Another GUMO story--Sitting Bull, an UNUSUAL adventure

[okiehiker]

This story is from late summer, 1980.  It involves my good friend from college, Joe Szewczak.  Joe now runs the US military's high altitude research station in the White Mountains out of Bishop, CA.  

Sitting Bull
I.
It had been thirteen months since the last significant rainfall in the southern Guadalupes.  Barring unusual circumstances, there seemed to be no credible threat to our modest plans for the day.  Yet somehow, things never seem to work out quite the way one anticipates.

It was late August, and Joe and I were just doing a little exploratory caving around my great uncle's ranch.  Joe and I had done some spelunking together in college, and we thought...okay, okay... I conned him into coming on this trip with me.  

By some quirk of fate (a.k.a. a major personality disorder) I had agreed to move to Booker, Texas, to go to work as a bank officer at the First Bank and Trust Company of Booker.  I was faced with making the sixteen-hundred mile move alone, and offered to take Joe on a trip in the Guadalupes if he would help me.

The trip from Durham to Booker was a classic slice of the American experience...drive like hell on roads designed to make sure you see as little scenery and experience as little of the native culture as possible.  American life is so strongly focused on the destination, that the journey itself...life itself...frequently is missed in the passage.  We took I-40 west, 1,430 miles without an intersection.  We did stop three times to get gas, but drove straight through otherwise.

The sole moment of interest (thankfully) occurred as we crossed the Canadian River breaks.  We stopped there because Joe had read of opal deposits in the cap-rock gypsum deposits.  We stopped at a promising-looking spot and scrambled down into the canyon.  I am not sure how we decided exactly where to look, but we went straight to an overhang on the far wall of the ravine.  We took to the gypsum floor of the small shelter cave with our rock hammers, shards of debris flying.  Within a few minutes we had uncovered several nice specimens of opal.  It was entrancing in a peculiar way to find this treasure in the barren bleakness of the north-Texas panhandle.

We had parked my Chevy Citation, trailer in tow, looking rather like a minuscule ant pulling some great trophy back to its hill, off to the side at a wide spot in the road.  From our spot we could see back to the road and looked over just in time to see someone preparing to pry open the door of my rented trailer with a tire iron.  This seemed an undesirable set of circumstances and Joe and I flew down the slope, scrambling up the far wall.  

We would emerge suddenly over the edge of the canyon, only about ten yards from the car.  What Joe and I lacked in intelligence we made up for in spirit.  We had these people in our sights and bore down on them.  For some unknown reason I shouted as we came over the edge, "Hey!  What the hell do you think you're doing?!"

They flew to their junk-heap and were headed south, down highway 183.  Our rig was facing north, all chance of confronting them having now been lost.

"Why'd you do that?!"  Joe demanded.

"I don't know," I said, "I...I just did it."

"Man!  They could never have gotten away from us."

I have to admit to having been as distressed about missing a chance to beat the daylights out of some unsuspecting villain as Joe was.  Two testosterone-laden twenty-two year old American males can't afford to pass up very many opportunities for justifiable homicide, armed with our rock hammers as we were.

In the hindsight of years, my decision to warn the foolish miscreants seems fortuitous.  Joe and I could have been totally undetected, we were young, probably nearly as foolish as our unsuspecting would-be robbers, and capable of more damage than we realized.  Though we had not been robbed, hadn't killed anyone or been killed, the whole episode gave us plenty of material for rumination, and redirected our focus on Booker.

[okiehiker]

II.
I had regaled Joe with tales of the Carlsbad area for much of the past two years.  I had not actually done much caving in the area, outside of the heavily-visited caves of Carlsbad Caverns National Park and the adjoining lands of Lincoln National Forest.  But the caverns of the region are legendary.  The massive volume, relatively pleasant conditions, and spectacular formations make the caves of the Guadalupe Mountains a Mecca for spelunkers and speleologists.

For Joe the academic interest was as great as the sense of adventure.  An opportunity to visit Carlsbad Caverns, New Cave and Cottonwood Cave, coupled with a chance to explore rarely visited private land adjoining the park was too much to pass up.

Fortunately for us, cave exploration is usually the most weather resistant of all "outdoor" sports.  It doesn't matter if it is 110 or 50 below, the temperature in the depths of a limestone cavern is always the same.  In the eastern U.S. the heavy annual rainfall and low mean temperature give caves names like "Aqua-Refrigerator" and the formations within them names like "Dave's Lake."  In the Guadalupes the temperatures inside the caves are in the upper fifties to low sixties and there is a limited amount of seepage by water from the surface due to the desert environment.

We were sure to be in for a great week of caving.

What really enticed Joe to come with me, however, were the stories of my great-uncle's ranch.  Uncle Sam (Samuel Alexander Hughes) had come to the Guadalupes at the turn of the century.  He had left home as a young child, going to work for a Frenchman who ran tens of thousands of sheep on over a million acres of unfenced, high desert range-land.  Range-land is something of a euphemism as regards the desolate terrain of the northern Chihuahuan Desert.  

Uncle Sam married young, an even younger girl named Clementine.  With a flock of sheep purchased from his former employer, Sam went to seek his fortunes in the remote locale of Dog Canyon, just opened for homesteading.  Sam was too young to qualify legally for the land, but somehow he and Clem staked their claim, patented the title and became permanent land-owners in the area that now lies between two of America's most rugged national parks.  

Life was difficult in that isolated region.  It was seventy-seven miles to town.  In the early days it was a two day trip, one-way, to buy supplies.  That meant seventy-seven miles to the store, to church, and now, for Uncle Sam's youngest grandson, to school...every day.  Three of Sam's children, Woody, Sammy, and Marion had remained on the ranch as adults.  It was a family operation, and due to its primitive and expansive nature required the effort of every family member.

Another distinctive characteristic of the ranch was a total absence of water.  In driving across the property, one of the first noticeable things was the proliferation of pump-jacks, those see-saw-like mechanisms that pump oil across Oklahoma, Texas and southern New Mexico.  On one of my first visits I inquired about the volume and depth of their oil production.  

No oil is produced on the Hughes Ranch.  Not that they wouldn't like to have some, mind you.  It's just that those pump-jacks produce something more vital, more precious, and equally uncommon in that arid climate.

Water.

Pumped from between fifteen-hundred and three thousand feet below the surface, the only available water on the ranch comes from those wells.

The Hughes family has spent most of one hundred years searching for water.  They hired geologists, hydrologists, drillers, and diviners.  And finally, they got up enough nerve, or enough desperation to hire a bonafide water-witch.  

In defiance of technological sophistication, there are people who seem capable of locating underground water supplies with uncanny accuracy.  My impression of water witches derives primarily from the images of Hanna-Barbera cartoons.  In this vision, someone with a forked stick, or a coat hanger bent in to the shape of a tuning fork, walks around blindly, until suddenly they are pulled to the ground by some unseen, underground force...water...WAT ER!  They drive a hole just inches into the surface and the equivalent of Old Faithful erupts skyward.

How does one find a water witch anyway?  Are they listed in the yellow pages, "Water, Diviners, witches..." or perhaps... "Witches, Water (see water, diviners...)."  However it is done,  Marion found one.  She came out, and after much searching, said the place to drill was right behind their house.  Now, from the profile of depth and spacing of the existing eighteen productive wells on the ranch, the idea was ludicrous.  The slope clearly indicated a declining water potential to the south of the last well, and you were talking at least twenty-eight hundred feet to water.

"Not more than three hundred." she said.

Desperate men do desperate things, and work commenced on the new well.

A three hundred foot well doesn't require the big multi-part drilling rigs dotting the countryside of the oil-patch.  A single truck-mounted rig was adequate for this job, or so it would have seemed.  As the drill passed through 150 feet below the surface, the impossible happened.  The bit burst through the ceiling of a geo-pressured cavern.  Dirt, rock, and most of the drilling rig shot up into the air.  A gulf of some magnitude lay below the spot at which they had hit the cavern.  The driller couldn't pump enough mud to seal the hole.  He rebuilt his rig, lost more than one bit in the effort, and finally gave up the project altogether.

So there remains, behind Marion and Verna's house a bore hole, about nine inches in diameter.  It has no permanent cover because it is a sort of mini-tourist attraction at their home.  The hole blew out air strongly for weeks, gradually subsiding to a slow up-draft for about three years.  Finally, the cavern within began to "breathe" in the manner of "normal" caves of significant size.  As barometric pressure increases, the pressure within the cave is low and the cave "inhales," air going down the hole, into the cavern.  When pressure drops, the cave "exhales," with air coming out of the hole.  

At different times, Joe and I would visit this marvel and mange to float a piece of paper over the opening, or watch a leaf get sucked down into blackness.  Geologists with the national park service had told me categorically that the strata beneath Dog Canyon were unsuitable for the development of solutional caverns.  But surely there had to be a void of significant proportion to generate the flow of air we witnessed.  

Joe and I pondered the possibilities.  The first task would be to lower a camera down into the void and photograph the cavern.  Depending upon what we saw, we would devise a plan for boring a larger access hole to the cavern.  Marion didn't take too well to the idea of more "damn tourists" coming across their place.  The plans the National Park Service had for expanding facilities at the Dog Canyon Ranger Station were problem enough, so Joe and I kept our discussions to ourselves.

We set about looking for openings which might lead us into some underground labyrinth, ready to dwarf Carlsbad (as strange as that thought seemed at the time, it has since happened with the exploration of Lechuguilla Cave within the national park) with the same foolish enthusiasm we had demonstrated in preparing to confront our would-be robbers the previous week.

Between visits to the conventional tourist attractions of the area, we slithered into some pretty interesting places, each exciting in its own way, but none of which held a great deal of promise.  We found pot sherds and the tiny corn cobs indicative of occupation by pre-Columbian Americans.  We inhaled our share of red dust and bat guano.  We bruised our shins and bumped our heads, and found nothing worthy of note, except two foolish city boys crawling through every opening they could find on the ranch, in the park, and in the national forest.

[Al]

Don't tell me that's it!  No more to the story?  Did you fire the water witch? Ever think of trying to drill to beneath the cavern to see if there's water?  Ever drop a little Eckman Dredge type device to try to sample to bottom of the cavern?

Al

[okiehiker]

Fear not.  That was just chapter two out of eight.  

I'll post another tomorrow!

[Al]

Dang.  You had me worried for couple of minutes!

Al

[okiehiker]

III.
There came a day on which we had exhausted the conventional tourist haunts, and temporarily depleted our will to explore the complete unknown (and completely frustrating.)  So we decided upon a visit to Sitting Bull Falls Cave.

To my great uncle and cousins, Sitting Bull Falls was a sort of local joke.  It is a trickle of water, dribbling over a massive travertine deposit, more than one hundred feet high.  Back behind the "falls" is a cave.  It is a small cave, regarded with some contempt by true cavers, but it was good enough for us.  

Southern New Mexico lay in the throes of the worst drought in memory.  One afternoon, a month or so earlier, as I sat with Uncle Sam and some of his old codger cronies, one of them remarked about the "unyooo...sual" weather, drawing out "usual" so as to emphasize the truly extraordinary nature of this dry spell.  Uncle Sam was nonplused.  "I've lived in this canyon eighty years," he replied, drawing his sentence out as if to let him relive each and every one of them, "And every one of them was unyooo...sual."

Well today was unusual, in light of recent weather patterns, in that it looked like it actually might rain.  It was a hazy, misty, drizzly sort of day.  We had thought about going up to Cottonwood Cave, in Lincoln National Forest, but the road was rough, and there was something of a hike, and we really didn't want to get out in the rain.  Sitting Bull Falls Cave was the perfect choice.  Located just above a paved parking lot, it was a very short walk, an easy climb, and required almost no gear.

Sitting Bull Falls Cave is a classic "Pennsylvania Cave."  Every state in the union has at least one known cave.  Delaware has only one, but it still counts.  Pennsylvania is distinctive in that it has the shortest caves in America.  Any time a caver finds a new cave to explore and ends up with a passage tapering off after a hundred feet or so, it is referred to as a Pennsylvania Cave.  

Today's exploration was of a cavern that couldn't take an hour to exhaust.  The formation was interesting, being composed entirely of travertine, rock deposited by the flow of the little creek in Sitting Bull Canyon.  There were surprising formations to be seen, beautiful pools of water, fed by percolation from the stream overhead.  But the cave was small.  It is a mark of a true cave that one has to be able to get beyond the "twilight zone," that area in which sun-light and cave-darkness mingle, into the real, black depths of the underground.

The canyons of the Guadalupes are prone to flooding when it rains heavily, so we called the ranger at the U.S. Forest Service's Queen Ranger Station, just up the road, in order to get an up-to-date weather forecast.  They reported that there would be scattered showers, with no possibility of significant rainfall.  Sitting Bull Falls Cave it would be.  

Sitting Bull Canyon is just a large, dry wash with an intermittent stream below the falls.  The spring which feeds the falls is perennial, making it one of the few lush spots in this part of southern New Mexico.

I parked in the designated area, about one hundred yards from the base of the falls.  Joe and I sorted through our gear, electing to take an absolute minimum.  The grey sky spit a minimal drizzle, but nothing much.  In order to get to the cave we had to climb about sixty feet up the cliff, and duck through the  falling...okay...th e dripping water.  Still, we didn't see any reason to take very much gear.  It was not a decent day for photography.  There were no winding passages to explore, no chance of getting lost.  It was just a little pock mark of a hole in the rock behind a falls.

As we prepared to start up the face, I decided that I didn't want to get my flannel shirt or wool jacket wet, so I hung them on the outstretched branch of a tree to the left of the little creek that ran away from the base of the cliff.  The scramble up the cliff-face was not exactly a challenge, but the wet rock did require a bit more thought than it might have otherwise.

In a couple of minutes we jumped across, through a shower of water onto the level floor of the opening to Sitting Bull Falls Cave.  The entrance room was expansive.  Typical of Guadalupe Caverns, it was spacious, and adorned with large amounts of flowstone.  This cavern was an amazing formation, simultaneously dissolved by and deposited from a single stream.  Back in the right-hand corner of the first room was a clear, smooth pool of water.  Under the water, its sides were encrusted in nodules of calcium carbonate.  Its bottom disappeared in a blackness which caused both of us to wonder if it didn't really go somewhere.  

Therein lies the allure of caving.  Every cave, even the most modest offers a chance...a hope...however small, of entering an entirely new world, a world isolated from our day to day reality as much as if we were making a passage to the moon.  Both Joe and I longed to dive in and see if there might be some underwater passage into another portion of the cave.

But, for now, common sense constrained us.  The water was cold, it was a cool day, and the only reason we were really in this tiny cavern was a bit of fatigue following the drive from North Carolina, the exploration we had done thus far, and the disappointment of having not found something more exciting thus far.

But all of that was put behind us for a moment as we slowly moved deeper into the recesses of the cave.  The further we went the more the grey light of the overcast sun mingled with the pure black of the cave's darkest corners.  We began to feel more at home, in the environs we had sought in leaving the comforts of modern society to go spelunking in a relative wilderness.  

There were stalagmites, stalactites, helictites, cave coral, rimstone dams and other features common to well-decorated limestone caverns.  The cave bore the marks of an excess of non-spelunkers, casual visitors who willfully or unwittingly damage formations, ruining a portion of the experience for everyone who comes after them.  But we were not here to worry about the damage done by a thoughtless few.  We were fascinated by our surroundings.  In just a few minutes we were able to leave the bleak surroundings of Sitting Bull Canyon, scale a face of travertine which had taken thousands upon thousands of years to deposit, and enter a spectacular natural gallery, each delicate fin and tube of limestone a work of natural art, as precious as any museum piece.  We were privileged to see it in situ, even in the midst of its creation.

But our time to ponder such wonders of water and rock was cut short.  We were in fact just about to head back to the main room, when we both noticed that something just didn't sound right.  Different rooms in caves each have a particular resonance.  Even a person who is not musical can patiently move the tone of their voice up and down until they find the sound that will set the whole room ringing.  But this sound had a different quality.  It had a duller, deeper character.  Not the sound of a freight train, it was not unlike a sound of some massive movement, though a long way off, extreme in intensity.  

The sound definitely increased in volume as we made our way closer to the front of the cave.  We came closer to that zone of twilight, which now seemed darker than it should have, given the short time we had been in the cave.  The noise increased to the roar of jet engines in ceaseless take-off.

Though the light filtering into the cave was grey, the lens that now impeded it was a murky brownish-white.  A million tons of dust and dirt, rock and sand, twigs, leaves and branches, were swept before the force of a flash-flood.  

Did I say flood?  We're talking Noah here.  A wall of water thundered over the spot which Marion perjoratively had described as "a trickle the size of yer thumbnail."  We had ourselves what might be called a "situation."

[Al]

Great story and writing, but it is a good thing we're not holding our breath!

Al

[okiehiker]

IV.
There was no getting through it.  The water spilled over the face of the cliff.  It extended 200 to 300 feet across, while dropping 135 feet to the canyon floor below.  The flow was about ten feet deep at its greatest, diminishing to nothing at the edges.  There was no route out horizontally, the stream was just too wide, the cliff-face too extreme.  There was no way to enter the water itself without being crushed beneath its force.

There was nothing to do but wait.

"These things go as fast as they come."  I said, imagining that the massive flow of water we saw before us would suddenly evaporate beneath the brutal desert sun, hoping it would subside in time to get out during daylight hours.  It was still just early afternoon, and would be light until about 8:00.  We would get back to our campsite in Dog Canyon in time to build a little fire, cook a late supper and consider ways to exaggerate our plight as time passed.

We had brought next to nothing into the cave with us.  There was, after all, no real exploring to do.  There was no chance of getting lost.  Any chance of injury was on the cliff face itself, outside the cave, and within yards of the car.  Conditions in Guadalupe caverns are mild, and there was no need of extra clothing.  We had not carried daypacks, brought extra light sources, or worn our helmets.  We had no food.

We decided to go ahead and further investigate our surroundings as we waited for the flood to subside.  Every few minutes saw us peering back toward the entrance just to marvel at the power roaring down into the canyon below, secretly hoping that the incredible event we were witnessing was really just a dream.  We were safe enough in our little roost.  There was no way for the falls to double back into the cave, and half of the state of New Mexico would be submerged before we could be flooded by rising water.  

Still, we had wanted to have a nice, easy day, to prepare for our last day's explorations.  We planned to visit another cave, elsewhere on the ranch, which had once been searched for hidden gold, and to explore Devil's Den Canyon, another site of numerous caves, some reputed to harbor hidden wealth.

During the late 1800's, the principal stage-coach line across the southwestern United States ran through El Paso, and on to southern California.  With mining operations across southern New Mexico, Arizona and California, there was a significant amount of gold carried on certain stages.  One watering stop along the route was at Pine Springs.  This spring at the base of Pine Springs Canyon gave robbers a perfect location for holding up the stage and heading into the rugged and forbidding mountains at their back.  

Aunt Clem's family had come to the Guadalupes, treasure map in hand, searching for gold stashed in these mountains by some such villains.  One map, possessed by Clem's father led to a cave on the ranch.  Unfortunately by the time they had gotten there, its floor already had been excavated, whether by the original robbers, or perhaps by some later treasure hunters, they never knew.  Similar maps led to as yet undiscovered sites in Devil's Den Canyon.

But here we stood, marveling at the power of nature, and frustrated at the same time.  "No chance of significant precipitation!"  What did we expect.  Weather forecasting under the best of circumstances is difficult.  In these mountains it is basically impossible.  And we were just the most recent victims of its impossibility.

"What if we have to spend the night?"  We both wondered to ourselves.  This was not a reasonable possibility.  We simply had to get out before dark.  Given the dynamics of water flow in this region, the level should begin dropping within an hour or so of the flood.  But somehow, every time we checked, the flow seemed as great or greater than the last.  The rain upstream of us must have continued to fall.  We could not see anything of the weather conditions outside the cave.  Our field of vision was limited to the backside of a curtain of water.  Over to our left, we could see the edge of the flow, as it effortlessly doubled over whole trees, growing near the cliff's edge.  

Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of our situation was the sound of boulders being dragged along the floor of the stream, directly overhead.  They would scrape, and grind, with the feeling of fingernails on a chalkboard but the depth of pedals of a great organ, until they teetered on the precipice for a fraction of a second, before crashing down onto the pile of rubble at the foot of the cliff.  We could see trunks of trees, match-sticks in the massive wall of white, up-rooted solely as a result of their poor selection of a home.  A good choice in the desert, because of the proximity of a reliable water source, became not so good when the water chose to stray from its appointed course.  

There was some consolation in the fact that we were safe from falling obstacles, rising water, wild animals, and a variety of other hazards.  Starvation would take weeks, and we had no shortage of water at this point.  But there was one risk about which we could do nothing.  Hypothermia.  We had not brought any extra clothing and its lack was becoming noticeable.

The initial brown flush of dirt and dust became clearer as we waited for the flow to subside.  It is remarkable how quickly fascination can become distraction.  The power and magnitude of the falls was beyond anything either Joe or I had experienced this close at hand.  The subtle beauty of the formations within the cave, and the massive quantity of travertine deposited by one (usually) tiny stream boggled the imagination.  Yet within minutes (that seemed like hours) we were ready for a change.  Like it or not, we were products of the sixty-second sound-bite generation.

I think perhaps we were ready to have our lives back.  We are accustomed to having things our own way, even when not at Burger King.  It is so American to be on control of our own destinies.  Having our well laid plans disrupted by something as inconsequential as the forces of nature was so, so, so... inconvenient.  Joe had a plane to catch, and I had a new job to get to.  In the meantime there was important exploration to be completed.  We couldn't be trifled with any longer.

We had been suitably awestruck.  We were dutifully patient for five hours or so.  Now it was time for a new turn of events.  It was time for the water to recede, and for us to return to my car.

But this wasn't the Red Sea, neither of us was Moses, and there was a notable lack of Egyptian chariots, drivers and horses to be drowned in the parting waters, as we made our way to safety.  So up a creek we remained...literall y...all afternoon.  Time didn't give us the respite from our prison as we had anticipated.  But it did bring one thing we might have prepared ourselves for somewhat more adequately.  

Darkness.

How can a cave explorer be caught off-guard by the dark?

The darkness of night is something easily grasped by the time we are out of elementary school.  The darkness of caverns is a unique condition which, with enough practice, the spelunker grows to comprehend.  The darkness of something greater than night, yet not quite like the blackness of the depths of a cavern, a falls the magnitude of the Arkansas River at flood stage, with the sound of a freight train, combining to imprison us beyond our capability to escape, created an oppression that quieted Joe and me in a way few events ever had.

We spoke a bit about an expedition in Butler Cave, Virginia.  Our friend, Maret Maxwell, had made a dive to explore a vast sump (an underwater passage of cave, which re-emerges into air-filled cavities,) which had never before been penetrated.  He was gone past the deadline for us to go to get help.  Joe and I were on the support crew.  We already had sent every other member of the party back, suffering from hypothermia.  We stared at each other.  We decided to give Maret a few extra minutes.  Every minute we waited was a nail in the coffin of a stranded cave diver.

Maret had solemnly promised to be back on time, or we were to organize a rescue party. But we waited.  We gave him ten, then twenty, thirty minutes, and finally an hour.  We already had packed our gear, shouldered our packs, and were counting the seconds to departure, when Maret's smiling face broke the surface of the pool which we had studied for so long.

So it was with the backside of the falls.  We stared at the mountainous wall of water, strangely separated from the cliff-face, pending its crashing demise on the rock pile at the bottom, striving to see a glimmer of hope.  The clouds might part, revealing a rainbow, sparing us the night in the caverns.  We at least might perceive a brightening of the sky.  But the curtain of whitish-brown was impenetrable.  What lay beyond rested solely on the strength of our internal hope and our imaginations.

Soon it became evident that we would not be going back to our campsite that evening.  We had to ponder our fate, all the while we could do nothing to tell the others that everything really was okay.

[okiehiker]

V.
It was about 7:00 P.M. when the desk-phone rang at the Queen Ranger Station of the U.S. Forest Service, not far up the road from the ranch.  We had planned to be back in time to have dinner with Marion, Verna, and A.J., or at least to have a cup of coffee and some pie.  My relationship with my cousins is rather laid back, but I am always concerned about pushing their hospitality too far.  When I go down there I generally camp, although sometimes, I and my friends, have rolled out our sleeping bags on the hardwood floor of their sturdy, rock ranch-house.

More than once it led Marion to scratch his head and say, "Believe you me, when I come to stay at your house, I plan to sleep in a bed."

We were absent, perhaps no great surprise, but the magnitude of the storm and its attendant run-off was something to consider.  I think it was Verna who finally persuaded Marion, "Oh, just go ahead and call.  What harm can it do."

Carl was there to answer the phone, and under the circumstances thought it might be best to check on us.  He hopped into his pick-up, and headed down the road to Sitting Bull Canyon.  Sitting Bull is one of the broadest, and honestly, least scenic canyons in the area.  But Sitting Bull Falls is a national forest recreation area and has a good paved road and parking area below it.  It was difficult, even with the good road, to make it up the canyon under those conditions.   A trip that normally would have taken less than thirty minutes took him over an hour.  He pulled up beside my car, in the otherwise deserted parking lot.  

His vehicle inspection didn't reveal much.  The car was locked, the back seat down, and the rear two-thirds of the car stuffed with an array of food, clothing, tents, packs, ropes, stoves and other outdoor gear.  The face of the cliff only occasionally could be seen through the veil of water cascading violently over the precipice.  It would be impossible to climb or descend until the flow subsided.  Someone caught on the face when the flood broke, or who tried to climb down in anticipation of rising water would have faced serious trouble.  But there was no evidence of that here, so he made his way back to his car.  

It was just as well.  If the boys were still in the cave, hypothermia was a real threat, but there was nothing to be done until the water level dropped and access to the cave was possible.  Carl returned to his car and settled in for the longer than normal drive back to the ranger station.  About a quarter mile down the road, as he prepared to cross a deep spot in the water, Carl noticed something caught on the branch of a partially submerged cottonwood tree.  He maneuvered his car around as close to the water's edge as he dared.   Getting into the water, he eased himself out into its depths, braced against the stand of small trees.  He carefully extracted the wool jacket from among the branches and carried it back to the car with him.

He wrung out the garment before getting into the car and turning on the dome light.  The jacket was one my sister had made me for Christmas a year or two earlier, Pendleton wool, with my name written on the tag in the collar.  This was not a good sign.  The chances of surviving being swept along in a flood such as this are extremely low.  Carl radioed the district office in Carlsbad to let them know there were two missing persons, possibly trapped in a cave, possibly lost in a flash-flood.

There was no chance of getting a helicopter out to scour the canyon floor with the persistent adverse weather conditions, so a volunteer party was sought to reach the places accessible by car, and if no progress was made, to come back to the area in daylight.

They all came out to help.  Salty, Chunker, Marion, Woody; their wives made pots of coffee and rounded up flashlights.  Friends and friends of friends pitched in to try and reach Sitting Bull Canyon, and the wash it opened into, by every road they could think of.  There was a flurry of interest at about two when one party found my flannel shirt caught up in strand of barbed wire strung across the draw, several miles downstream.  But by 2:30 A.M. they decided to break until morning when a helicopter could make a safe, speedy, and methodical search of the drainage.  And there still was the chance that were alive, up in that cave.  But as each hour passed and each piece of clothing was found, that chance seemed ever more remote.

[colorado]

as always, thanks for the great stories okiehiker. i can hardly wait for the next chapter.

[okiehiker]

VI.
Joe and I contemplated the diminution of the light with some trepidation.  We knew that there would be concern about our disappearance.  The poor choice I had made in hanging my clothes below the falls, and our minimal quantity of gear all began to haunt us.  The main tasks before us were avoiding hypothermia and maintaining our sanity, until the sun came back up.    We each had brought only two flashlights into the cave, and we wished to make every effort to conserve our batteries.  The imposing darkness, bolstered by the oppressive roar of the water made the prospect of the entire night under these conditions intimidating.  But we had no choice.

Though time was our ally as far as the receding of the water was concerned, it was our enemy in all else.  It would take days to starve to death, so there was limited fear there.  We certainly were in no danger of running short of water.  The limited life expectancy of batteries in our flashlights was disconcerting, but in no way a threat to life.  The sole threats we faced were our own judgment and the creeping discomfort of the damp and cool conditions.

The situation in the depths of Sitting Bull Falls Cave is somewhat different than most caverns in the Capitan Reef complex.  Directly over our heads ran a steady stream of water, filled with one of its greatest quantities of water ever, and therefore exerting a greater hydrostatic pressure than ordinarily present in the strata above.  Rather than the excessively dry conditions of many area caves, this one was nearly as damp and cold as any good eastern cave.

Everywhere we sat drops of water pelted us from the ceiling.  The air was chilled more than its usual degree by the whelming flood at our door.  The humidity in our environs was right at 100 percent.  Within an hour after sunset, we both were aware of the real danger presented by the atmospheric conditions.  The greatest single contributor to hypothermia is unawareness of its possibility and its attendant danger.  We faced our situation with no such naiveté.  Joe and I were well aware of the hazard we faced.  Keeping our spirits up just because we had to was another matter.  Despite the simplicity implied in the lyrics, "Don't worry.  Be happy!" happiness is not always a condition attainable by simple act of will.  It helps if one really is happy.

What the hell had we to be happy about.  Well, first of all, neither of us had ever encountered a flood even approaching this magnitude.  I had spent a lot of time gauging the progress of a lot of storms in Durham over the previous two years, but nothing compared to this.  It was an incredibly exciting and dynamic place to be.  We both loved the outdoors, caving in particular, and water sports to a lesser extent.  There was, of course, no prospect of putting a canoe on the waters of Sitting Bull Canyon, but ordinarily we would simply have been content to view such an extraordinary natural phenomenon from any perspective, with great interest.  Okay...we would be interested.. and we would be happy.  We would be interested in getting the hell out of there, and happy to be back at our campsite cooking dinner.  

It just wasn't working...and we were just getting colder.

In addition to the psychological aspect of hypothermia, there is the real physical fact of declining body temperature, and its real, physical causes.  The greater the surface area exposed to the atmosphere, the greater the heat transfer.  Dampness increases heat loss, as does the velocity of moving air.  We needed to find a position in which the two of us had a minimum of surface exposure to the air, a minimum of water dripping on our heads, and a minimum of draft.  

Finally we settled on a position near the center of the first room.  Joe and I each sat down, pulling our knees as close to our respective chests as possible, sitting upright, back to back, to minimize exposure.  This worked somewhat well, as we curled up, tight as we could, and yet shared as large a common boundary as we could.  Still, the longer we sat, the colder we got.

Following thirty minutes or so of sitting thus, we would get up and pace quickly around the room in order to get our blood flowing again.  It simply was too cold to stand apart very long.  Our still active twenty-two year old sense of machismo prevented us from experimenting with any seating positions which might have shared more of our respective warmth.  Given the fact that we wanted to minimize contact with the cold, damp cavern floor, our situation probably was nearly as good as we were going to get.  

After several iterations of sitting on the floor and trying our best to restore depressed body temperatures by jogging, jumping, and hopping around the dark cave, we discovered an additional possibility.  Off to the left there was a small opening, leading into a tiny slot about half the size of a phone booth.  We could squeeze in there, be protected from the dripping water and draft of the main room, and share a greater amount of heat from each other.

We squeezed into the tiny opening, pressing against each other harder than we had anticipated.  But it was effective.  We shared enough warmth that each of us felt better.  We shared enough discomfort that neither of us could begin to feel too sorry for ourselves.  And we discovered another weakness to our plan.

For a Pennsylvania cave, Sitting Bull Falls Cave was fairly well decorated.  Among the formations were helictites.  These randomly growing protrusions of calcium carbonate, may develop in any direction.  Their irregular appearance has given them the common names of "cave coral" or "popcorn."  The walls of our little cubicle were covered with it. There was coral in your ear, against your shin poking up your butt.  Being pressed up close against knee-caps, elbows and other of your partner's protruding body parts was no great bonus either.

In a matter of minutes, sufficient warmth was restored to our now-less-numb extremities, that we began to noticed little things such as pain.  We would stay in our little nook just as long as we could stand it, then finally give up and go sit outside again, curled up, back to back.  We never were able to go more than about thirty minutes without changing positions.

[okiehiker]

VII.
At 6:00 A.M. the forest service personnel made contact with the staff at the Carlsbad Airport.  A military helicopter had been brought in from El Paso, and they were fueled and ready to begin a reconnaissance of the Sitting Bull Canyon watershed.  It also was 7:00 A.M. Central and 8:00 A.M. Eastern time.  It was time to call the parents and let them know what was going on.

"Well," Carl said, "there is a chance that they are still in that cave.  But with the clothes that we've found downstream, I have to be honest.  I'm not very optimistic."  

A check of the area of the falls in the early morning revealed only that it would be some time before the water went down enough for anyone to get in or out of the cave.  The helicopter reconnaissance revealed nothing downstream.  By noon, the crews took a break from searching the drainage, and decided to wait until conditions improved before going back up to the falls.  The weather still was heavily overcast, and with the slim amount of hope downstream, there was no sense in keeping the aircraft up any longer than was necessary.

Inside the cave, Joe and I heaved a great sigh of relief  as daylight began to shade the blackness in front of us to the now familiar brownish-grey of our prison door.  Our relief was short lived, however.  The numbing of our ears by the constant din had made it impossible to honestly assess the magnitude of the flow of water over the cave's opening.  The wall before us had receded somewhat from the afternoon before, but still was intimidating.  The hazards of crossing through that wall of water seemed as great as any risk attendant to waiting out the storm.

As we watched, logs continued occasionally to tumble over the edge, looking small in relation to the pouring water, though now more like toy boats than match-sticks.  The night had been miserable enough.  The thought of another day and night like the last was unbearable.  The water continued to flow, hundreds of cubic feet per second, relentlessly over the cliff.  It might be possible to climb down the face, as far as possible avoiding getting into the water itself, and then jump through, to a pile of rocks down and to the left of us.  The chances of slipping on the rock, misjudging the force of the water and being crushed as we leapt through it, or being hit by some piece of falling debris, was simply too great.  There was no point in rushing it.  

A cursory review of the inside of the cavern revealed no new passages, no amazing unnoticed formations.  We had, through the course of the night become more closely acquainted with the character of the rock in that cave than we had ever intended.  We contented ourselves with watching for the subtle changes of the water flow through time.  The water clearly had subsided significantly since yesterday.  It was just that it remained so high as to be unsafe to pass through.  We could see through small gaps in the flow that the weather remained overcast.  This meant the continued threat of rain, and a new wave of water rolling down the canyon.  

Our stay in the cavern was approaching twenty-four hours.  We had chosen this spot because we wanted a rest.  We had been up for thirty hours.  During a second night in the cave, if we fell asleep,  we would be unlikely to awaken again.  Spending another night was completely out of the question.  At some point, staying in the dark, damp cave, without comfort, would become more dangerous than attempting the descent of the cliff face, through the water.  

By noon we had our nerve up, and debated the best course to a spot from which we could jump through the water to a suitable landing spot.  If we failed to land securely, falling in the stream, the force of the water would be sufficient to sweep us downstream beyond our control.  There was a spot down and to the left through which we could jump, missing the greatest force of the falls, aiming for a large rock with a reasonably flat, reasonably large top.  The risks were obvious and we had run through them a dozen times, both in our minds and in debating our options.  

We had no gear to pack, no other party members to consult.  The time had come to give it a shot.  We down-climbed the forty feet to our spot.  I went first through the shower of water.  It was intimidating, looking up and wondering if a log was going to be carried over the edge just as I jumped through the flow.  I wondered how well damp shoes would grip on wet rock.  But there was no choice.  The weather was threatening and the prospects of increasing water and increased danger seemed as great as any likelihood of its decline.  

I took a deep breath, braced myself and pushed off.  It was about eight feet through the air, dropping three feet or so to the surface of the rock.  Breaking through the force of the falling water was like breaking through the face of an ocean wave.  In the smallest fraction of a second I was absolutely saturated.  But as soon as I was through all resistance vanished.  I bent both legs and reached out with both hands, striving to make a four-point landing on the rock.  My left foot slipped, but both hands held, and other than the barking of my left shin, I was none the worse for wear.  Joe followed with a somewhat more graceful jump than I had made.

We quickly, though cautiously, made our way down the slippery slope of wet rock.  I struggled with my saturated jeans pocket to get out the keys, and opened the hatch on the back of my car.

[bigcreek]

Did this all happen around labor day of 1980?

[okiehiker]

Yes it did!  :-)

[bigcreek]

Another GUMO story--Sitting Bull, an UNUSUAL adventure