by Beyond Mammoth Cave- A Tale of Obsession in the World's Longest Cave (epub)
They said yes. With Don Coons, Sheri Engler, and John Branstetter, we had a complement of ten.
The need for secrecy was the common theme in all my calls. Geary Schindel had shell-shocked me to the point where I feared that any leak before the connection parties were in the cave would have devastating effects. I felt sure that Geary was busy in Bowling Green trying to put together his own renegade connection team. I was counting on him to not know how fast we were moving. We would tell no one outside the circle of participants.
This became more complicated due to the planned CKKC expedition scheduled for the same weekend as our connection trip. Many of us who could usually be counted on as regular participants on CKKC expeditions were now inexplicably busy elsewhere. The plague of dropouts was puzzling to those unaware of the secret plans. Some of the tales we told were quite outrageous: I, for example, said I had to brush up on my flying skills or risk losing my pilot’s license—I never missed caving trips if it could be avoided. Dave Black inexplicably decided to take photographs in a nearby cave—he had never before expressed such an interest in this cave. Roberta Swicegood suddenly remembered a previous commitment to lead a Smithsonian field trip to a cave in West Virginia—she never forgot appointments. Pete Crecelius attended the expedition, as planned. He would provide cover for our trip and explanations for our absence. He knew our timetables and could dissemble and divert the Roppel cavers, if necessary.
“What was going on?” everyone asked.
Since the connection was not a certainty, we agreed that we had to extend the deception to well past the start of the trip. Should the trip fail, we would have to try again as soon as possible, or the caving renegades might swoop in before we could regroup. No, we would keep it secret before, during, and also after the trip. The CRF and CKKC had agreed to release news of any connection jointly, and the CRF had an agreement with the National Park Service not to release news of discoveries unilaterally. So, the connection participants agreed to keep the lid on the story until the park announcement could be scheduled. This fact was painful. We had never kept news of discoveries in Roppel a secret from any CKKC members. There would be hurt feelings.
To maintain secrecy, we planned to enter the cave at six o’clock in the morning, long before any other cavers would be awake. We would complete the trip after dark, but early enough so any other Roppel parties would most likely still be deep in the cave. We would hide our cars far from the entrances, slipping in and out undetected.
As we began to implement the plan, I fretted about the implications of our actions. In just a few days, the existence of Roppel Cave as a separate cave might cease forever. My dream of a cave as large as Mammoth Cave would be shattered beyond recall. A connection can never be undone. However, I resolved that Roppel Cave would not simply be swallowed up to become a nameless extension of Mammoth Cave. If I had anything to say about it, the CKKC would also forever retain its identity. I vowed also that the connection event would be momentous, forever etched into the history of caving in the area. Capitulating to the CRF’s demands that the Park Service handle this as a press briefing would help ensure that the event would be remembered.
The whole plan was based upon secrecy, right or wrong. Unfortunately, secrecy meant deception, and deception meant lying to our friends. The decision weighed heavily upon me. Why was the entire history of the stormy relationships among all the opposing parties in the Mammoth Cave region’s cave connections laced throughout with lies, deception, breaches of trust, and damaged friendships? Regrettably, I could not ensure that it would stop for this one last trip. In any event, the price would be high. Plans went forward with their own momentum.
On Friday, 9 September 1983, Roberta Swicegood and I flew out of Montgomery County Airpark in an old single-engine Cessna airplane. The day was spectacular. Puffy cumulus clouds dotted the skies around us as we flew over the mountains of West Virginia and the site of the Old-Timers Reunion. I looked down with regret at the now empty fields of the party site. A few tents of family campers dotted the peaceful grounds. I thought back over the events that had led us to this point. I was saddened. A grand era was ending, perhaps never to be recaptured. I looked down at the instruments, confirming our altitude and position. We were right on course and ahead of schedule.
As we sped over the Big Sandy River into eastern Kentucky, the sun lazily slipped beneath the razor-sharp horizon. Ahead, the inky blackness lay between us and a three-hundred-mile cave.
Roberta and I headed silently into the deepening gloom.
24
Swallowed Up
A New Beginning
The bittersweet reality of waking up on Roppel Cave’s last day impressed me more by its pain than its pleasure. It was depressing to face the inevitable shattering of my dream. Realistically, there was a low probability of connecting any two caves on a trip deliberately aimed at that objective. Why didn’t I just plead sick? Secret reasons for not joining the trip had served others—Pete Crecelius, Tom Brucker, and John Wilcox had removed themselves. Jim Currens, not a likely connection participant anyway, also said he would not attend. His tone of indifference seemed a delicious kind of disdain. Did anyone except me wonder why? Wasn’t their refusal an ennobling act of pride and defiance?
My curiosity about whether the cave connection could be found drove me to swing my feet out of my sleeping bag in the Collins House at Flint Ridge. I smarted at the irony that we were ending it where it had all begun—at Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave.
It was just morning’s first light, but the Austin House was abuzz with life. Roger Brucker was already up cooking breakfast. The enthusiastic banter from the kitchen reinforced my belief that nobody else saw the serious side of this trip. They were all curious, go-for-broke, to-hell-with-Roppel-Cave, press-on-regardless commandos. Their trip planning was what one would expect from military special forces.
“Let’s Simoniz our watches,” Roger ordered. He must have made that joke a hundred times in my presence, and I still had no idea what it meant. We set departure times, rehearsed cover stories, decided where to park vehicles, and agreed to operate as independent teams in case we didn’t connect. Most of us had packed the night before for the trip, so there was a minimum of scurrying around. We trooped out to the assigned cars. In this veteran group, the experience and skill level was so high that each of us was capable of leading the trip. We were interchangeable in every way—the CKKC and the CRF were as one, and that was a sobering thought.
About two hours into the connection trip, I saw my chance to take the lead. Roger Brucker was taking his sweet time explaining things to those who had not seen this part of the cave. I felt patronized. As he prattled about cave blindfish and the wiping out of the aquatic ecosystem when the Park Service emptied a sewage lagoon into a sinkhole, I charged past him. Was he running a classroom or a connection trip? The pace was too slow.
Hours later, at the so-called sump, I was astonished. There was a two-foot-high opening with cold air pouring out. Was this ever a siphon? Had the previous reports been lies? Dave Weller later speculated that the flood on Kentucky Derby Day, 7 May 1983, must have wiped out the last trace of any dam and scoured the river channel deeper.
“Time.” Don Coons was pointing at his watch.
His warning caught me. We were ten minutes late according to the timetable I had set; we should have been well into the breakdown where we would start pounding on the rocks—our signal for the other party coming from Roppel Cave. Roger’s lamp troubles had delayed us. Smoothly, Don slipped into the hole following the river upstream. In a few minutes, I realized that he was moving fast and I was no longer leading. I scrambled to catch up. Shortly, we were squeezing along the left wall in a V-shaped crack formed by the breakdown blocks.
A little beyond where someone had hung an orange streamer, we heard a distant cry: “Hello!” It came from ahead of us.
Don sprinted ahead with me struggling to keep up. The rest of the party was behind, nowhere to be seen.
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br /> “Hello!” we shouted.
The voice ahead was closer now. I saw faint flashes of light shooting through the cracks among the fallen rocks.
I squeezed through a narrow crack into a room formed between the ceiling and fallen ceiling blocks. John Branstetter, the lead caver on the Roppel party, and Don Coons were sitting on a block in the wide room. John greeted me with an outstretched arm and a broad smile.
“We did it!” he said.
I clasped his hand firmly. Before I could compose a response, cavers from both sides started pouring into the room.
I looked at the growing horde and sighed. The moment was lost.
“How far have you come through the breakdown?” I asked.
“Not real far, but the route was confusing. We arrived at the breakdown early and decided to explore the crawlways under the big slabs. The farther into the breakdown we went, the tighter it got. But, it was wide. Anderson must have turned around because it looked impassable. His scuff marks stopped pretty far back. If you didn’t know anything was here, you would think it ends. It wasn’t until I heard your shouts that I knew which way to go. I had to squeeze up between two slabs of rock. It looked like it would pinch for sure. But that’s where the voices were coming from. When I reached this room, I could hear you clearly. Then I knew we’d connected.”
The cavers shouted greetings. It was pandemonium. No time to reflect. I felt this must be like falling into the Niagara River and being swept over the falls. Jubilation took many forms. Roger Brucker organized group photos. He joked and set the camera self-timer, then sprang into the scene with a stupid grin on his face. Several of us built the victory cairn. It was a kids’ birthday party without the cake.
After the parties separated, we continued toward Roppel. The route led through a couple of thousand feet of low, miserable river I had not seen from the Roppel side. I thought about how this stretch of river had been “explored to its end” by Bob Anderson and Chris Welsh and how later it had become the focal point of fierce political maneuvering by both the CRF and the CKKC. Now it was just one passage among thousands in the one great cave, nothing more. No one would ever see it as anything else again.
The minutes marched on as we traveled through the mind-numbing succession of cave passages that countless explorers had strung together. Discoveries were made like beads on a string—no one discovery more or less important than the previous, or the one that followed. But, I felt I had shepherded each of them. I thought about the vastness of this cave called Roppel and of my brief glimpse of the vast reaches of Mammoth Cave for the past eight hours or so. It was now obvious: it was not Roppel Cave that was swallowed up by the connection we had found; it was me who was swallowed up in a vastness that I recognized was the beginning, not the end, of what lies beyond Mammoth Cave.
Afterword
300 Miles to 365 Miles . . . and More
When the Mammoth Cave–Roppel Cave connection excitement died down at the end of 1983, we added up the mileage of the longest cave and discovered that there were 296 miles instead of the 293 we had thought in the cave. In 1984, after the Memorial Day expedition, the cave mileage rolled over the 300-mile mark. The cave has continued to grow each year. By 1996, it was 365 miles long, making Mammoth Cave more than 3.5 times as long as the second longest cave in the world.
The rate of cave length extensions has slowed a little since the 1970s and 1980s. This is because some of the underground effort is devoted to resurveying passages to higher accuracy standards than the original surveys. The maps are more comprehensive and win prizes in cave cartography contests.
Contrary to some predictions, Roppel Cave was not entirely “swallowed up” by the CRF and the Mammoth Cave effort. The CKKC operates cave trips and recruits volunteers to go through one or more of the new Roppel entrances constructed by Dave Weller. The CRF, of course, continues to run expeditions in the caves of Mammoth Cave National Park.
The big news in 1995 was the Fisher Ridge Cave System, which has been explored and surveyed to a length of eighty miles. The breakthrough areas are miles from an entrance. Deep push trips require camping. Passages in Fisher Ridge and Roppel are less than twelve hundred feet apart. Those Fisher Ridge cavers don’t want their cave “swallowed up,” so they continue to issue stern warnings to the CKKC to steer clear of a connection—or else!—an ironic reversal of roles.
Some unexpected cave connections were made in 1996. Some cavers, including Jim Currens, gained entrance to the large Jackpot Cave, near Long
Cave in Mammoth Cave National Park. They went to great lengths to keep their explorations secret. Meanwhile, cavers from Bowling Green had found a second cave, Martin Ridge Cave. This cave was also secret, apparently one better kept than Jackpot Cave. Martin Ridge proved to be the key to several cave connections. First, Martin Ridge was connected to the back of Whigpistle Cave; then, to the chagrin of its explorers, Jackpot Cave was connected to Martin Ridge (by Don Coons and Pat Kambesis). Triple connection! The whole system already exceeds thirty miles in length and will, some day, connect to Mammoth Cave.
Red Watson said we should go out on a limb and predict the five-hundred-mile cave. And we’re almost there! Don Coons has compiled a Mammoth Cave area regional map that shows all the surveyed caves. It doesn’t take a genius to see that sooner or later, they will all be connected. Jim Quinlan’s dye tracing has shown that the passages can go right under the surface drainage basin divides. We’ll be dead then, but one day there will be one thousand miles of connected cave under the upland between Munfordville and Bowling Green, Kentucky. Guaranteed!
• • •
Since 2000, when this book was first published, several notable discoveries and advances have taken place. For years explorers had been intrigued by a large sinkhole on the surface above Roppel Cave. In 2003 a small opening formed and Hoover Cave was “born.” Hoover Cave was found to sprawl over the main parts of Roppel Cave, but no connections between them were known. Then a team of explorers extended the survey of Hoover Cave and saw that a deep canyon or pit lay immediately above a set of domes in Roppel Cave below. An exploration team rigged the Hoover drop and rappelled down into Roppel Cave, tying their surveys together. As of 2015 Mammoth Cave, including Roppel Cave, was officially more than 407 miles long and was growing with monthly expeditions. Nearby, the Fisher Ridge Cave System has been surveyed to more than 122 miles in length, but no connection to Mammoth Cave has been discovered. Active exploration and survey continue in all portions of the world’s longest cave, so discoveries and new length records may be set at any time.
J. D. B. and R. W. B.
PARTICIPANTS IN THE MAMMOTH CAVE–ROPPEL CAVE EXPLORATION, 1972–1983
Acree, Ed
Adamson, Greg
Alexander, R.
Alfred, Janet
Alfred, Tom
Allin, Tom
Allured, Dave
Allured, Vie
Anderson, Bob
Anderson, Eric
Anderson, Jennifer
Anderson, Terry
Anthony, Darlene
Arp, Jeff
Artz, Mike
Backstrom, Neil
Baker, Brian
Baker, Linda
Balister, Phil
Ballman, Carolina
Ballman, Hans-ruedi
Banther, Mike
Barnes, John
Baus, Bill
Beard, Bruce
Bennett, Steve
Bennington, Tammy
Berglund, Donna
Berk, Eric
Bersheim, Bill
Binney, Frank
Bishop, Sarah
Bishop, Steve
Bishop, Sue
Bishop, Bill
Black, David
Black, Greg
Black, Tom
Blankenship, Diane
Bonner, Bob
Borden, Jim
Borgerding, Tracy
Bosted, Peter
Bowers, Ken
Bradley, Paul
Bradshaw, Karla
Branstetter, John
Breiding, Mike
Breisch, Richard
Bridge, John
Bridgemon, Ron
Bridges, Hal
Broer, I.
Brotzge, Jeff
Brucker, Ellen
Brucker, Roger
Brucker, Thomas
Bruno, Kevin
Buckner, Joel
Buecher, Debbie
Buecher, Robert
Burns, Denver
Burns, Pam
Butler, Bonnie
Cahall, Donald
Campbell, Frank
Carlton, Keith
Carpenter, Mary
Carter, Jim
Catozzi, Lou
Cavenaugh, Maureen
Ceters, Robert
Chalin, Stu
Chesnick, Tom
Clemmer, Greg
Clifford, Paul
Coates, Fred
Cobb, Bill
Cochran, Alexis
Conner, Steve
Cook, Bob
Cook, Holly
Coons, Don
Cottrell, Tom
Crann, David
Crawford, J.
Crecelius, Pete
Crowther, Pat (later Wilcox)
Crowther, Will
Currens, Deborah
Currens, Jim
Currens, Samantha
Curtis, Sue
Dale-Mule, Renato
Danobich, John
Dasher, Elisa
Dasher, George
Daunt, Diana (later Mergens and Miller)
Davidson, Joe
Davis, Jerry
Davis, Nevin
Davis, Roy
Debevoise, Tom
DePaepe, Duane
DePaepe, Veda
DesMarais, David
DesMarais, Shirley
Dible, Danny