Beyond Mammoth Cave

by Beyond Mammoth Cave- A Tale of Obsession in the World's Longest Cave (epub)

  Tom’s lamp was the first to die. Water would not come out of the dropper. No shaking, twisting, or reaming helped. Lynn handed him her spare lamp.

  By this time, Lynn was miserable. She felt wiped out, her lamp kept conking out, her shoulders ached horribly from supporting the entire weight of her muddy pack, and her head throbbed because her helmet didn’t fit with all the mud in it. She wondered when she had ever felt worse. Never, she decided.

  Lynn was not hungry but realized she needed to eat. She knew Tom would not stop for anything more than a candy bar, and the very thought of candy made her nauseous.

  Tom had been saying since her first expedition that he was out of shape. Lynn prayed she might never have the honor of caving with him when he was in shape. At one point, Lynn said she felt like sitting down in the middle of the passage and crying. She bit her lip—what a stupid thing to consider doing! “I had to laugh at myself. The whole thing was absurd enough to be funny,” said Lynn later.

  Suddenly, Tom Alfred turned around. His light had winked off. Lynn held her lamp out to relight his, but then hers went out too. Darkness. Lynn spun the spark wheel, which ignited the flame with a pop. She decided the lamp must be out of water. There was plenty of water in it, but it wasn’t dripping. She tried all the tricks she knew, but none worked. Just too much dirt clogged the water chamber. Lynn screwed the darkened lamp back together and they hurried to catch up with Tom. “A can of fruit juice sounds good,” said Alfred.

  The party caught up with Tom at the chest compressor exit from the crawlway. It hadn’t been bad coming in because they had been going downhill; however, it would be tougher going uphill. Lynn’s chest went through, but her hips caught. Pushing with her feet just squeezed her in tighter. There was nothing to pull on, and her arms were weak from all the digging earlier in the day. She backed up and dug a little, then tried again. Not enough. She dug some more, then Tom Alfred extended a hand. She took it and he pulled her through.

  Lynn’s failed lamp was shot and Alfred’s lamp was almost to that point. “Just pour a little water into the carbide chamber every ten minutes,” was Tom’s advice. Lynn poured in a slug of water and screwed the lamp together. With a spark, a giant flame leapt forward. They continued.

  At the next lamp repair stop, Lynn said, “Tom, I’m going to mutiny and eat a can of fruit.”

  An unhappy sigh came from Tom. “Okay.” He sat watching Alfred and Lynn down cans of fruit cocktail in a few gulps. He never reached for any food.

  Energy returned almost immediately, but the spurt lasted only about forty-five minutes. Fruit is better than candy bars for a quick boost, but neither lasts.

  They wiggled through the last chert crawl and finally emerged into Logan Avenue. Lynn was feeling bad again. She staggered unsteadily to her feet in the walking-height passage. She worried about some of the climbs ahead. Her arms were weak and she didn’t know if she could walk without falling, let alone climb.

  By the beam of her feeble flashlight, she put one foot ahead of the other in a semi-trance. Alfred also staggered along. It was a silent, stumbling journey—a forced march driven by necessity to get out of the cave. The outside air revived them somewhat as they closed the cave gate behind them.

  On the drive back to camp, Tom commented that this had been a good group. “I never heard one complaint,” he said. Lynn thought, What good would it have done if we had complained? But he was right. All of them had been miserable, and the problems had been many. Nobody had really complained—at least out loud. In fact, they had laughed at themselves many times to help relieve the pain, chill, and suffering.

  Party after party returned from cave trips with survey notes and tales of discovery in all parts of the cave. Mammoth Cave was growing by miles and miles. The occasional small pushes toward Proctor Cave were a drop in the bucket compared to the productivity of cave-finding elsewhere in the system.

  My focus was on Doyle Valley, even though most of my own trips were to other leads in the system. CRF expedition leaders followed lines of least resistance in dispatching survey parties. Leaders could send parties to a variety of leads, knowing only some would pay off. If they concentrated the expedition trips on narrow targets, they risked having nothing to show for hundreds of hours of work. When I led expeditions, I hedged the bet with a trip dispersion strategy. Sending trips to many different locations would yield more cave than dispatching trips to a concentrated area. When I wasn’t leading expeditions, I enjoyed going wherever I was assigned.

  When Tom Brucker’s party returned, I scaled off their estimates of discovery on the topographic map. I speculated that the remaining distance to Proctor Cave was about seven hundred feet, but it may as well have been a mile. There had to be more promising ways to get beneath Joppa Ridge. My thoughts again turned toward Proctor Cave. Indeed, there were not many leads left, but most of the pits discovered off the trunk remained unexplored. Just maybe . . .

  In 1978, Lynn Weller took numerous trips into Proctor Cave through the dreaded Proctor Crawl. Both Tom Brucker and Stan Sides had warned that I wouldn’t fit through the tightest part and had discouraged me from even thinking of trying it. Lynn, on the other hand, had been talking with Jerry Davis, who was a good vertical caver. He had earlier led a trip into Proctor to a promising pit at Station P17 in the Proctor trunk passage. John Barnes had gone on the trip, too, and he agreed it was the place to go. John and Jerry convinced Lynn.

  Lynn was leading the next trip to the P17 Pit on 21 April 1979 with John Barnes and Richard Zopf. She urged me to join them since I could do vertical work. Tom Brucker was horrified when he heard I was on the trip, but Lynn and Richard agreed I would do fine. John Wilcox told them I could go anywhere but might be slow coming out. Since Richard had dug out the tightest part of the Proctor Crawl, he could judge who would fit. Besides, I really wanted to go, because for some years I had been following the work in Proctor Cave in hopes that I could be on the party that connected it with Mammoth Cave.

  We set off with a small coil of rope and some tools for digging. We wound the straps of our cave packs around our ankles so that we could drag them through the sand behind us. I found the Proctor belly crawl low and monotonously unending.

  At the tightest spot, I had to exhale to squeeze through, but the trip in was otherwise uneventful. I concluded that there must have been a conspiracy to keep me out of Proctor Cave. Was it that they didn’t want me to find something wonderful? Or were they genuinely concerned about my ability to make it?

  At Station P17, we climbed down a short pitch into the bottom of a little dome to where a canyon led off. Richard Zopf canyon-straddled a deep void to find the anchor point for the rope. We tied the last ten feet of rope around a rock corner as a safety backup. Richard adjusted the rope pad to protect against abrasion where the rope went over a lip of rock. We put on harnesses and a carabiner brake bar and one after another clipped onto the rope where it dropped vertically into the pit. The first few feet down were a layback climb until we dangled free on the brake bars. The descent, about sixty feet, was a piece of cake. We found the previous C Survey station at the bottom of the pit.

  The C Survey ran along the bottom of the pit, which was a chain of vertical shafts that made up a canyon about sixty feet high by twenty feet wide. A lot of wind blew through the place. The survey left the floor of the pit to angle up a sixty-foot climb. We knew there was a little more survey to finish, but our attention was on a slot in the floor on the far left side of the dome. Water drained out through it.

  We had to dig to get through. We took turns prying rocks with a short wrecking bar. Lynn had packed a putty knife for digging; we also used our hands to scoop mud and loose rocks out of the plugged passage. Only one person could work at a time; the others froze in the stiff breeze flowing through the shaft.

  There was plenty of time to talk, because the digging was extensive. We’d dig through into a comparatively wide place, then attack the next blockage. I used Richard’s hammer to break up l
arger rocks. Rock chips flew in all directions from the blows, and I had no safety glasses.

  John Barnes said he liked caving in Proctor, contrasting it with Roppel Cave. “They take a lot of risks in Roppel,” he said. He reinforced the prejudice I felt, that the Central Kentucky Karst Coalition was made up of daredevils who believed in giving the cave a chance. Jim Borden had told me of handholds breaking off while free-climbing a deep pit. Were these tales of youthful machismo? Or just plain unsafe caving? Well, John was among safe friends here.

  Chips continued to fly. All of us were accomplished diggers, making steady progress through the mud. Then using the hammer and rocks, we pounded off projections to make the slot larger.

  Near the end of our allotted time, we broke through to the next room, a low-ceilinged alcove at the top of another pit. This one was about twenty-five feet deep. The only place to tie off our rope was back where we had first opened this passageway. Lynn went back to the bottom of the previous pit for more rope. We tied off our last 150-foot rope and threaded it through the tight passage, then lowered the end down the drop.

  Richard Zopf rappelled down our second rope into virgin cave. He heard the sound of a distant waterfall, out of sight. He yelled there was still another pit below that one. We followed him into the second pit, where the walls glistened with descending water and mud was everywhere under foot.

  “This place has been under water recently,” Lynn said, examining a muddy high-water mark on the wall. “I’ll bet it was back in December when the water was up fifty-three feet in the Green River.”

  At the far end of this room was the lip of the third pit. We lowered the end of our 150-foot rope into it, but with all the zigzagging from the anchor of the second pit, it did not reach the bottom.

  Richard reached into his pack and pulled out a length of rope. “You never know when you might need a line.” He uncoiled the thirty-foot handline. I made a note to myself that on our next trip here, we must bring more rope.

  To test the depth of the drop, we searched for rocks to heave. Finding none, we packed mud into pretty good mud balls and hurled those into the pit. Splash!

  Richard rigged the line, then clipped onto it with his descending rack, a steel loop containing an array of aluminum brake bars. He threaded the rope around alternate bars to provide friction during his rappel. He arranged his ascending Jumar clamps so he could get at them in case he had to stop on the rope and reverse his direction. Lynn, John, and I huddled as he backed over the edge of the mud slope.

  “It’s pretty dark,” Richard said. “I see the water below me. I’m going down for a better look.”

  There was a pause, with appropriate twangs of the rope, grunts, and groans. He was about twenty feet below us.

  “Hoooo-weee!” Richard exclaimed. “I didn’t stop in time. Part of me is under water. I’m on top of some kind of lake . . . or rather, up to my middle in a lake or river or something. No telling how deep it is. I’m trying to re-rig to ascend the rope.” He struggled. Minutes stretched out. We shivered.

  Every sound of Richard’s description reverberated. Next to the shaft was a single passage, maybe twenty feet wide, with only four feet of air between water and ceiling. Richard fished his Jumars from his cave pack, taking care not to drop them into the water. He clamped one Jumar on the line above his locked descending rack; its nylon leader streamed down from it. He fumbled to hook his chest carabiner into the leader. This was a difficult maneuver under dry conditions. Here, partly submerged, it was frustrating and cold. He had to transfer his weight from the rack to the Jumar leader. There was nothing to push against; he pulled himself up with arm strength alone. At last, his full weight dangled from the locked Jumar clamp.

  The next task was to rig a second Jumar clamp that trailed a foot loop. It was located below the now loose rack. It clicked onto the rope. Now, he had to raise one foot high enough out of the water to pull the loop over it. This seemed impossible. Dangle, thrash, and splash. He launched out with one foot toward the loop held low in the water. It was a blind thrust. There was nothing to be seen in this watery hole. He had the impression his foot came nowhere near the loop. He tried the maneuver many more times before he was successful.

  Richard thought of a way to plumb the depth of the water. He tied his hammer on some webbing from his pack and lowered it down the pit. When he felt slack, he pulled it up and looked for the water line. “It’s about four feet deep,” he said.

  “How are you coming?” we asked from above. We couldn’t see him.

  “Keep your pants on.” A testy response, I thought. It wasn’t like Richard. He must be in trouble. I mentally ran through the drill to rappel down and rescue him if necessary.

  He was climbing higher. He shouted: the echo amplified his voice. “It appears to be—and sounds like—a ponded river. I’m feeling pretty weak. Pull me up if I tell you.” We braced as best we could in the muddy canyon. There wasn’t any place to get a good purchase. “Pull!” We pulled him up the last few feet of the slippery slope.

  Richard was caked with mud and drained of energy, although objectively I knew him to be the strongest caver on earth, tired or not. He said the pool was at base level. We had descended far enough by my reckoning, too. Echoes had made it nearly impossible for him to understand our words above him. Zopf and I agreed that we had heard an echo of such intensity only in Roaring River and Echo River in Mammoth Cave.

  Next time, he’d prepare better for the transfer from descending to ascending gear. And he would make it a point to stop before getting his butt wet.

  We surveyed from the newly found pit back up the second drop. We ate a meal and headed out. John Barnes was like a zombie, pulling prussik knots from his cave pack. Prussik knots to climb out, instead of Jumars? That’s what cavers used in the fifties; now, thirty years later, only a cheapskate would think of using such primitive gear! The party zipped up the rope in short order, but John tediously moved each knot inch by inch up the rope. Prussik knot ascents can drain away as much energy as doing fifty pushups. I didn’t think John could do ten pushups in his present state. Eventually, he struggled over the lip and we began the long trip out.

  “This is the base level we’ve been trying to find for years. It’s a prize because in base-level passages you can go for miles, crossing under sinkholes and valleys,” I informed Lynn at a resting spot in the Bottle Room near the entrance. I proposed a return trip. The Green River water level should fall soon. Its flood stage had backed up water in all the lowest level passages, but when the Green River receded, the passages would empty quickly. Lynn was eager to go. She could piece together the evidence without my patronizing lecture.

  Her trip report later indicated Richard Zopf’s stream appeared to head the right direction and ought to open up all of Joppa Ridge. She also said it would be one hell of a difficult trip to traverse the Proctor Crawl and three vertical drops. I wondered from a practical standpoint how much cave could one explore from such a deep-cave jumping off point. Could anyone expect productive survey work from the cavers after such formidable obstacles?

  John Barnes supplied his own answer. He never returned to Proctor Cave.

  10

  The Legacy of George Morrison

  Cavers Follow in the Footsteps of the Old-Timers

  Now the plot thickens. Let’s go back eighty years and begin again. And we will not lose sight of Roppel Cave.

  Between 1915 and 1925, the legendary cave wars reached their peak. The conflicts pitted landowner against landowner, each seeking to cash in on the fledgling cave tourist industry. Mammoth Cave was the big tourist magnet. The path to success during these turbulent times was to find a cave to commercialize or, better yet, an entrance to Mammoth Cave to siphon off tourists headed for the Historic Entrance on the northwest edge of Mammoth Cave Ridge. One of the more enterprising individuals during this period was George D. Morrison, a likable oil prospector who turned to cave prospecting. His determination, brute force, and ability to operate by s
tealth led to the discovery of many miles of passage in Mammoth Cave (to the dismay of the heirs of the Mammoth Cave Estate) and, more importantly, to the opening of the New Entrance and Frozen Niagara Entrance to Mammoth Cave. He was successful. He built and operated a hotel and conducted Mammoth Cave tours, making a lot of money operating the “New Entrance to Mammoth Cave” at the expense of the historic Mammoth Cave.

  During his search for this back door to Mammoth Cave, Morrison probed countless holes along Mammoth Cave Ridge and other areas. His efforts were systematic and thorough. The Mammoth Cave Estate got most of the tourist money; everyone else had to scratch out a living off the land. A few operated souvenir rock shops. But every landowner knew that he might get rich if Morrison found an entrance on his property, so all the landowners cooperated with Morrison.

  One of the holes Morrison looked into was perched on the side of an upland midway between Joppa Ridge and Mammoth Cave Ridge. This hole could accommodate a person—barely—and dropped immediately into a deep pit. This pit probably interested Morrison and his men because it exhaled large volumes of cold air in the summer—a sure sign of big cave. Although not on Mammoth Cave Ridge, the pit might intersect passages that were an eastern extension of Mammoth Cave. Elmore Borden, Pete Strange, and Will Warfe owned the lands surrounding the blowing hole and entered into an exploration agreement with Morrison. The four of them would explore the cave.

  At the time, explorers descended pits on homemade ladders or, if the pit was deep, by being lowered on a hay rope. Morrison’s hole was deep, over seventy feet, so they lowered Morrison on a rope threaded through a pulley that was lashed to a log placed across the entrance. The drop was narrow with two jagged offsets. The three on the surface had to lower the explorer slowly to avoid injuring Morrison or catching the rope behind a ledge. Despite these precautions, the tethered explorer had to continually avoid falling rock knocked from the many ledges by the rope.