#John james nutty putty cave free
#John james nutty putty cave crack

The two devoutly Mormon brothers prayed together. “Seeing his feet and seeing how swallowed he was by the rock, that’s when I knew it was serious.” Josh said. By then he could see his brother, and dread settled in. When he reached the corkscrew, he got stuck himself. Leon Jones worked his way out, but the story entered the pantheon of family lore.īut as Josh wound through the tunnel, crab-crawling feet first between the cramped, muddy walls, he felt a creeping apprehension. Their father had once gotten briefly stuck between two rocks when they were children. When 23-year-old Josh learned his brother was stuck, he thought it was the beginning of another family adventure story.

#John james nutty putty cave crack

Instead of widening so John could get out, the crack narrowed and all but closed. One arm was pinned underneath him, the other forced backward by an outcropping of rock.

#John james nutty putty cave free

Struggling to free himself only made John slide deeper into the narrower, 8 1/2-inch-wide side of the fissure. But when his chest expanded again, he was stuck. Rescuers believe John sucked in his chest to investigate the fissure, sliding his torso over a lip of rock and down into the 10-inch-wide side of the crevice. When he saw a fissure that dropped nearly straight down in front of him, it may have appeared to widen out at the bottom, giving him a spot to turn around. So he kept going, likely thinking he was in the Canal. John found no place big enough to turn his body around and leave the tunnel. Other cavers exploring this hole had found that only the nimblest of contortionists could navigate its tight corkscrew of rock. John went in headfirst, pushing himself along with his hips, his stomach, his fingers. He wore a rainbow-colored, 1970s-style caving headlamp his father had bought for the family trips of his childhood. John picked a waist-high hole to explore. They split up, wriggling into alcoves and passages to look for it. and explored a large chamber called the Big Slide before John and Josh broke off with two friends to find a challenge: a tight but navigable passage called the Birth Canal. John was by then attending medical school in Virginia, where he lived with his wife, Emily, and 1-year-old daughter, Lizzie.

John hadn’t gone into a cave in years when the two brothers met for Thanksgiving at their parents’ Stansbury Park home. It was their first time in Nutty Putty and a throwback to childhood family caving outings. 24, 2009 with 10 other friends and family members on an excursion organized by his brother, Josh. Thousands of people have explored the cave, which was once so popular that line formed at its entrance. Hot rising water formed the ancient fissure, and the still-humid air is slowly but constantly degrading the rock. The cave tightens its gripĬaver Dale Green discovered Nutty Putty in 1960 and named it after the clay he found in much of its 1,400 feet of chutes and tunnels. “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.