“You’re going to be out of here lickety split.”īut as she tied a webbed rope into a Lover’s Knot around his ankles, she realized bringing John out of the cave was going to be like swimming backward against a very strong current. He had been stuck for more than three hours, one arm bent underneath his chest, the other forced backward. Susie went in first and reached John at 12:30 a.m. They traversed its chambers for about 30 minutes before reaching the 135-foot tunnel where John was stuck. Susie met two other rescuers and descended into the cave through a rocky hole on top of a large hill in the west desert. She drove her Toyota 4Runner, purchased with an eye toward rescues, around the southern end of Utah Lake and down the long, dark dirt road leading to the cave. Susie had been moving into a new house, but dropped everything when her rescue pager went off just after 9 p.m. She knew Nutty Putty, and she could go where others couldn’t. She couldn’t fully extend her arms and legs, but she was confident.Īmong the smallest of the dedicated band of search-and-rescue volunteers in rugged Utah County, Susie couldn’t carry the biggest packs and she got cold faster. He was trapped nearly upside down, his 6-foot, 200-pound body seemingly swallowed by the rock.Ībove John, Susie ‘s slight, 5-foot-3-inch frame was also encased. “Hi, Susie, thanks for coming, but I really, really want to get out,” said 26-year-old John Jones. The reply seemed to come from the other end of a long hallway. "We're here to inform, teach and get people into caving safely.“Hi, John, my name is Susie. "That's why there are grottos of the National Speleological Society like ours all over the United States," says Paulson. Paulson mourns the death of Jones, but insists that caving is a very safe activity, especially when it's done with the right equipment and with an experienced guide. When it became clear that Jones' remains couldn't be extricated from the cave, Nutty Putty was permanently closed and sealed as Jones' final resting place. He left behind his wife Emily, a young daughter and a baby boy on the way (he's named John).ĭowney says that many of the volunteer rescuers were traumatized by the experience and some haven't entered a cave since. Despite the heroic effort to save him, Jones died a few minutes before midnight, the day before Thanksgiving. One rescuer was badly injured when a pulley ripped free and struck him in the face. ![]() Rescuers installed a system of 15 pulleys to try and free Jones, but the clay walls of the cave couldn't bear the weight. "They told me, 'I need to get contact information for really skinny cavers.'" "I was the Grotto secretary and I had all of the contact information for the local caving community," says Downey. Analyses done on the clay in the 1960s found that it was composed of tiny particles of silicon dioxide (the main component of sand) roughly 3 microns (less than 0.0001 inches) in diameter. Like Silly Putty, the clay would change from a solid to an elastic fluid when lightly squeezed.ĭowney says that the clay was even "sound active," meaning that if you yelled at it, it would ooze and move. The most recognizable characteristic of the cave was the strangely viscous clay oozing from some of its walls, which the cave's first explorer, a man named Dale Green, compared to Nutty Putty, the original product name for Silly Putty. A survey conducted in 2003 was able to map 1,355 feet (413 meters) of cave to a depth of 145 feet (44 meters) from the surface. ![]() Perhaps because of its hydrothermal past, temperatures inside Nutty Putty stayed around 55 degrees Fahrenheit (12.7 degrees Celsius) year round. It was very characteristic of a hypogenic cave." "It had tight squeezes that opened up into a big room, then back to another tight squeeze. "Traditionally, these types of caves are very complex and feature lots of domes and three-dimensional passages, which was true of Nutty Putty," says Paulson.
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