by Beyond Mammoth Cave- A Tale of Obsession in the World's Longest Cave (epub)
But maybe I was just paranoid.
For years, I had, most of the time, been supplying Jim with complete sets of copies of the field notes, if for no other reason than to avoid any accusation of holding back. But he had been doing positive, productive work, so I would have given him copies anyway. Nevertheless, I was intractable. I would not split up the collection of original notes. That could lead to their loss, something, unfortunately, that was common in the history of project caving. There was no way I was going to give in to what had become Jim’s insistent demands. With our opposed and hardening positions, the issue became the catalyst of a much broader distrust. The turbulence of this conflict spread quickly to embrace our other points of contention—the newsletter (on one occasion, both Jim and the D.C. contingent simultaneously published two different versions of the CKKC Newsletter), cartographic responsibilities, and magazine article preparations.
Roberta and Cady told me they saw little merit in Jim’s position, but they could see the fires of conflict threatening to destroy the fabric of the CKKC. They mediated, vigorously offering various compromises. At times, Jim and I would strike an agreement, only to find weeks later that fine issues of interpretation would cause it to unravel. This was as bad as arms reduction treaty negotiations. Jim and I soon became adversaries. Our escalating disagreements and vociferous conflicts marked the point of no return to our six-year partnership. To Jim, the unprofessional opportunists, led by me, were seizing what he had so painstakingly built over the years. They were impulsive, insensitive, and irrational. To me, the only issue was who would come out on top.
And I already knew the answer to that question.
9
Treasures Beneath Doyle Valley
CRF Cavers Try to Expand the Big Cave into Joppa Ridge
I —Roger Brucker—explored Mammoth Cave intensively while Jim Borden’s Roppel Cave adventures unfolded. We in the CRF were making big discoveries and surveying miles of passage. The Mammoth Cave System sprawled across Mammoth Cave Ridge and Flint Ridge, linked by passages that snaked below Houchins Valley. Discoveries were everywhere. To the south of Mammoth Cave lay Doyle Valley, and beyond that, the vast expanse of Joppa Ridge. I was sure that the next frontiers of Mammoth Cave lay across that valley. The New Discovery section of Mammoth Cave was explored to within a few feet of Joppa Ridge, but like other leads that had promised to take us beneath Doyle Valley, it did not go.
Over the years, others had also looked to Joppa Ridge for new cave. One such discovery was Proctor Cave, the hoped-for key to the Joppa Ridge Cave System.
Proctor Cave is located precisely due south of the underground Snowball Dining Room in Mammoth Cave, across the mile-wide Doyle Valley. The valley floor is 240 feet below the tops of Mammoth Cave Ridge and Joppa Ridge, still 150 feet above Green River level, leaving 150 feet of limestone for connecting passages to Mammoth Cave.
In the last days of slavery in Kentucky, Jonathan Doyle was a slave of a nearby landowner. During the Civil War, he escaped and joined the Union Army. In 1863, he went AWOL from the military and returned home, hiding and living in the woods on Joppa Ridge.
One day he felt cold air pouring from a crevice where he camped. He moved rocks and dug his way into a cave. The landowner was so pleased to know of the new cave that he arranged to free the slave.
Doyle discovered a “large river, as yet inaccessible to visitors,” according to William Stump Forwood’s 1870 Historical and Descriptive Narrative of the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky.
In 1887, the Mammoth Cave Railroad was completed between Glasgow Junction on the L&N Railroad and Mammoth Cave, and its right-of-way passed within a few hundred feet of Proctor Cave. For forty-two years, visitors paid to see Proctor Cave. When the Mammoth Cave Railroad died in 1929, Proctor Cave died with it. Thirty-eight years later, CRF teams began to explore and survey in Proctor Cave.
In 1970, a CRF party led by Gordon Smith found “Mystic River,” a puny trickle of water six inches wide. To reach it required crawling on knees and belly for nearly two thousand feet. No wonder cavers passed it up for easier pickings. Proctor Cave went back to sleep.
In 1973, John Wilcox became interested in Proctor Cave and its potential. He selected a strong party to open up its new areas of exploration, picking Richard Zopf, Steve Wells, Bill Hawes, and my son, Tom Brucker, to find something there.
When I heard Tom was going, I said, “Be sure to take along enough rope. Go down the pit where that river goes. No excuses.”
Tom spared me the “oh-dad” tone: “Richard’s picking out the rope now. Don’t worry.”
Richard Zopf interrupted: “The only rope left is this one-hundred-foot Goldline. Maybe we’d better just leave it—”
“That’ll do just fine!” I said. They would spin and bounce on this elastic rope, but they would be able to handle it. I had descended pits on Goldline rope dozens of times.
Deep inside Proctor Cave, Richard’s party split into two teams for the systematic checking of leads near the so-called Mystic River. Richard and Steve Wells followed the ceiling canyon that diverged from the floor canyon of the R Survey at R70. The canyon led them to a small dome. Richard climbed up the dome to investigate what looked like a shadow. He squeezed up through a narrow crack that led into a virgin elliptical passage fifteen feet wide by eight feet high.
Richard said he felt a sense of disbelief. The discovery was immense, and there were no footprints in the sand floor.
Richard called the others to see the new cave. They set off exploring, carefully confining their footsteps to a narrow track to keep the new passages as pristine as possible and to watch for any signs of aboriginal visits.
Richard counted his paces as they swept along trunk passages twenty to thirty feet wide by ten to twenty feet high, past intersections and pits. They found cave rat debris and exotic gypsum formations.
Altogether they counted eight thousand paces—between three and four miles of prime, spectacular cave passages in which they had pressed the first footprints. Some cavers call this “scooping booty,” racing through big virgin cave without surveying; CRF leaders frown on this kind of irresponsible behavior by others but have hidden their own guilt.
Richard later insisted that they had not acted irresponsibly. (He lamely pointed out that his indoctrination to CRF caving had been with Tom Brucker in Hansons Lost River, looking for the Flint Ridge–Mammoth Cave connection, a trip where there had been no surveying.)
Expedition leader John Wilcox was ecstatic at their news. He grinned broadly but chided Richard a little. CRF teams usually bring back survey data rather than just tales of wonder, he reminded Richard.
When I heard the news, I asked Tom if I could make the trip into the new passages in Proctor Cave. “No,” he said. “The crawlway is too tight. You’d never fit.” I smarted at that.
Over the next few years, CRF’s thinnest cavers poured into Proctor Cave. They surveyed about five miles of new passages, little more than the complex of trunk passages first discovered by Richard Zopf and Tom Brucker. Leads were followed systematically, and most were surveyed to their ends. Exploration slacked off when only a handful of unremarkable leads remained unsurveyed. The Joppa Ridge puzzle remained unsolved.
Doyle Valley was like an insurmountable mountain peak. One could draw a line along the boundary between Mammoth Cave Ridge and Doyle Valley; no cave seemed to be able to cross it. I often studied the map looking for a route that would probe beneath the valley toward Joppa Ridge. Each time, nothing new presented itself. And since I was president of the CRF, between 1974 and 1976, I had many other things to worry about. Joppa Ridge would have to wait—or so I thought.
“Roger, skip the political shit and let’s go caving.” Diana Daunt—sharp-minded, determined, tiny, skinny—was extending more than a casual invitation to me. She knew my focus was on the frustrating politics of CRF relationships with the National Park Service but knew my heart was into cave connections. Her disarming invitation would reveal a cunning str
eak if I listened further.
She continued, “Back in August, John Wilcox led a trip into new passages under the south end of Mammoth Cave. We put in a lot of survey in narrow canyons that didn’t end and found some domes and leads. There’s a K Survey that takes off from a big dome at Station A57, forty-five or fifty stations of it . . .”
Instead of blurting out “Go on,” I smiled, knowing she would reveal progressively wonderful details—and her real intention.
“On the Labor Day expedition, a party extended the K Survey from K47 to K89 where it ends in a dig. The survey goes south and then turns west.” Diana lowered her voice: “It’s the best and closest lead we’ve got to connect Mammoth Cave to Proctor Cave.”
Bingo! She was recruiting me to scoop John Wilcox. Her desire to connect the caves was at least as strong as mine. With her determination and my zeal, the passage might be pushed. But why hadn’t she recruited Wilcox? It didn’t occur to me at that moment that Wilcox would be tough to con. He probably knew the possibilities out there better than anyone and would be skeptical of surplus enthusiasm. Besides, Wilcox seemed preoccupied with his own explorations. Yet, just maybe he had overlooked this one!
I was assigned to lead this trip to continue the K Survey. Previous trip reports described the unfolding discovery. On 1 September 1973, Ernst Kastning had led three others to the crawl that departed from Logan Avenue. They were barely able to keep their chests above the water, but the passage opened to a comfortable scrambling height, ideal for surveying. They carried their K Survey extension through several hundred feet of alternating crawlways and small stand-up rooms to Station K86, where sand on the floor sloped upward to within inches of the ceiling. One of the party dug ahead for ten feet; larger passage hinted just beyond.
The words on the page screamed for attention: “About five minutes of digging is all that is needed to go farther . . . it is the continuation of a very distinct passage heading south toward Joppa Ridge.”
Jim Keith, Diana, and I were good diggers. We tucked a short wrecking bar in our pack, the necessary tool for loosening rocks or packed gravel, tested the compass and clinometer, and set off. Our objective: dig at K86 and carry the survey through to Proctor Cave. We closed the solid gate of the Frozen Niagara Entrance to Mammoth Cave behind us—all caves within the national park were gated and locked for security and safety reasons, restricting access to those with keys—at nine o’clock, a good, early start for a two-meal trip.
The sand and small gravel in the K Survey was loose and easy to shift to the side at places where the passage tightened. The passage then successively opened upward into a series of six dome-like rooms, each oriented diagonally to the direction of the passage we were surveying. The cross section of each room was that of the inside of a miniature gothic cathedral, with tan-gray walls six to eight feet high and about fifteen feet long.
Diana led the digging. She seemed able to wiggle through impossible places, while Jim Keith and I excavated a deeper and wider trench in the floor following her. In one two-hundred-foot reach of passage, we dug a sixty-foot-long V-shaped trench, ample for even the largest caver. (I had learned that if I expected to lure others, nothing conveys the credible promise of reward like a generous-sized dugway.)
We named the passage Snail Trail after the snail shells we had found in the sand—an unusual discovery—and because we had traversed the passage at the pace of a snail.
Near the end of our trench, we unsheathed the short bar where the fill rose to within an inch of the ceiling and a cold draft of air poured over our faces. The sandy dig led us downward at a twenty-degree angle, following the dipping ceiling.
Diana and I took off our hard hats and removed the suspension straps from inside. This was formidable digging and required proper tools. We worked the helmets as buckets, biting out brimful scoops of sand and passing them back for emptying. It was an efficient bucket brigade. For me, this was caving at its finest, chatting with amiable friends about man’s adaptation, development, and use of tools while extending our earthworm tunnel downward for six feet, then to the left for seven feet.
We took turns at the face for several hours, then Jim complained of stomach upset and retreated to the room behind us. Diana and I kept digging. Suddenly I was aware that Diana was not passing back helmets of sand; she was gone. “Hey, don’t go off without us!” I yelled.
“Hurry up. There’s big cave here!” she demanded.
Was this how the seductive Lorelei had lured the sailors onto the rocks? I squirmed through the last seven feet of tunnel to a low ramp slanting thirty feet upward. Clearance was less than six inches.
“Step on it!” she explained. “Going cave here.”
It irritated me that she wasn’t digging back toward me. An image flashed in my motion picture mind: the brutal commander of a Greek war galley ordering the slave master to increase the beat to ramming speed.
“It would help if you dig back toward us,” I suggested.
“Do you want to see this, or not?”
Jim and I dug through, and in an hour we traveled along one of the most beautiful passages in the cave. Light gray limestone walls undulated with scallop marks, and glistening gold highlights reflected from our lamps. Perfect ripple marks covered the undisturbed floor. A discovery like this was the visual equivalent of a sustained orgasm.
“Time to get to work,” ordered Diana. “We’ll survey from here back.”
“Here” was a reduction in passage size to a tight crawl, with a strong breeze flowing from it. I was sure it would enlarge again and lead into Proctor Cave. Jim complained again of a growing headache and continuing nausea, but Diana silenced him with a lecture on how important it was to put this discovery on the map. Her appeal was sprinkled with phrases such as “They’ll never forgive us” and “wimp-out.” I had used intimidation of this kind myself, but hers lacked the subtlety I had cultivated.
We started an L Survey in the ten-foot-wide by nine-foot-high undulating passage and in a few hours tied back to the K Survey. Jim said his headache registered 9.5 on the Excedrin scale. What kind of party leader would let a party member get so trashed?
Well, I was forty-five years old, he was what—thirty? If people couldn’t do this stuff, they shouldn’t try. Diana was smiling as if in agreement. It was 4:20 A.M. when we left the cave. Jim Keith never came back.
We described Snail Trail as a four-star lead, which was how really hot openings were marked on the exploration lead list. From roughly scaling off the survey on the topographic map, we saw we were well away from Mammoth Cave Ridge, nearly halfway across Doyle Valley. Directly southwest of Snail Trail was Proctor Cave. “Thin people are needed!” Diana appended to the trip report.
If Diana was to connect caves, she’d need thinner cavers than Jim Keith or me. At 185 pounds, my girth was not the problem; it was chest and bone size that limited me. Or was it that I withdrew from confrontation with limitations? Diana escalated her recruiting, and one month later she fielded the first “All Woman Party,” as it came to be known.
In the Mammoth Cave area, women cavers had made significant leadership contributions from the early days. One or two old-time CRF officials didn’t like the idea of women leaders, but highly successful women explorers and leaders abounded in our field work. A physiologist said that women make good push cavers because they excel at endurance—something about better distribution of body fat. Exceptional upper-body strength was not the issue. In an almost legendary incident, Diana Daunt, working as a Park Service tour guide for the Wild Cave Tour in Mammoth Cave, was challenged by two burly football players: “That is our guide? We’ll run her ass off. Not that she’s got one!”
Toward the end of their tough trip, peppered by their derision, Diana quietly turned over the rest of their party and conclusion of the trip to the trailer guide. She said to the athletes, “You boys just follow me . . . if you can.”
She led the pair of muscle men at breakneck speed through crawls, across ledges, down cl
imbs, and through water and mud. They begged her to stop, gasping, swearing, and sweating. She said, “Now just keep up with this candy-ass guide. We don’t want you lost.” She took off like a shot. At the end of ninety nonstop minutes, the carnage was terrible and the mutilation of the male spirit complete.
When cavers, regardless of sex, heard her story of the football players, they howled. Women cavers are not all destroyers, but they can do anything the men cavers can and regularly lead push trips and major expeditions.
Diana’s recruitment of Pat Crowther to lead the next trip to Snail Trail was a good choice. Pat was thin. She had discovered the way to the Flint Ridge connection with Mammoth Cave and had been a party member on that tough trip. She was as good as cavers come. Beth Grover and Cindi Smith were also competent, and with Diana, they expected great things.
At the Thanksgiving expedition, Pat’s Snail Trail party got off to a slow start. Someone forgot a carbide bottle, so they returned to camp for it. The timing was unfortunate, and they waited two hours for a window between tourist trips going in the Frozen Niagara Entrance. Their speed in the cave was frustratingly slow, taking five hours to reach the end of the Snail Trail survey. But they were loaded with enthusiasm and tools—trenching shovel, crowbar, and trowel.
Pat and Diana squirmed through the tight crawlway beyond Station L1. It pinched to six inches of airspace with cold water and goopy mud below. It was a belly-crawl, so tight that Beth and Cindi could not fit through it.
According to Pat, it was lucky for Beth and Cindi that they couldn’t make it.
Pat and Diana surveyed fifteen stations of N Survey starting on the far side of the tight swamp crawl. The gap in the survey would be closed later. It was relatively dry going, and they came to a passage trending northwest in one direction and northeast the other way. The passage to the northwest ended in a fill to the ceiling after a few feet. The other end, to the northeast, went five feet to a lead, a two-level passage that looked like it might drain a vertical shaft. The way into it was blocked by jutting rocks. Diana said, “We need a hammer to break off the projections. There’s a good wind blowing. Remind me to bring a hammer next time.”