When it was built 70 or 80 year ago, the wood was coated in creosote to preserve it. Creosote smells like mothballs and, as it happens, is poisonous to cave life. Every day a little more of the creosote leeches out of the wood, into the ground water.
Mammoth Cave's a national park, so the funds to clean this come from the federal government. This Congress hasn't been too eager to 'waste' more money on national parks, so it falls to volunteers to do it.
The Mammoth Cave National Park Restoration Camp meets for several weekends and one weeklong effort every year. The 2004 weeklong camp was the first week of August, and the first one I've been to.
The makeup of the camp was from every flyover state you can think of. A lot were native to Kentucky. People drove from Indiana, Ohio, and Iowa. A whole contingent rode in from Madison, Wisconsin. A carload came from Vermont - driving through Canada to save time. One guy flew in from Oregon.
The one quality everyone shared was the unmentioned integrity. Everyone here was a very decent person, and never brought it up. You know when you've been at a job for a year and you realize that Joe Smith - who never brags about what he does - is the best damn employee in the whole company? The whole crew's made up of Joe Smith. At one point a group of us were talking about blood donation, and virtually everyone in the conversation was a regular blood donor.
I tried to defend New Jersey as being "the Garden State" from these guys, half of whom had either worked on or lived in farms. Some had visited New Jersey, and had the typical Turnpike and Parkway tour. So out came my stats that New Jersey was half farmland, it's got the shore and the Pine Barrens ... and then the acquiescing joke that the state tree is the smokestack.
Monday - Bucket Brigades, Gourmet Gorp
It didn't raining on Sunday or Monday, but it did in higher parts of Kentucky, and that rain was washing through the Echo River now. Monday (and also Tuesday) we'd have to find work to do that wasn't on the bridge.
Lucky for us there were 299 grass sacks full of pungent wood to haul. Ripping the wood off the bridge is the fun part of the job. Lugging it all a mile out of the cave is the grunt part.
The bags were stored in the 'Chop Shop.' They were double bagged, with each grass sack containing a garbage bag with a length of wood inside. Touching the wood with bare hands is not recommended, since it's muddy and the creosote will give you a nasty rash.
We moved the bags in installments. The first part was picking up a bag (or two or three, if you could) and walking it through Sparks Avenue to the base of the Fire Tower. That was the morning's work right there.
I was a bit worried about what I was wearing. It wasn't the normal coveralls, since there wasn't privacy for changing at a massive tourist attraction. I wore jeans, a T-shirt and a flannel, which was the preferred uniform. If you got hot, you took the flannel off. If you were hauling dirty stuff, you put the flannel on. You only got cold when you stopped moving for lunch. You didn't need kneepads for this cave. Seriously, you didn't.
For lunch we'd hiked to the surface and ate at the top of the entrance steps. Sunday's dinner was a feast of turkeys and hams, and the leftovers became ham and turkey sandwiches for the rest of the week. There was also a huge bowl of gorp we'd took baggies of. I like to eat it one ingredient at a time, and that process took the better part of the lunch hour.
After lunch we'd did bucket brigades to get the bags up the giant Fire Tower by the Ruins of Karnak. Our 40-person crew wasn't enough to cover all 138 steps, so we'd hauled them to a halfway point, advanced ourselves up a few stories, and repeated.
The bags were ideally supposed to have a uniform weight, but some weren't. The heavy ones were John bags, and the light ones were Nancy bags (named after two of the regular attendees, neither of whom was able to make it this year).
"John bag" warnings were common as the heavy sacks were passed up the stairs. If you weren't expecting it, grabbing a 30-pound bag when you're expecting 15 pounds can tip your balance and knock you down the stairs. "John bag" was echoed by cavers as each heavy bag worked its way up the stairs.
Two or three times we'd stopped to let tour groups come through. It felt like yelling "Car!" when you were playing in the street: you moved to the side, let the grownups through, then went back to your important work. They were also breaks from manual labor, so the tours were always welcome.
Once the bags were at the base of Audibon Avenue, it was flat surface all the way to the entrance. I grabbed as many as I could, because I realized making two three-bag trips was much better than making three two-bag trips.
Four wheelbarrows were scrounged up, and that saved everyone a few trips. We dumped the bags at the base of the entrance stairs. We'd get a dumpster to empty them into on Friday, so they'd stay at the base for the week. The tour guides prepared speeches to explain what all these smelly bags were. (We were always tempted to tell the tours they were souvenirs, and to take as many bags as they wanted.)
We made a quick stop after the cave work to visit Floyd Collins' house, the world's most famous cave fatality. It had been used as a field house for decades, but it had fallen into disrepair over the last few years. The wood of the house was so warped, we'd could only open the front door a few inches. Inside the house was a partially collapsed roof, 25 soiled mattresses to be hauled out, and a bat hanging in a corner.
The filthy mattresses were strapped to a dump truck and hauled to the dumpster. Some of the mattresses looked like raccoons burrowed through them, others looked like raccoons were butchered on them. If I was thrown from a plane and saw this truck full of mattresses on my way down, I'd aim for the pavement.
Dinner that night was Chicken Cordon Bleu. I think there was some Southern tradition to get pork in every meal. Chicken could be served, but only if someone hid a slice of ham in each serving.
Shawn the chef was fantastic, cooking up food with his wife Patty that made even hungry cavers eat more than they thought they could. It didn't stop with dinner, either. Breakfast wasn't just cereal but egg casseroles, French toast sandwiches with peach slices, and enough bacon to build your own show cave.
This could have been billed as a gourmet's dream vacation. "Eat three rich, sumptuous meals every day for a week and don't gain weight! How? Uh, weworkyourassoffhaulingtoxicwoodunderground. Here's the menu!" After a week of stuffing my face, I still needed to carve a smaller notch in my belt.
Tuesday - Deaths Marches, Bad Shoes
Tuesday was still no go for the bridge, so we went to a side project in Silliman Avenue. We went in the Carmichael Entrance for this day, 180 steep wet steps injecting us into Cleveland Avenue. It was exhausting just walking down them at the beginning of the day; walking up them eight hours later was going to hurt.
I asked one of the restoration camp vets what we were doing in this part of the cave, and he said "Walking you to death." We'd were actually taking disassembled lighting down from Silliman Avenue and the Pass of El Ghor.
These are several miles past the Carmichael Entrance, with the Snowball Dining Room at the halfway point. Every trip with lighting would add a mile or so to our walking time.
This wasn't all labor: when we'd first got down, those of us that wanted to could go to the end of Silliman Avenue, where it meets the Echo River on the far side. This was where the famous connection was made between Flint Ridge and Mammoth, making it the longest known cave in the world. We stood on the metal walkway that those first cavers saw when they went through the sump twenty feet from us.
In the water was one small cave fish, and one albino crawfish was in the mud further up. One of the younger guys began poking the crawfish, which promptly pinched him. Once the wood gets taken out, hopefully more crawfish will survive down here, and all pinch him in unison.
The electric cable running through Silliman Avenue had been dug up and cut into lengths 30 to 40 feet long. We moved them to a dumping spot a mile up. Each time we went for the furthest length of cable, and took two or three cables per trip, so every subsequent trip was shorter by about a football field. The longer we worked, the shorter the trips got.
Larry (one of the camp veterans), one of the younger guys and me worked as a team, each supporting part of the cables. We looked like the world's cheapest Chinese New Year dragon. Larry's day job was as an electrician, so hauling around wire was nothing new for him.
One of the minor drawbacks I had about this week was that I'd blow through dozens of AA batteries. However, the only batteries I changed on the whole trip were in my digital camera. Most of the cave we were in was lit for tourists, so no need to use a light source. When we were off-trail (or more accurately, on-trail-that-wasn't-used-any-more), I used my Tikka LED. It's not a great light for looking at details, but when you're hauling cable, you don't need to see every inch of it.
Lunch was not in the Snowball Dining Room, as you might expect, because tour groups were moving through there, and cavers tend to scare tourists. We could buy coffee and hot soup there if we wanted, but we were sitting off by the service elevator.
I've dreamed of elevators in caves. After four or five hours of a tough trip, it'd be great to say "I'm outta here" and be in daylight with the push of a button.
The elevator used to bring disabled people into Mammoth, one of the few caves in the country they could explore. The elevator wasn't designed for moist cave air, though, so the cables get worn much quicker than normal. One of them snapped in 2002, trapping a ranger midway between the surface and the ground. Since then, it's only been used for freight: the coffee and hot soup sold in Snowball.
Karen Kennedy, a caver at the camp with her husband, ended up escorting a hurt woman out with one of the tour groups. She had fallen and hurt her arm, and just happened to be on one of the few trips with a bailout point. Mammoth has wheeled chairs specifically for this purpose, but the passage to the exit is bumpy enough to make walking preferable whenever possible. Karen, a former New Jersey caver at the camp with her husband, happened to be a doctor, so she gave a little free medical care to the woman as they went to the surface. Karen probably went through a variety of creative ways in her head to tell this woman that she was a gynecologist.
In the afternoon, the logic of the morning cable hauling got flipped on its ear. We were moving light fixtures, looped cable, and blue ballast cylinders from El Ghor to behind the elevators. Everyone was grabbing the closest thing to them and hauling that back, so every subsequent trip became longer and longer.
I passed on the light fixtures, because they didn't weigh much and I figured they were good for the women to move. Instead I picked up ballast, small blue metal cylinders with an octopus of thick wiring stretching in seven directions. The wiring made for decent handholds, but they were heavy enough so any position would cut into your hands after a couple hundred yards.
I decided to take an easy load once, and so picked up one of the lights. I didn't want to make it too easy, so I picked up a second one. This was the hardest trip I made all week. If I held them on opposite shoulders, one would tip down while the other tipped up, or one would tip left while the other tipped right. I couldn't put them on the same shoulder, since they didn't stack neatly and just encouraged them to go sliding off in different directions. I was almost glad to go back to backbreaking, grip-killing ballast. Almost.
During the hike out, I noticed my right foot was hurting a bit. I didn't bring the horrific holey boots I normally cave in; this time I brought a slightly less horrific pair of boots I had worn several times a week for the past five years (but never in a cave).
Well, pain is good for you. I was one of the first to climb the stairs, which hurt a bit, but climbing 180 stairs always hurts. I joined the other early ascenders in making lame jokes about forgetting flashlights and asking people to go back down to get them.
Dinner was prime rib. Rick Olsen, the Ranger who was working with the camp this week, came over for dinner with his wife. He came a couple other times that week; I think the quality of the food was a big motivator. Rick worked as hard as anyone else that week. He spent 20 years as a regular caver before joining the Park Service, so he felt like the knowledgeable guide you wish came with every cave.
Wednesday - Bridge Work, Limps
We'd were warned not to overdo ourselves on this work. The people most likely to do this were the young guys. Women and the older guys don't have as much to prove, and so don't kill themselves.
My right foot had gotten worse. It was now a flat out limp. The walk down to the entrance this morning made me look like I had a pegleg. The heel had given out on the right boot, which was the source of the pain.
This camp had a vendor, Bonnie. She makes numerous cave T-shirts (including every joke cave T-shirt you've ever seen) and in addition sells boots and other equipment from tubs she brought along. She had a pair of boots that fit me for $15, but she left them at camp. I'd buy those shoes tomorrow, and make do with the crappy ones today.
Today was our first day of actually seeing the bridge. I planned on going down there and staying the whole day. I felt fine, except for the inability to walk two paces. Most of the jobs were transporting wood and bags, except for the bridge people, who stood still while tearing up the bridge. So I'd work on the bridge.
The bridge has several thick posts running straight down and at 45 degree angles to the ground. Several support planks are in a heavily nailed lattice, with a boardwalk layer on top. This whole thing is buried in mud.
To get the wood out, you needed to 1. Get the mud off it 2. Pry it free from the other nails and 3. Sometimes pull it out of the mud like Excalibur.
Everything was being done at once. Shovels were clearing off the top inches of mud and ripping up the boardwalk. Five feet away, the support boards were being dug out and pried loose from a deeper layer of mud. Five feet away, the posts were being forced out of the mud with a Vargo tool.
The Vargo tool was used for post removal (named after its inventor, John Vargo, who also had John bags named after him). It's a broad platform with an attached lever to put a maximum amount of strength into post-pulling. It works like a giant corkscrew. With it, a post took five minutes to get out of several feet of mud, rather than the hour it would take to dig with shovels.
This was the only day I brought my new camera down. I didn't want to destroy it, and the only carrying case I had was the bubble wrap it came in. I felt like a real macho guy for that half hour others worked and I made sure my hands were extra clean before touching my camera.
After lunch (which I was debating skipping just to avoid several miles of walking) we hit the bridge some more. The jobs ripping up wood were coveted, so I rotated back a few feet to help with packaging the wood.
The smaller pieces of wood were cleaned of mud, put in the garbage bags and grass sacks right at the bridge, and then hauled to the dump point (I didn't do too much of that last step). The bigger pieces - some of the posts were fourteen feet long - were carried whole to the chop shop.
The Wednesday entertainment after work was Rick Sanders, one of the tour guides and an old fashioned storyteller. Listening to him was like watching Big Fish again. He wisely came up to the camp a little early, in time for pork chops. After telling great stories for an hour, he went outside, and told tour guide stories for another hour. Nothing brings a tour guide pleasure like a Halloween where obnoxious tourists get scared out of their skin.
Thursday - Chainsaws, Bottomless Pits
The bunkhouse awoke at 3:00 in the morning Thursday to a crash, and then a torrent of water. It had rained the whole night, so I assumed the roof sprung a leak, and soaked through the acoustic tiles until they collapsed.
There was definitely a leak involved, but not from the roof. One of the younger volunteers got blitzed Wednesday night, made it to his top bunk to sleep it off, and then rolled with such ferocity that he broke the wooden barrier built specifically to stop people from rolling off the top bunk. He landed unhurt, realized he had to pee, and did so - right where he landed.
If the loud geyser of urine didn't wake everyone up, Carla screaming at him to stop sure did. She, like the floor, was pissed off. Some of the anger was toward the offending party, and some of it was toward the rest of us, because we weren't leaving our sleeping bags to clean it up. Larry jumped right to the task, though, earning him a "Peebody" award during the Friday closing ceremony.
My new boots felt great on my feet, but weren't miracle workers. I still had the limp. It'd go away in a few days so long as I didn't push it. Too bad every day involved ten miles of walking.
New people were working on the bridge today, so I picked the other stationary activity: Chop Shop. The Chop Shop was a collection of electric chain saws, sawhorses and blue tarps just before Sparks Avenue starts. The big wood gets brought in here, searched for nails, and then cut at metal-free places into bite sized chunks to be bagged.
The Chop Shop's just a few feet away from the tourist trail, so the work stops while tour groups pass by. (For some reason tourists get scared when they hear chain saws in a cave.) We were hoping to hear Rick Sanders' group pass by, but we'd never did.
I let other people use the chain saws. Consequentially, I still have all ten fingers.
After our work cutting wood this day, we had a side trip. We also had a side trip Tuesday night, to Dogwood and Atwell caves, but this was a side trip inside Mammoth.
Rick was taking us to the bottom of the Bottomless Pit. (It was so named because it was the stopping point for all explorers until Stephen Bishop. Lantern light didn't reach the bottom, and no one had ever crossed it, until Stephen Bishop pushed a ladder over the gap.)
A convoluted path led down off the tourist path, through passage that was the roughest we'd seen in Mammoth so far (but would still be glorified walking passage in the Northeast.) It came out into a steep but manageable muddy drop. Rick rigged a hand line, and one by one we dropped down into where some people probably believed was the mouth of Hell.
The area was thick with mud-coated boulders, and a few electric lights that weren't on at the moment. The mud was studded with coins from all the people who made wishes over the years. Thousands of coins were down here. This was straight out of the Goonies. Of course, taking anything from a cave is forbidden, so no one did it. Nope. No sirree Bob, not one soul came back with any change.
Dinner was jambalaya, something I had been getting a craving for all week. This was Shawn's last night (Friday meal was a fish fry that Mammoth was catering for us) so we'd pooled some money and got him some scotch. He was thankful for it, as well as thankful that his wife didn't like scotch.
Friday - Dump Trucks, Carved Cedar
This was the one day we'd have access to a dumpster. It wasn't being dragged down to the entrance: a dump truck was being backed to the entrance, which we'd fill as many times as necessary with the wood. We pulled the grass sacks off them before chucking them in the truck, to reuse the sacks.
My buddy John realized there were more than enough hands to fill the dump truck, and so went to the snack bar for an ice cream cone. Out of pure cruelty, he then watched the rest of us work while licking his cone and commenting how nice it was to work smart, not hard.
We had so many bags, it took three groaning dump trucks to cart them all away. We kept count of the total bags moved, and came out with 639 bags.
If you figure that the bags were 20 pounds each, that makes about six and a half tons that were carried out of Mammoth. But try to figure the balance of John bags and Nancy bags, and you can get anywhere from five to seven tons. Add that to whatever we'd moved Tuesday, which isn't counted in the math, and we'd might have gotten ten tons of junk out of Mammoth. That's the weight of three of my cars. Or one Hummer.
After the fish dinner, Roy Vanhoozer gave out carved cedar plaques to everyone who participated. It had come from the bridge (the cedar posts in the bridge weren't creosoted, so for once, wood this week actually smelled good).
Saturday - Educational Trips, Lotteries
There were several 'educational' trips planned on Saturday. The Park doesn't like the term 'reward trip' so they were technically 'educational trips.'
I signed up for the Albert's Dome trip, which took us deep into Mammoth for seven hours. After years of pleading, the Park was finally allowing some attendees to visit the New Discovery Entrance. That trip was limited to 12 people and started late at night Saturday. I was driving home right afterward my Albert's Dome trip, so I didn't bother entering.
Here's the economics of the trip. There was a $60 charge for the food (which was well worth it) but the week's lodgings were otherwise free. The cost of driving down was about $125 in gas, plus a couple stops at Burger King and Hardees. In exchange I got guided tours of the biggest cave in the world, made great caving contacts, and made the cave a cleaner place. I didn't know this coming into Kentucky, but the NSS reimburses travel for conservation trips like this. So I'm making a profit off this.
I'm seriously thinking about returning next year. Any riders?