by Beyond Mammoth Cave- A Tale of Obsession in the World's Longest Cave (epub)
Why was I going into the cave? I wanted to do whatever it took to bring the dig project to a useful conclusion. Dave deserved that, and I wanted him to enjoy the limelight of success. I also knew that if someone had offered to take my place, I would have happily stayed topside, because I hate digging. I was so concerned with the risk of failure that I would relinquish my place on this trip to anyone.
Hours later in the cave, I was lying on my side along the floor of a narrow and twisting canyon that lead to the inside of the entrance dig. My knees were wedged tight against the right wall, unyielding to my efforts to make them bend backwards. As I craned my neck, trying to look ahead, my denim coveralls soaked up water from wet streambed gravel. My muscles straining, I saw that the passage bent back again to the left and looked to be narrower still.
“Shit!” My back cramped as I tried to force my body around the next corner, left shoulder plowing uselessly through the wet gravel. I ground to a halt. My body just wasn’t meant to bend this way.
Bill Walter and Hal Bridges had reported that this canyon was not too bad. Not bad? This canyon was pure hell. Resting again, I realized what the problem was. Hal and Bill were both shorter than me. My length was the problem. My six-foot, one-inch frame would not bend around the sharp turns of the canyon. I listened to Roberta behind me. She was struggling but was getting through with far less trouble than I was. She was overweight, but short. I was the opposite. So I knew what the problem was, but that knowledge was no help in this case.
“Damn, I don’t know if I can make it!”
Roberta tried to be sympathetic. “I know it’s tight, but just keep trying. You can do it!” She had to be cold too, stuck behind me in the narrow, wet passage.
Roberta knew I hated that kind of patronizing encouragement. I imagined her chuckling to herself behind me as I struggled.
In the narrow canyon, I gave another push and was around the corner. I could continue more easily now. There was black space above me, so I grunted and groaned my way into an upright position to where I could climb into the dome overhead. I was through!
Roberta was quick, climbing out of the wet slot just a minute or two behind me.
“I sure don’t want to have to go back through there!” I told her.
Roberta agreed the passage was terrible. My coveralls were shredded, and we both were wet and miserable.
We followed the trail Bill and Hal had blazed up to the small room at the dig. I had to boost Roberta up through the tight hole in the ceiling. We must have looked like Abbott and Costello as I tried to push on whatever I could to force her up through that hole while I tried to dodge her wildly swinging legs.
While we were traveling through the cave, a large crew had been working to enlarge the passage leading up to the headwall, just three feet from our noses. Bill Walter handed us a sledgehammer, a digging trowel, and a crowbar through the tiny opening that connected the new entrance with the small room we were in. With a glint in his eye, he asked me how I liked the canyon drain.
“Pretty bad. I didn’t think I would make it.”
“I thought you’d like it,” he said.
Roberta and I took turns working at the dig while Bill watched from the other side. Digging was slow and exhausting. When we were not digging, we were freezing from the cold wind blowing into the cave. Bill soon retreated to the entrance. After several hours, we were nearly in a hypothermic state, and the last twelve inches of the dig resisted all our efforts. It was time for desperate measures. We yelled our orders to the surface.
In fifteen minutes, four sticks of dynamite were placed into my outstretched hand. I shakily placed them at the last obstacle. The explosives had already been set up with a blasting cap and were taped into a tight bundle; a long wire stretched to the surface. Instead of a powder fuse, Dave Weller had begun using more reliable electric blasting wire. Too many times during the project, the dig had to be abandoned for the day when a powder fuse failed to detonate the charge. We never knew if a powder fuse had fizzled out or continued to smolder, so we would just leave it to burn out. Sometimes it would go off in fifteen minutes; sometimes it would not. Better to be safe. With electric detonation, if the charge did not ignite, we could immediately diagnose and correct the problem.
I could not properly tamp the charge in the confined space, but four sticks ought to be enough, I figured.
After we placed the explosives, we agreed on a time that Dave would touch the exposed wire leads to the battery poles to set off the dynamite. Unfortunately, there were not many places for shelter. Roberta and I were not willing to climb down the hole back to the lower level—that was too much trouble. Instead, we selected a twisting canyon leading off the room at the beginning of our dig. The multiple turns would surely deflect the concussion of the blast. The two of us squeezed into the narrow lead, forcing our bodies as far as we could. Three corners and twenty feet—not much distance between us and four sticks of dynamite. We hoped for the best, covered our ears, and waited for the anticipated blast.
Ker-blam!
The explosion was deafening. The immense concussion wave stunned us and forced us down hard to the floor.
Neither of us moved for almost a minute. I tried to clear my head.
Where was I? I slowly opened my eyes. Nothing: it was pitch black. My ears rang. I shook my head. I dreamed I was at home in bed in a deep sleep. I felt warm.
Someone was shaking me.
“James, are you okay?”
I had taken the bulk of the shock wave impact, my body cushioning Roberta from the blast.
The fog began to clear. I was in Roppel Cave. But what was that horrible smell?
“James! Are you okay?”
I shook my head to clear the last of the cobwebs. The smell—dynamite. It all came back to me.
“I’m okay, I think.”
My back stung painfully, probably from broken rock ejected from ground zero.
“That was the third time I asked. I was beginning to worry.”
“Well, I’m back. That was one hell of a shock. Maybe we were too close.”
“You took the brunt of the concussion. To me it was just goddamn loud.”
My ears were still ringing. I shook my head. The ringing continued.
“Yeah, it was loud all right. I hope we don’t go deaf.”
We felt around for our carbide lamps, which we had held in our hands but then dropped at the time of the explosion. The blast had extinguished them.
The smoke had cleared by the time we got our lamps lit. We crawled back to the dig. The smell of explosive-shattered rock was intense, and chunks of broken rock littered the passage. As we started pulling rocks away, someone came up to the other side of the blast pile.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
“It’s me!”
What an answer. “Who’s ‘me’?”
“Oh . . . sorry. It’s Davey.”
Dave Weller had a son, also known as Dave Weller. We all called him Davey to avoid confusion. Davey was fifteen years old and often helped his father on the entrance project.
Davey worked on the entrance side of the pile, passing the larger rocks over to where I could reach them and pass them back to Roberta, who then tossed them out of the way back in the cave. In short order, we had a passable gap. Since Davey was all the way in, it made sense for him to come on through so he could turn around. A hard worker, he deserved the honor of being the first person to make the connection between Dry Valley Cave and Roppel Cave. Davey crawled through to outstretched arms and warm congratulations.
Roberta and I were shivering and ready to head out. With Davey in the lead, me in the middle, and Roberta bringing up the rear, we crawled toward the surface. The gap was certainly tight! It took us fifteen minutes to get around the narrow turns at the rear of the dig—a distance of ten feet. The sharp, irregular floor dug into our bodies. Wind whistled through the small space and extinguished our lamp flames. But we finally crawled out to brilliant camera flashes and a cro
wd of cavers who had gathered for the anticipated connection. Dave Weller smiled and handed us each a plastic goblet of champagne.
19
House of Cards
A Breakdown Pile and Political Chaos
Dave Weller’s monumental dig was named the Weller Entrance. However, this new, second entrance was far from practical. A series of formidable and time-consuming obstacles delayed quick entry into the main part of the cave. The excavation was 120 feet long, almost half of which was low belly crawl, and took fifteen minutes to traverse. Once into the cave proper, we were faced with the difficult down-climb through the hole in the ceiling. We could not see where to put our feet. Some cavers would just let go, dropping the remaining three feet to the floor. The result was often a jumbled mass of a caver and toppled stones from the teetering tower of loose rocks built to shorten the free drop. Next came the short, tricky chimney down to the bottom of the dome above the rusty can lead. We called this dome Connection Pit since it had been the key discovery that had allowed the entrance to be completed. Roberta Swicegood named the rusty can lead out of it the Dred Drain. “This thing is dreadful,” Roberta had said in a deadpan voice.
Cavers were spent before their trips had barely begun.
Dave Weller saw two principle problems. One, the Dred Drain had to be enlarged. Nobody wanted to crawl through that terrible canyon to begin (or finish) a long trip in Roppel Cave. It was too wet and too miserable. Two, the flooding had to be stopped. During rainy periods, the entrance became a muddy sleazeway.
Dave wanted to start with the Dred Drain, but first he had to enlarge the excavated entrance tunnel to allow his large girth to pass. This took several weeks. For the Dred Drain, he planned to use sledgehammers, crowbars, and dynamite—whatever it took to widen the canyon to an easy crawl for its worst thirty-five feet. I didn’t think Dave’s plan could be successful. It was difficult to blast solid, smooth-walled rock, because there were no cracks in which to jam the explosives.
On D-day—dynamite day—five of us gathered at the foot of Connection Pit to help Dave. He had over a dozen sticks of dynamite to set off, so on this day he was quite popular. He studied the problem at hand. The Dred Drain consisted of a narrow canyon (where one could fit) overlaid by a low and wide tube (where one could not fit). The cross section looked like an exaggerated mushroom. This tube followed the canyon for about ten feet before veering off and disappearing. Dave decided to work along the top of the canyon at the base of the tube (the top of the mushroom stem). There would be less rock to move and more work space. He would open this wider level for as far as he could, then drop to the floor of the Dred Drain and continue from there.
Dave pried big chunks of rocks from the wall and floor and set up the explosive charges. Connection Pit offered good shelter from the blasts. Dave did not have any electric caps, so we lit the fuses, rushed to crouch in a corner, and cleared out the debris after the blast.
We spent anxious moments when one charge did not go off, wishing we had the more dependable electric caps. Several minutes after the expected detonation time, we crept to the corner and carefully peered around. The fuse had burned all the way into the explosive charge but had failed to ignite the blasting cap. I shook like a green recruit in a bomb squad. Had the fuse fizzled, or was the blasting cap flawed?
We waited some more. What if the fuse was still ignited? A firecracker sometimes plays dud until some nerd picks it up. We could not afford that mistake with two sticks of dynamite. I crawled up to the unexploded charge and yanked the burned fuse; the blasting cap came out with it. It was a stupid thing to do, but I was lucky. Now we could continue with the project.
I was horrified when I saw Dave scraping the broken rock from a blast into the underlying Dred Drain.
“What are you doing?” I howled.
Dave looked confused. “Throwing the rocks into the canyon.”
“You’re blocking the route into the cave.” The only way down to the bottom of the Dred Drain was at the edge of Connection Pit. He had packed it with rubble and made it impassable.
Dave looked at the rock in his hand, peered down the canyon, then blinked at me. With Olympic grace, Dave ceremonially heaved the rock in a sweeping arc over his right shoulder and into the Dred Drain. He laughed. “Don’t worry. You’ll never use that route again.”
“Hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I’ll have this fixed in no time.” He continued clearing the rocks.
After more blasts, the drain was brimful with shattered rocks. However, we had progressed almost fifteen feet, nearly halfway through the obstacle. Maybe there was hope.
It took two more weekends for Dave to bypass the Dred Drain. He tunneled along the top level to a corner where he was able to drop straight down to the floor. After a few more shots at key corners, we had an easy way into the cave.
The project was not completed, however. Dave’s mania for route building possessed him. As the months passed, the route into the cave changed continually. Roberta and I had discovered a lower level below the entrance passage. When I showed the map to Dave, he smiled broadly. He quickly blasted a new pit into the rubble floor just inside the entrance. We were astonished when we saw the once menacing stream now falling harmlessly into the lower level Roberta and I had mapped.
The flooding problem now solved, Dave worked on the floor of a shallow pit just beyond the Dred Drain. The route from Sand Dome into Kangaroo Trail was a body-sized tube called the Gunbarrel, which was too tight for Dave. This shallow pit was close to another section of Kangaroo Trail, and Dave was confident that he could punch through its floor and make an effective shortcut.
A few blasts proved him right again.
Next, Dave recruited us to drag sections of fabricated steel ladders into the cave. As the ladder we were dragging jammed hard in one especially tight curve of the Dred Drain, Roberta growled, “This is going to be a goddamn commercial cave before he gets done.”
We pleaded with Dave to use restraint, but the ladders kept coming. We tried to impose limits on his project by restricting his work to the entrance side of the new pit connection to Kangaroo Trail. We yearned to dictate a halt to the cave modification—even we had our limits of how much we could stand! The conflict between cave conservation, volunteer enthusiasm, and engineering challenge raged. Dave was an engineering zealot who now resented our attempts to bridle him. After all, he knew he was helping the project.
He eventually relented to the pressure and promised to exercise restraint. However, he visited one last insult upon the cave: a twenty-five-foot ladder fixed top to bottom in Pirates Pot. We nearly cried as we viewed the red-painted indignity in the middle of the glistening-walled Pirates Pot. With that eyesore installed, Dave promised that the project was completed.
The Weller Entrance was like a mine portal. Explorers could reach Arlie Way in ninety minutes, about an hour faster and with far less energy expended than if they had taken the old route through the S Survey. The Weller Entrance shaved three hours, one way, for access to the cave to the north. The route to Pirates Pot, by way of Dave’s ladders, was so fast that explorers resumed their northward push with vigor. The old Roppel Entrance fell into disuse.
I was sad: we had reached the end of an era. It was as if we had put down a favorite old dog and were left with only fond memories. The old Roppel Entrance was now as good as dead. Would the memories die also? I never wanted to lose them.
Several of our hardest-charging cavers scolded us severely for opening the Weller Entrance. How dare we reduce the cave to our own level? It was our obligation to rise to the challenge, not blast it into oblivion. The engineering triumph of the Weller Entrance meant the loss of one of the most challenging caves in the country. Now, they said, Roppel Cave was for wimps!
Some were so serious in their protest of this flagrant violation of the ethical spirit of adventure that they never returned to the cave. Their determined withdrawal saddened us, but we were practical, were we not? For the p
roject to advance, we had to have that entrance. Were we hypocrites? Well, maybe all caving is hypocrisy. On one hand, doctrinaire cavers said we should subject our bodies to the challenge, but they thought nothing of smashing a rock that blocked their way into fragments with a hammer. Call us hypocrites? Conservation-minded cavers—including many in the CRF—railed at us for destroying cave features by blasting. I am interested in protecting the cave, but where does one draw the line? Cavers all over the world cry for strict cave conservation; the caves must be protected at all costs from the vandals, they say. Vandals? Who are the vandals? True conservation is pure preservation—no use of or access to the cave whatsoever. Effective conservation is measured and controlled change. Many cavers were quick to condemn us but immediately justified their own efforts elsewhere as necessary exploration.
Maybe the CKKC was a little more hypocritical than others. Well, people could complain. We had a vast cave to explore, and we were doers, not debaters. Nevertheless, old Roppel, that killer cave, was gone forever.
We had not foreseen the problems that such an easy entrance would bring. When the cave was so difficult, the cavers who arrived were strong and responsible; now, nearly anyone could cave in Roppel. The number of aborted trips increased, the quality of survey dropped, and the cave showed more wear and tear. The green cavers came by the carload, alarming us; we had a real management problem on our hands. We established rules about who could come. We formulated membership policies, the kind of bureaucratic nonsense for which we had criticized the CRF. This disconcerted all of us. And despite it all, we lost control.
We no longer knew where people were going or what they were doing. I was dismayed by the number of tourist trips to Yahoo Avenue that were taken under the guise of special “science” trips. The cave was wearing out. Maybe the cavers who called this a wimp cave were right.
Our amateurish, soft policy became embarrassing and ineffective soon after the opening of the Weller Entrance. Our lack of control tested our resolve to maintain the Mammoth Cave Connection Moratorium. We had condemned those deceitful CRF cavers after their bungled secret connection trip in April, loudly proclaiming that we were superior to that group. And now?