Beyond Mammoth Cave
Page 35
Pete did not find Roger Brucker’s obscure drain to bypass the sump. However, on one trip in February 1983, he made the discovery that abruptly terminated our complacency about connection. On this particular day, he noticed that the level of sump in upstream Logsdon River in Mammoth Cave had lowered to the point where one inch of air space now existed between the water’s surface and the ceiling. As Pete crouched to peer through the low gap, he felt a cool breeze on his face and heard sounds of a small waterfall.
The sump was draining and was now open—barely. Once again, the situation had changed and we were forced to rethink our strategies.
21
A New Entrance to Secret Passages
Growing Complexity and Changed Relationships
I—Roger Brucker—learned in 1979 from Scooter Hildebolt that John Wilcox had been running low-profile cave trips since 1976 south of the Frozen Niagara section of Mammoth Cave. From Scooter’s hushed, excited accounts, I knew that Wilcox had penetrated beyond the boundary of the park.
“We haven’t been surveying. John has made careful compass and pace estimates, so he knows where this cave lies in general. But there aren’t any surveys or maps!” Scooter said. “I saw a footprint of a boot in the bottom of a pool of water in a passage way out there. Not a Vibram sole mark, but a smooth print, like a farmer’s work shoe. Couldn’t have come in the way we did. Think there could be an entrance out there?” he wanted to know.
More secret exploration, I thought. I asked Wilcox about it. He explained that there were no surveys or maps of these passages that led outside Mammoth Cave National Park; this preserved deniability. Whose deniability? The National Park Service, for one. Any Freedom of Information Act request for details about south-going passages could be truthfully answered; the park possessed no information. Furthermore, the CRF could deny the existence of surveys and maps. Nobody could disclose what they didn’t know. Ever since the days of George Morrison’s secret surveying in Mammoth Cave that led to his own New Entrance, there was the possibility of enterprising landowners gaining a marketable access through a new entrance to Mammoth Cave. John Wilcox wanted to avoid that. But he was forthcoming with me when I asked.
Wilcox had run trip after trip out East Bransford Avenue and Cocklebur Avenue in Mammoth Cave. Lynn Weller and Scooter Hildebolt had participated. They had found an endless succession of canyons and crawlways heading mostly southeast. These passages certainly extended outside the park under the upland of the plateau. There was no natural obstacle between Mammoth Cave and newly connected Logsdon River in Proctor Cave. The French Connection was an accomplished fact, so as the months of 1979 turned to the fall season, CRF teams revisited and carefully surveyed the secret passageways. Our surveying on the occasion of the August 1979 connection trip was an extension of the Third A Survey with excursions into promising side leads. There was going, hot cave all around the Bransford-Cocklebur area of Mammoth Cave.
After Mammoth Cave and Morrison Cave were joined, the CRF had to survey the connection route to tie the caves together and to map the rest of what we were finding. I led a trip into Morrison Cave to survey the connection route just two weeks after Wilcox and Tom Gracanin had made their nude swim.
Scooter found sticks and organic matter plastered against the ceiling of Logsdon River. “Do you think it floods much?” John Branstetter and I said we didn’t know. It set Scooter to thinking.
“How fast do you think the water can rise?” he asked. Again, nobody knew. We waded upstream toward Station Z7.
“But if the water comes up, we could get trapped in here!” He was beginning to cause us to look at the river flotsam more carefully.
“Shut up, Scooter. You’re scaring these folks,” John said.
“Yeah, but ten years from now my daughter, Nea, may ask her mom, `What was Daddy like?’”
“Shut up, Scooter!” we yelled.
Scooter and John had not seen this part of the cave, and Scooter marveled that anyone could have squeezed through the pool with four inches of air space.
Scooter forced his wet way through the squeeze on his belly and complained loudly. I went through the low spot on my back, but the water seemed dangerously high. Scooter’s concerns were getting to me. I spent one anxious moment slipping down the sloping pool bottom toward certain total submersion. My fingers caught a ceiling nubbin and halted my slide.
“Scooter, how did you get through this?” My voice quavered a little.
“I had to submerge one ear and one nostril to pass through,” he replied. John said he’d watch what I did—and do something else.
The main work was to assimilate the ten or more miles of unsurveyed cave in and adjacent to Logsdon River. Each trip required wetsuits, rope work, and eighteen to twenty-two hours. At age fifty-one, I was, objectively, too old to do this kind of caving. But I felt the so-called male menopause rush that has been blamed for causing otherwise sane men to reevaluate everything important in their lives: their physical condition, families, marriages, jobs—everything! I felt I was at the peak of my caving ability, able to complete the toughest trips carrying rope and wetsuits.
Yet, I feared that at any minute I might become too old. My friend Red Watson had lorded his excellent physical condition over everyone by running miles each day and eating bran. Then he essentially quit caving, although he kept on running. God, I thought, I don’t want to fizzle out like that. And Watson was a couple of years younger than me. Old age could sneak up!
My kids were mostly grown up. I caved with my son, Tom, now and then, although I felt he subtly patronized me ever since he had discouraged me from going into Proctor Cave. My daughters Ellen and Emily were finishing college near Seattle; Jane was at home planning to marry. Soon the nest would be empty—and my marriage had been a problem for several years. To be honest, caving—the hardest kind of far-out caving—was a sublimation of my unexpressed anger regarding my marriage.
That summer of 1979, I made five wetsuit trips through the Morrison Cave Entrance, surveying the Logsdon River and tributary passages, including the T Survey. Chris Gerace, Lynn Weller, and Tom Gracanin were key workers on these arduous endurance marathons. The surveys were characterized by one-hundred-foot shots, surprise dunkings in deep spots in the river, body surfing in the rapids, and good humor.
We made a spectacular trip in July to survey up the right-hand fork of Hawkins River in Proctor Cave. We wore wetsuits and bobbed on inner tubes, surveying through clouds of flies rising from the river. After several hours of heading toward Park City, Kentucky, we came to a sump. Inner tube surveying gave me a glimpse of what it must feel like to be a cave diver, night parachutist, or solo astronaut. The circumstances are threatening, the environment alien, and one’s position is unstable. The visible world ended at the edge of my cone of light. I was utterly dependent on my bag of life support equipment. The least slip, and I would be history. It was ironic to feel this way when most people would see no distinction between a caver’s madness and that of other risk takers. But I hated a continuous dependence on equipment. I was uncomfortable abandoning all to the performance of my gear.
The official announcement regarding the connection between Mammoth Cave and Proctor Cave was made by the Park Service regional public information officer at a press conference at Mammoth Cave National Park in October 1979. Superintendent Robert Deskins then remarked on the historic importance of the expansion of the cave and the vast regional drainage basin whose pollution could threaten Mammoth Cave, and CRF president Cal Welbourn discussed the scientific importance of studying such an extensive cave. Members of the connection party told their individual versions of the events before, during, and after the connection. We passed out packets of photos, background materials, and a map. Why had we waited so long, from 11 August to 1 October, to break the news? The Park Service information officer fielded that one. We had wanted to survey the connection, evaluate the reports, and prepare an announcement, all of which took time.
Later that month, a Ci
ncinnati newspaper reporter wanted to write a first-person follow-up story. He claimed to be able to rappel, mountain climb, dive, and parachute jump, so we took him through the Morrison Cave Entrance to accompany a survey trip. Scooter Hildebolt, Tom Gracanin, Stan Sides, and I—all regulars at river surveying—expected him to be able to handle himself. Wrong! The first tip-off was his boast of how fearless he was; the second, his brand new red coveralls and vertical gear. We taught him to rappel on the spot. He learned the practical application of the theoretical on his sixty-five-foot slide to the bottom of the first pit. We surveyed fifty stations in walking cave. When it was time to leave, we taught him how to use his new Jumar ascenders. His story, more sensational than factual, carried the title “A Mammoth Cave Scare—I Was Trapped and Knew I Was Going to Die!” It was typical of the breathless style of adventure hacks who write about caves with no experience or discernment.
On New Year’s Day of 1980, I received a telephone call late at night from my son, Tom. He had been on a trip into the upper-level passageways above the Third A Survey in the Bransford-Cocklebur area where we had made the connection back in August. His party had felt a strong, cold breeze in the passage they were surveying. When they could survey no longer because of time constraints, he and Richard Zopf had pressed ahead. The canyon was tight and led to the bottom of a shaft about forty feet high. There were many dry leaves there. The wind was so strong in this shaft that it blew out an unguarded lamp flame. The pair briefly checked climbing possibilities, then started up a crack on one side of the shaft. They used opposition holds and layback moves to clear the seamless parts of the wall. Near the top, they traversed around the edge.
“It looked like dirt and leaves being blown in by the wind,” Tom told me. Was there a hole, an opening to the surface? He couldn’t be sure in the gloom.
The following day, Tom made a rough estimate of where the shaft might be located in relation to the surface topography. It was a bright, mild January day when he, Kathleen Womack, Claire Weedman, and George Wood hiked through the trees in the approximate area. Before long, they found a canyon-like opening in the hillside, twelve feet wide by fifty feet long. The rock walls dropped precipitously fifteen feet to the bottom, except at the down-slope end of the crack where the explorers climbed down a dirt collapse. They moved into the darkness, climbed down the face of a breakdown block, and walked a few feet to a funnel of rocks and leaves next to the cave wall.
In a few minutes, they moved enough leaves and rocks to feel a sudden increase in airflow. Rocks chucked into the newly opened black void crashed on the bottom of a drop.
The discovery presented a dilemma. It might—or might not—lead to the dome Tom had climbed a few hours previously. An entrance to Mammoth Cave off national park land would attract a lot of attention. How could it be protected? They didn’t know the landowner, nor had they received permission to tramp though the woods. Tom and Kathleen decided to keep the existence of an entrance confidential until an approach could be worked out. They pulled down rocks and leaves to leave the funnel plugged as they had found it.
A later discreet check through a third party revealed that the land over the new entrance was not for sale.
In 1980, the Mammoth Cave length was 214.5 miles. Planning had started for the Eighth International Congress of Speleology to be held in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in July 1981. The CRF shifted its focus to logistical and political matters, away from breakneck exploring. Sarah Bishop, one of the CRF’s brightest, started preparing a nomination of Mammoth Cave as a World Heritage Site, a United Nations honorific designation for the most outstanding natural and historic places of the world.
Exploration continued in Logsdon River through Morrison Cave, and also in John Wilcox’s secret E Survey in Salts Cave. The E Survey headed outside the park directly toward Roppel Cave. The New Discovery section of Mammoth Cave continued to grow, but we were still not close to connecting with anything that interested me.
Dr. Nick Crawford, director of the Center for Cave and Karst Studies at Western Kentucky University, asked me if I would teach a field course in speleology the week of 9 June. Crawford was launching a summer educational program in cooperation with the National Park Service and had already recruited such prestigious caver-professors as Dr. Art Palmer, Dr. Derek Ford, Dr. Tom Barr, and Dr. Jim Quinlan. Mr. Brucker would be in good company!
The prospect of an international congress of cavers and a speleology course may have seemed a diversion from my purpose of wanting to connect caves, but my first love through this life of adventure had been teaching. I taught a Sunday school class of teenagers one time when nobody else wanted to and enjoyed it immensely. I’d been a YMCA camp counselor on several occasions and had a ball. I taught marketing as an adjunct professor at Wright State University. What could be better than teaching people how to understand caves and to find more of them? I could teach people how to connect caves! The experience proved to be life-changing for the students and for me. The enthusiastic reaction of those students convinced me that teaching caving was, in many ways, more fun than caving itself. I have taught the speleology class for WKU for twenty years since 1980, influencing about 250 students.
Near the end of June 1980, I packed up everything I owned and left home. It was a precipitous desertion, a coward’s way out. My wife, Joan, was devastated. She said later she hoped I never allowed anyone to fall in love with me because I was too much in love with myself to have room for anyone else. At the time, she was absolutely right. My mother blamed my failed marriage on too much caving. I knew in my heart it was my own anger and unwillingness to deal with it as an adult that motivated my decision. Then there was always the fear of age sneaking up. First, it was a hernia, then cancer, then . . . what? From this point forward, I told myself, I would select among all the alternatives life presented and be responsible for the choices I made.
In July 1981, when all eyes were focused on preparations for the Eighth International Congress of Speleology, two cavers from Bowling Green were surface walking some of the valleys around Mammoth Cave National Park, looking for signs of cave. Jim Carter and Billy Matlin found the same canyon entrance that Tom Brucker and Kathleen Womack had found six months earlier. Since Carter and Matlin had dug away rocks and leaves to expose the drop, they naturally assumed the new entrance was their original discovery. They asked Don Coons, who knew nothing of the new entrance.
Carter approached Louise Hanson, who owned the property and several others along the road to Mammoth Cave National Park, and asked to lease the entrance so he could explore the cave. Mrs. Hanson agreed to allow his use of the entrance.
Don Coons and Jim Quinlan quickly learned of Jim Carter’s coup in tying up an entrance. After Carter cleared away the rocks and rigged the entrance drop, it was only a matter of minutes before he found survey station marks deeper in the cave! Carter asked Don if he knew anything about that survey.
Don guessed that the survey was probably part of the Bransford-Cockle-bur extension of Mammoth Cave, where the connection of Mammoth Cave and Proctor-Morrison Cave had taken place the previous August. If this were true, it was a shortcut to the connection and was indeed another entrance to Mammoth Cave. It required a gate, no matter who controlled it. Don called Tom Brucker at his home in Nashville to ask what he knew about a J Survey in a tight canyon. J30 was the last marked station.
Tom was flabbergasted. His secret entrance had been found before plans could be laid to control it by the CRF, and it was now in the hands of an unknown third party! Don had also alerted Jim Quinlan, who was even now having Dave Weller fabricate a gate for this new entrance to Mammoth Cave. Quinlan had funds as well as an appreciation of the scientific value of an entrance so close to the vast Logsdon River drainage of the cave. Dave, from the CKKC, had appointed himself as the civil engineer of the gate building project, which was going forward at high speed.
With alarms going off and the circumstances spinning the decision making out of the CRF’s hands, I contacted Ji
m Carter by telephone. He seemed surprised by my direct approach but knew that there had been a lot of interest by a lot of cavers in his discovery. I appealed to his noble motives: the new entrance had to be protected by a gate as quickly as possible since cavers wanting to yo-yo in for a look-see could be expected at any minute. I told him about the CRF’s successful effort to negotiate a lease for the entrance to Morrison Cave and how we had installed a fabricated gate just in time for Cleveland caver Bob Nadich (on a spy mission) to see us removing the last of the concrete form boards from that gate. A significant entrance had to be protected with a gate before the spelunkers and vandals arrived.
Carter volunteered that his intent was to allow Quinlan, the CRF, and the CKKC to use the new gate and that all parties would receive keys. But what about the larger public relations issue? What would happen after the landowner had time to reflect on the implications of owning an entrance to Mammoth Cave? “Is she interested in the cave?” I asked Carter.
“Yes, very much so. I’ve shown her some photos,” Carter said. “She doesn’t want to go in it.”
Thank God, I thought. Louise Hanson was a remarkable person. Micky Storts had interviewed her as part of the CRF’s oral history project in 1959. She was a sister-in-law of Pete Hanson, who together with Leo Hunt had found the New Discovery section of Mammoth Cave. In 1938, those two explorers also had crawled out Hansons Lost River, the eventual connection route between Mammoth Cave and the Flint Ridge Cave System. Mrs. Hanson was interested in caves, but if she saw those pits and canyons, she might close the entrance. Nobody needed an attractive and dangerous nuisance like that entrance to precipitate litigation.
“Next time you see Louise Hanson, tell her we’re working on a map to give to her. It shows all of the cave under the new entrance. We should name it the Ferguson Entrance. Wasn’t that land in the Ferguson family, and wasn’t Louise a Ferguson?” I put out all the lures I could think of.