Beyond Mammoth Cave Read online

  The caves are always dark, so every explorer carries at least three separate sources of light. Most of the exploration in Mammoth Cave was lit by carbide lamps. This two-part brass lamp contains a lower chamber into which lumps of calcium carbide are placed. A top compartment is filled with water and adjusted with a valve to a rate of one drip per second. When the two halves of the lamp are screwed together, the water reacts with the calcium carbide to generate an acetylene gas jet. When ignited with a spark from the built-in flint lighter, the gas burns with a bright yellow-white flame. A polished reflector focuses the light ahead of the caver. Cavers can carry enough carbide in two baby bottles to last for thirty-six hours.

  Electric headlamps are sometimes used in Mammoth Cave, but carbide is cheaper and more reliable. Cavers debate the merits of the two types of light, but veteran cavers know there’s a place for both.

  Other sources of light include flashlights, plumber’s candles, matches, or spare carbide lamps. The reason cavers bring so many types of light is that if a caver gets lost in the dark, he or she could die.

  Cavers wear the headlamp on a high-impact plastic helmet or hard hat that protects against ceiling scrapes and rockfalls. Rubber pads protect knees while crawling and permit friction for the knees while climbing.

  A caver’s pack contains food and supplies for about twenty-four hours of hard exploring. It resembles a large purse and holds everything that the old-timers tried to stuff into their pockets. Carbide, water bottle, flashlights, candles, survey gear, canned food, and other useful items fit into the pack.

  A variety of climbing hardware is used for descending and ascending vertical pitches in caves. Cavers use single-rope techniques of rappelling—a controlled friction slide down a sheathed, non-stretch nylon rope. They ascend the same rope using a variety of cam or ratchet devices that permit an inchworm-type of climbing movement upward.

  For surveying cave passages, one uses, for example, a Suunto magnetic compass that displays the bearing from one survey station to the next with a precision of one-half degree or less. Survey teams measure the distance between survey stations with a fifty-foot tape and the vertical angle up or down with a Suunto clinometer. The compass reader calls the observed measurements out loud to a note taker, who writes the data in the survey notebook. The note taker also draws a sketch map of the passage. In short, a cave is mapped by describing a line through three-dimensional space, then by describing the cave surrounding the line. A survey party may return to the surface with a survey of a half-mile in easy walking passageway, or maybe only a few tens of feet in a tough, small, muddy crawlway.

  Why survey caves? Cave maps drafted from the surveys are the prime tools of discovery. In the Mammoth Cave region, few serious cavers even think about cave exploring without doing a simultaneous survey. We made the big discoveries and connections that way, although many who do not survey still think our findings in Mammoth Cave were pure, enviable luck.

  Getting lost in a cave is a horror imagined by all readers of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. The fear is exaggerated and unwarranted for most simple caves, because their plan is obvious. Serious cavers pay attention to the confusing junctions, as a visitor to a city would note the streets. But large caves can be so confusing that inexperienced spelunkers get lost. Cave maps, drafted from cave passage surveys, untangle this confusion, just as a road map shows the complex route for a long trip. Other dangers are falling rocks or cavers falling into holes. Death by drowning is a risk on the lowest levels of caves and is a relatively frequent occurrence in cave diving. Caves can kill or injure in many ways, even if explorers are careful.

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  Blazing Glory and Blind Ambition

  Roger Brucker Tells of the Thrill and Envy

  “Whump! My wetsuit pack hit the sand floor seven feet below me. I—Roger Brucker—sat on the edge of the drop and braced on a foothold three feet below. Then I jumped down. I scooped up the bulky but lightweight wetsuit pack and headed south in a walking passage to join the others.

  We carefully picked our way down an easy free-climb that connected a passage containing a B Survey with the Third A Survey in Cocklebur Avenue in Mammoth Cave. Six of us were laden with shoulder packs stuffed with cave gear: extra carbide and water, food, surveying compass and measuring tape, and flashlights. Each caver clutched an additional pack containing a wetsuit.

  A pool of yellow light from our combined carbide lamps filled a room about fifteen feet wide, twenty-five feet long, and six feet high. Some of us stood and some sat as we all stripped off cave clothes and crammed ourselves into the sponge rubber wetsuits that scuba divers wear.

  Sheri Engler’s piercing shriek cut through the murmur of voices: “Don, help me with this goddamn zipper! You said you were going to fix it. If I get cold, I can’t read compass!” Her husband, Don Coons, rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, stood up, and began to fumble with her wetsuit zipper.

  Dave Weller talked nonstop about tearing apart an old building in Louisville. Jim Borden peered into the gloom ahead, where the water started and the ceiling dipped almost to meet it. Lynn Brucker, my wife of eight months, pulled her wetsuit on with no wasted motions, while I struggled into my patched, secondhand, much-used wetsuit.

  Our purpose on this September day in 1983 was to find and survey a connection between Mammoth Cave and Roppel Cave, and our excitement about this “trip of a lifetime” was expressed in various ways. The “engineers,” whether talking or listening, methodically prepared for their plunge into water. These included Dave, a self-taught, practical engineer and cave entrance constructor; Lynn, an electrical engineer by profession; and Jim, a systems analyst with IBM. The rest of us were “liberal arts”–oriented. Sheri had a degree in history, Don was a farmer, and I worked in an advertising agency. Our preparations were more spontaneous and chaotic than the others’. All of us were seasoned cave explorers who had devoted from five to thirty years of our lives to exploring the big caves of Kentucky.

  What were our prospects for success? Certainly slim. Finding connections between these caves took years, often frustrating years of search, disappointment, and despair. There was no luck to it. Nobody “stumbles” onto a connection. A cave connection is the product of sequential discoveries, of building on new knowledge from mapping and from crawling on the backs of previous explorers. While the probability of finding a connection was low, there was always the eternal driver: possibility.

  Our friendly, echoing chatter filled the passage as we plunged into the river to wade upstream. Wetsuit caving is warm and comfortable; cold cave water seeps in between suit and skin but quickly heats to body temperature. The noise of splashing water drowned out conversation except between adjacent pairs of cavers. Since I was leading the party, I could see deep into the unsilted, clear pools of water. I saw several white cave crayfish and a pale pink cave blindfish and reduced the pace so I wouldn’t miss any of this fine glimpse of the cave ecosystem.

  After three hundred feet, Jim Borden cruised by me in a crashing wave of foam at high speed. A natural leader, he had grown impatient at my scenic pace. Rather than negotiate with the old man, he had shifted into second gear and passed him. He did not relinquish the lead for the rest of the trip.

  Our long hike in the underground river was a delightful succession of wading, swimming, and portaging across gravel bars for thousands of feet, all in a passage from twenty to thirty feet wide by twenty feet high. Jim and Dave had never been in this passage, but the rest of us had. It was the finest cave anyone could want, and our spirits were high. We knew we would have a productive trip, even if we didn’t find a connection.

  How many times had we been confident of finding a connection, only to meet a dead end? Truthfully, most of the time. Only a few perpetual enthusiasts like Jim and me thought in romantic terms of “sure” connections and “certain” discoveries. Much of our palaver had been bait to lure new cavers. Yet, secretly we knew we would find the connection between Roppel Cave and Mammoth Cave. Some of the old
-timers with us, especially the engineers by temperament or vocation, regarded us as bullshitters.

  What makes cave connections rare is collapse. Flowing underground water enlarges a crack into a passage. As the passage enlarges, its walls and ceilings become stressed. Rock slabs and arches fail, and the fallen rock closes off the passage. The worry is not that the roof will fall on the caver’s head (which is what non-cavers think) but that the fallen rocks will terminate the passage and frustrate the caver to death.

  At 12:30 P.M., our party of six reached the spot where the river upstream had formerly terminated in a sump. Dave and I brought up the rear. Don and Jim led the party in a rush under the low ledge that used to be underwater. They left us behind as Dave changed the carbide in his lamp. This was the first moment of quiet on the trip.

  We then caught up with the others at the end of a long stretch of river wading, where a breakdown filled most of the passage and covered the river. We could move along the left wall of the passage near the ceiling. This was extremely wet cave. Water beads stood out on the walls and ceiling and fresh mud coated the floor. Shattered rocks jutted out from the right side. I knew this kind of passage must lie beneath a valley, where all the waterflow and rock weakening processes were maximized. We bumped some rocks and they fell, reminding us that while general collapse was unlikely, local collapse of a few pounds of this unstable rock could trap, injure, or kill us.

  A piece of orange flagging tape marked the last survey station from the Mammoth Cave passages behind us. Jim and Don were now leading.

  I heard a faint cry ahead of us.

  Don shouted, “It’s them!”

  We all yelled simultaneously, then got better organized and shouted “Hello” in unison. The muffled shouts from the distant caver seemed closer now. My heart pounded!

  Ding! My lamp struck a rock and went out, plunging me into darkness.

  “Dave,” I yelled, “I need a light.” I could have opened my pack for a flashlight but thought Weller was close by. He reversed and came back to me to light my lamp with the flame of his.

  In a few minutes we both moved forward a couple of hundred feet, then climbed up to the right where the traffic scuff marks led through a crack. The room we squeezed into was about four feet high, floored by large breakdown slabs extending the width of the fifteen-foot-wide passage. There was mud everywhere. In the small room we joined Jim, Lynn, Don, Sheri, and John Branstetter.

  John, who had heard our shouting, was a member of a team of explorers who had entered Roppel Cave that same morning. Their objective was to search for a connection to Mammoth Cave from the Roppel end, following a river passage that certainly seemed to be the same river in both caves.

  We shook hands with John, an unusual gesture for cave explorers in a cave, but it seemed a suitable greeting for our counterpart connection party. John said that the others in his party were some distance back, squeezing through a tight crawlway. One by one, Roberta Swicegood, Bill Walter, and Dave Black popped into the connection room, the site of our long-awaited success. We laughed, hugged each other, and shook hands again, then took photographs of the combined connection party.

  John described how the Roppel party had arrived at the farthest point of penetration. They had concluded that the previous party had not penetrated far into the breakdown. As John and Roberta were placing new knee-print marks in the mud of a virgin crawl, he had yelled, “Hey!” but had heard nothing in return.

  Don Coons built a cairn to mark the connection spot. I smoked a sign on a flat rock with my carbide lamp: “9–9–83–293,” which indicated the date and the number of combined cave miles we had joined together by finding and traversing the connection route. Nobody wanted to leave.

  The plan was that if a connection were made, the parties would survey the connection route and tie the survey into stations on either side, and each party would exit the other’s entrance. A grand traverse, portal to portal, with a party crossover was an exciting prospect, but we were way-to-hell-and-gone in the cave and had plenty of survey work to do.

  Jim Borden asked me, “How does it feel to actually be in on a connection?”

  I smarted a little, thinking to myself, You squirt, I was exploring these caves before you were born! Back in 1954, three years before Jim existed, I was plotting how to connect Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave with Mammoth Cave in Mammoth Cave National Park. I had helped or led expeditions—that is, I set the expeditions up but didn’t directly participate—when the connections of 1960 and 1961 were made. I helped with the connection of the Flint Ridge caves and Mammoth Cave in 1972 and Proctor Cave to Morrison Cave in 1979. Later in 1979, I had led a trip on which the connection between Mammoth Cave and Proctor-Morrison Cave was found. True, I had never been on a connection party, but wasn’t that just a detail? A stinging little detail? Well, this was not the time for sarcasm.

  I said to Jim, “I’m pleased to be invited.” This was the first time I had been on an actual connection. It felt wonderful.

  We started surveys about 2:30 P.M. from the connection room and tied them back to the respective caves. Our party left via the Roppel Entrance around midnight. John Branstetter’s party emerged from the Ferguson Entrance about 2:30 A.M. Then both parties celebrated with champagne. The three-hundred-mile cave was 98 percent complete, a blaze of glory indeed.

  Becoming president of the Cave Research Foundation had been my ambition since the summer of 1957, when Philip Smith, Burnell Ehman, David Huber, Jim Dyer, Dave Jones, Jack Lehrberger, and I formed the CRF on Smith’s front porch in Springfield, Ohio. In November 1974, I did become CRF president. Much of a rich lifetime of caving was behind me. At forty-four, I had been crawling in Flint Ridge caves since Jim Dyer had introduced us to the sport twenty-one years before. With Joe Lawrence Jr. I wrote a book, The Caves Beyond, about the National Speleological Society’s 1954 expedition into Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave. I had participated in setting up connection trips in the Flint Ridge Cave System in Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky. Some of my discoveries were short but vital pieces of the trail that became the connection route to Mammoth Cave in 1972. I felt a romantic thrill when my friend John Wilcox and his connection party telephoned me at 4:00 A.M. on 10 September 1972 to tell this “grand old man” of caving that the big connection had been made.

  While I also felt keen disappointment at not being on the Mammoth Cave connection trip, I knew I was too big to fit through the squeeze known as the Tight Spot that blocked the route for me. Were I Wilcox, I’d have left me at home, too.

  Following the connection, I had two thoughts: First, this 1972 grand Kentucky junction was not going to be the last of the big connections. I could continue to help set up and make future cave connections. Second, I wasn’t the premier cave connection strategist I thought I was. John Wilcox had succeeded with a better strategy, and we were as different in temperament as could be.

  Two seventeenth-century French philosopher-scientists illustrated our two polarized approaches, René Descartes and Blaise Pascal. Descartes believed the world was governed by reason and that it would yield its mysteries to reasoned inquiries. Wilcox the engineer was like that: logical, systematic, thorough. I viewed him as a thinker with never an impulsive thought. He had methodically fitted together the Mammoth Cave connection route, lead by lead, eliminating each possibility one by one. Wilcox was successful.

  Blaise Pascal, a contemporary of Descartes, changed his whole way of life upon receiving a revelation from God in his study one evening. He argued that reason must be abandoned altogether in favor of an important human factor, intuition. I fancied myself a Pascal. To me, the Gestalt psychology idea of the “Aha!” experience summed it up. I could imagine the cave in my mind in three dimensions and crank it forward or backward like a movie film. The sudden breakthrough of insight was what revelation meant to me. I thought like a shotgun, Wilcox like a high-powered rifle. Wilcox was a doer, I was a communicator. It wasn’t that I saw myself as unsuccessful in relation to Wilcox
; rather, I was not yet successful.

  In the flurry of CRF activity following the 1972 connection, Red Watson and I plunged into the tasks of photographing the connection route, writing news releases, and planning a press conference. We set Wilcox to work making a map of the connection route.

  Red and I collaborated on a book about everything leading up to the connection. Red and I had lived and crawled through the toughest places. Together, over the years, we had enjoyed each other’s full involvement in exploring, mapping, strategizing, and writing. We were old friends. Gathering historical materials and seeking cooperation of the participants absorbed us completely.

  John Wilcox’s careful draftsmanship on the cave maps delighted me and set my imagination racing. I had been drawing cave maps for years, and I envied Wilcox’s style. Almost twenty years earlier, I had railed against Bill Austin’s idea of a cave map—simple straight lines connecting pin pricks on the vellum. You couldn’t tell anything about the cave passages and their relationship to the land above from Bill’s surveys, and he was educated as a civil engineer!

  My artistic talent had eclipsed Bill as the cave mapper, and I had dragged in and coached like-minded cave mappers over the years. Those mappers—Micky Storts, Denny Burns, and now John Wilcox—had much more patience than I did. My concern for cartographic beauty and unity was supplanted by their more practical attention to accuracy and detail. Wilcox elevated cave cartography by orders of magnitude over earlier efforts.