Opening Goliath: Danger and Discovery in Caving

PART ONE

Dangerous Explorations

Southeastern Minnesota karst region, 2001, & St. Paul, 2004

1

Doorway to the Odessa

Odessa Spring, near Granger, Minnesota

Sunday, April 29, 2001

John Ackerman steps into the water-filled passageway fins first. His pulse races, and a wave of anxiety spreads across his body until it settles in his head. His head tells him he must be crazy. Many times in his forty-seven years, Ackerman has pushed through underworld passages—some so narrow he had to strip to his waist in wet, almost freezing conditions to get to the other side. At five feet eleven inches, 160 pounds, with a gymnast’s thin, muscular body, he is a seasoned cave explorer. But cave diving is the most dangerous recreational sport in the world, and this is only his third dive—and the third time he has entered this passage. He feels certain that one of the largest undiscovered cave systems in the Upper Midwest is hidden just beyond this watery entrance. And for that he is willing to risk what common sense tells him may very well be a fool’s errand, or the most dangerous afternoon of his life.

Nature has taken eons to carve this rough column out of rock. The persistent force of slightly acidic water has acted like a drill bit on the soft limestone substrate. But the chute, angling down in an almost vertical shaft, is anything but regular. Over millennia, the water flow loosened sedimentary rock and left jagged, irregular walls pockmarked with phantom holes that lead into sucker passageways. Those dead-end holes can add to the underwater confusion. What’s more, his diving partner, Mark Henderson, an experienced Florida cave diver, has already descended into the chute, worked his way toward its bottom, and clouded the waters. Within minutes Henderson resurfaced. He stuck his masked head above the water, took the regulator out of his mouth, and said, It’s blocked.

Blocked?

Down near the bottom. Must have been a fresh rock fall since last week.

I’m going to have a look, Ackerman said.

Suit yourself, Henderson said, and moved out of the chute.

Henderson had anchored their dive reel at the bottom in a copse of rock, because he knows John Ackerman. He suspected the monomaniacal caver would want to follow their thick nylon descent rope into the water and see for himself. Or feel for himself, given that Henderson’s movement through the water riled it to an opaque brown. If Ackerman can find a way around the blockage, he will want to take up the anchored reel and continue probing the underwater cave.

Before Henderson made his first descent, the two men had argued about gear. Henderson wanted Ackerman to use a harness plate to affix the large air tank to his back. Ackerman was against it. He’s had little experience cave diving, but plenty in Minnesota’s caves. He’ll be squeezing through places too small for his body with a tank strapped to his back. And with the tank on his back, the regulator hose and turn-off valves would be somewhere behind his neck. In blackout conditions, if there were problems, tracing the proper hose to the proper valve would be impossible. Ackerman was adamant about not wearing the back plate—far better to have a small makeshift harness he can use to pull the tank behind him or move it to his side. Henderson acquiesced, but he told Ackerman he had to wear the fins. Ackerman wanted no part of the fins because he thought they were unwieldy and unnecessary and would only further cloud the water. But since he’d won the battle over the back plate, he deferred to Henderson’s greater cave-diving experience. Besides, when they had practiced in Henderson’s dark apartment pool, Ackerman had learned how to reach neutral buoyancy—that place of underwater weightlessness in which you neither rise nor sink. Henderson assured him if he was able to maintain neutral buoyancy and move with his diving fins, he might be able to avoid clouding the water.

Henderson’s descent and return has turned the water a muddy tan—the color of the limestone cliff face under which this spring boils out of the ground.

Ackerman tries not to think about the blackout conditions. He has focused on every step of preparation: the drive down to the remote Minnesota border region, hauling their tanks fifty yards through the woods to the limestone cliff face, pulling on his seven-mil wet suit, cleaning his mask. Now, he envisions another column, rising not far from the few brief feet they have already explored into an underground cavern, this one open and air filled. It is the gateway to the Odessa Spring system, a series of interconnected caves that some geologists and cavers estimate contains over thirty miles of unexplored openings and passages. Ackerman is determined to find the entry point that will open up the massive subsurface wilderness of waterfalls, fossils, and ancient stone formations.

On the embankment five feet above the two men, Amos Yoder, the Amish man who owns the land, looks on. His broad-brimmed hat and faded homespun cut a wide shadow in the afternoon light. Next to Yoder, Henderson’s wife snaps pictures of the two men standing in the ditch of murky water. Beside her is Dave Gerboth, another longtime caver who has explored this region with Ackerman since the start of their effort to find the doorway into the Odessa. Gerboth holds the end of the heavy nylon cord. If he feels three tugs on the rope, Ackerman is in trouble. At that point he can pull, or send Henderson into the water for rescue.

Ackerman rests his large, fluorescent green air tank on the bank and pushes on the regulator’s diaphragm. Air bursts through the opening, punctuating the quiet of remote woods. Then he inserts the mouthpiece and breathes, making sure the apparatus is operational.

The late April afternoon is sunny and bright, and the temperature has climbed above 60 degrees. But the outflow from this wide underground spring is 16 degrees above freezing. Through his wet suit he can feel the temperature envelop his feet, then calves, knees, thighs—it is the kind of cold that can kill an ill-equipped man in less than five minutes. Now it seeps into the small edges of his suit, sends a brief cold rush into the thin layer between his skin and the wet suit wall. His body heat quickly warms the cold water to 98.6 degrees, and suddenly he can breathe again. Before he descends, he works through one last mental checklist of equipment preparations and his plan of attack.

Ready? Henderson asks.

Ackerman looks up, the dive mask perched on top of his hooded forehead. He remembers the silvery edge of a line-cutting knife he watched Henderson tuck into his dive belt. He knows you can never be too careful. Maybe I should borrow your knife?

Henderson pulls it out and hands it over.

The knife, designed for working blind underwater, has a blade less than two inches long with a hooked edge and a razor-sharp crook. John attaches the two-inch strap with its snug sheath to one of his harness straps. Thanks, he says. Ready.

Finally, Ackerman lowers his face mask and begins working his way backward into the earthen-colored brew, his pulse kicking up another notch. His head drops beneath the surface, and he is immersed in cold. He pauses, checking his apparatus, holding the fluorescent green tank above him. Once underwater his head is filled with the sound of his inhaled breath. Then his exhale rises in a burst of bubbles.

Only inches beneath the sunny surface the world turns cloudy, then muddy, then entirely dark. Attached to his wrist with a nylon lanyard hangs a high-powered underwater flashlight, but it is worthless in this kind of water. His twelve-pound weight belt helps him sink. But he needs to drop slowly and carefully through the seventeen-foot shaft—in places less than three feet wide—like a blind man descending into a rough earthen well.

***

John Ackerman begins his descent into the Odessa Spring. Courtesy John Ackerman

Every year the National Speleological Society publishes shorthand accounts of cave explorations gone awry. In a special section for Cave Diving Accidents and Incidents, the statistics underscore the danger. For the year 2000 the report noted ten cave-diving fatalities. The causes included inadequate equipment, siltation, poor training, bad air in a gas pocket, no guidelines, and deep diving on too little air.

Ackerman has read these records and also studied the manuals. The National Speleological Society’s Cave Diving Manual (1998), which contains practical information, including sections on dive planning, basic equipment, underwater cave fauna, and hypothermia, even has a segment called psychological aspects. Ackerman’s dive today is dangerous, but he has a clear plan, the right equipment, and experience—at least with Minnesota’s caves. A paragraph in the manual’s psychology section made him smile, though, wondering if the text’s author played Dungeons and Dragons, or maybe was a Tolkien fan. It referred to the crescendo of events and having to slay your dragon.

Remember the cascade of events. If you are in a spot where there is no margin for error, you will execute a flawless dive if you slow down and remain in charge of your head. The Dragon lives at the base of your skull. When you wake him, you will first feel his fiery breath reaching upward under your hair between your ears. If you fail to slay your Dragon, he will slay you.

The cascade of events resonates. Over almost two decades of caving Ackerman has found himself in many tight spots. But he’s never met the dragon. He reminds himself to pay attention—maybe he can add dragon slayer to his long list of caving accomplishments.

He brings the tank down after him, breathing steadily.

During his twenties and early thirties, Ackerman focused on building up his furniture restoration business, Ackerman’s Furniture Service, which now has twelve employees and a state-of-the-art restoration facility. The business thrived, providing him with the financial resources to pursue his passion. Over the last decade he has increasingly spent his spare time in the pursuit of discovering and opening up virgin cave. He has owned Spring Valley Caverns, now the second-longest cave in the state, since 1989. That year he also created the Minnesota Karst Preserve and began adding more cave properties to his holdings, often with controversy. Many people do not agree with his methods of creating new entryways into caves.

But no matter, Ackerman now thinks. Truth is, he feels completely caught up in this latest effort to locate the entrance to the Odessa system. He feels certain today he is knocking on the door.

It has been less than a year since he and Dave Gerboth discovered this small opening in the remote cliff face near the town of Granger on the Iowa border. Southeast Minnesota is known for its karst topography. Over four hundred million years ago in the Ordovician Period, when this area was covered with a great sea, layers and layers of shell debris were deposited and then compressed into limestone as other layers of sedimentary rock were deposited. Although the area was glaciated early in the last Ice Age, it missed the later stages that ground the rest of the state flat. Erosion has had more than a million years here to remove glacial drift and expose the limestone bedrock. Eons of snowmelt and rainfall, carrying minute concentrations of carbonic acid, have bored into and under the limestone, creating caves throughout this karst region. Now the rolling terrain holds dairy farms—and some of the largest undiscovered and unexplored cave systems in the United States.

Ackerman is new to scuba diving. Less than two months earlier he finished his classroom training and did his open water certification in a Florida resort, where the waters were warm, clear, and sparkling. He’d acquired his diver’s license so he could drop into this darkened shaft. His heartbeat rises in his chest. His breathing is measured but rapid. He focuses on his descent.

Last week the spring runoff swelled this escaping water to a rushing fountain. He managed to get down into the watery column, but the rush of water almost tore the regulator out of his mouth. This week the water rises more slowly, and he moves down the shaft, feeling for the place where Henderson claims the bottom has been blocked.

Ackerman and Henderson have been back to this site three times, and on each dive they’ve been able to push a few feet farther. First they managed to find their way to the bottom of this seventeen-foot chute. There you place your feet onto a flat slab of limestone and make a 180-degree turn into a cloudy, underwater room. But the first time Ackerman dove it, the water was so dirty he could only venture along a stretch of winding tunnel by hand. And then last Sunday, when both of them were fifteen feet along the subterranean passage, Henderson’s dive reel froze. This cylindrical wheel, wrapped with one-eighth-inch nylon cord, is their lifeline to the surface. While they move forward, it plays out behind them, pulling off the reel inches at a time. The wheel assembly stopped turning.

They struggled in the murky water, trying to fix it. But their flashlights were useless, and working with hands sheathed in diving gloves was like picking up dimes wearing mittens. And of course they could not take off their gloves. After one or two minutes in 48-degree water, bare hands go numb and the joints start to slow and seize up, causing virtual paralysis. They began to run out of oxygen and had to surface.

Over the subsequent week, Henderson realized the dive reel’s housing assembly was missing two bolts. He repaired it and added small knots in the nylon cord to measure off ten-foot increments. And today he anchored it near the pit’s bottom, at the end of their descent rope, just in case he was wrong about the pit’s blockage and Ackerman could pick up the reel and continue exploring.

Cave-diving exploration involves a process referred to as moving the reel forward. If Ackerman can find the place where Henderson anchored the dive reel and discover a way around the obstruction, he can play out the nylon cord. As he moves, the reel will map his trail through the unexplored passages. He will push as far as he can and then anchor the dive reel in place. He can follow the cord out to the surface. And the next time they enter the underwater world, they can move quickly along the line to the dive reel and push farther ahead. That is, if John Ackerman doesn’t first discover the gateway to the Odessa.

Now Ackerman approaches the dark bottom of the pit, feeling carefully around the obstruction for the dive reel and picking it up. He finds another hole to one side, large enough to enter. Sure enough, just a few feet farther he is through what Henderson mistook for blockage, entering the last section of chute bottom. It seems as though the water has cleared. He thinks he might be able to see more than a couple inches of dark murkiness, and he switches on his light.

Less than a foot from his face his beam illuminates the rock wall. The current flows up, and because Henderson didn’t make it to the bottom, this section is clear. Under the light the water glistens like crystal.

Ackerman carefully twists, making his 180-degree rotation, keeping his flashlight beam in front of him. He holds the dive reel in his other hand, playing out nylon cord. And then he looks up and follows his beam’s light into the underwater cave and he is … mesmerized.

He peers into a room ten feet square with clearly visible walls and a ceiling that reaches into darkness. Boulders and jagged rocks protrude from two side walls cut out of limestone. He has been here before, but the water has never been so clear. The room and its walls are shimmering blue green and beautiful, like the beckoning turquoise of a summer swimming pool, sparkling in the curious cut of his light. Another large opening yawns across the room. He is going to find his doorway.

He pauses with his feet on the solid limestone floor long enough to take in the miracle of this underwater room. He inhales, thinking this space is like a vestibule, a threshold to a new world. Down here there is only the sound of his breathing, like Darth Vader’s slow inhale and exhale. And his bubbles. He can hear them rise above him and disappear up the chute.

He turns and looks up the chute, aiming his beam into the dark tunnel. The silt has been settling for thousands of years, covering everything with a half-inch blanket of dust. Before last week, this stretch of territory had never been touched. Other than spring runoff and the occasional summer rainstorms, the chamber maintains a steady flow of water. There has never been anything else to stir the silt and raise it off the flowage bottom and underwater walls.

When he shines his light above him, his beam disappears into the thick black cloud of the column. He holds the diving reel in his right hand and sees the white cord disappear into the murk. Even if this entire room becomes mired and black, Ackerman will be able to use the thin nylon cord to retrace his passage through this underwater world—and to exit the black chute.

He pushes across the room, trying to move forward without creating too much current. After the narrow chute, the room appears cavernous. Ackerman moves toward the tunnel, breathing steadily, careful to maintain his buoyancy. Even though his fins are useful in this open area, he still wishes he had left them on the surface. The small space toward which he moves is narrowing and twisting, and in less than five more feet he is in it. One easy kick lifts the ancient silt from the bottom, and the room fills in behind him, as impenetrable as steeped black tea.

He keeps moving. He will not enter a passage he cannot see, but if he has clear visibility—as he does here, now—he can examine the passage. He can memorize its walls, overall size and shape, any obstructions or phantom holes he must avoid. Once he frames a passage in his mind, he can find his way back through it, even though this one bends down, then up, makes one turn, then another.

He drags the dive reel beside him, careful to keep the unwinding rope clear of his equipment. His tank rests in its makeshift harness on his other side. The tunnel narrows and twists down; like the seventeen-foot vertical shaft, its sides are jagged, and occasionally he has to work around large pieces of stone. But he keeps moving, well beyond the farthest point they reached the week before. He knows if he can just keep moving, the tunnel will eventually rise upward. But in these tight quarters, moving slowly, clouding the water is inevitable.

Now Ackerman takes fifteen minutes to push another fifty feet, bumping and pulling along the twisting tunnel, waiting for its angled rise or the appearance of a yawning dark shaft above him. But after he passes through seventy-five, maybe eighty feet of unexplored tunnel, the silty water finally catches up with him. The cloud follows him into a six-foot-wide space. Ahead he can see more tunnel. There is a large flat boulder to his left. If he can anchor the dive reel on that stone shelf, he can move to the other side of the tunnel, carefully turn around, recover his line, and follow the eighth-inch nylon cord through the twisting passage, through the vestibule, and up into the chute that will return him to safety. It is time to return to the surface.

Moments before this small horizontal room disappears in a thick black cloud, he anchors his dive reel on the stone shelf. And then everything goes dark. The silt-out is complete, and he begins moving to the other side of the chamber, stretching out his right hand to feel for the wall. He hugs the wall opposite the dive reel so when he makes his small, careful turn, no part of his equipment will become entangled in the knotted line.

He turns, very carefully, abiding by the room size and his detailed memory of the small passage. Though he cannot see which way is up or down, left or right, he can feel the walls. If he moves carefully he should be able to complete his turn, recover the line, and follow it through darkness to safety.

He guesses he has been under for more than fifteen minutes. He should still have plenty of air. Cave divers need to mind their oxygen and time. Ackerman entered this cave without a pressure gauge to tell him exactly how much air he has left. Not that he would be able to read it in this dark water. From his limited diving experience, he knows he doesn’t use much oxygen. The eighty-cubic-foot diving tank tucked in the harness to his side, riding up a little on his back, should give him up to an hour of breathing time, almost triple what he needs. By the time he reaches the surface, if everything goes as planned, he should have at least a half hour to spare.

He turns toward his right, ready to