I was told my last blog didn’t make much sense and I should clarify what is happening with the dig—other than our filling the sink around the culvert and capping it. But what is happening is politics and it is really hard for me to explain that stuff. I don’t even understand the politicizing of the cave. The cave is a natural feature of the planet. It has its lessons to teach us. It is, so to speak, a totally unique library. We have a management plan designed not only to just go into the library, but to read it without altering it. And according to the Federal Cave Protection Act of 1988, you are not even allowed to check a book out. It must be read in the cave. And not only to just read it, but to share with the world the opening of those books.

A little history. My first cave experience was working at the Oregon Caves -- NPS -- on what we called the rubble crew. This was around 1989. The early days of discovery and tourism at the Oregon Caves had left a lot of blasted rock and cave sediments that were thrown aside and or stuffed into holes. These were being removed to expose the natural features along the trail. It was like the whole bottom half of the cave was buried under the dirt and rock that had been blasted and was being moved to make a trail that could be walked through and not have to be crawled through. 

Now as a digger and a treasure hunter of sorts -- I’ve dug a lot of agate in my life, even looked for gold -- I was fascinated by what was found in the dirt we were digging. There were of course human artifacts: coins, marbles, hairpins, flashbulbs, and buttons. Stuff that falls out of people’s pockets when they take their hands out of them. These artifacts were accidentally found and a lot of them I believe ended up in some kind of museum or storage that the park maintains. Not for the public. Also, and these were more interesting to me, we found a lot of bones. I remember at first when I noticed them, my first day of digging, I thought, “Are these left over from the lunches of the workers?”  I imagined cavemen gnawing on slabs of bear meat.  As the digging continued though, it was obvious that these bones, some of them in deep deposits of washed sand, were naturally deposited in the cave. Eventually some of them were identified as belonging to a 10,000 year old environment and are still available for study, but most of the found bones were thrown away. A few random finds including a wolf tooth, a Native American tooth, and many small mammal bones were picked out as they were spotted. These were identified by Dr. Rob Orr, paleontologist. 

I love to dig and am always interested in what I find in the ground, even just a rock. I grew up ½ mile from the Willamette River, and you could dig for weeks and not see anything but dirt and loam, not even any sand till you got down about 5-7 feet. Josephine County is fun to dig in. The Oregon Caves were the most interesting digging I’ve done. When the Cave Next Door (CND) was first entered, a bone and a snail shell were found in the first room. They might have come directly down from the surface, from an opening above. I think they were washed through the cave because a snail shell was also found on a sandbank beside the creek ½ way through the canyon passage. I have often hoped that the CND might at some place duplicate the fossil record lost and scattered, even just thrown away, from the Oregon Caves. A record of fauna in Josephine County from 10,000 years ago. ( In speaking of fossils, I want to mention here that there are some carboniferous rocks between Waldo and O’Brien in this county that I have seen some beautiful fossils from that different people have randomly gathered. There is a fossil resource in Oregon that has yet to be explored and studied.)

Another thing I learned on my first day of work in a cave (along with the abundance of information I could learn) was how difficult and impossible it is to go into a cave, much less build a trail through it, without some kind of significant impact. These issues have been dealt with quite successfully in many private and state tour caves, to preserve and maintain them for the maximum experience of future visitors. In my years of cleaning and building trail at the Oregon Caves, I learned abut Kartchner Caverns in Arizona and the efforts the discoverers made to protect the cave and build a trail to be able to share it with others without hurting the cave. Public television made a 15 minute TV show of some of our efforts to clean, restore, and rebuild the Oregon Caves and I think that had an effect on other cavers and their restoration projects.

So as the trail-building in the Oregon Caves progressed, these issues were always in my mind, and guided many of the daily decisions that had to be made in construction there. The first issue was the vast amount of knowledge a cave can contain that is too often missed or ignored because of the overwhelming experience of being in a strange environment with such unnatural beautiful decorations. Also “seeing” a cave by the light of a lamp encourages tunnel vision. After over 100 years of tourism and caving by thousands of people, an ancient bear track was found in the Oregon Caves, as an example plus the revelation that some of the bones were 10,000 years old. Another example of information from the "cave library" is the climate record recorded in the precipitates. This is a recent important field of research. The other issue was how to discover, explore, and share a cave without significant impact while learning that cave’s particular lessons. And these issues were uppermost in my mind when we received the challenge.

The challenge was a $1,000 reward for anybody who could find the “Lechuguilla of the Oregon Caves,” referring to a magnificent cave found near Carlsbad Caverns. The challenge was put out by Craig Ackerman, then superintendent of the Oregon Caves. Well, myself and my friend, Don Young, couldn’t help but take up the challenge. We both have loved to dig and explore from our youths. We went to the resource department at the Caves, did some research, geological and historical, and put together a list of possible places to look. We found and searched around every marble outcrop and hole in the ground we could find. The result was the discovery and mapping of the first 700’ of the Cave Next Door. We still have videos of the first room of the cave. A nice shot of John Roth’s (Oregon Caves resource manager) boots disappearing into the trachea, the narrow passage to get into the heart of the cave. These were exciting days for me and I regularly informed both the Park Service and the Forest Service of my progress and results. Some of John Roth’s ideas were incorporated into the management plan. It was obvious that this was a significant cave. For some reason though, it didn’t fit the criterion of the challenge so we never got the reward, but subsequent work has shown the cave to be much larger than the 700’ of mapped passage. 

 

Now it is important to notice here that from the time we first punched a hole in a layer of sand near the ceiling (August 15, 1999), the CND has had airflow. In fact the last trip into the cave, January 2000, was a very cold night and the air was rising through the cave quite well. It was telling us how much more cave there was and most definitely telling us there was another opening. Not just air seeping through micro-fissures and soil. 

That same trip brought us to the sump at the end of the mapped passage. On a silt bar of the sump were mouse and rat tracks that had not gotten there the way we came, but from another entrance. That rat’s skeleton was lying in the stream a short distance away. The CND is very open at some other end or ends.

Anyway, the one end we came in, where the stream came out, by April had collapsed with large alluvial boulders filling the tunnel we had dug. Subsequent investigations showed that had not only alluvium collapsed but what had been the ceiling of the first room called the Boulder Room, was now the floor. The marble is like Swiss cheese with intense dissolution along joint fracture lines.

After a couple of years of geological and hydrological work, I located a sinkhole (part of a cave, according to the Federal Cave Protection Act of 1988) connected to the original dig. I started digging. About once a year, I would give a letter or a disc to the local FS office and they would usually just give me a “What do you expect us to do about it?” look. We would go back to digging. Turnover of personnel at the office was pretty high; sometimes we found someone who was interested. Once we had some meetings with the cave specialists and natural resource types, and we visited the site. They told me that they recognized my right to be doing what I was doing. We kept digging. Eventually we found marble, then airflow. Then we found a whole cave room, but the passage leading down was still blocked with rubble.

Over the years there were many people who helped with the digging. Much of it was done with a jin-pole. There were as many as 6 people involved in the raising of the 1/3 cubic foot of dirt in a white plastic bucket. Often there was only a digger and a lifter, and even more often the digger and lifter were one in the same person--that is, me, David. You had to climb up to the top to fish for buckets sitting 30’ below with a hook on the end of a rope you were holding down attached to a pole with a counter-weight of rock to help you lift the bucket when you caught it. I calculate there are over 10,000 hours of voluntary community service put into this project by over 50 individuals in one way or another. 

 

Much of the help came from seasonal employees at the Oregon Caves. I have enjoyed working with those kids over the years, and some still keep in touch. I remember Greg. He had a bad back, but loved to dig, that didn’t hurt. He would come out of the hole so happy and dirty. He was a timber cruiser by trade and I took him for his last walk on some specials trails I knew of in the forest around the site. He died soon after. Sure hated to lose such a dedicated helper. All these folks believed in the project.

What is the project? The project is a process designed to discover, explore, and digitally map a cave with zero to minimal impact. Do this with at least some kind of WWW Internet connection to share the opening of the cave with the whole world in real time. And at the end, be able to roll back up trails and leave the cave alone. In effect, we want to show how to satisfy the requirements of the Cave Protection Act. Yes, we have set very strict standards for ourselves, for the sake of the cave; otherwise it would have been entered and explored years ago. These standards apply especially to any engineering in the construction of the shaft or the trail. Much extra time and expense has been put in to make sure everything would be safe and sound and would last at least 50 years. I know of no other plan for entering and exploring a cave (something that’s usually done the night before as you hastily gather ropes and gear), other than some NASA experiments, that adhere to such strict regimen. The project is not about caving, it is about the cave. It is about applying 21st century technology to one of mankind’s oldest, recreational, or perhaps, religious pursuits.

So now we are in the process of filling in the sink with its own rubble and sealing up the top. We seem to be right at the neck of the sink because air flow is increasing and all the rocks are getting looser with more air voids all the time. After 10 years—what excitement and hope. Also, once again the powers that be, the FS in this case, are taking notice of our efforts and visited the site. Now I have always known that this project cannot ultimately succeed without FS approval. Unless of course, I’d have chosen to just forget safety and engineering and other people and busted that cave for myself. But I didn’t do that. I kept trying to get some official help. I think they were hoping it would collapse on me and I wouldn’t be pestering them anymore. It didn’t and I am. Almost 2 years ago, we went to them and applied for a special use permit. Phone calls were never returned. Well let me tell you, I think it is much easier to build a stable trail right down the throat of an active sinkhole than it is to find a way through the sinkhole of regulatory agencies. I have been informed that right now they are planning to put in a grate at the top and then return and fill the shaft with expandable foam. How green of them! I’m thinking of taking my meager retirement somewhere else where they only laugh at an old man who likes to dig for nothing, and not make a criminal out of him. I feel like the bottom is about ready out of this hole, and I need to chain myself to the cave so I don’t fall in with it.