Mammoth Cave (Silver Springs, FL)

[Red Hat Jef]

Can anyone provide some information about Mammoth Cave - Silver Springs, FL?

http://www.caveatlas.com/systems/sys...p?ID=741&co=US

Tampa Diving doesn't have much except for an artistic map of the system. Doesn't tell me much about the system other than what the sinkhole looks like and a few of the passages. (Reminds me of the map of 40 fathoms...but not much about lines etc)

Is this system open to diving? If so, is this "boat required" cave access, or is it swimmable? Sidemount or backmount? Anyone dive this one lately? (Worth it?)

[FW]

IIRC, it is a high current, no-mount dive, and has difficult access requirements.

[sskasser]

Not a specific answer, but an interesting article about it:

http://floridanature.wordpress.com/2009/08/22/1360/

Silver Springs: A Troglodytic Myth, Realized

At the mouth of Mammoth Springs—the main artesian gusher in the historic Florida tourist attraction of Silver Springs—I have only two choices.

The first choice is to go straight up, some 30 feet to the surface, where at this very moment a gaggle of tourists inside a World Famous Glass Bottom Boat is getting a classic theme-park spiel. Within this reality, the spring beneath them is described as “a bottomless pit”, a dark hole in the earth that mysteriously spouts up millions of gallons of crystal clear water from somewhere deep and unknown.

The second choice is the bottomless pit itself. It’s accessed by a slender horizontal gash in the limestone bottom—a doorway to a water-filled labyrinth of caverns, caves and tunnels. Like much of geology, the deeper it goes down into the rock, the older the history of the rock will become. There are stories embedded here, some from long ago in geologic time, and some from long ago in my own life.

Down here, I settle on the sand-covered limestone bottom next to the dark cave mouth, my legs and fins tucked under me. The entrance to Mammoth is about five feet high and over a hundred feet wide, creating the affect of one giant smile, Batman’s Joker incised in the rock. There’s well over 20 springs between here and the first half mile of the Silver River that seep or gush up from the limestone and dolomite, together creating a flow of 500 million gallons a day. Mammoth accounts for 45 percent of that upwelling, so the force of the water flowing out of its giant smile is mighty indeed.

Although my two choices today seem as if they are exaggerations of reality, they frame the very real condition of Florida. Like so much else that is beneath the veneer here in this tourist-driven state, my choices are characterized by vast incongruities between what is promoted and what is actually going on. Melodramatic theme park spin often seems more real to visitors than the true nature of the place itself. And so, I hope to more fully realize—perhaps even to reconcile—the caricatures that conspired to bring me to the bottom of Silver Springs.

Here, I’ll accompany a small team of cave divers exploring the underground plumbing of this famous, powerful spring system. Within this mission, our goals are to watch for unusual troglodytic life forms and rare fossils, to carefully monitor the air in our tanks, and—perhaps most importantly—to time our ascents so the Glass Bottom Boats and the Lost River Voyages on their way to the giraffe and porcupine show don’t run us down.

I have vivid memories of visiting this same Silver Springs as a bright-eyed eight-year-old on a family vacation years ago. We drove the “blue highways” in the pre-Interstate days, back when Mom and Pop motels and Monkey Jungles were far more common than chain hotels and corporate theme parks.



At the Springs, my Dad, Mom, younger brother Jack and I climbed aboard a wooden glass bottom boat that floated over water as clear as our aquarium full of guppies back home. Beneath us, beach-white sand lay on the limestone walls of the spring basin like snow. We saw bass and bream and a small alligator swimming below us, as if we were watching a science show on television. The set for the Sea Hunt TV series had been built in one cove, some of it constructed on the spring bottom. Rhesus monkeys yelled at us from the jungle-like shore. All that was missing was Tarzan and Boy swinging on the thick muscadine grape vines. And of course, that had happened too, back in the 1930’s when several of those movies were filmed here.



And when the guide gave us an earlier version of today’s narrative, I was enthralled. Where does all this water come from, I wondered—and is the pit really bottomless? I yearned to find out where the darkness beneath the turquoise waters might lead me. At eight, everything unseen or forbidden was a fairyland of possibilities, a place where the imagination could gift you with stories that, otherwise, would go untold.

It was a seminal moment for me, one that later would draw me to scuba diving soon after I moved to Florida as a young adult to live. As a diver and journalist, I went on to travel to some of the most remote sites on earth to report on the local marine environment—the distant islands of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the crater-like “blue holes” in the ocean bottom just north of Cuba, the isolated coastal reefs and cliffs off Panama, Nicaragua and Venezuela, and the sink hole-like cenotes of the Dominican Republic. All those explorations were revealing, rich with adventure and crammed with subsurface images I had never seen before. My diving partners were marine biologists or archaeologists, all working on one project or another that would advance their respective science.



The places I visited were unknown to most tourists, sites where the unexpected became almost commonplace for me. But, it wasn’t until a friend who was a seasoned cave explorer invited me to join him in a mapping expedition to Silver Springs that I truly became giddy with anticipation. As we geared up for the dive, I realized I was no longer the veteran diver-writer with a portfolio of rare and offbeat experiences underwater, a guy who would try almost anything, at least once. Instead, I was an eight-year-old again. And I was finally getting to go into inside the “bottomless pit.”


Despite the fact that thousands of tourists still float in glass bottom boats every week atop Silver Springs, the caves that feed one of the world’s most powerful upwellings are what divers call a “virgin system”—largely unexplored or mapped. Sport divers have long been barred from the spring since they would interfere with the theatrical business of spin making. And, over the years, various owners felt the danger of even a professional dive expedition created a liability that might outweigh any benefits. A dead or injured diver was problematic on so many levels—not the least of which is that it would be difficult for the World Famous Glass Bottom Boat guides to explain in an entertaining sort of way.
View of mainspring from hotel, 1886


And, there was this: “This is probably the largest cave-spring on land in the U.S.,” a geologist who had studied the hydrology of the spring told me when I was researching the springs before the dive. “But it’s incredibly difficult to explore since most of the original cave has collapsed, and there’s a diversion maze right beyond the entrance.” A “diversion maze” means limestone has collapsed over time, creating restrictions that are nearly impossible for most divers to pass beyond.

The point man in the push to explore Silver was Eric Hutcheson, an adventurer from nearby Ocala, Florida with a growing reputation as an artistic maker of underwater cave maps. With explorer and cinematographer Wes Skiles from High Springs, Hutcheson had dived and mapped Nooch Nah Chinh, the extensive underwater system of caves linked by cenotes in Mexico’s Yucatan, as well as several Florida spring-cave systems. Skiles went on to be a world class photographer and filmmaker of underwater caves, and he would bring audiences images—and messages—they would not otherwise have.


Earlier, I had accompanied Skiles and Hutcheson on a survey of Silver Glen Springs in northern Florida. With Hutcheson, I dove into a chimney-like cave in the side of a remote limestone island in the Bahamas near Man o’ War Cay. When Hutcheson approached the current owners of Silver Springs with the concept of exploring the main cave, they saw the marketing possibilities, and agreed.

Eric would chart at least some of the conduits inside Mammoth for the very first time, and when possible, collect small cave-dwelling life forms for scientific study. Later, maps and photos from the cave could be displayed at the attraction and replicas sold in its gift shops. When his divers were entering or leaving the water, tour guides could point them out to the tourists, weaving them into the myth of Tarzan and Sea Hunt, and the 20-odd movies that had all been filmed there.


Silver Springs, after all, is the archetypical Florida theme park, first created when an enterprising soul back in the 1870’s figured out a way to put a slab of heavy glass in the bottom of a row boat. At that same time, steamboats traveled up the Ocklawaha River and then onto the seven-mile-long spring run known as the “Silver River” to the headsprings here. A luxury four-story hotel awaited them, making Silver Springs and its river a mandatory stop for anyone wanting to experience the exotic jungle mysteries of this off-the-grid peninsula.


Today, we assemble our gear, lights and line that cave divers carry, and from a temporary floating platform at the shore, descend under the clear surface of Mammoth Springs. At the edge of the spring pool, I see a seven foot alligator enter the water, and then spooked by our exhaust bubbles, swim away. I notice it is far more graceful underwater than gators ever are on land. On the 30 foot bottom outside the cave mouth, a glass bottom boat glides by just overhead. The water is clear, but not as transparent as I remember it, shards of stringy algae now swirling about us.

Sitting on the bottom, I push against my mask to clear the pressure in my ears, and then ascend a few feet above the wide cave mouth. Strong flipper kicks alone aren’t enough to pull me in against the enormous outflow of spring water. Hutcheson had earlier advised me of this, suggesting the best way to enter is from the top of the mouth rather than the bottom. And so I force my way in by moving up and against the cave ceiling, just above the main force of the flow. I notice the ceiling is made of thousands of fossilized sand dollars, left from when all of Florida was once covered by the sea. Once inside, the rock opens into an expansive cavern and the strong flow has a chance to spread out; it is not unlike how the energy of a swift stream dissipates when it meets a wider river or bay in the lighted world above.

From deeper in the cave, I see flickers of Hutcheson’s light in the darkness and move towards it. As I do, I fin over the boulder-strewn floor and see remnants of large prehistoric animal bones. They are mineralized black, gargantuan in size. Long before the Europeans ever arrived, springs like this were favorite camp sites for Paleo-Indians—who stalked mastodons and bear and harpooned manatees here for food over 10,000 years ago. With the outsized bone yard below me, I am treading a fine line between myth and reality, part of me thinking this is an old stage set, part of me knowing it is real.



Although the cavern is large, boulders that have collapsed from its ceiling have created small cave-like alcoves amidst the rubble of bone and rock. I squeeze inside one of the dark openings. Down in here, I hold my light with one hand, and use the edge of the palm of the other to gently fan across the sand, as I have seen archaeologists do to find artifacts. When I stop fanning to allow the tiny vortex of sand to drift away, my light beam reveals a four-inch-long spear point cared from chert. Hidden here for centuries in the rock and sand, it looks as if it was carved just yesterday.

I gingerly turn and pull my way out of the little cave, and poke around some more on the bottom, exploring other large crevices. I see more paleo-artifacts, and finally, spot a tiny albino arthropod, a shrimp-like crustacean, flipping about in the crack of eternal darkness. I remove a small specimen collection bag from my dive vest and carefully coax the little animal into it. Many caves like this in Florida nurture endemic creatures, some of them not yet known to science. Later the little shrimp will travel to the Smithsonian where Hutcheson sends such specimens, and experts in troglydictic lifeforms will try to classify it.

From the far side of the cavern, I watch as Hutcheson removes his tank from his back and pushes it ahead of him into an even tighter “restriction” until he disappears in a cloud of silt and churning water. The cave he has entered takes him farther back under the land above, following a route that—if he were the size of a tiny shrimp—might lead him miles to soft limestone fissures below the distant uplands where rain fall seeps into the springshed itself.


I poke about some more on the bottom, following the edges of the cavern as far as I can. Under another boulder pile, I see large wooden timbers, charred black from a fire long ago. There is no way of telling for sure, but I know that the old four-story luxury hotel that sat next to Mammoth Springs burned back in the 1890’s. Hutcheson had told me others have seen charred wood down here; history shows that the burned hotel was razed, much of it simply dumped into the spring, because that is what people did in such times.



Minutes later, when Hutcheson returns from the narrow tunnel, he carries a clam fossil the size of a breadbasket. I marvel at its heft, of how clearly defined the striations of each rib still is on the surface of its shells, a bivalve forever welded shut by time. Later, after we finish the dive, he will tell me there are scores of such clams along the base of one wall, a bed of giant seabottom mollusks long extinct.

Mapping of the sort that is being done here helps scientists better understand the limitations of our Floridan Aquifer. The cave does stretch for miles into the limestone under the rolling north Florida landscape, veining out into tiny crevices and fissures, sometimes opening back up into gigantic cathedral-sized rooms. But it’s not truly “bottomless”, nor is its water supply endless. It’s a hard lesson we are now learning throughout Florida as the magnitude of our major springs declines, and our potable water supply ebbs away. It is a lesson the extinct seabottom clams learned long ago.

It is time for the dive to end and so I fin back out to the cave mouth and let its energy literally blow me out onto the bottom of the spring basin. Just as I recover and sit upright, a boatload of families in a glassbottom boat pass overhead. Despite the algae, the water is still transparent enough that I can look up through my mask and make eye contact with a little boy sitting in the boat, intently looking down at me. His eyes are big, and he seems entranced, pushing his face closer to the glass than the rest. It is a true Florida out-of-body moment, where the transect that connects us seems to shift there, for just a split second, and I am now the little boy in the boat, looking down at the bottomless pit and at the mysterious man in the mysterious suit who has emerged from it. And all the years in between disappear as if they’ve never been.

Can there be any difference between me, the bass and gators, the old Sea Hunt set, the imported monkeys, the bottomless spring? Another myth, a sacred story, in a little boy’s imagination has been created. I don’t know where it will lead him, long after I’m physically gone from this spring, this earth. But it gives me great joy to know that, in some way, I have entered the sacrosanct dreams of a child, an inviolable place. If he is careful, he might also store this moment away for a lifetime, just as the cave has stored its own relics from so long ago.

From behind my regulator, I smile broadly, watching the boat putter slowly away until all I can see now are the swirls in the water it has left behind. The other divers emerge and as they ascend, they motion me to join them. I shake my head as if waking from a long and beloved dream, and fin upwards, ever towards the light.

[diveconjeff]

What a fun read during my lunch break ! I need to dive soon....

[FW]

Thanks Shirley, seems my memory is pretty good

[Red Hat Jef]

This looks like it's part of the Silver Springs Park, and based on the article sskasser posted, it looks like the landowners have shut down all diving here? This article is from 2009 - does anyone know if anything has changed?

[metaldector]

Nice read Shirley. I took the family to Silver Springs last fall and stared down at the mouth of the cave from the glass bottom boat trying to figure out how I could bet permission to dive there. Hasn't happened yet, but some day I hope to add it to my cave list.

[ccrowe23]

Hey guys I work at silver spring I do maint. And no diving is not offered or allowed I thank theres a law that diving in the head spring is illegal.

[WEPIV]

Hey guys I work at silver spring I do maint. And no diving is not offered or allowed I thank theres a law that diving in the head spring is illegal.

You can take a boat up there (as has been done for decades) and dive (with a flag). The Silver Springs folks may not like it but they can't do much about it unless some local law has been changed for their benefit.
Even if someone tells you to get out of the water the worse thing that would happen is that eventually (perhaps) a local law enforcement boat might show up and ask you to leave.
(Which again I believe they don't have the legal right to do.)
Then, you can either leave or get a ticket/summons and deal with it legally.

[curtschu]

I think there is a county ordinace that prohibits diving there and Silver Glenn. Eric Huchenson did the Cartogaphy in the 90's He made those really pretty Blue Print style maps. If I remember there is really no swimming passage reasonably accesable Eric described pushing his tanks and using the tank to push rock just to get through. If anyone knows Eric he is one of the Original Worm divers I don't think there is a hole to small for him to get through.