feet inside, the stream flowed over the lip of a short drop. Joe uncoiled a twenty-foot length of cable ladder, tied it off to a rock column, and lowered it down the pitch.
We took turns climbing down the aluminum rungs, the spray from the waterfall soaking our clothing. As Keith belayed Joe down the climb, I peered into the only open passage leading from the bottom of the pit.
“Yech!” I cried. “We have to crawl into that?”
Joe snickered as he stepped off the ladder but said nothing.
Joe subsequently led Keith and me through an endless succession of low, wide crawlways beginning with the five-hundred-foot slog on our bellies through wet gravel—the drain of the entrance pit. We then moved along on our hands and knees through the sandy-floored C Crawl, wiggled our way on our sides in Thin Man’s Misery, and dragged our bodies through the Long Crawl. There were thousands of feet of low, wide elliptical tubes: endless foot after endless foot. My arms ached. Every hour or so, we would stop to survey some tiny passage that did not go anywhere. They were low and excruciatingly tight crawls. Joe sat outside with the notebook while Keith and I struggled with the survey, shouting numbers back to him. Joe loved a complete map; he surveyed everything.
After twelve hours of this routine, we emerged into a tall series of vertical shafts: Five Domes. Here we surveyed eighty feet, giving us a little over two hundred feet for the day. It was late, we were tired, and it was now time to head out. I had expected the trip to be the closest thing to hell imaginable, but I found it to be far less difficult than I had feared. I could feel the allure of these ca
ves. The passages went everywhere and seemed boundless, especially compared to the caves in West Virginia. I watched as Joe and Keith drooped during the long trip out; they were as tired as I was. I was holding my own against these seasoned Kentucky cave veterans.
We climbed out of the cave into a beautiful, sunny Kentucky morning after twenty-two hours underground. The wind that howled through the entrance snuffed out our lights. We had surveyed only a few hundred feet and found nothing new, but my first trip into the caves of central Kentucky was special. I had fallen in love with these caves. I was trapped. I would return.
Two months later, Joe and I prepared for a much longer trip into the cave. We would travel through the nefarious Whimper Route into Crump Avenue, the cave’s “main” passage. We faced a one-way travel time of six hours. The total trip would last at least twenty-four hours. Keith Ortiz could not get away from classes at VPI (or so he said), so only Joe and I went.
This time, Joe’s Opel was comfortable. The two of us sat in front, gear randomly tossed in the now vacant back seat. The passenger seat could now be reclined to afford at least a little sleep. Unfortunately, the only time Joe was silent was when I was driving. Otherwise, he babbled in the continuous conversation he said was necessary to keep him awake.
I had purchased a set of a dozen USGS topographic maps that covered the entire Mammoth Cave Plateau and had already begun to study the areas around Crump Spring Cave. Few caves were known beyond the boundaries of Mammoth Cave National Park, but those many large ridges suggested myriad opportunities for new discoveries. During the long drive, I quizzed Joe about all the other caves in the area, draining as much information from him as I could.