Have any funeral or other memorial details been shared?
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Have any funeral or other memorial details been shared?
A great guy, a legend! RIP Forrest.
Sorry to hear this, but not unexpected. Forrest (2 R's) and I dived Indian few times. Talked about people we both met back in the 70's. He had a good sense of humor, and good tales to tell. For a while, we swapped antique gear back and forth (I still have his Nikonos). We cussed at airplanes we owned (he built his own, of course). RIP Forrest.
"Have you ever noticed
When you're feeling really good
There's always a pigeon
That'll come shiat on your hood?" John Prine 4-7-2020
"Into the blue again; in the silent water
Under the rocks, and stones; there is water underground" Talking Heads
He was a great guy and I enjoyed working with him during my first stint on the NSS-CDS board, his love of the cave diving community shone through in everything he did.
RIP
Ken Sallot
When I was new to the sport, Forrest was of course one of the celebrities that I learned about. The first time that I ever actually met the guy was at Dive Outpost during a holiday dining extravaganza put on by Cathy. I was amazed when he walked up to me, introduced himself, and began chatting like we were long time friends. I spoke with him a lot over the years and gained a wealth if information. He was one of the few people that was 110% forthcoming with his ideas, success and failures of his homebuilt bailout rebreather when I was researching to build my own. I will never forget Forrest and will be forever grateful for the opportunity to know him.
No naked pictures, just dive stuff. Click Here
I got to do some exploration dives with Forrest in Smithsonia Cave, near Florence, AL. I fluked my way into a cave that he'd been trying to dive for 30 years. We put in some line and left a pinger in the cave so we could locate it from the surface because the landowner wanted to know where to sink a well to irrigate his cotton field. I held the end of line honors for a while, but eventually that cave got pushed back to over 6000' making it the longest underwater cave in Alabama.
Great cave diving notwithstanding, getting Forrest's signature in my log book was the real treasure. I was lucky to spend those few days with him.
RIP
Back in 2002 we were all sitting around the table at Dive Outpost after one of. Cathy?s dinners. I mentioned I wanted to learn side mount. This was before the Armadillo. He grabbed some supplies and took my harness apart and changed it into a side mount harness. Used tire inner tubes for bungees Changed the placement of the wing. Worked great! Wish I still had that harness.
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roadkill
He requested no service and to be cremated. not sure if anything will or will not be planned. I would love to have a memorial at a local brewery tho....Originally Posted by Arctic Mike
Hated to see this thread initially, (as we all did), but then reading through all these posts brought back a lot of memories and reminded me of some of my own talks with him at workshops and dive sites/shops, etc. He was helpful and supportive to many and I'll miss him.
For those who may not have seen it or may not use social media, Jill Heinerth wrote a nice tribute on her page.
*********************
As many friends now know, we recently lost an icon in cave exploration. I've put together a few words and I hope it does justice to a friend I will not forget.
Forrest Wilson: The Explorer Who Never Stopped Moving
Some people leave behind discoveries. Others leave behind inventions. The rarest leave behind generations of explorers who see the world differently because they crossed paths with them.
That was Forrest Wilson.
If you met Forrest, you could be forgiven for thinking he looked like a long-lost member of ZZ Top. His shock of white hair and flowing beard made him instantly recognizable. But it was his smile—equal parts curiosity, kindness and quiet mischief—that people remembered most. He carried the infectious enthusiasm of someone who never lost the wonder of being a child.
Perhaps that is because, in many ways, he never did.
Growing up as one of seven children, Forrest often joked that his mother's only rule was to be home for supper. It was a childhood filled with freedom. His father, a radiologist, regularly took the children to university lectures while they were still in elementary school. One speaker left a lasting impression on the eight-year-old Forrest: Jacques Cousteau. Among his many stories, Cousteau offered one simple piece of advice that Forrest never forgot: if you ever go into a cave underwater, take a guideline.
At fourteen years old, Forrest made a promise to himself that would define the rest of his life. He resolved never to stop moving.
He never did.
He studied physics at Loyola University with minors in mathematics and computer science before working at the Baton Rouge Planetarium, where he helped automate projection systems while saving money for diving equipment. Later he worked at the Smithsonian Institution, but no career could contain his restless curiosity. If something interested him, he learned how it worked, then figured out how to build a better version.
In an era when almost no cave-diving equipment existed commercially, Forrest simply made his own. He designed reels, cave lights, underwater camera systems, an early sidemount configuration and even experimented with building rebreathers. Away from diving he built a hang glider, raced motocross motorcycles, automated planetariums and even stepped away from diving for fourteen years to build an airplane from the ground up.
Innovation wasn't a hobby. It was simply how Forrest's mind worked.
He began diving in the late 1950s and discovered cave diving in 1969. He became an open water instructor in 1974, completed his first sump dive the following year, and in 1978 became a cave diving instructor and the first Training Director of the National Speleological Society–Cave Diving Section. During a lifetime of exploration, he completed well over 2,000 dives in more than 200 caves across twelve U.S. states and ten countries, including Mexico, the Bahamas, Australia, France, England, Wales and the Dominican Republic. He was also the first person in the United States to lay a continuous mile of guideline beyond a sump—a remarkable achievement during an era when every foot of exploration demanded ingenuity and determination.
Yet one of Forrest's greatest contributions came from solving a deceptively simple problem.
In the earliest days of Florida cave diving, permanent guidelines were uncommon. Divers carried their reels into caves and reeled them back out when they left. When permanent lines finally appeared, there was still no reliable way to indicate the direction to safety. After a tragic fatality at Peacock Springs in 1976, Lewis Holzendorf developed temporary duct-tape, "dorf" markers. They worked, but they deteriorated quickly.
During an early NSS-CDS Workshop, Sheck Exley asked Forrest to lead a discussion that eventually produced the durable plastic triangular directional line arrow that cave divers around the world still use today.
Forrest hand-built the first hundred arrows and brought them to a dive shop in Branford, Florida. When he returned with another batch, the owner laughed.
"There are only ten caves," he said. "If you put ten arrows in each cave, that's a hundred arrows. You'll never sell another one."
History had other plans.
Today, millions of those little arrows quietly guide cave divers home. Countless lives have been saved by an idea that began with Forrest asking a simple question: how can we make this better?
But equipment was never what defined him.
His greatest legacy lives in people.
Forrest had an extraordinary gift for spotting potential in others. He constantly invited younger divers into projects, taught without ego, shared knowledge freely and celebrated other people's successes as enthusiastically as his own. He understood that exploration is not measured by the places we reach, but by the explorers we help create.
He was equally devoted to protecting the caves he loved. When Cow Springs Cave suffered extensive vandalism and graffiti, Forrest engaged artist and sculptor Michael Gagliardi to restore the damaged clay banks. In one of those delightful coincidences that Forrest seemed to attract throughout life, the two men emailed each other at almost exactly the same moment—each offering the other's help before either had read the first message.
It was a fitting partnership for someone who always saw possibilities where others saw problems.
Even into his seventies, Forrest continued pushing into unexplored passageways. He lived the promise he had made to himself as a teenager, proving that exploration is not reserved for the young but for the curious.
Per his wishes, there will be no funeral.
Instead, his family and friends hope to gather the stories and photographs that reveal the remarkable life he lived. It is an appropriate tribute because Forrest was never interested in monuments. His memorial already exists in the caves of the world, in the directional arrows clipped to permanent lines, in innovations that have become so commonplace we forget they were once revolutionary, and most importantly, in the countless explorers who carry forward his generosity, wisdom and insatiable curiosity.
Forrest Wilson never stopped moving.
And because of him, neither will the rest of us.
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