by Beyond Mammoth Cave- A Tale of Obsession in the World's Longest Cave (epub)
“Now, keep walking!” he ordered.
We repeated the scene several times. The energy of our mock conflict lifted all of our spirits. Finally, we stood on the last dry sandbank in Arlie Way, 150 feet north of S163.
The game was over.
While Ron looked on, we donned our wetsuit tops. We shuddered as we pulled the cold, clammy rubber over our warm bodies. Sand lodged under the rubber, grating our skin. Ron smiled.
Chris, Linda, and I walked down to the muddy stream that flowed into the wet passages beyond S163. Ron stopped. “Good luck!” was the last we heard from him as he turned and began his solo trek back to the surface.
At Station S163, the ceiling dropped two feet and the trickling stream flowed into a pool that stretched out of sight. A piece of flagging tape tied around a projection marked this last point. I crouched and looked into the low and gloomy lead. Mudbanks rose steeply out of the water to meet the mud-covered ceiling just eighteen inches above. An ugly scum floated on the water.
“Yech.”
We eased ourselves into the dreadful pool, each of us howling in turn as the fifty-four-degree water reached our chests. The passage was a crawlway, three feet tall and half filled with water. We sunk into the mud as we crawled, the cool breeze further chilling our already shivering bodies. After just fifty feet, we were forced even deeper into the pool by a large chert projection that jutted from the ceiling.
“This is really discouraging,” I said.
I paused to peer underneath another ledge. The ceiling was lower, now just ten inches above the water.
“Well, it still goes.” I reported back to my silent followers.
I lay down in the water and scooted ahead in the wet fourteen-inch-high crawl. The waves from my movements made foreboding lapping sounds against the ceiling, indicating lower airspace ahead. I knew it would not sump because the strong breeze ruled out that possibility.
Around the next corner, another ominous black chert lump hung close to the water’s surface.
“Shit! It’s getting low!” I said.
“Does it look like it still goes?” Linda asked.
I cocked my head awkwardly above the water just inches below my nose. “Well, it does blow air. Looks like it gets a little higher in just a few feet.
“Keep moving!” Chris bellowed from the back of the line. “This is no time to stop!”
I squeezed ahead, the side of my face now in the water. The muddy floor gave way to sharp rocks. As I forced my way beneath the obstruction, the sharp corners of the rocks ground into my chest and water sloshed into my eyes.
Past the chert obstacle, the passage was more spacious and comfortable. The airspace increased to ten inches in the eighteen-inch-high passage. After several hundred feet of this, I saw a shadowy slot in the left wall.
“I think we might have something here!”
The opening was almost too low to squeeze through. The mudbank pinned my chest against the corner of the slot as I sought purchase with my feet in the water behind me. A couple of good pushes allowed me to pop through. I scrambled up a steep bank and looked to see what I had found. The lower passage had fortuitously connected with a higher-level parallel passage. In two directions, a crouch-high tube led off into blackness.
“Come on through! It’s big!” The echoes of my voice were confirmation enough of a breakthrough.
Linda and Chris plowed through the last of the obstacles below and soon stood by my side.
South was the way to go. The three of us walked onward in the enlarging passage, wind in our faces. We lumbered through an easy walking passage floored with hard mud. Three hundred feet ahead, the floor dropped away into a large room with a small stream of water falling from the ceiling. On the far side of the fifty-foot-long chamber, a mudbank led up to a continuation of the passage we were following. To the right at floor level, a stream issued from a low passage, crossed the room, and disappeared into another similar crawl on the opposite side.
Beyond the room, we continued in the virgin corridor.
At a mud ramp leading down to a lower level, I suddenly froze in my tracks.
“Quiet!” I said. “Can you hear that?”
We stood, listening. Sounds of a large stream greeted us.
We stepped onto the steep bank to investigate. Simultaneously, we all lost our footing and careened on our rears down the bank into the unknown passage. With resounding splashes, we landed on our feet, knee-deep in a large pool of water.
“Look at this river!” cried Linda.
We all whooped and hollered. Echoes from our shouting reverberated.
To our left, a round tunnel fifteen feet in diameter led off. A large stream gurgled downstream among rocks the size of watermelons. Behind us, the water flowed from a deep blue pool. The ceiling dipped beneath the level of the water—a sump. Exploration upstream was blocked.
“This is the river we thought was down here.” I beamed as I confirmed the prediction. We had probably found what I had promised (and hoped for)—the upstream Roppel Cave extension of Logsdon River.
“Let’s go!” Chris led the way downstream in the big passage.
The stream was alternately knee-deep and waist-deep and was moving fast. After three hundred feet, the passage made a sharp turn from due south to the northwest. The fast-moving water had cut a deep trench in the floor, and we had to swim to continue in the passage.
We soon came to a large breakdown where the stream disappeared below the rocks. Plastic milk jugs, shreds of plastic bags, and old rusty cans were wedged among the large blocks.
“This trash comes all the way from Cave City,” I said. Cave City was three miles away, but it was the most likely source.
Above us, the blocks were larger. We climbed upward between them easily. Twenty-five feet above the stream, we emerged into blackness to stand on the floor of an enormous passage. The ceiling was sixty feet above us and the walls were vertical and thirty feet apart. It was huge!
We scurried among the boulders on the floor to see where the giant canyon would lead. As we proceeded, the piles of rocks rose higher, eventually reaching the ceiling and completely sealing the end of the passage. We stood at this eastern end of the passage looking down the long, sweeping hill sixty feet to the level of the river. The rocks we had climbed up through were faintly visible in the distant gloom. We perched on a large rock that jutted out like a pulpit overlooking the giant passage.
We moved down the breakdown mountain, searching the opposite wall for a way down to the river. We threaded our way between the boulders to a steep mud slope back into the murky river water.
Linda and I were done. Exhausted. Satisfaction with our success was not a substitute for energy. Chris, with his boundless energy, disappeared downstream, reappearing after fifteen minutes. He had been stopped where the ceiling lowered to five inches above the water. The water was over his head and the current strong. To move on would be too dangerous to attempt alone.
We began the long trip out of the cave, pausing only in Arlie Way to pack our wetsuit tops. Chris was still on retainer with Linda, so he crammed two tops into his bulging pack. I started into the S Survey first, Linda and the heavily-laden Chris following a few minutes later. Insensitive to any hardships Chris and his oversized pack might encounter, I moved out alone and never looked back. I did not see the two of them again until I opened my eyes the following morning after a fitful sleep in my bunk.
When Chris and Linda finally struggled through the Entrance Series to the surface, the sun was high in the sky and the weather was warm. It was 1:00 P.M., three hours behind my exit: they had been underground for twenty-six hours.
It wasn’t until fall of that same year, 1980, that the memories of the pain of the S163 push trip had dulled sufficiently to be outweighed by thoughts of the wondrous river. By October, we had put together a party of five—Chris Welsh, Linda Baker, Pete Crecelius, Bob Anderson, and myself—to return to the new discovery. Unlike that first trip, surveying now had to
be on the agenda. Wetsuit tops would not do; this time, each of us would have to haul in a full wetsuit. It was imperative to see where the river lay and how close we could penetrate downstream toward Mammoth Cave. This was a dangerous game; the results could be devastating if misplayed. We could not tip off the CRF to our plan before we completed it.
Linda Baker still did not want to carry a wetsuit through the S Survey but was determined to survey the discovery. Unfortunately for her, Chris Welsh had lost interest in being her porter. She had to solve this problem on her own. To the astonishment of all, her solution was to don the rubber suit on the surface and wear the bulky thing into the cave. Madness!
While the rest of us painfully struggled with our large and unruly wetsuit packs, Linda sweltered her way to Arlie Way, nearly succumbing to heat prostration. Salt tablets and copious amounts of water saved her. On the sandy floor of Arlie Way, she collapsed, drenched in sweat. To cool off, she poured bottles of water down her top.
After a rest, we climbed into our constrictive suits, the cold, clammy rubber even less tolerable than it had been the last time. We split into two survey teams. Given the trouble we were going through, we wanted to survey as much as possible. The river had to be pushed to its end. We gathered our packs and proceeded along to S163.
While Pete, Linda, and I surveyed through the water crawl south of S163, the lead party of Chris and Anderson followed the river downstream, quickly passing the limits of Chris’s previous exploration. This month, the conditions were dry and water levels were low, much lower than in May. What had seemed an impressive river before had dwindled to just a flowing stream. The long swim where Chris had quit was no obstacle this time. They moved rapidly through several thousand feet of wide river passage. The water was pooled and often deep; the tunnel featureless and stark.
The reason for the ponding was evident when they reached a breakdown that ended their rapid progress. Unlike the breakdown explored on the previous trip, the rocks here were not massive. The water gurgled away to be lost underneath small pieces of shattered rock. Wide, low crawlways continued through the jumbled blocks, but the breakdown looked extensive, and if there was a way through, it was not obvious. The once strong airflow now drifted lazily past them, dissipated in the vastness of the collapse zone.
Chris and Anderson set a permanent poker chip survey marker—which would last in flooded passage—and began their survey back upstream. Two thousand feet upstream from the collapse, they linked with my survey line coming downstream toward them from S163. The survey tied, we added up the numbers. It had been a big day; between the two groups, we had surveyed more than six thousand feet. We had pushed the river to an end.
However, it was not the end we had expected. We had anticipated finding the water gurgling into the sump that ended upstream Logsdon River in Proctor–Morrison–Mammoth Cave to the east. We thought that the airflow would lead us to south Toohey Ridge, completing the stratagem of outflanking the CRF cavers. Unfortunately, the airflow came from the breakdown, still from the direction of Mammoth Cave. A breakdown? What was going on here? Pete and I were disappointed. While the river had extended Roppel Cave far to the south, the gateway to the vast cave we knew had to exist still eluded us. Over a mile of cave surveyed and hardly any leads. How could this be?
We struggled back to the surface to complete the twenty-four-hour trip.
When the survey data was plotted and added to the map, we confirmed it was all but certain that the new river was an extension of Logsdon River in Mammoth Cave. Although we had yet to see a map of the river passages beyond the park boundary to the east, we knew that the sump that terminated Logsdon River in the upstream direction was beneath the western flanks of Toohey Ridge. Our maps showed that the downstream breakdown in the river in Roppel—also named Logsdon River—was probably about fifteen hundred feet short of the now-famous sump.
The hand had been played and won. We had successfully outmaneuvered the political windbags of the CRF, beating them at their own game. Their organization was effectively shut down to the east. In just one day of cave exploration, the principal gap between the two caves had closed from well over a mile to a span of barely over a thousand feet. No map was available to us of Hawkins River and Logsdon River; it was a CRF secret. However, I believed that if our map were joined to it, it would show over five miles of river with only one small gap. This was certainly the main river system of the vast underground Turnhole Spring Basin that drained about fifty square miles. The relationship between the two caves was unmistakable: they were the same.
The political situation was volatile, much more so than we had thought. Two large caves looked to be on the brink of connection. Our map was not a secret, and knowledge of the fifteen-hundred-foot gap between the two caves spread through the caving community like wildfire. We were continually questioned about when we would connect the caves.
The CRF was intrigued by the connection possibility, making it very clear that we were quite welcome to connect as far as they were concerned. However, after such a daring maneuver of outflanking the CRF, the last thing we wanted to do was to connect the caves. Roppel Cave now had an identity. We liked our big cave, and we wanted to make it bigger. We had just snatched south Toohey Ridge from the CRF; we did not intend to connect it to Mammoth Cave.
Jim Currens watched me carefully to make sure my conviction not to connect was firm. It was—for now.
Nevertheless, the connection area was a temptation to any caver greedy for glory. Such cavers abound. Controlling them would be difficult, and the idea of legislating exploration was abhorrent. Had we not built our organization on the bedrock of our hatred of the CRF’s regimented style of caving?
It galled us to reverse our policy, but the alternatives seemed even uglier. In October 1980, we openly declared a moratorium on exploration beyond S223 in downstream Logsdon River in Roppel Cave. Cavers from all over the country howled. The CKKC was accused of playing the same dastardly political games that the CRF played. To those not involved, a moratorium was unthinkable. The accusations stung, but we ignored them.
We kept our fingers crossed, though. For now, the intervening sump seemed a sufficient enough obstacle to allow us to set the issue of connection on the back burner for awhile. But questions remained and festered: Where did the airflow come from at the end of the river in Roppel Cave? Where would the upper levels above the sump in Mammoth Cave lead? We hoped no one would learn the answers for a long time.
17
Secret Trip to Morrison Cave
Diana Daunt and the Bruckers Infuriate Everyone
“Dad, we want you to come along on a special trip to Morrison Cave . . . to the river,” Tom Brucker said to me—Roger Brucker—over the telephone. This was unprecedented behavior by my son, who often patronized me but seldom tried to con me.
“Who is ‘we’ ?” I asked, hoping not to betray suspicion.
“Diana Daunt and I have been discussing a trip that requires your seasoned experience. We want you to enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime trip. After all, you can’t continue caving indefinitely,” Tom said. There it was, the harpoon of patronage cloaked in velvet flattery. Worse, the appeal had a “before-you-die” overtone that pissed me off.
In the past months, I had trained myself to the absolute peak of my caving abilities and endurance. I was able to do the toughest trips because I ran several miles most mornings. I had participated fully in extensive wetsuit survey trips into Morrison Cave, both up and down Logsdon River. I had led the survey to the upstream sump of Logsdon River and had noted several small leads that might go on from that remote termination.
“Sure, I’ll go,” I said. It was April 1981, and the rains that had drenched Kentucky had abated. I met Tom and Diana at Diana’s house near Fort Knox, Kentucky, on Friday night, 10 April.
The trip was to be on the quiet, Tom said. Nobody must know about it. Tom had arranged with Mrs. John Logsdon to expect us Sunday morning. We would park out of sight and, being fully prepare
d before setting out, would alight from the car, sweep up our gear and rope in one graceful movement, and disappear over the hill with nobody the wiser.
Our trip was to be a comprehensive reconnaissance of the possibilities of pushing upstream beyond the sump in Logsdon River. Unknown to Tom, Diana had confided to me that Tom’s unspoken purpose was to try to find the connection to Roppel Cave. He might—or might not—stop just short of it so the official discovery could be made at a time of our own choosing. I told Diana this was overly optimistic. Connections are not made that easily.
Unknown to Diana, Tom had told me in a low voice that Diana’s purpose was to find the connection between Morrison Cave and Roppel Cave. He wanted me along to restrain her if and when the time came. He apparently believed that I could exert some sort of moral leadership or ethical appeal if we found the connection. I told Tom that in my judgment, we would not find the connection. I guessed it must be two thousand feet away.
What was my motive in joining the trip? I knew that there were some leads at the sump and wanted to know where they went. I had negotiated with the CKKC representatives on behalf of the CRF, and our organization had unilaterally agreed to refrain from searching for a connection between the caves. On the other hand, the CRF had asserted its intention to explore the cave passages wherever they went. Of course, these policies were in conflict, but it set up the CRF party leader as the sole arbiter of where exploration left off and connection began. In a superior way, I knew I could make such a delicate distinction, but could any other leader be relied upon? Certainly John Wilcox and Pete Lindsley could, and maybe one or two others—but Tom? Doubtful. Diana? Impossible. So my motives were as pure as driven snow. As the party leader of experience, maturity, and political sensitivity, I was the obvious and only pick.
I had other motives. We had stayed away from the river too long due to the rainy weather. I relished caving with Tom and Diana, both capable and great companions in tough caving. Also, this reconnaissance allowed us to discover the possibilities of going on without the fanfare of a large, heavily organized party. So if our motives were so lofty, why the conspiracy and secrecy?