Beyond Mammoth Cave

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

  “What’s this?” I pointed to one particularly enormous room, more than one hundred feet in diameter, in the middle of the map. Many passages radiated from the big landmark in the remote cave.

  “Flint Dome.”

  I spanned my thumb and index finger over the gap between the two walls. It was over an inch. “Is it as big as it looks here?”

  Wilcox smiled. “I’m sure it is the biggest vertical shaft in the system—over 120 feet in diameter and higher than you can see. I named it Flint Dome since it is the largest in Flint Ridge.”

  “Leads?”

  “All over the place. Lots to survey.”

  I continued studying the map. I noted carefully where the eastern terminus of the passages were relative to the surface. I counted sinkholes northeast from a prominent finger of ridge. I wanted to be able to reproduce the endpoint on my map at home.

  I asked about the end of Salts Cave.

  “It takes about six hours of tough caving to get out there,” he said. “Lots of water and mud, and the wind makes you cold—sucks the heat right out of you. We mapped for a long time and still didn’t finish it. We were too cold. After we quit, we explored awhile, trying to warm up. We saw another five hundred feet of passage, all in four feet of water. The passage was only six feet high! I would say it sumped, but the wind was blowing. I don’t know how far it goes like that.”

  Wilcox was laconic and serious as he told his tale. He never dramatized things. It had to be something wonderful to evoke this much feeling from him.

  “It took us a long time to get out of the cave. Eight hours I think—I don’t really remember, I was too tired. I think that I was as exhausted as I have ever been on a caving trip. I was so pooped I could hardly climb up all those canyons to the bottom of Dismal Valley. I thought I would never get out. The trip was twenty-six hours long—a real marathon.”

  “But it still goes?”

  “Yeah, it still goes.”

  I felt a chill. Wilcox was a strong caver. If he had become that tired, it had to be a tough trip. The lead was obviously safe. I promised myself that one day I would see where it went.

  “Can I have a copy of the map?”

  “No.”

  He laid the map neatly on top of the stack and slid the whole pile back under the bed.

  “How come?”

  “Nobody has a copy of this map—too risky. We don’t want to start any trouble with the park or other landowners.”

  I nodded, unconvinced.

  I was at the Wilcox home for several more days. The possibilities shown on the map lying beneath the bed upstairs gnawed at me. One afternoon, I could no longer resist the temptation. I crept upstairs to take just one more look.

  As I studied the map again, I realized that knowing where the end of Salts Cave was not enough. I wanted a copy of that map!

  I considered borrowing it and driving to neighboring Punxatawny twenty miles to the north to have a copy made. However, there were several risks to that scheme. Punxatawny was a small town, and the blueprint shop owner undoubtedly knew John Wilcox, who visited frequently. There were not many cavers in this part of Pennsylvania, and not many people drew cave maps. Worse, what if the blueprint machine ate the map? It was not much of a chance, but the results would be devastating if I were forced to return to Coolspring with a crumpled and ripped sheet of Mylar.

  I decided to photograph the map secretly. It was perfect—low risk and guaranteed success. I got my camera and flash from the car and arranged the map on the floor. I estimated the optimal distance to hold the camera above the map, the angle of the flash, and how many exposures it would require to cover the entire reach of passages.

  My hands were sweating. I looked at the map and thought about what I was doing. It pained me to break a trust with Wilcox, but I had to have the map and thought the chances of getting caught were nearly nil.

  I took a mosaic of snapshots that I could later stitch together to make my own map. With each click of the shutter, a bright burst of light from the flash flooded the room. My heart was pounding.

  Six snapshots and the crime was complete.

  I could not keep a secret. Within a week after returning home, I called Don Coons and told him what I had done. My feeling of elation was incomplete until I had bragged to someone. Don asked me a little about the map and seemed pleased with what I had done. I knew he would understand.

  Unfortunately, his wife at that time, Diana Daunt, overheard enough fragments of the conversation to know something devious was up. In short order, Diana browbeat the information out of her husband, who crumpled immediately under her relentless pressure. With just one phone call, I had blown it. Tick, tick, tick . . .

  The next weekend, I attended the Labor Day CRF expedition. In the intervening days, Diana had telephoned just about everyone in a position of responsibility in the CRF about my crime. On Sunday morning, the phone in the Austin House rang. The call was for Roger Brucker.

  I was sitting out on the picnic tables in the warm morning sun talking with the others about the previous day’s cave adventures. Ten parties had been underground, and there were many lies to swap. I knew nothing of Diana’s activities since my conversation with Don. As far as I knew, my secret was still secure. Tick, tick, tick . . .

  My conversation was interrupted by a loud bellow coming from the open kitchen window.

  “Borden! Get in here!” It was Roger Brucker. “Now!”

  “What the hell does he want?” I mumbled.

  I had no idea what this was about as I walked into the house. Roger had his arm extended toward me, phone receiver in hand.

  “Here.” He thrust his arm at my face. “Talk!”

  I took the phone from Roger, slowly bringing it to my ear.

  “Hello?”

  It was John Wilcox. My heart began to pound and my spirits sank as I listened. This was not a conversation; this was a tirade. Wilcox had found out about my covert picture-taking operation. His words cut like knives. He was very angry, and my violation of his trust injured him deeply. I breathed in short gasps, speechless. I stammered, offering a few guilty excuses, and said how sorry I was.

  I handed the phone back to Roger and slumped down in the chair.

  Shit.

  I was sorry, but the damage had been done. For the next twenty minutes, Roger and I engaged in a shouting match, the details of which escape my memory. He was pissed and exploded with indignation. I became defensive. The entire camp heard the exchange. Probably Floyd Collins was turning over in his coffin below us in Crystal Cave.

  The exchange slid into insults and threats. It was ugly.

  I was humiliated. I had been caught red-handed, and Roger had twisted the knife in my festering wound. I had had enough.

  I stomped out of the house and threw my gear into the back of the car. Gravel flew as my wheels spun.

  In the heat of the moment, I had capitulated, agreeing to return both the prints and negatives of the map. I was ashamed. I had failed as a spy, destroyed my credibility, and, worse, had hurt John and Pat Wilcox in the process.

  Diana Daunt later told me that she had been the one who sold me out. She gloated as she explained that it had been her duty to report me. She was a member of the CRF; I was just a Joint Venturer in the CRF, like everyone else. I glowered at her as she snickered about how clever she was.

  Regardless of the outcome, I still had all the information I needed. I had paid a high price for my deceit, had hurt a dear friend, and was universally unwelcome at the CRF as a result. Unintentionally, almost befittingly, I was now devoted full-time to the work in Roppel Cave.

  I leaned back in my chair, rereading Bob Anderson’s trip report. Something smelled fishy, but nothing clicked. Disgusted by the recent turn of events, I reinserted the document into the file folder labeled “1981 Trip Reports” and threw it onto the cluttered desk.

  With the outlook of pushing the breakdown in Logsdon River apparently grim, we discounted this threat of connection, for n
ow. Instead, we concentrated on widening the frontiers of Roppel Cave, aided now by the easy access that the Weller Entrance provided.

  Even with this new way into the cave, the far northwest end of Elysian Way was still remote by most standards, and trips were still infrequent. Besides, with the going cave in the BWOB as a temptation, who could blame us? I kept my counsel about Wilcox’s Salts Cave passage he had mapped heading straight for the Watergate. No use doing more damage.

  Nevertheless, I kept reminding Roberta Swicegood of the Watergate’s allure, appealing to her sense of challenge. There had to be large cave out there to the northwest. A passage as large as Elysian Way does not just end; a continuation had to exist. After months of cajoling, Roberta and Don Coons could no longer resist the blowing passages at this far corner of the cave. They armed themselves with lengths of rope and artificial anchors and began a long trip to conquer the Watergate.

  After eight hours, they finally stood on the first of the rimstone dams. They looked down a shimmering orange ramp that dropped ten feet into a dark, blue pool. A small hole in the wall looped around the upper five feet of the dam to where Don could hang onto some holds and lower himself into the deep pool. Roberta fixed a line around a pillar and payed it out as Don continued down to the next dam. The second dam was easier, something like a child’s playground slide. He slid down into the next pool and swam across to the top of the next dam. Beyond was only blackness. One more climb down led him into a large room fifty feet wide. An enormous rimstone dam ten feet high extended from wall to wall across the room, like a barrier placed specifically to guard the cave beyond. The pool had long since drained away. They had to climb over the wall by pulling themselves up, throwing a leg over, then lowering themselves on the other side of the dam. Beyond, the cave was large and complex. They were now below the Lost River Chert. A thousand feet ahead, they intersected a large underground river of nearly the same flow as Logsdon River. Although this river immediately sumped both upstream and downstream, there were many low-level leads that were wet and blew air, teasing with the possibility of continuing to the west. The gap between the secret end of Salts Cave and the Watergate was now less than two thousand feet.

  Around the same time, Dave Black was pulling rocks from under a ledge just a few feet from the base of the rope in the Rift. He and Danny Dible had felt a cool breeze and were wildly digging, trying to find its source. After a few minutes of removing round sandstone cobbles, they opened a down-sloping hole beneath the low, muddy ledge. The strong breeze cooling their sweating faces hinted of extensive cave ahead.

  They continued the survey line below the Rift into the new lead and on that first trip added nearly three thousand feet to the map. Just past the dig, they followed a low, wide, cobblestone-floored crouchway that ended in a magnificent white flowstone mound. They called the passage Rocky Road.

  A chert-floored chute under the south wall a few feet before the termination showed promise of bypassing the flowstone mound. They crawled . . . and crawled . . . and crawled. On that first trip, over a thousand feet of crawlway was pushed. It led on endlessly, the black chert walls, floor, and ceiling soaking up the light from their carbide lamps.

  Over the next several months, Dave Black and Danny Dible led a series of trips to push the crawlway, now known as the Lunatic Fringe. They gave up trying to reconnect to Rocky Road and concentrated instead on going west. The passage continued relentlessly, nearly always crawling. The map showed that they were crossing under a broad valley and were approaching the eastern flanks of Flint Ridge. The possibilities spurred them on. This section of Flint Ridge east of Colossal Cave had for years resisted CRF attempts to discover cave in it. We snickered, thinking of a preemptive strike against the CRF, beating them at their own game as we explored miles of new cave beneath Flint Ridge.

  The trips were difficult and long, requiring nearly a mile of crawling over chert to reach the limits of exploration. Each long trip back toward the surface was punctuated by the ninety-foot climb up the rope to the top of the Rift. The climb was made in three stages by way of broad ledges; the last stage was forty feet. On one trip, as Dave Black was reaching the top, the prussik knots he was using to climb began to slip down the muddy rope. Instinctively, he grabbed the knots, trying to arrest this unplanned descent. This only served to make the situation worse, and he began to glide uncontrollably down the rope. As he gained speed, the friction of the knots sliding against the standing rope caused them to melt and separate from the rope. He was now in free-fall. The rapid descent ended in a crash as he hit the bottom. He landed on his feet and fell backwards to a sitting position in a shallow pool of water. Blackness. The air stank from burning nylon.

  As was customary on these trips, Dave had brought up the rear. The rest of the party had continued from the top of the Rift into Yahoo Avenue, where the waiting was drier and warmer. He knew that there was no use yelling; there would be no one to hear. He was sore but thought nothing was broken. He groped around for his lamp, finding it in two pieces beside him. He remembered that he had a small flashlight on a lanyard around his neck.

  Dave squinted at the fuzzy scene now bathed in light from his flashlight. His glasses! Where were his glasses? He groped around and eventually found them a few feet farther away in a pool of water. They were still in one piece although smeared with mud; one of the lenses was scratched badly. He put them on, then he reassembled his carbide lamp and reamed the tip. Pop! The bright glow from the flame was comforting.

  He stood up.

  “Ouch!” He fell back to the floor. Bolts of pain shot through the heels of both his feet as put weight on them.

  Dave breathed slowly and deeply. “Shit, I hope I didn’t break anything.”

  As he was contemplating cutting the rope to make new prussik knots, a glow appeared at the top of the drop.

  “Dave! What’s going on?” It was Danny Dible.

  “I fell. My knots slipped.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I think so. My ass and feet are pretty sore—just bruised, I guess.”

  “Anything we can do from up here?”

  “No, just send down some gear so I can climb out of here.”

  One hour later, Dave Black was crawling down Yahoo Avenue, unable to put any weight on his badly bruised heels. “The longest stretch of walking passage I’d ever crawled through,” he later remarked. “I couldn’t wait to get to the S Survey where everyone crawled and I could keep up.”

  Fortunately, Dave had not broken anything, and after a few weeks he was ready to go at it again. He returned to the lunacy below the Rift.

  The breakthrough into Flint Ridge appeared to be imminent at last. But when the passage finally snaked beneath the ridge’s broad sandstone cap, it necked down to impassable dimensions. The breeze had diminished, lost somewhere along the crawl’s great length. The explorers had bypassed many leads that hinted of lower levels. There was more to find in the Lunatic Fringe, but it thwarted us for now. Exploration of the lower levels still awaits the hardy caver.

  The cave system still seemed to have no limits. Everywhere we looked, we widened the boundaries of Roppel Cave. These penetrations were not without their price, however. After we extended one lead from the BWOB over two miles to the foot of Fisher Ridge northeast of Eudora Ridge, we found ourselves embroiled in a new wave of caving politics.

  Since 1981, cavers from Michigan had been enthusiastically exploring a cave beneath Fisher Ridge. Optimistic from the beginning, they had named the network of shafts and canyons they discovered the Fisher Ridge Cave System. Their boldness did not jinx their discovery; the Fisher Ridge Cave System quickly grew into a fine cave with many miles of passage.

  The Fisher Ridge cavers cried foul when we penetrated beneath their ridge. Worse, though, we had explored to within twelve hundred feet of a connection to that cave. Now, the shoe was on the other foot.

  Insults were hurled and threats exchanged, a moratorium was proposed, deals were made. With li
ttle to lose, the Fisher Ridgers fought dirty. The landowner of their cave was dragged into the political quagmire and was requested to enforce his rights to protect his property to keep us at bay. We were appalled at their treachery! The section of Roppel Cave beneath Fisher Ridge was far away, and that fact alone led us to agree to yet another connection moratorium. We shook our heads with disgust at the turn of events. Now we had a moratorium on two fronts: one we had demanded and the other demanded of us. We felt stuck, jammed between the risk of yet more hypocrisy and the risk of turnabout if we should seek a connection to Fisher Ridge. What a joke. Cavers all over the country laughed at the CKKC, the CRF, and now the Fisher Ridge cavers for engaging in exploration-bridling politics. Limiting connections by agreement began to suck, in our estimation. Was the posturing worth it? If the caves connected, then so be it!

  Politically, things looked largely under control on the connection front, but the CRF had a few more cards to play. After our discovery of the Logsdon River breakdown in Roppel Cave, the Mammoth Cave Connection Moratorium seemed finally enforceable, if only because of the breakdown and a sump. However, the CRF explorers were not yet ready to give up their desire to know more about that vicinity of the cave. They had learned their lesson after the Brucker connection attempt. Now, they courted Pete Crecelius to lead CRF trips up the river. They were clever. If Pete, the president of the CKKC, led the trips, then the spirit of the moratorium would be preserved. Any efforts now would be considered joint efforts—at least, that was how the CRF viewed it. The self-serving ploy was obvious to me, but Pete took the bait anyhow, “in the spirit of cooperation.” I could not dissuade him—he was playing right into their hands. All I could do was grit my teeth.

  Pete led a number of trips to the upper levels above the sump first explored on the Bruckers’ connection reconnaissance. There was a lot of cave, but breakdown hemmed progress farther to the east toward Roppel Cave.