National Geographic: Mysteries Underground Page #4

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Visiting Mammoth today

is a journey through time.

But as they are guided

along comfortable tourist trails,

few visitors can imagine the tortuous

passageways that lie beyond them.

not knowing the true depth of the pit

or what lay on the other side.

Reaching the other side,

they were surprised to find an avenue

over there and more cave.

This opened up the doorway to the vast

unknown mileage that

we all Mammoth Cave.

Mammoth Cave Ridge skirts

the Houchins Valley.

On the other side, beneath Flint Ridge

lies another cave network,

once shrouded in mystery.

Here, 40 years ago,

one of the great exploits

of cave exploration began.

In the 1950s a group of weekend

adventurers began an intensive probe

into the secrets of Flint Ridge.

There had long been talk of a vast

underground system

that might link all

the caves in the area.

It began as an exciting pastime.

It became a grueling obsession.

Over the years hundreds of

men and women took part.

There were untold yards

of muddy crawlways.

There were pits and crevices and mazes

from which there seemed no escape.

Flint ridge developed its own

colorful place names: the Corkscrew,

Shower Shaft, Agony Avenue.

But the cave grew,

until Flint Ridge alone

was pushed to nearly 90 miles.

And if it could be connected

to Mammoth,

then this was the underground Everest

by far the longest cave in the world.

In the summer of 1972

a team entered Flint Ridge to probe

a tantalizing passage

that led toward Mammoth.

It took seven hours to reach the end

of the known passage.

Then they tackled what would be called

the Tight Spot.

It seemed impenetrable.

But one of the team had a knack

for narrow places

Pat Crowther a computer programmer

and mother of two.

Well, it never occurred to anyone

to try to go through that place.

It was a crazy place to even think

that you could get your body into.

The Tight Sport was a very tiny,

vertical crevice out the bottom

of a small indentation in the floor.

And if you just casually looked down

into the hole and saw that crack,

you would say no one could

possibly fit in there.

Somehow Crowther squirmed through.

Six weeks later,

miles beyond where anyone

had gone before,

a chilling but significant discovery

was made.

In a mud bank were the initials P.H.,

scratched there by Pete Hanson,

a long-dead tour guide.

He could have come here only

from the Mammoth Cave side.

Carpenter Richard Zopf

was in the group

and recalls the impact

of the discovery.

We had the feeling that we had found

...the passage that was going

to take us into Mammoth Cave,

but we hadn't done it.

We seen virtually a mile of passage

but we didn't know

exactly where it went.

And we plugged along

and we plodded along

and we surveyed and we surveyed

and we surveyed.

Ten days later the group tried again,

reaching what they now called

Hanson's Lost River in nine hours.

Excitement and exhaustion dominated

the thoughts of leader John Wilcox.

The worst thing we feared was that

the passage would descent

so that the water would come clear

to the ceiling,

and it sure looked like that

was what was happening.

The water was getting

deeper and deeper

and the ceiling was coming down.

We're getting bent over,

scrunching our backs up

against the ceiling,

trying to keep from getting

our chests wet.

And it was getting so wet that I told

the rest of the party to wait here...

I'm going to look ahead a little bit.

Because I know if I get completely wet

I can get out of the cave,

but I wasn't sure everybody else could

And just go as far as

I can and trying very carefully

not to get my chest wet and not to put

my light out and so forth.

I don't have a good sense of the time

but John only went a few feet,

went ahead for 30 seconds.

And then there was a pause

and it's like:

What's happening, John?

And John says:

You know the passage is opening up!

And, well, you know:

'Should we come ahead?'

From that low point the passage

just immediately opens

into the huge Echo River passage...

and eventually my eyes adjusted enough

I could begin to see a wall clear

across the passage,

a hundred feet away perhaps.

And there was a bright, shining,

horizontal line along the wall,

which is something

you don't see in a cave.

You don't see any straight lines.

And it had these vertical lines

underneath

and I realized that was a handrail.

We had come out on a tourist trail!

All of sudden John shouted:

I see a tourist trail!

And those words just

electrified the party.

It was kind of like

someone yelling Fire! in a theater.

Everybody just surged forward...

...and we realized that

we had made the connection.

Achieving the dream of decades,

they had connected two great

subterranean systems.

Today, it is a cave with 340 miles

of passageways.

It's one of these, you know,

complete victories that

you don't often achieve in life.

Usually things are shades of gray

in your professional work

or your personal relations with

other people or whatever.

In climbing a mountain,

sometimes you have a clear-cut victory

Either you reached the top

or you didn't.

And this was one clear-cut victory

in my life where,

by golly,

we went in the Flint Ridge side

and we came out the Mammoth Cave side

It was a strange and lonely victory.

After a grim struggle in the dark,

subterranean river,

they emerged in Mammoth Cave

at one in the morning.

Not even a watchman

was there to greet them

as they trudged into

one of the most famous

tourist landmarks underground

the Snowball Dining Room.

And they would complete

their historic trek

with sublime ease

riding to the surface in an elevator.

There was no fanfare,

no waiting reporters.

But they were still overjoyed.

Like all cavers, in victory or defeat,

they were used to being on their own.

Beneath the New Mexican desert,

the National Geographic expedition

to Lechuguilla

Begins its second week underground.

The cave's beauty is now legendary,

but there is more to discover here.

High on a hill deep within the heart

of the cave, a mystery unfolds.

Sulfur is prevalent here and

in other regions of the cave.

And tiny bacteria are found

in these deposits along

with fungi that feed on them.

In turn, the bacteria may feed

on the sulfur,

thriving in eternal darkness.

Evidence indicates an unusual genesis

for Lechuguilla.

As hydrogen sulfide rose from below,

it mixed with oxygen in water or air,

forming sulfuric acid.

This potent chemistry gradually

ate through the limestone,

creating the cave from the bottom up.

Lechuguilla's vulnerability

to human impact

may preclude it from ever becoming

a public show cave.

A profound respect for the cave

is shared by most cavers

and severely enforced.

Special shoes are worn for

traversing formations where boots

may mar exquisite flowstone.

Stalagmites of calcite line the shores

of the Persian Gulf,

so called because of the thousands

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