Missouri Cave Diving
It was way too early in the day, but the sun was setting anyway. Jerry had taken me on a tour of Mine La Motte, showing me the swimming area, the boat dock, the camping area, and the place where cave divers entered the mine. I was now out on the roadside waiting for Crawford to show up so we could dive. The large metal sign had been blown down in a tornado that had come through last March, it's 8-inch diameter steel supports bent over to the ground as if a giant hand had simply squashed the sign. Signs of destruction were everywhere, trees uprooted or snapped off, cars and trucks broken and rusted among the trees, blue poly tarps covering houses in various stages of rebuilding. I had spent an hour driving around searching for the road to Mine La Motte, missing the downed sign several times, but had taken an interesting tour of the aftermath of a major tornado. The destruction path was clear. A great scar, a swath, a laceration of the land, cut through the woods before and after the small town, and totally destroyed many homes as it cut through the middle of the town.
Crawford showed up as the sun dipped below the horizon leaving us just enough light to sign in and drive down the slope to the edge of the water filled mine. This was a pre-civil war lead mine; hand-dug in the days before machinery. Unlike Bon Terre, this mine had no guide; we were on our own.
We geared up and entered the water. It was after dark and our lights flickered above and below the water as we made the short surface swim to the squared off entry, which was partially submerged, partially exposed. The near-full moon and translucent wisps of cloud provided an eerie subdued light like the kind they use to film horror flicks. We were alone at the site, no other divers, no campers, no sounds except the rustle of dead leaves and water lapping gently on algae-covered rock. We descended just inside the opening to a depth of 8 feet. I tied off the line to a old metal post and we entered the overhead. I ascended and looked around inside the large air pocket, like a pond in a cave, then descended again to find a place for the secondary tie-off. A few more feet in and we found the cement-filled bucket with the permanent line and tied off the reel at 12 feet deep.
The viz was poor, no more than 20 feet, and the water had an orange appearance. I realized it was not the water that was orange, but our lights that were reflecting off the rusting iron metal of mine work. Pipes lay everywhere, and as we proceeded deeper and further in, rusting tracks, pick-axes, and cables were scattered about as if the mine was abandoned in a hurry. The viz improved and we saw the smooth cut and rectangular angles all around us. We went from tunnel where a human could walk upright, to large rooms where the ceiling and far walls were not visible. We followed the line around corners, over humps, up and down inclines impossible for a person to climb or walk without ladders. I searched for the ladders the miners of over a hundred years ago must have used, but didn't see any.
The line T-ed off, or rather W-ed off, so to make sure we knew which to follow I placed a cookie behind the exit arrow (there are several lines with exit arrows, leading to different exits. I had heard that one exit was the old elevator shaft and depending on the water level, a diver may or may not be able to climb out of the shaft (at least it was air, even if it didn't provide an exit to the outside). We swam on and came to another T, then another, and by now we had 40 feet or better of viz and we say lines everywhere. It was a spiderweb of lines, none of them gold, all of them knotted with line arrows, with dates. Station tags were attached every so often to one of the lines indicating that a survey was still in progress (some the line arrows were dated 1999).
We turned the dive early; the maze of lines concerned me and all the T's and W's we had passed and marked left me concerned about a slit out and trying to follow the right line out under zero viz conditions. This was an easy place to silt out. There was very little flow; only the entry seemed to have any flow at all. The bottom was thick soft thin silt that clouded up the water and would not settle or move. Buoyancy was critical here. And what with all the ups and downs, from 60 feet deep to 15 feet deep in a few yards sometimes, it was an exciting endeavor to maintain buoyancy involving breathing, constant BC adjustments, and drysuit deflations/inflations. I don't think I've dumped and inflated so often so much anywhere else. It was great practice at dumping air from the drysuit by turning the body without letting the feet drop into the silt. When possible, I'd grab a rock ledge high off the floor and take a moment allowing the air to work it's way up from my legs to my chest and out the dump valve, before proceeding up and over and back down again.
As we left, the flow picked up and small silt clouds I made with one hand spread forward with the current. By the time we reached the reel I could feel the current pushing my fins around in front of me, so I rode the spin and finned to a stop to retrieve the reel. The last 200 feet or so was shallow, so our safety stop was on the fly. We exited easily, back into the moonlit night of the main pool. That night we camped right there at the edge of the water, had a late dinner of grilled chicken, baked potato, green beans, and a salad, with a couple of beers to toast our success.
The next morning we left for Cannonball. But first we had to get refill our tanks. This took us into Poplar Bluff, to the Ozark Dive Company, a local dive shop. Ed, the owner/manager was friendly and obviously enthusiastic about local diving. We talked while the tanks filled, got lots of good information, and then left to drive up to Lake Wapappello. Cannonball Spring is in the lake. It's a hole in the bottom of the lake.
We met Bill and Steve at the top of Blue Spring Bluff at the north end of the lake. Bill and Steve were old-hand Ozark cave divers. Crawford had dove with Bill before and had arranged this dive for us. We met and talked and reviewed the entry procedures. From the parking area (way out in the woods of the state park and lake), we had to walk a dead-leaf path down a steep bluff to the rocky edge of water, enter, swim out to a marker they had set up earlier that morning, and descend down a thin line through no-viz lake water to the mouth of the cave. It looked difficult and it was. But we did it and as we descended the thirty feet to the bottom, all of a sudden the water cleared and I could see!
The bottom was rock-strewn, like big orange sharp-edged gravel, loose with no tie-offs, and the current was kicking! The entry was narrow, a chest and tank scraper for sure. I got totally negative and crawled on my belly, but soon discovered that it was easier to push off the ceiling with the heels of my rock boots than to try to pull and glide through the loose chunky gravel. Bill led the way, Crawford followed, then me, with Steve bringing up the rear. That was the plan, but once we got in and past the fastest part of the current, I could see only two lights, one ahead of me and one behind. The viz was not so good, and with four divers it was possible that I would not be able to see everyone. But I did wonder, so flashed my light to get the attention of the diver ahead of me. I then turned to check with the diver behind me, asking with counting fingers, 1,2,3…., but where is number 4? I was unsure just who I was talking too, but soon realized that Bill was ahead, Steve was behind, and Crawford was missing! We searched a minute, cupping our lights, shining them here and there, and then just as we decided to turn the dive and exit, we saw a light coming towards us. It was Crawford. Later we learned he had lost the line on the way down (in the zero viz lake) and had had to surface, locate the float, and come back down again.
All together again, we proceeded with the dive. It was dark, the water milky, much like Tennessee caves, but with better viz. The contours of the walls were like Florida caves, solution caves carved out by the flow, but the ceiling was flatter, darker, as if a more dense rock formed a slab across the bottom of the lake. It was an odd feeling to realize we were in an underground river running under the lake it fed. I wondered if there was another hole in the bottom of the lake where the water siphoned, where the river continued underground flowing south and east to the Great Missouri or to the Mighty Mississippi. I began to get that giddy feeling that comes when you see yourself as a speck, as if looking down on yourself from a skyscraper. There you are among the crowd, an ant busying himself with antish antics, going to and fro. Then you zoom out and see the town ant-like, then the sphere of the Earth and then the solar system and so on until you are but a mere virus and finally even less than a sub-atomic particle in a universe.
Dead fish lay on the silty bottom. This dive too is a difficult dive. It is very silty, poor viz, with places a lost diver could go and not find the way out. Small dark side passages, convoluted overhangs with deep depressions and fractures wide enough to go back up in thinking it was clear passage out, only to find a dead-end that at once confuses and frightens. Air to breathe, Lights to see, Buoyancy to hover: thank God for these. But the decaying carcasses of large fish add to the difficulty. In various states of decomposition, they are everywhere you look. Ribs with flesh still attached, remnants of organs, identifiable scales, fins, and the occasional globe of an eyeball, staring silently at you, absorbing, not reflecting the light from its' once living retina. I was reminded of my time in the military and how serving as a medic in Ft. Benning, a civilian-type job on a post larger than most towns in America, I was called to the scene of an accident and found those same eyeballs, loosened from sockets, staring mindlessly from the squashed body of a dead child who chased a ball into the street….that year of ambulance service was far worse than the year in Vietnam, where the same thing was understandable - it was done on purpose there, with intention, and thus was expected, justified.
I shook off the past, and switched to fiction, thinking of the movie "The Cave" and the creatures that ate human flesh, that surely must have killed these fish, ate the good parts, then left the rest to rot. They are here watching us now. I smiled to myself and checked the depth: 53 feet. Too shallow to be narc'd. Bill's light drooped and then began to make small circles on the bottom. I too made small circles with my light, and then turned a bit to make small circles to Crawford behind me. He returned the ok signal and I watched as he turned to ok Steve.
The bottom got rocky again, the dead fish left behind in the silt, as if we had passed through a fish graveyard, like an elephant graveyard, and I wondered if fish had a graveyard, if maybe that's how these large dead fish came to be here. They came here with a purpose; it was time to die. Then the bottom opened up. There was nothing but blueish-dark void beneath us. Beside us was gold line stretching across a vast emptiness of liquid space. Particles in the water reflected back to my eyes like the stars from space and Bill's bright light, dimmed by the translucence of the milky-blue water, was the near-full moon. For a moment I was outside under the Milky Way canopy of stars and moon - space-walking.
The gold line ended at a thicker white line that dropped straight down. With loops spaced every so often this line led to the bottom at 180-200 feet. This was a funnel-shaped cave, with a narrow side entrance leading to a main room, the top of the funnel, and then spiraling down to the deep, tornado-like. At the bottom another tunnel descending further, perhaps to 300 feet or more.
We stopped at 88 feet and scanned the perimeter with our lights. Nothing was visible in any direction. We stayed only a few minutes then turned the dive. We rose up along the thick white line to the gold line, then followed it back to the rock wall with our passage home boring through it. On the way out, the current seemed to pick up, I suppose from the progressive narrowing of the passage, and I noticed more ledges and crevices, arches and corners than I'd noticed on the way in. I worked my up towards the ceiling and let the current propel me 15 feet above the floor, where the line snaked along the bottom. The vertical viz was excellent and I could see, below me and ahead, Steve and Crawford frogging along, and behind and just below was Bill gliding along appearing to catch the slight current by the positioning of his fins.
I looked ahead again as a rock ledge jutted out, exhaled and reached for the rear dump-valve pull-string, turned slightly to one side and passed just under it, rose up the other side on the inhale, saw another ledge ahead, further down, so tucked and ducked and arched under that one and back into the wide but low passage, the fish graveyard.
We were soon back in the gravel bed, at the beginning of the mainline, where Bill retrieved his reel. We ascended, doing the safety stop on the reel in the cold lake water with no viz. I looked down and just below me was Bill, his light like a candle flame would flicker an orange spot up at me. I'd flicker mine back, not knowing if he saw me or realized I was replying. We stopped for three minutes, then four, then five and I began to wonder what was going on. I hadn't seen Bill's light in awhile, which added to my anxiety. Then I saw it flicker again and thought I'd best go down and check, wondering if it would do any good. I couldn't see a thing. Maybe I'd drop right into an entanglement mess and join Bill in the struggle to get free…. But then his light grew brighter and larger and I could see him coming up. I turned and ascended with Bill on my heels. At the surface we saw Steve near shore and Crawford's bubbles off to the side. We watched his bubbles for awhile then decided to go have a look. I followed the bubble trail down and there was Crawford holding an old soda bottle, showing me excitedly! Cool. But I was tired and a bit cold, so surfaced and left him to play. He joined us a short while later and we all definned, climbed the steep slope (Whew, it was a climb!) to the parking lot.
We talked a bit and shook hands, packed and drove off, going our separate ways. Four divers, three states, we drove home. As I drove I reflected on the last two days of diving in a Missouri mine and a Missouri cave, wanting to return and do both dives again. They say there are more caves in the Wapappello. Caves unexplored. Caverns measureless to man. As Ed, at Ozark Dive Company, said to me, "Sheck Exley once said that if he 'didn't have Florida, he'd be diving in Missouri caves.'" I can see why.
-skip
Welcome to the Cave Diver's Forum.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by mgersch
Bookmarks