GOODING, Idaho (AP) - In the darkness 45 feet below ground, three fantastic spires guard a low passage decorated in cave coral.
Between 5 and 6 feet tall, the Three Sentinels are towers of drips and blobs and mini lava tubes. They’re all rock, but it seems that at any moment they might sway or grunt warnings in an alien language.
One Sentinel is black, like the basalt familiar to southern Idahoans. Its neighbor is strangely mottled by gray and white. And the Sentinel on the left is exotic red-brown rock. Thousands of years of evaporation have covered it in feathery brown mineral fronds, like sea creatures, their white tips sparkling in the light of cavers’ headlamps.
These three in Jawdropper Cave are the largest extrusion spires known in Idaho. About six miles northwest of Gooding, Jawdropper’s loops and passages are lava tubes, formed as the surfaces of a river of molten lava solidified into basalt while the lava inside flowed and drained away.
The Sentinels are beloved by a small and historically secretive corps of local cavers. But these days the Silver Sage Grotto is recruiting members, and its cavers escort the uninitiated into this and other gated caves on public land.
Still, you won’t get into Jawdropper if Silver Sage Grotto leaders aren’t convinced you’ll respect the underground art gallery. And they don’t give out cave locations.
Shon Gerard of Bellevue was among four Silver Sage Grotto members who took two journalists and a Bureau of Land Management employee to Jawdropper on May 15. As they approached the Three Sentinels, Gerard expressed a shared sentiment:
“I’m so glad nobody ever found this cave.”
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Somebody did, of course - in the 1980s. But the “nobody” Gerard means are the people who party in caves, leaving behind trash and graffiti.
Magic Valley’s serious cavers clean up those messes. They also try to educate the public about protecting caves’ geological and archaeological value and the bats that hibernate in them.
But in a handful of caves around southern Idaho - dubbed “sacrifice caves” - the spelunkers have stopped fighting the partiers.
One of those is Dead Horse Cave, not far from Jawdropper. As often as cavers cleaned up Dead Horse, Steve Frye said, someone else came along to drink beer with his buddies or declare undying love in spray paint.
The Hailey man is chairman of Silver Sage Grotto, one of three Idaho clubs associated with the National Speleological Society. He’s a passionate protector of the fragile and the vulnerable.
On May 15, Frye sprayed down fellow cavers’ boots and gear with Formula 409 between one cave visit and the next. Cavers follow decontamination protocols though white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease killing bats across the eastern U.S., hasn’t been found in Idaho or adjacent states.
Inside Jawdropper, the big tooth of a camel or horse is marked by a ring of rocks. Gypsum crystals, clinging like frost to basalt, float down in a caver’s breath. A smoothly wrinkled floor - like the disturbed surface of a pudding - wears a crust of evaporite minerals, and dripping water has scoured leopard spots into the crust.
As fellow cavers positioned lights for a photographer documenting the Three Sentinels, Frye pointed to the ceiling, where gas-filled molten lava solidified into dangling bulbs.
“If we come in and break it, it’ll be broken forever,” he said.
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Heavy metal bars block the crawl-through entrance to Jawdropper.
The cave’s mouth is at the bottom of a rocky hole on the desert, where a section of lava tube collapsed. Part of the metal is removable to open a small, square gate - locked, and labeled with a Bureau of Land Management phone number.
Make the call, and you’ll talk with Blaine Potts, BLM’s Shoshone-based outdoor recreation planner for Craters of the Moon.
“If they call for a permit, anybody can get in,” Potts said.
But you’ll need to allow at least a couple of weeks for paperwork and scheduling. To issue a general entrance permit for a restricted-access cave such as Jawdropper, the BLM requires a resource adviser to accompany the group, which may total up to eight people.
Advisers designated for each cave have been in that cave at least three times and are knowledgeable about its vulnerable resources and its dangers. Many of them are Silver Sage Grotto cavers.
“Generally we just choose from the grotto population or from our office staff,” Potts said.
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The paperwork is the easy part of getting into Jawdropper.
You’ll crawl over piles of loose breakdown, your nose a few inches from the dirt. You’ll suck in your belly and raise your ribs to maneuver past a sharp corner of rock just inches from the opposite side of a tight passage. Even where you can walk, it’s often at a crouch.
And basalt doesn’t forgive. If a kneepad or elbow pad slips, you’ll get a painful surprise in the next crawl space. Even in a helmet, bumping your head is memorable.
Tiny reflectors placed on the floor of Jawdropper confine the damage of cavers’ footsteps to a narrow corridor and steer them around sensitive areas like stalagmites, stalactites and descriptively named lava formations - Hanging Thumbs, Sitting Trolls, Ropy Floor. In one direction, you’ll see the red side of each reflector. Turn back toward the cave mouth and you’ll see a path of white.
Cavers’ mnemonic is a nod to the dangers of their enterprise: “White, light. Red, dead.”
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In darkness, it’s no wonder headlamps dominate the gear talk.
The May 15 cavers’ first destination was Gypsum Cave, about 12 miles northwest of Shoshone - the second-longest lava tube in the lower 48 states.
“OK, guys, we’re going to kick the sun on here,” said Jeremy Callen of Filer.
That seemed an invitation to admire his new headlamp, a $97 model with enviable LED output.
On his $15 helmet, Bruce Jennings of Buhl wore a $600 headlamp of machined aluminum, custom built in Bulgaria. Built to withstand extreme conditions, it can run a spotlight and a floodlight simultaneously.
“It took three months for the guy to build it and get it to me,” Jennings said. At the time, it used the newest, hottest emitter. In another three months, it was outdated.
LED technology is moving fast, Callen said, as they hiked through a Gypsum passage wide enough for easy four-abreast conversation. “Ten years from now, these will be a joke.”
Frye chimed in with his battery power and lamp features. A few minutes later, he discovered his battery was dying - an occasion for ribbing from Callen.
“That’s because I used it all year and never charged it,” Frye said.
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You’ll need powerful lights to fully appreciate the size of Gypsum. One section of the cave has six traversable layers of tube, separated by rock. Pieces of the dividing rock collapsed, leaving huge rooms with multiple stories - and precarious sidewalks clinging to the walls.
On May 15, Gerard, Potts, Callen, Jennings and Frye spread out on several layers to illuminate photographs of a big, complex room. Patient with the photographer’s changing instructions, they showed off Gypsum with proprietary pride.
Chris Anderson, a Silver Sage Grotto founder, remembers surveying Gypsum in 1998. Hoping to claim the designation of longest lava tube in the lower 48, Anderson and a caving buddy jammed themselves into every hole that might add feet to the cave length traversable by humans.
That fame went instead to Washington’s 2.735-mile Deadhorse Cave, but Gypsum’s 2.682 miles is impressive nevertheless. (A cave’s total length tallies all traversable passages, including those that lie atop one another. North America’s longest lava tube is Mexico’s Ferrocarril-Mina Inferior, at 3.851 miles, and the world’s longest is 40.7-mile Kazumura Cave in Hawaii.)
Groundwater that leached calcium from wind-blown silt worked its way into Gypsum Cave, forming crystals of calcium sulfate dihydrate. For years Gypsum was known as Cocaine Cave for that fine, white powder. Before the cave was gated in the late 1990s, locals trashed it with parties and disturbed bat hibernation with fireworks.
“We’ve only been seriously gating caves for the past 20 years, at least in this area,” Potts said.
Even behind a gate, Gypsum is vulnerable.
A capsule just inside the mouth holds a logbook that cavers sign. The May 15 group found discouraging news in the most recent note, left by a member of the Boise-based Gem State Grotto in August 2014. “Seems as if the Chocolate Factory had new damage,” it read.
About half a mile from the entrance, the floor in one arm of the cave is a flat expanse of chocolaty brown rock, fractured into sharp-edged bricks.
Callen’s explanation: “Willy Wonka had some excess waste.”
Anderson’s explanation later: At one point, this part of Gypsum was wet. Rock powder ground off by glaciation and transported here by wind accumulated in the cave, forming loess that dried and cracked.
But the chocolate color puzzles even him.
Despite its years of violation, this ancient underground world retains some mystery.
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Information from: The Times-News, https://www.magicvalley.com
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