Beyond Mammoth Cave Read online

  Well, this was a big operation, requiring the very best talents of the very best people. Delegation and sharing were the keys. The old-timers had kept their precious secrets and never gave anything away, but we were smarter, giving it all away as a lure to promising newcomers—the way John Bridge and Denny Burns had first snared John Wilcox.

  Through 1973, Red Watson and I worked hard writing the book. My talk that year to the National Speleological Society convention in Bloomington, Indiana, brought an emotional standing ovation from the audience of one thousand cavers in response to my account of the “final connection story.”

  By 1974, The Longest Cave was largely completed. Pat Crowther, a key figure in the connection story, spent many days at my house drafting maps for the book. Her mapping skill rivaled Wilcox’s. Then in November, I was elected the fifth president of the CRF, succeeding Stan Sides.

  My heart was with the continuing cave exploration in Kentucky, but my objectives as CRF president were to help strengthen the organization’s western operations at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico and to spearhead the largely political undertaking of protecting the Mammoth Cave National Park environment. It was noble missionary work.

  In truth, I relished the chance to move the CRF forward in the direction of our founding vision. If the politics took me out of the cave, then it was time I paid my dues running interference for scientific projects, negotiating with National Park Service officials, and developing future CRF leadership by helping to launch the National Cave Management Symposium. Phil Smith, Red Watson, Joe Davidson, and Stan Sides had taken their presidential turn in the management arena so the rest of us could explore the caves. Now it was my turn.

  Mammoth Cave continued to grow with a set of large discoveries: In 1973, Mystic River in Mammoth Cave yielded several miles of trunk passage. Carlos Way, a muddy walking canyon leading off from River Hall in Mammoth Cave, was developing into a five-mile complex of shafts and drains under Eaton Valley. One of the passages looked for a time as if it might give us yet another connection to the Flint Ridge caves. John Wilcox, still a spark plug of exploration, began running parties into East Bransford Avenue at the south end of Mammoth Cave. What was he up to?

  In the late summer of 1974, Jim Borden had shown up at our field station on Flint Ridge. He was only seventeen, six feet, one inch tall, with a shock of dark brown hair and big glasses. His smooth, bony face was as thin as his frame.

  A mouth breather, I thought. The girls won’t discover him for years. Maybe he’ll take the bait and get sucked into big caving like the rest of us.

  Jim Borden wanted to go caving, all right, but the CRF’s agreement with the National Park Service required all cavers to be at least eighteen. Denied participation on a “real cave trip,” Jim was taken by expedition leader Stan Sides on a spellbinding tour of the formerly commercial parts of Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave in October. It was the old Flint Ridge con, the same covert recruitment tactic I had worked on Stan ten years earlier and that Jim Dyer had used to net me ten years before that. I argued with the CRF’s personnel officer, seeking special dispensation from the age rule for Jim Borden, since he wouldn’t be old enough until the next May.

  Jim’s conversations convinced me we had a promising caver. He could mentally project cave passages in three dimensions—another Pascal! But too often such raw talent had left the CRF in frustration over bureaucratic red tape.

  And hadn’t Joe Saunders brought him around? Guys like Joe had cave smarts and could recruit cavers. I liked Joe personally but thought of him as just another project caver with his own agenda; a risk taker, not a cave connector. He could steal away a kid like Jim Borden. And we needed an uninterrupted supply of enthusiastic, unspoiled talent.

  I wrote Red Watson and asked him to send the Sincere Encouragement Letter to Jim. Red promptly complied:

  Dear Jim,

  I got a letter from Roger Brucker telling me to write a little encouraging note to you, because you have great potential, and we want to keep you interested. Now I don’t want particularly to imply that you are a stupid son of a bitch, but it is true that young men have been joining the Marines at the age of 14 from time immemorial. You don’t even seem to be capable of figuring out how to join CRF, an organization whose investigative forces, I can assure you, are considerably less than that of the U.S. Marines. Enclosed is a Joint Venture form with your name typed on it, with witness signatures of two of the most venerable persons in CRF. Now if you can’t figure out how to fill out the DATE OF BIRTH blank so you can do a bit of caving with us on the expedition, I give up on you.

  Sincerely,

  Red

  (And quit shooting off your mouth about your age; it bores us people who are over forty to hear about the accomplishments of the young. Want to hear how good I was when I was only fifteen? I thought not.)

  When his high school let out, Jim came back to Flint Ridge and went on several survey trips. In August 1975, Jim and I were assigned to two parties going to Carlos Way. He was full of good questions (meaning those I could answer) and seemed a quick study, but it concerned me that he was going on a wet trip without wool underwear or knee pads. Several times his party leaders bitched about his growing cold and running out of energy. In November, several party leaders wanted to boot Jim out of the CRF. It was time for my own tough letter to him: Shape up or ship out.

  The CRF brand of big-time caving had earned the well-deserved reputation of elitist. It was conceived in rebellion against the slow, fumbling methods of old-time explorers. It was weaned on tough, adversarial relationships with the National Park Service. It had teethed on audacious visions of establishing speleology as Real Science. The CRF had recruited good minds and strong bodies. Collectively, we had learned how to harness the cave and the experience to Challenge the Promising Men and Women to Significant Accomplishment and had alienated some of the loudest mouths in American sport caving (proof of success!). Most of all, we had become an institution that could reproduce itself. Detractors never accused the CRF of being unsuccessful.

  Whether Jim stayed or left was up to him. No matter; we had lots of good prospects in the pipe. Richard Zopf, who stumbled into John Wilcox’s net when we needed strong cave connectors, was within a year leading survey and exploring trips. Tom Gracanin, a geology student from Ohio State, had become addicted to this kind of caving. Diana Daunt, a small woman with an apparently limitless capacity for getting what she wanted, led hard trips, drafted maps, and fueled the big caving engine with her drive. Most cave project managers would give their eyeteeth to land even one such promising caver; the CRF had scores of them! It had to. Attrition of cavers was high due to the physical punishment of caving, frustration from the persistence required, changes in life goals and values, aging, and finite tolerance for bullshit and arrogance. We had learned to tweak the personnel intake valve to keep the good people flowing in at a slightly faster rate than the good cavers drained away. From the pool of prospects, only the determined applied—thus demonstrating they had a key quality we needed.

  Making big discoveries was a goal of my CRF administration. But what I really wanted was finally to be on a connection party myself. According to my wonderful intuition, the next connection had to be with Proctor Cave in nearby Joppa Ridge in Mammoth Cave National Park, and I intended to make it. Well, it didn’t exactly work out that way. Embarrassing as it is, I owe the completion of my dreams to that damned twerp, Jim Borden. He set me up for my final connection trip.

  2

  Roots of a System

  Jim Borden Seeks Involvement in the Longest Cave

  “Shit!” I muttered. I finally had to stop in the low crawlway, panting, sweat dripping from my nose. What the hell was I doing here? I—Jim Borden—mindlessly gazed at the dark brown pebbles on the floor two inches from my nose. They were everywhere, laid down by fast-moving water sometime in the distant past. They were rounded and polished, probably carried from some eroding hilltop miles away. That hilltop might not
even exist today. Now, the crawlway was more like a desert, long abandoned by any water. My mouth was dry from all the crawling.

  Still panting, I raised my helmet off the rough floor and peered farther into the cave; I felt alone. So far, we had crawled better than a thousand feet in this passage, the first foot looking just as the last. For all I knew, it could continue a thousand feet more before relenting. “Right,” I snickered to myself, “this thing will probably dump us into something even worse, half filled with water, no doubt.”

  Ahead, I could see the passage stretching nearly a hundred feet before the wide elliptical tube gently turned to the right and out of sight. The sounds of my heart beating, amplified in the close confines of the crawl, echoed through my head. Once in a while, I could hear the telltale scraping and groaning from a moving caver. Keith Ortiz was out of sight around the corner ahead. The illumination from his bobbing carbide light cast shadows that danced eerily off the ceiling. Somewhere behind was Joe Saunders, who completed our party of three cavers. I strained to listen, holding my breath. Nothing. Joe was either too far back or was also resting. I turned my head backward to look behind: nothing but blackness. “Well, he can’t get lost,” I mumbled.

  Resigned, I sighed. “God, is this what caving in the Mammoth Cave region is like?”

  It was the spring of 1974. I was in Crump Spring Cave, my introduction to caving in Kentucky. Five miles to the west lay Mammoth Cave, the longest cave in the world. Since 1969, cavers from Illinois and Wisconsin had been exploring Crump Spring Cave in hope that it would lead to another Mammoth Cave . . . well, at least to a big cave. So far, all they had to show for their efforts were ten miles of caving hell. A monumental effort indeed—almost heroic—but a Mammoth Cave it was not.

  I dropped my helmet back onto the floor and fell asleep, the floor’s coolness soothing me.

  Six months earlier, I had listened with awe as Joe Saunders presented a slide program at the regular monthly meeting of the District of Columbia Grotto (D.C. Grotto), a chapter of the National Speleological Society (NSS). Cavers from all over the Washington area gathered at these meetings held at the local library near my home. After the end of the obligatory business session and before the program, people would look over some new maps or tell tales about the most recent discoveries. They swapped lies and planned future cave trips. I, like the others, savored the fellowship. This was why we came—the new as well as the experienced caver. Each month, I was learning all about the world of caves: where to go and who the real explorers were. I deliberately sought the company of these “real” cavers.

  Before the program had begun, the chairman of the D.C. Grotto stood in front of the room and called the meeting to order. He watched as the clumps of chattering cavers began to break up and slowly take their seats. Cavers are generally unruly; it usually took cajoling to quiet them down. Stragglers, oblivious to the glares of the chairman, continued their animated conversation until a well-thrown paper wad hit the ring leader on the side of his head. Grumbling, the remaining few shuffled to their seats. As the chairman made his introduction, a plump, red-faced fellow took his place at the podium, the evening’s featured speaker.

  This was Joe Saunders. His beaming smile captivated me as he enthusiastically began his program, describing a cave dear to his heart in the hills of central Kentucky. He gestured a lot and raised and lowered his voice, a skilled storyteller. As the room darkened for the slide program, his story mesmerized me. With each slide and movement of his waving arms, Joe spun out vivid descriptions about exploring in Crump Spring Cave in Fisher Ridge, five miles east of Flint Ridge. Crump Spring certainly was not a large cave but was located in an area influenced by the same hydrologic conditions that formed nearby Mammoth Cave. “Big cave is surely there to be found,” he repeated as slide after slide showed only the bottoms of some unknown caver’s boots, heels scraping the ceiling.

  “Yes, lots of crawling,” Joe bantered, “but we do have some walking passage too!” On the screen flashed an underexposed photograph filled with fog. A shadowy figure could barely be seen.

  I squinted at the scene. Yes, you could see someone standing on something. Was that Kentucky? Before I could study it further, the next slide flashed onto the screen. More boot soles.

  As slide after slide flashed by, Joe’s presentation never lost its animation. I was hypnotized.

  From my perspective, it seemed that I had entered the caving scene relatively late. The golden age of exploration in the caves of West Virginia had been in the late 1950s and 1960s. For years I had listened to my uncle Bob’s spellbinding tales of cutting-edge exploration in the caves of eastern West Virginia.

  Uncle Bob had started me in caving in 1966 when I was nine years old. He outfitted me with a helmet and a brass carbide lamp hooked onto its front. The weight of the carbide lamp caused the helmet to slide over my eyes continually.

  We began by exploring the hundred-year-old gold mines in the Maryland forests along the Potomac River. At the time, I did not know that I was exploring gold mines. To me, these were caves, and I crawled through the low tunnels as if I were the first ever to see them. The feeling of being a cave explorer was a high I had never experienced before.

  I had been especially proud when, before entering the mine, I did not throw the lamp down when it burst into flames in my hands due to a missing gasket. I was frightened, yes, but I would not show fear to my uncle. I calmly placed the lamp on the rock beside me. I smiled, ignoring the pain from the burn.

  The trip was short, probably no more than an hour or two. I yearned for more of this caving. My uncle saw the glimmer in my eye and smiled. He knew he had a caver.

  The next month, Uncle Bob, my dad, and I crawled through the low and muddy passages of Molers Cave—my first “real” cave. Vastness! This cave in West Virginia, two hours from my home, seemed to go forever. At a small room, we came upon some other explorers. They talked about exploring the “Third Level” and “Fourth Level,” crawling through hundreds of feet of mud and water. These were super-cavers! I envied these explorers and longed to be just like them.

  Later, as I squinted in the bright sunshine outside the entrance, I thought to myself that Molers must be a giant cave. I was shocked to learn years later that it was barely three thousand feet long—a small cave by most standards.

  I took the bait. The hook was set. Like many other male adolescents, I had an obsession. Mine was not with guns, sports, or other “normal” endeavors; mine was an exploration obsession. I read everything I could find about caving. My thirst was insatiable. To quench it, I had to find a cave that I could lose myself in. I sought after and found other cavers with a passion like my own.

  When Uncle Bob caved in the 1960s, new cave was everywhere, waiting only for someone to look in the right place. On weekends, scores of cavers would fan out into the cave-rich counties. The friendly local folk were always happy to lead inquiring cavers to holes on their farms. Often they told age-old tales of bottomless pits or of caves miles long with a dog entering one place and emerging from hillsides far away. This was fuel for imagination. In one such cave, Uncle Bob and his party had crawled for hours in water to discover big cave. On a later trip, they found an obscure back entrance, verifying a local yarn. They squirmed through the small hole into a raging winter gale outside. Faced with the choice of crawling back through miles of mud or braving the numbing cold and snow, they stoically headed off into the woods, using a compass to lead them in the direction of their waiting cars. Frostbite, hypothermia, and wet clothes that froze into boards turned this already epic trip into near disaster.

  Back at the car, unable to pull the frozen zippers on their wetsuits that they wore beneath overalls, they climbed into their cars and drove to the nearest restaurant. Denim-clad patrons sipping coffee after a tough day working in the snow were agape to see this muddy crew in black rubber suits stagger through the front door. Frozen zippers were not going to stop this hungry group from devouring a hot meal.

 
; During this heyday, big cave systems were discovered everywhere. But in 1973, it seemed that the ripest fruit had already been plucked and big discoveries were much fewer. No, I concluded, I could not satisfy my dreams of unexplored cave in the well-combed hills of West Virginia. So I looked for other areas that might offer the promise.

  Roger Brucker was a caver who had also written a cave book. He wrote with the same passion and feeling of infinity that I was seeking. I could identify with this unseen person, Roger Brucker. He was constantly looking for a missing link that would lead to the cave of unimaginable length that was lurking behind some unseen corner. In his book The Caves Beyond, Roger wrote of heart-wrenching efforts during a week-long expedition into the depths of Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave in Flint Ridge, right next door to the famous Mammoth Cave (said then to have 150 miles of passage). Nearly seventy men and women had dragged in supplies for an underground camp and had frustrated themselves trying to decipher the labyrinth of complex cave. That was 1954, the “beginning” of modern exploration in the passages of the Mammoth Cave region of Kentucky. Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave later proved to be the nucleus of the longest cave on earth, the Flint Ridge Cave System.

  I combed the literature to put together what had happened since The Caves Beyond but found only fragments. In the fall of 1954 (the same year as the chronicled NSS expedition), a side passage not pushed on the expedition proved to be the key, the sought-for missing link. As recounted in a copy of the NSS Bulletin, a semiannual publication of the National Speleological Society, this passage led to immense vertical shafts and an underground river. It was this discovery that opened the way to the real Flint Ridge Cave System and the connections that followed.

  In 1972, I opened my mailbox to a headline on the cover of the December NSS News announcing that the long-elusive link between Mammoth Cave and Flint Ridge had been found. The Flint-Mammoth System was truly vast. With the new link, the longest cave on earth had more than 144 miles of surveyed passage. No more information was offered, just the byline—a stop-press news flash dramatic in its effect. There would be more later, the editor promised. I brooded.