by Beyond Mammoth Cave- A Tale of Obsession in the World's Longest Cave (epub)
Suddenly our debate was interrupted by the whoomph . . . whoomph . . . whoomph of someone walking through deep water. We looked up, surprised to see Tom, hunched over, moving away from us into the low, wet passage. We watched his progress. The water was now above his waist as he leaned over, hands on the opposite wall, struggling to keep his balance on some unseen mudbank. His helmet scraped blobs of wet mud off the goo-encrusted ceiling.
He rounded the corner and his sloshing increased its pace. A few seconds later he bellowed, “Come on through! The water gets shallow!”
Chagrined by Tom’s direct approach, we waded in and were soon walking in a fine stream passage. The mud yielded to coarse gravel as the stream merrily flowed freely to the north. After fifteen minutes, we reached the strip flagging tape tied to a projection marking the end of the survey in upstream River Lethe. Success! We had found the connection shortcut.
The name River Lethe was retired in favor of Lower Black River, since the two streams were now found to be one. We named the low spot through which Tom Brucker had waded the Brucker Connection.
The discovery refreshed us. We could now bypass the horrors of the North Crouchway, Kris Krawl, and Death Canyon and continue with renewed vigor toward our objective in Lower Elysian Way.
The North Crouchway once again lay fallow, unused by cavers.
Jim Currens was true to his principles. In the ensuing months, he continued his relentless crusade to push south, all but ignoring everything else going on in Roppel Cave, particularly the efforts to the north. He was not going to let those CRF cavers beat him to the plum that was south Toohey Ridge. He systematically worked leads to the south in the main section near Arlie Way and Downy Avenue.
We regulars were still not interested; we had big cave to the north. So Jim led trip after trip of new and gullible cavers to those leads. He had already attacked the easier and more open passages such as West Lexington Avenue and Western Kentucky Parkway. All these were either blocked or else reconnected to known sections of cave with no progress made to the south. Jim was finding new cave, but not what he was searching for.
Later, he selected an obvious lead at the southern end of Arlie Way at the point where the passage withered away into a low, muddy crawlway. This passage blew a lot of air and had impressed us since the first breakthrough into Arlie Way. In view of the relative proximity of the presumed upstream continuation of Logsdon River beyond the sump in Proctor Cave, we speculated that it was possible that this lead at Station S163 might be related in some way to the river. Jim led a winter trip to try to push this passage, but his party was thwarted by deep water after just fifty feet. The passage was probably sumped. A wetsuit and lower water levels would be needed to push this slimy prospect any farther south. Jim had no desire to go caving in a wetsuit, so he wrote off the lead at S163. On most of these trips, his new CKKC cavers would emerge totally spent and thoroughly unimpressed by the effort. Often they did not return.
Jim’s focus eventually returned to the southern end of Downy Avenue where a large and dry passage was filled with shattered limestone. Cool air streamed through the gaps in the rocks, suggesting more cave beyond. This was the objective that Jim had wanted to pursue when he had been dragged into Elysian Way by Bill Walter and Pete Crecelius a few months back.
“This lead is the key!” Jim repeatedly preached to anyone who would listen.
We agreed that it probably was a good lead. However, I had more important things to push. Besides, I was not interested in digging in any more piles of rocks. Bill Walter, on the other hand, did not like to get wet. He had not returned to Lower Elysian Way since the push on the trip with Jim; there was too much water. But Bill liked to dig, and he liked dry cave.
Jim arranged another trip to the pile of rocks. This time, there was no big discovery to subvert his plan, so with Bill Walter and Hal Bridges, they attacked the offending pile of rocks.
Bill was the best digger and pusher among them, so he was unanimously nominated to lead. Swinging a hammer, he was able to squeeze forward. The breakdown was yielding, but unfortunately, it was also hundreds of feet long, not the few feet that had been hoped for. Jim and Hal followed along behind, they too hammering to make more room for their larger frames.
They passed one particularly difficult spot and emerged into open space. Breakthrough! They raced out of the collapse, surveying as they explored.
Unfortunately, the breakthrough was short. It was large passage, but the breakdown was so plentiful that it was more like being in a chain of large rooms separated by breakdown chokes. After five or six of these rooms, the new passage that they had decided to call Currens Corridor ran into a jumbled pile of wet sandstone. This was the end. A few leads did remain, assuring at least one return trip.
Breaking through into south Toohey Ridge would not be so easy. However, the CRF had not made any further progress in penetrating east into Toohey Ridge, either. Jim reconsidered his plan of attack, keeping an ever-watchful eye on the CRF presence he so much abhorred.
The rest of us continued caving, unfettered by any burden of politics. By early 1981, Roppel Cave quietly passed twenty-five miles in surveyed length.
To celebrate, Bill Walter formally announced the opening of a new fieldhouse, providing this advertising flier:
Roppel Hotel
The daily rates are now one dollar per day. The money is to be used for improvements of accommodations(?) and maintenance problems. [Free! That would be an improvement!]
Think of the Good Points!!
• Fresh air daily—(Except near that box across the road)
• Running water—(When it rains)
• Heat—(In the summer) Extra heat (winter) is available if you can get Borden and Currens to discuss . . .
• Scenic View—Be sure to bring your camera and get a picture of Lord Borden and his neatly arrayed caving gear (if he remembered to bring it)
• Beds — Count Currens will let you sleep in his canopied bed (when it is empty, of course)
• Bathroom—Wimpy Walter will pose free on camera in the outhouse with door shut (one dollar charge for open door shots)
• Recreation—Pistol Pete says there will be no charge for throwing cow chips if you forgot your Frisbee
• Sport—Dangerous Dave will let you dig in his sand box in the new entrance. No cats please
• Entertainment—Happy Hal has a free night course on how to fly over tables in the dark (he is the only one to make a successful landing on his face and still smile)
16
Power Play
A Gasoline Spill Changes the Rules
Cave City is one of three small rural towns along the main CSX line of the former Louisville & Nashville Railroad. They grew largely in response to the growing tourist industry of Mammoth Cave National Park. Along with Horse Cave to the north and Park City to the south, these communities still compete for the tourist dollars.
Cave City is the southbound gateway for tourists on their way to visit Mammoth Cave National Park. Traffic swarms over and ensnarls the poorly designed secondary roads. Acres of asphalt funnel the runoff water that ultimately flows into and through the passages of the Mammoth Cave System. Cave City’s storm water and its flotsam immediately find the way underground through the thousands of sinkhole depressions that dot the landscape. Unfortunately, a cavernous limestone aquifer such as that which underlies the Mammoth Cave region conducts water speedily, without the natural filtration that occurs in gravel aquifers. Underground streams are thus littered with trash, high fecal coliform populations, and agricultural chemicals.
Two spectacular events demonstrated the vulnerability of the ground water to hazardous contamination. On a slick and rainy July day in 1979, a gasoline tanker truck lost control and jackknifed on Interstate 65 in front of the busy Cave City interchange. The truck skidded, coming to rest on its side along the shoulder. Several people were killed in the violent collision. The tank ruptured and its contents then drained into an adjoining si
nkhole. The spill was contained, the local papers said; no evacuation was necessary. A potential major disaster was narrowly averted. In just a few short hours, the excitement had passed and the truck was hauled away. Life in the town of fifteen hundred people resumed its normal pace almost as quickly as it had been interrupted. Accidents along this busy stretch of road were not uncommon; this one was soon forgotten.
At the same time, an underground gasoline storage tank at a Texaco gas station, also in Cave City, was mysteriously losing its contents. It had a leak.
As a result of the accident and the leak, thousands of gallons of petroleum products flowed into the underground streams and began a journey to the Green River. Left in the wake was an ecological catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. What was once a biologically rich underground stream became uninhabitable; large populations of blindfish, crayfish, and other aquatic cave fauna were snuffed out in a few hours.
The hydrocarbons flowed freely and quickly from Cave City, beneath Toohey Ridge and Mammoth Cave Ridge via the underground Logsdon River, and then southwest toward Proctor Cave in Joppa Ridge. The plume of hydrocarbons resurfaced into the Green River at Turnhole Spring, ten miles west of Cave City. The spill petered out, but the damage remained.
A strong whiff of petroleum greeted Jim Quinlan’s researchers as they made the long climb from the lower levels of Proctor Cave into the upper-level trunk passages. Quinlan, running a water tracing program to map the flow of water through the region, had placed charcoal dye traps in large streams to intercept dye put in sinkholes miles away. In some cases, such as in Proctor Cave, retrieving the dye traps involved a lot of work. As his field workers moved toward the pits in the upper level, the pungent odor told them that something was wrong. When they reached the bottom of the rope in P17 Pit and stood in Hawkins River, they immediately saw what had happened. Dozens of dying crayfish were crawling up the steep mudbanks, trying to escape the contaminated water. A thin oil slick moved slowly past them.
It was heartbreaking. Scores of dead and dying blindfish and crayfish littered the river and its banks. Each footstep in the polluted passage churned the settled goo, further increasing the stench. The river was dead.
In the following weeks, many people made the long crawl to Hawkins River. Photographers took pictures; hydrologists took water samples; biologists surveyed the mortality rate of the cave life. All this evidence strengthened the case for initiatives to protect the groundwater of the Mammoth Cave region.
Within a week of the tanker truck spill, hydrocarbon fumes from the polluted water permeated the breezes that moved through Arlie Way. When Bill Walter and I first encountered the smell after stepping out of Hobbit Trail into Arlie Way, we were overwhelmed nearly to the point of nausea by its potency.
“What the hell stinks?” Bill had a frown on his face.
I puzzled over the unexpected odor. The air was blowing from south to north. We knew that the unexplored cave beyond S163 was the major conduit for the wind that blew through Arlie Way. The smell had to be coming from those unknown wet passages south of S163.
“Do you know what that smell is?” I asked Bill.
He said nothing. He apparently did not know about the fuel spills.
“You’re smelling gasoline from a tanker truck spill,” I said. “The smell’s from the main drain of Turnhole Spring!”
He still said nothing.
“We always thought S163 might connect to a base-level river; we were just too lazy to check it. It was too wet! Not only does it lead to a base-level river, it leads to the base-level river—the upstream continuation of Logsdon River in Proctor Cave!”
Bill was more concerned about the gasoline odor. “This smell makes me feel sick. It’s not safe to stay here. We might blow up.”
I wasn’t finished. “There could be miles of cave down there!”
Bill was gathering his stuff.
I relented. “Yeah, I guess it’s pretty bad. Let’s pack out of here.”
The odor was nauseating, and I feared that the impact to the cave life had to be severe. Yet I smiled as we walked north in Arlie Way. The cards had now fallen in our favor. A calamity had struck the caves, but it had proven beyond any doubt that Roppel Cave and Mammoth Cave shared the great underground water course named Logsdon River. It would not be easy to connect, though; we knew that from the CRF’s discovery of the sump beneath Toohey Ridge. But we might be able to show that the caves were close, and if they were, the CRF would then be bound by their own non-connection policy not to explore cave in the vicinity of the sump. This would further ensure that the cave of south Toohey Ridge would be ours for the taking. The pressure would be off.
However, I also knew that if this scenario were played out fully, the CKKC would have to face the inevitable. From that moment on, the question was not whether the caves would connect but when the connection would be found.
The possibilities of discovery beyond S163 were intriguing, especially in view of the possibility of finding an unknown segment of a large underground river. Unfortunately, the winter rains came early, and the water levels rose. There was no chance now to push the base-level passages, either for us or for the CRF. Through the winter, the lead gnawed at me.
In the spring of 1980, I began planning my trip to S163. The water levels would be dropping soon, and I was eager to see what lay beyond to the south. Wearing or carrying a wetsuit through the hot S Survey would be horrible. Memories of the hell of hauling the camping gear into the cave the previous Thanksgiving were still fresh in everyone’s minds. The effort had been exhausting, and nobody yearned to repeat that struggle.
I spent my spare time at home in Bethesda, Maryland, selling the idea of a push beyond S163 to the strongest of the Roppel cavers. Chris Welsh and Linda Baker were veterans of the cave camp, and their enthusiasm for hard trips had not been diminished by the experience. They were always up for a challenge and quickly accepted my proposal. My plan was to carry as little additional gear as possible into the cave. We would wear enough to fight off the cold from the water in S163 but not enough to allow for the slow pace of a survey. Instead of a full wetsuit, each of us would take only a wetsuit top. We would then push into the lead without surveying and see what we could find.
This plan departed from our normal policy of surveying as we explored; but in my opinion, this lean approach was justified to enable us to discover where it went. It was a gamble. If our results were inconclusive, we would accomplish nothing and might not return to explore the lead for a long time. If the lead ended quickly, it again would likely never be surveyed. Nobody would want to drag a wetsuit into the cave just to survey a grim and already explored dead end. But I was sure that a determined-enough push would find the big cave. If that happened, there would be no problem about later completing the survey.
On Memorial Day weekend, Chris Welsh and I were sweating our way through the narrow passages of the S Survey. Each of us carried an additional pack containing the wetsuit tops for the push south beyond Station S163. Linda Baker and Ron Gariepy were a few feet behind, the pair of them easily gliding through the tight canyons with their relatively small loads. Linda had cleverly taken advantage of Chris’s woeful financial state: she hired him to carry her wetsuit load through the cave. They had set an appropriate hourly wage, and now Chris carried not only his own wetsuit but also hers. I shook my head in amazement after hearing of this arrangement, but both parties seemed satisfied.
My original plan not to survey had continued to disturb me as the date for the trip approached. I arrived at a suitable compromise with myself. We would go to Arlie Way with the wetsuits, park them, and then survey a dry gypsum passageway that overlay Currens Corridor. We would work a full day, then return to the wetsuits and resume with the plan to push the wet lead. No matter what the outcome of the push, we would have a productive survey effort to show for our time in the cave. Once we completed the survey, Ron Gariepy would go back to the surface alone, leaving us to our wet mission. He had no de
sire to push these wet passages.
The first phase of the plan was a good one. The four of us surveyed twelve hundred feet in a stunningly beautiful elliptical tube. Massive white crystals of gypsum and calcite lined the walls and ceiling of the sandy-floored crawlway. We found a small hole in the floor that reconnected to the main passage through a previously unseen ceiling cavity, and this connection avoided the need to retrace our path back through the long crawl.
We quickly made our way back to Arlie Way and our waiting packs. We had already been underground for fifteen hours, and the packs did not appeal to me now. I had lost my enthusiasm for phase two of the plan. I cringed at the thought of putting on a cold wetsuit and getting soaked at this point in the trip.
“Do you guys really want to do this?” I asked.
“Sure,” Chris Welsh said. “I didn’t drag this crap in for nothing.”
“Well, it is a bit late,” I said. “Perhaps doing the survey was too much to bite off.”
“What?” Chris railed, appalled to hear me wimping-out on my own plan. He could not tell if I was being serious.
“Maybe we should just head out,” I said.
“Hey! You are going to push that lead!” he demanded.
Chris walked over to the packs, grabbed mine, and flung it at me. It bounced off my chest and fell to the floor.
“Let’s go!” he said. Chris grabbed the pack again, this time thrusting it into my arms.
Ron watched, silent and amused. I winked at him. He knew how it worked.
After animated haranguing from Chris, we began the walk down Arlie Way. Chris marched behind me like a prison guard.
When he glanced away, I quickly tossed the pack aside, hiding it behind a rock. I continued several steps before Chris noticed my empty arms, the wetsuit missing.
He had my number. “Hey! What the hell are you doing?”
Chris went back, found the discarded pack, and dramatically slammed it back into my chest.