Roger W. Brucker and Richard A. Watson
Editors’ note: Roger Brucker is an American cave explorer and the author and coauthor of five books about caves. He is best known for his exploration of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave system and began exploring sections of it in 1954. Mammoth Cave is the world’s longest explored cave system, and Brucker and his friends are credited with many of the most significant finds. The excerpt below is from The Longest Cave (1976) by Brucker and Richard A. Watson.
Author’s note: Mammoth Cave in Kentucky is 404 miles long and still growing through survey and exploration. It is three times longer than any other cave. The following story tells of a breakthrough set of discoveries that taught the explorers to “follow the water” to find natural connections between the big caves. These trips revealed the clues necessary to connect Crystal Cave, Unknown Cave, Salts Cave, Colossal Cave, and finally Mammoth Cave in 1972.
Soon after Roger Brucker unveiled his map of the lower levels of Crystal Cave in Flint Ridge, Bill Austin recognized from the maps and descriptions that Jack Lehrgerger, Russ Gurnee, and Roy Charlton—who had been sent out to explore around Bogardus Waterfall—had actually gone to another place, subsequently named Bogus Bogardus Waterfall. This left a passage still to be explored at Bogardus Waterfall. If it went, it might connect Crystal Cave with Salts Cave. So in July 1954 Bill, Jack, Roger, Phil, and Dixon Brackett took a grinding eighteen-hour trip into the Bogardus area to straighten out the ambiguities of the C-3 expedition map.
The explorers proceeded to the real Bogardus Waterfall. Nearby was an entrance to a small passage over which the words “A NICE CRAWL” had been written in soot with the flame of a carbide lamp. Bill said he had written them in 1948 when he was exploring with Jim Dyer, and that the passage went a long way. He had turned back at a pit. There would be plenty for everyone out there, he said, so he, Jack, and Phil crawled on their bellies into the small passage. Roger, after his long drive from Ohio to Kentucky, was beginning to feel the effects of lack of sleep, so he decided to take a nap while the others explored. Dixon stayed with him. They slept for several hours, awaking when they heard a shout. The others had found their way to the bottom of Bogus Bogardus Waterfall by a new route. Roger fired up his carbide lamp and crawled down through a muddy, tight tube to the others. Dixon followed. By this time the advance party was ready for a meal.
Bill and Jack had taken a long crawl leading to a small elliptical tube with a sandy floor that took them to a cluster of dry vertical shafts. Then they followed another crawlway, but abandoned it to crawl through a small side passage back into the Bogardus Waterfall Trail. The crawlway they had abandoned was still unexplored. Roger asked how to find it. Jack pointed across the stone lily pads at the entrance to an ocher-colored tube just big enough to slide into. While the others were eating, Roger crawled off to explore.
Out of sight and hearing of the others, Roger found the passage getting smaller. Grape and small crystals on the walls, ceiling, and floor tore at his clothing—which is why they named it Fish-hook Crawl—and he tensed as he realized he would have to back out of the passage if he could not find a place to turn around. He decided he must have missed the side passage that led back to Bogardus Waterfall Trail. There were no scuff marks on the floor. The passage ahead was virgin.
He decided to go around one more corner. Wham! As he stuck his head around the corner, a cold breeze struck him squarely in the face. It came from a black hole that had appeared at the end of the tunnel. The passage was even smaller ahead. Roger’s adrenaline surged as he pushed rapidly ahead on his belly. The breeze felt like a gale. The hole, however, was a deception. It was just another bend in the passage. So were the next several holes. Then, after about 400 feet of very tight belly crawling, Roger thrust his head out a tiny window-like opening into a pit about ten feet in diameter, with a basin floor ten feet below. The pit was decorated with brownish-black flowstone, so Roger named it Black Onyx Pit. Above the window the walls ballooned out.
Roger could not turn around, or even roll over on his back in the tiny crawlway. But if he could get out of the window and get up onto a ledge a few feet to left on the wall of Black Onyx Pit, he could see what he had found, and could turn around for the long crawl back. He had to push his body out into empty space until he could bend sideways at the waist. Then, holding on to the slick cave onyx projections at the level of the hole, he slid his legs out and down the wall into a layback against the wall. The traverse across the side wall to the ledge was not difficult. He did not think getting back to the window would be easy, but he was sure he could do it.
The ledge was a delight. It led to an extension of Black Onyx Pit that was nearly thirty feet long, eighteen feet wide, and fifty feet high. Peering into the gloom, he could see several leads, including the entrance to a passage five feet in diameter that departed from one wall. He could do nothing more now, however, for he had overstayed his time and the others would be expecting him. He climbed back over to the window.
The window in the wall of Black Onyx Pit leading back into Fishhook Crawl was not easy to enter. Roger put his arms into the opening and hung there, his feet swinging free, but the hole was not large enough for him to pull himself up by his arms and at the same time bend his head and shoulders into it. Finally he had to reverse his entrance procedure, pulling his body up in a layback on the slippery wall until he could slide his head and shoulders sideways into the hole. Then, with his arms outstretched down the passage and his shoulders wedged, he flailed his legs in the open air of Black Onyx Pit until he managed to slide forward into Fishhook Crawl on his belly. Then he slid forward like a snake in a hurry toward Bogardus Waterfall. When he was nearly there, he heard Jack calling him. He answered elatedly. Jack listened to his account, and then went off down Fishhook Crawl. He checked Roger’s Black Onyx Pit, and came back smiling.
The breakthrough into a new passage complex of Crystal Cave in the heart of Flint Ridge had been made. Later it was learned that during the C-3 expedition a crucial crawlway opening along the line of discovery had not been found because during an exploration-trip rest stop Russ Gurnee had sat his six-foot-five-inch frame on the ledge above it, hiding it completely. Now, however, the way was clear. They planned a Thanksgiving expedition to explore the passages leading off from Black Onyx Pit. It would be a big job, and there was some discussion about personnel.
Red Watson had joined the ROTC during the Korean War to avoid the draft. The war was over by the time he got his commission. He spent a year in Denver going to an Air Force aerial-photography school, and then was sent to an air base outside Columbus, Ohio. Searching for outdoor adventure, he looked through the membership list of the National Speleological Society for the member in Columbus who had the lowest NSS number, and who thus would have been an NSS member longer than any of the others.
Jim Dyer answered the phone and after listening awhile said, “You call Phil Smith.”
Phil was working on his thesis for an MA in educational psychology at The Ohio State University, but he told Red to come on over anyway. Red climbed up to a room under the eves of an old house where slanted ceilings forced tall Phil to stoop except in the center of the room. The room was piled with books, papers, and camera equipment. On the walls were cave maps, and photographs of caves and of scenes from Shakespearean plays.
Red and Phil talked, sizing each other up. Phil stretched out lazily in a chair, his legs crossed at the ankles, has hands clasped, flesh spare on his lanky frame. Red roamed the room, looking at everything, his compact body full of nervous energy.
“Have you done much caving?” Phil asked.
“Some,” Red said.
“Our caving is pretty strenuous,” Phil went on.
Red changed the subject to mountain climbing. He had done some climbing, but did not want to mention that he had been in only four caves in his life, one of which was almost 100 yards long, and another of which was Carlsbad Caverns on a commercial tour. The other two did not amount to much.
Four hours later Phil and Red had discussed if not solved most of the world’s major problems, and Red left with an invitation to go with Phil to his home in Springfield, Ohio, for Thanksgiving dinner. Then they would go to Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave for a big trip in Flint Ridge. Red stumbled down the stairs, glancing at the magazines Phil had given him. He read through the rest of the night. In the Louisville Courier-Journal Magazine, an extensive feature article emphasized the danger of getting lost while exploring caves. Red wondered whether Phil knew Crystal Cave well enough not to get lost. “Seven Days in the Hole” by Robert Halmi, reporting in True Magazine on the C-3 expedition, filled Red with visions of the horror of the Keyhole, Bottomless Pit, and Formerly Impossible. He slept fitfully, cave darkness terrifying his dreams. He awoke around noon, and never thereafter was he so frightened of caving as he was before ever going caving at all. The reality of those dreaded places came as a welcomed relief when he actually experienced them in Crystal Cave.
Phil outfitted Red with caving gear, and lectured about caving on the long ride from Ohio to Kentucky. Red listened carefully, cramming, a bit anxious because he thought everyone took him to be an experienced caver. In fact, he had not fooled Phil, and he was wrong in thinking that he had to be an experienced caver to join the Flint Ridge Crew. When Jim Dyer had suggested to Phil the need to develop teams of explorers, Jim had also remarked that desire and fitness were as important as previous caving experience. Red was Phil’s first green recruit.
In turn, Red had fastened on Phil as the one he should follow to learn. However, when he reached Flint Ridge, Red began to get confused. He had thought that Phil was the organizing force behind this expedition. Then he met Roger Brucker, who seemed to view the expedition as part of his cartography program. However, Bill Austin, manager of Crystal Cave, was directing operations. And underground, on the long crawl out to the Bogardus area, Red found some of the cavers deferring to Jack Lehrberger, who charismatically projected the image of being the biggest daddy cave explorer of them all. The amazing thing was that there was no conflict in these crisscrossing lines.
Phil was busily managing, an occupation that led him three years later to found the Cave Research Foundation. Roger Brucker was constructing maps, and would become the first Chief Cartographer for the Flint Ridge Cave System. Bill was an heir to the finest cave system in the world—Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave—and he was protective of his property. Jack, most interested in exploration, was quietly eager to go beyond the limits of previous penetration in Flint Ridge. Roger McClure, Dave Jones, Jack Reccius, Bill Hulstrunk, Dixon Brackett, Bob White, and Red Watson—only seven Indians for four chiefs—followed the low passage on hands and knees, obeying orders. Red crawled blindly, because he soon saw that he could not memorize the complicated route back as he had read in a book that he should. He was dependent on the others.
During the C-3 expedition, heavy-duty phone wire had been laid from the Austins’ yard where the Headquarters tent was located on the surface of Flint Ridge to the Lost Passage in Crystal Cave underground. The heavy wire and field telephones had taken so much energy to install that Dave Jones, who was a recording engineer, adapted lightweight, sound-powered telephones for use in Crystal Cave. One could both listen and speak through a single crystal earphone that could be clipped anywhere along a thin, plastic-covered wire. A thousand feet of this wire weighed only a few pounds. At Floyd’s Lost Passage, Dave spliced one of the rolls into the heavy telephone line. Transmission was loud and clear. Jacque Austin on the surface expressed suitably serious interest in the continuously reported accomplishments as the explorers unrolled the wire toward Bogardus Waterfall.
When the end of the previous survey was reached, Roger Brucker assigned segments of the passage ahead to various teams of surveyors. After five hours the new route had been surveyed all the way to Black Onyx Pit.
Meanwhile, Phil and Bill had gone beyond Black Onyx Pit to make a stupendous discovery. Instead of going up onto the ledge Roger had found to explore the high leads, they decided to continue through a crack at the bottom of Black Onyx Pit. It was Bill’s experience that such drain passages often lead to larger passages. Within twenty feet they came to another drop, a much larger and deeper part of Black Onyx Pit. Phil uncoiled a shining new white nylon rope that contrasted with the muddy explorers. He tied the rope to a rock projection to use as a hand line for the climb down.
The passage continued on the other side of the pit as a canyon thirty feet high and five to ten feet wide, with possible routes of travel on several levels. Phil explored a small side passage while Bill went on down the main canyon. Coming back from the side passage, Phil decided to go back to the roped pit to leave a note for the surveyors who would be coming along. Bill and Phil were only fifty feet beyond the previously known limits, but already there were so many leads to choose from that the follow-up teams would need clear guidance.
Then Phil followed Bill’s scuff marks over large boulders jammed in the canyon passage.
“Come up here and look at this!” Bill shouted.
Phil rushed on to find Bill standing on the edge of the biggest pit either had ever seen. They called the wide platform they stood on the Balcony, and the pit itself the Overlook. Their lights neither reached the ceiling nor the floor of the pit in front of them. Its far wall was nearly fifty feet away. They threw a rock. Several seconds later it splashed in a deep pool. They estimated that the Overlook had a total height of about 150 feet. Phil and Bill were standing on the Balcony about sixty feet above its bottom.
This discovery spurred them on. There were at least three obvious leads off the Balcony of the Overlook.
They chose a passage opening behind a spray of water on the same level as the entry passage. A few minutes after ducking through the shower, they came to a junction. In one direction a canyon led down to a rectangular passage four feet wide and six feet high. It offered more of the same wet and muddy prospect. The passage straight ahead was somewhat smaller, but it showed a sprinkling of gypsum on the walls, a sandy floor, and a change in the texture of the rock itself.
The choice was obvious. At Bogus Bogardus Waterfall the explorers had gone down to lower, wetter cave. Fishhook Crawl, Black Onyx Pit, and the passages beyond the Overlook were also low. They had gone deep into the depths of Crystal Cave. To find big, dry passages higher up under Flint Ridge, perhaps without any direct surface entrance, they would have to climb back up again. Cave passages on higher levels are often characterized by growths of gypsum crystals on their walls. When Bill saw the sparkling of gypsum in the passage before him, he was as pleased as he had been when he found the Overlook. Behind him, Phil was certain that this was the way to connect Crystal Cave with Salts Cave.
They walked rapidly into the passage, then crouched. Finally, when they were forced to their bellies by the lowering ceiling, Bill, in the lead, turned a disgusted look back to Phil.
“Oh, hell!” Phil said, and started backing out.
Back at the junction again, they climbed down into the wet passage. Phil was overheated from the crawlway. He was also already somewhat uneasy about having turned back, because the gypsum crawl did go on. It still does, unexplored.
The wet passage Phil and Bill now ran down got to be ten feet wide and seven feet high in places. It kept its rectangular shape, and it trended distinctly downward. They had very early along named it Storm Sewer.
After several hundred feet the ceiling closed down until they were crawling through mud and water in a passage three feet high and ten feet wide. The persistent rectangular cross-section was so striking that the tunnel seemed man-made. A thin layer of mud covered the ceiling, walls, and floor. They knew they were getting down near the base-level of the Green River, which was known to backflood from the surface into the cave passages for thousands of feet and as high as fifty or sixty feet above normal river level.
“What’s the weather like outside?” Phil asked.
“I haven’t the foggiest,” Bill replied.
This base-level caving was something new to Bill and Phil. They had never gotten this low under Flint Ridge before.
After a quarter of a mile Storm Sewer opened into a large passage making a T-junction. It was as though they had now entered the master sewer, with a vaulted limestone ceiling stretching six feet over a mud-bank floor twenty to thirty feet wide. A few hundred feet to the right, the room closed down to a muddy crater with no opening at the bottom. To the left, the big passage contained a small stream that flowed in a mud-walled canyon. Passage walls were twenty feet apart, with a fifteen-foot ceiling. Bill slid fifteen feet down a mud bank to the water on his feet, twisted back, and almost fell, crying, “Blindfish!”
All of these discoveries seemed to offer names immediately. The passage was named Eyeless Fish Trail, and the river it contained, Eyeless Fish River. The river was a major discovery that culminated years of exploration in Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave. This small stream was surely part of a large underground river system that extended at near base level beneath all the caves of Flint Ridge. If they could follow it, they would surely connect all the Flint Ridge caves into one system. Eyeless Fish River might even extend under Houchins Valley, which separated Flint Ridge from Mammoth Cave Ridge. The blindfish in Eyeless Fish Trail of Crystal Cave might be able to swim all the way to Mammoth Cave. But even if they could, this would be no promise that cavers—obeying the rule that you should follow the water to find new caves—actually could follow. Underground rivers have a tendency to siphon—that is, the ceilings of the passages that contain them sometimes meet the surface of the water, making it virtually impossible for the explorers to go on. Siphons are formidable barriers to exploration even for cavers with special diving equipment, and there is never any guarantee that the ceiling will rise into open air beyond.
Downstream, the water of Eyeless Fish River flowed into a narrow black opening. At this level, so close to the Green River outside, it would probably soon siphon. Even if it did not siphon, it would be very difficult to follow. Bill and Phil decided to explore upstream. Eyeless Fish River might intersect the bottoms of pits up which they could climb into unknown higher-level passages.
They sloshed upstream until the roof of Eyeless Fish River dipped down so that further progress would have required crawling in the water. Here they traced their initials, “P.M.S.” and “B.A.,” in the mud, and turned back. In a few hours they had found more new cave passages in Crystal Cave than half a hundred explorers had during the previous thirty years. On the way out, Phil sank to his crotch in the mud trying to climb up the bank of Eyeless Fish Trail. He noted that the mud out that way constituted a hazard.
It was not only the mud that was dangerous. A few years later Bill, Roger Brucker, and Dave Jones took two top adventure journalists—Coles Phinizy and Robert Halmi of Sports Illustrated—to see Eyeless Fish Trail. The water was up, and at one point a foot-wide bridge of mud crossed the river with a dark pool of water lying on either side. Bill walked across, with Phinizy, Halmi, and Jones following. Roger, however, had slung around his neck a steel ammunition case full of Bill’s camera equipment. He decided, for safety’s sake, to crawl on his hands and knees across the bridge. Sliding slowly down the mud bank on all fours, he slid smoothly off and head first into a pool about two feet in diameter on one side of the bridge. He went completely under, turned over, and came up banging his head solidly on a ledge underwater. The river ordinarily flowed on a level about six feet lower than it was now, and Roger knew there were passages down at that level into which he could be swept. He floundered wildly in a long moment of panic. He could not breathe. He was totally submerged in cold water, suspended in total darkness. There was nothing for his hands and feet to get a purchase on. Then his arms and head emerged back out the opening.
“Help!”
Bill had already raced back down the mud bank and was crouching on the bridge, extending a hand to Roger. “Taking a bath?” he asked, as he grabbed Roger firmly by a wrist.
The steel ammunition case also popped to the surface and was retrieved. Bill showed great satisfaction with the fact that the camera equipment he had packed emerged from the experience safe and dry. Roger emerged safe, but he was very wet. At a supply dump on the way out of the cave, Dave ran a butane torch over Roger, raising clouds of steam from his clothing. Despite this, it was a long, cold trip for Roger from Eyeless Fish Trail to the Crystal Entrance.
On the original discovery trip, Bill and Phil returned from Eyeless Fish Trail to Black Onyx Pit to find Jack Lehrberger and Dixon Brackett exploring leads in that vicinity. Roger Brucker was supposed to meet them there, but the surveying had taken longer than they had expected. Always impatient with delays, Phil was furious. There was so much to be done. Then the surveying parties began catching up with the explorers. Everyone was so excited at the descriptions of the new finds that Bill and Phil immediately guided some of the surveyors to the Overlook. The rest of the party laid the telephone line into a side pit, a dark, elongated room six or eight feet wide with a forty-foot ceiling. Only the lights made it seem like a camp. This dismal place was fittingly named Camp Pit.
At the Overlook there ensued a great rock-throwing orgy. In a few minutes all the larger loose rocks on the Balcony—no more than ten or twelve—had been pitched over, with enormously satisfying results. Each time, a long silence was followed by a deep, heavy ker-chunk from the pool of water far below. Nothing was left except a huge block of limestone about six feet long, three feet wide, and three feet high, seemingly just teetering on the edge of the Balcony. By this time Jack Reccius, a caver from Louisville who had done a lot of exploring in Salts Cave and Unknown Cave with Jack Lehrberger, was wild with enthusiasm. He rushed to the edge of the pit without thought of life or limb to strain at the block of limestone.
“Help me, help me!” he yelled. Several people tried, gingerly, to pry the block over the edge without going over themselves. Others were not about to join the madmen. Red crouched back against the wall of the Balcony, well away from the edge of the Overlook. He had gone along with everything so far, but did not want to get close to the edge of that deep pit. The boulder won. Twenty-two years later it is still as solidly attached—and as precarious-looking—on the edge of the Overlook Balcony as it has probably been for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
The pitch of excitement could not be subdued. Bill and Phil led some of the party on out Storm Sewer to see the blindfish in Eyeless Fish River. On the way back they stopped at a walking lead, a broad opening ten feet high by five feet wide in the side of Storm Sewer.
“Red,” Phil shouted, “this one’s for you! Explore some virgin cave.”
The others stood back expectantly as Red ducked forward. He had done all right so far as part of a survey team. Now the lies had caught up with him, and he felt as though he had told a group of climbers that he could climb when he never had before, and then found himself forced into leading up a vertical wall.
“We’ll wait here,” Phil said, slumping down to sit with his back against the wall of Storm Sewer. The others sat down, too.
Not only had Red never explored virgin cave before, he had to go alone. His body carried him along. A few feet into the passage, he stepped down and turned a corner. There in front of him was a blank wall. It was not a pile of breakdown blocks, nor a mud fill blocking the passage. It was a solid stone wall. For a moment he thought he had been tricked, but, no, he had noticed quite carefully that there had been no tracks on the floor. Phil had not set it up for him.
“It ends!” Red shouted back.
There were sounds of disbelief and disgust from Storm Sewer. Groaning, the others got up to set the newcomer straight. They walked around the corner and stared for a moment in disbelief. So much new cave had been discovered on this trip that everyone expected every passage to go and go. Then they all burst out in laughter. Phil could say nothing because he was choking, so he just pounded Red on the back. Back out into Storm Sewer, Phil wrote over the top of the arched opening in big letters with the flame of his carbide lamp: “WATSON’S FOLLY.” That seemed a little hardhearted to Red at the time.
It had been a hard trip for everyone. Some people in the party had complained about the difficulty on the way in, and had several times suggested that the group turn back. After reaching Camp Pit, one person refused to go a few hundred feet farther down the passage to see the Overlook. Three of the party members never entered Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave again after this trip.
For others, this discovery trip was the beginning of Flint Ridge caving. Jim Dyer’s hypothesis and hope that Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave was the heart of a large Flint Ridge Cave System had been confirmed. For Phil and Roger, the discoveries proved the value of a kind of organized cave exploration they were developing in the Flint Ridge Reconnaissance, and that would lead to the founding of the Cave Research Foundation. For Red, it was the grandest adventure he had ever had. He had fallen in love with Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave.