Beyond Mammoth Cave

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

  First, it wouldn’t do to let the CKKC know we were going up to the end of the river for any reason. Just the mention of such a trip would produce an uproar. Second, we didn’t want Don Coons to know about the trip. He had a mixed reputation—he kept his extensive explorations secret when it suited him but also told secrets to almost anyone, including the CKKC, when it suited him. Third, I didn’t want some in the CRF to know about the outing, particularly Richard Zopf, who seldom approved of other people’s secret trips. He would conclude that we were trying to connect the caves if he got wind of the trip. I didn’t tell Scooter Hildebolt, the CRF’s operations director and our representative to Mammoth Cave National Park, to provide him deniability in case of a screw-up.

  There was still another person we wished to keep out of the know: the Cleveland Grotto spy Bob Nadich, who had “just happened” upon our engineering efforts when we installed a gate on the entrance to Morrison Cave the previous year. His breathless account of discovering a CRF crew putting the finishing touches on a formidable steel gate to Mammoth Cave had appeared quickly in the Cleve-O-Grotto News. Never mind that we had fed him such eye-opening information; the fact is we had been under surveillance and word could travel at light speed.

  Finally, we did not want John Logsdon inquiring about what we had found. He already had an exaggerated idea of what the federal government might pay for another entrance to Mammoth Cave, and we wanted to avoid feeding his notion of riches with yet another story of fabulous discovery. We timed our entrance and exit to miss him.

  I did tell Pete Lindsley, the CRF’s president, of the impending trip and the reasons for it. He warned me to be careful and to make a full report of what we found.

  We rigged the Morrison Entrance drop and locked the gate behind us. After reaching the river, we detoured upward into a large breakdown room to check our emergency cache of food and first-aid supplies. The CRF had put emergency provision dumps in likely entrapment areas since the mid-fifties. Here, the threat was entrapment by fast-rising water.

  We came close to the intersection of the route to Mammoth Cave, the now-famous French Connection. I showed Tom and Diana the red poker chip I had wired to the wall in prediction of where the Mammoth connection would be made. My prediction was off by two hundred feet; I had thought we would connect through a dome in the ceiling. Around the corner we saw the sandbank with footprints made by John Wilcox and Tom Gracanin and the subsequent survey party I had led.

  We waded and walked and floated for ninety minutes. Diana said, “When we connect with Roppel, let’s build a big cairn. We can write ‘SUCKER’ on it in big letters.”

  “Diana, we’re not trying to connect,” I said. “We’re following the cave wherever it goes, as we said we would. In the name of science.”

  “That’s a crock of shit!”

  We were having a great time. Tom, who had not seen the upper reaches of Logsdon River, was impressed by the length and breadth of it.

  We reached the sump, which neither of the others had seen. On my last visit, at the termination of the survey, I had examined the sump carefully. Previously, the water had formed a pool five or six inches deep, backing against the rock wall that extended a few inches underwater to a lip. Then, as now, there was no air over the water. But now the pool was a foot deep! The underwater lip of the wall and continuing passage were more deeply submerged than before. If the pool level could fluctuate, it meant the sump might open or flood, depending on rainfall. Or maybe with a little engineering, we could drop the pool level.

  I examined the downstream bank of the pool, which was made up of rocks cemented with flowstone. We kicked at the rocks, then collected some loose ones farther downstream to pound with. In a few minutes of vigorous pounding, we failed to breach the bank in any significant way. We discussed the possibility of blasting, but dynamite had never been the CRF’s style, due to the abhorrence of blasting cave passages in a wilderness-protected national park. The CKKC seemed in love with explosives, a blasting immorality we disdained.

  No matter; there were leads to be examined. We retreated a few feet downstream to a hole in the right wall. We climbed into a small muddy canyon, a little above the level of the stream passage. After 120 feet, the canyon branched to the left and right. The floor sloped up to passage two feet high by four feet wide going two hundred feet to a higher canyon that branched left and right. We went to the right eighty feet to a set of vertical shafts. We climbed around over rocks and down under boulders, looking for abandoned or active drains we might enter. There was several hundred feet of cave passage here, and we searched aggressively for a way onward.

  Tom and Diana pushed a tiny crawlway, while I returned to the first shaft, which was about ten feet in diameter and fifty feet high, the first of a chain of five or six such shafts. They were aligned parallel to the flooded river passage, about fifteen feet below me. I was trying to climb up into what might be an abandoned drain, which was no more than a dark shadow into which my light beam disappeared, but I couldn’t reach it.

  I returned to the intermediate level of the shafts and searched for a shaft drain. The largest stream of water drained through a four-inch hole. Other drains were too small or blocked. I found a tight, twelve-inch-high squeeze heading promisingly downward for ten feet. It led to a small room about four feet in diameter. Several drains joined in this room and combined to flow out the other side through a tube two feet high by eighteen inches wide, with a nine-inch depth of wall-to-wall water. The slope of the drain leveled out. I figured that this was the master drain. It would connect with the river in a few feet, and the airspace indicated the ceiling of the river passage had risen above the present level of the sump.

  What was the significance of these clues? Just this: I had found the way to bypass the sump! Nearly thirty years of looking at cave passages convinced me of the certainty of my conclusion. My mind was racing: If you’re so certain, why not just slip through and confirm it? Go ahead, you’re dressed for it.

  My conscience responded: If the river does continue open to the air and you can bypass the sump without diving, haven’t you as good as connected to Roppel Cave?

  My son, Tom, had been in this position when he had found Pete Hanson and Leo Hunt’s smoked initials and arrow in Hansons Lost River in 1972. He knew he had found the connection between the Flint Ridge Cave System and Mammoth Cave. He was so certain that when John Wilcox had offered him a place on the connection trip, Tom declined. He’d done it, and besides, he had to study that weekend.

  My mental war continued: You’re too pooped and too old to do it. Not wanting to connect is a cop-out. Face it, you’re not that sure, and you can’t stand being wrong.

  No, responded my conscience, that’s not true. Turning back now is an ethical decision.

  Ethics? Don’t kid me, you’re so crooked you bring up ethics only when it’s convenient.

  True, but how can you have any self-respect when this certain connection prize is sacrificed on your altar of self-gratification?

  My mind-war escalated. What will your friends think?

  You won’t have any friends if you find the connection. Even Tom and Diana will be pissed off. And how will that look when you write the book?

  That’s another cop-out. Which are you, a real caver or a self-important writer?

  No, it’s not a cop-out! Back in 1954 on the C-3 expedition to Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave, I did, however, write the final entry in the Lost Passage camp log with an eye to how that would look in the book when I wrote it.

  So, you admit it! That’s self-gratification! Ego drives you, my conscience said.

  No, it’s a sense of the dramatic. I’m a storyteller at heart. Any book I write, they’ll have to read. Finding the connection now is climaxing too soon, bad form in writing and everything else.

  That settled it for me. It would make a better book not knowing and not connecting. I would not press on but would act on the certainty that this new drain would bypass the sump when the time w
as right. Besides that, lying prone in the drain passage peering into the water, I was getting cold. And, alas, older.

  I told Tom and Diana about the drain passage, and Tom went back to look at it. He concluded it was not nearly so promising as I knew it was.

  The time had come to head out if we were to miss John Logsdon. We sloshed downstream in the river and up the tributary stream that led to the Morrison Entrance.

  The fire-storm reaction to our secret trip began ten minutes after we parked our car near John Logsdon’s machinery shed. Don Coons spotted it. He was investigating and would broadcast the news with relish. The following day, he called Diana, who confirmed that there had been a trip, primarily to introduce her to the cave—a tourist trip to show off the new stuff.

  Don then called Tom, without mention of his conversation with Diana. Tom flatly denied there had been a trip!

  Next, Don called me. Without reference to his calls to Diana and Tom, he asked me if there had been a trip. I confirmed that there had been and told him the substance of what we had found but omitted the master-drain discovery. I overemphasized our search for the source of a considerable quantity of water that the river picked up somewhere along its course.

  Tom, feeling guilt and panic, called Jim Borden, telling him everything, including his intention to connect with Roppel Cave if possible.

  What was going on, anyway? The CKKC cavers were thunderstruck: here was confirming proof that the CRF hypocrites were trying to make the connection. Why else would they go secretly? Of course their sneak trip was to connect, and it wouldn’t matter what cover story they feebly offered.

  Richard Zopf also believed that this had been a trip to connect and was angry about the breach of policy and about my dissembling remarks to him to cover the real purpose of the trip.

  I apologized to him and gave him a lengthy account of the trip and its circumstances.

  “Your apologies are a dime a dozen,” he wrote.

  It was a long time before Richard would forgive me, my apology notwithstanding. I had shattered a trust, and my guilty feelings led me to conclude that I had gone beyond the limits of usefulness as far as representing the CRF was concerned. The new CRF administration might do better without me.

  There was a further complication. Diana told me that Tom Gracanin, Cal Welbourn, and she were planning another trip, a trip to look at the biota in the river. The real purpose of their trip, Diana said, was to “end this bullshit” and connect the caves. Now I was horrified. I immediately confronted Gracanin for ninety minutes. My ultimatum to him was to subject this trip to my control, including veto power, or expose it. He relented and agreed.

  After a night of no sleep, I wrote Gracanin and Diana that the trip was canceled. I phoned Pete Lindsley to declare that the whole situation stank and to urge him to tell Tom Brucker that his trip was canceled by official order of the CRF’s president.

  Tom reported later that Gracanin and Diana were still planning the trip. Pete then ordered Tom to change the lock on the cave gate. He did, and apparently, that was the last of it.

  Cal Welbourn, a CRF director, was angry about my participation in this secret stuff—or was it because I had scuttled his own secret stuff? Tom Gracanin was mad. Diana was furious. Don Coons was seething, and he enlisted John Branstetter’s sympathy. Richard Zopf was angry. When Scooter Hildebolt heard the scathing condemnation of my role, he expressed disappointment—in no small part because he had not been invited—but also wrote a letter saying the harm was not permanent.

  Don Coons’s letter warned me about the risk of alienating the CKKC. He stressed the importance of maintaining good relations in the future.

  The final outcome: when my term of office as a CRF director expired, I withdrew from consideration for another term. In hindsight, I had made a bad decision and felt the responsibility deeply for the anguish I caused. I was happy that Pete Lindsley placed a moratorium on all future secret trips.

  My last policy recommendation to the CRF’s operations people was that we ask the CKKC to furnish a party leader for any future trips to the upstream end of the river. If they accepted, then any connection—accidental or otherwise—would be the CKKC’s responsibility.

  18

  Further Separations

  Worn-out Cavers and Outside Pressure

  Sometime in late 1980, I—Jim Borden—realized that Roppel Cave had achieved the remarkable distinction of being the longest cave on earth with just a single entrance.

  Every cave that was longer had at least two entrances. Mammoth Cave had seventeen! The event would have passed unnoticed except that the trampled route between the Roppel Entrance and Arlie Way—the S Survey—was finally beginning to wear out the patience of the cavers who had come to know it so intimately. Many of us were just plain sick of the S Survey.

  Roppel Cave was hard; it would have been harder were it not for the elaborate set of linkups and shortcut routes we continually discovered. Yet, round trips to the frontiers of Roppel Cave involved nearly ten miles of caving, and there was no bypass to the S Survey. Ten miles was longer than the entire length of all but a handful of the world’s caves.

  As a result of the distance and tough travel, cavers returned in April 1982 to the long-abandoned part of Roppel Cave known prior to September 1978—the Old Cave. For some time, I had been lamenting the many good (but difficult) leads that we had left prior to the breakthrough into Arlie Way. I gushed about the beckoning Fishhook Canyon and Grim Trail, blowing passages on which we had turned our backs. Except for Jim Currens and me, none of the currently active cavers at Roppel had ever experienced the Old Cave. They were too new to know!

  I thought these newcomers could be lulled into overlooking the evil reputation earned by this seldom-visited section of Roppel. There was cave to be found in the Old Cave!

  Both Jim and I led trips into the old passages. The trips were hard, they were hot, and they were longer and more difficult than I remembered.

  God, I thought, how could we have suffered this trip after trip? Was I getting old?

  It was impossible to walk in the Old Cave; cavers either had to crawl or relentlessly squeeze their bodies through tight canyons or over sharp corners of breakdown. Nevertheless, cave discoveries were made almost immediately. The new cavers scoffed at the old-timers—Jim and me—when they found an overlooked crawlway in the floor of Vivian Way. This lead was in such an obvious place. How could we have missed it? After a few hundred feet of hands-and-knees crawl (the Rape of the Sabines), it broke into big cave. The green cavers whooped as they ran down the big and dry elliptical tube. They called their new discovery Abracadabra, since finding it surely had to be by magic. There was even a hint that this could be a portal to the south if the elusive air could be followed.

  Dumb luck, I thought.

  The Old Cave, unfortunately, was true to form. Abracadabra was short-lived, extending only five hundred feet before ending in a pile of sand. However, strong air blew from a tall canyon heading to the southeast, hinting of big cave somewhere. Cavers combed the canyon, but they could not find the source of the air.

  Leads did remain. Pete Crecelius, Bill Walter, and Jim Currens followed narrow canyons below the Rape of the Sabines to climb down through tight slots to lower levels. After one last climb, they joined a small stream. Downstream led to footprints and a connection to the wet passages beyond Tinkle Shaft in the C Crawl first explored by Don Coons, Bill Eidson, and me. I recalled that years ago, I had considered many of the leads promising. When my best lead from that time ended with the stream falling through a hopelessly small crack, Bill Walter named it Borden’s Folly. Jim had laughed, while I had winced at the humiliation.

  Later, it felt strange to crawl easily through this newly discovered route to passages that, previously, were nearly beyond my abilities. It was as if a legend had been shattered, some of the mystery unshrouded. However, old mysteries were replaced with new when Bill Walter dug through at the end of a long crawlway to emerge in walking ca
ve with one set of footprints. Their origin is still unresolved, the lead never pursued.

  The trips continued, but like before, the cavers eventually wore out. The cave was small, difficult, and unforgiving. Once again, the Old Cave section of Roppel went to sleep, still stubbornly clinging to its secrets.

  The tedium of the S Survey influenced different people in different ways. Some cavers just quit coming altogether. The difficulties of this route coupled with the extremely long trips were simply too much to endure. Others avoided the long trips; they reserved their strength for the strenuous exit and seemed satisfied to leave the frontier leads to others. Most of us just put up with the reality of tight, terrible cave and gritted our teeth at the prospects of returning each time back through the S Survey. No doubt about it: we were suffering heroes (or was it bumbling idiots?).

  Jim Currens was fed up with the S Survey also. But if his toleration had worn thin, he had no intention of quitting. The cave would not beat him. He would solve the problem as he had many times before. If an obstacle was too difficult or a situation too formidable, he would either overcome it or circumvent it altogether, finding creative solutions to these challenges. His performance in the breakthrough to Arlie Way was a result of his can-do attitude.

  The prospects of finding a suitable bypass to the S Survey by some undiscovered entrance or another route were not promising. So far, we had found just one alternative to the S Survey, technically a bypass, but by that route it took eight hours of hard caving to reach Arlie Way. We had also spent countless hours walking the surface above Roppel Cave looking for any hole that could possibly connect down into the main cave. Our luck was no better now than it had been during the period prior to the discovery of Roppel Cave. We found lots of holes, but almost nothing we examined went anywhere, and none went into Roppel.