‘I tried to save doomed caver from most horrifying death imaginable – here’s why I couldn’t’
A first responder has described the final moments of John Edward Jones who went on a doomed spelunking trip to Utah’s now infamous Nutty Putty cave and never returned.
Jones, 26, suffered ‘one of the most horrifying deaths imaginable’ when he took a wrong turn and became trapped upside-down in a terrifyingly small crevice, essentially ‘crawling into his own grave’.
Unable to turn or move backwards, the 26-year-old father suffered 27 hours of hell as his family sent desperate messages of support by a two-way radio.
Now, the man tasked with the impossible job of trying to free him has spoken of his ordeal.
John Jones
A devout Christian, medical student and father to a newborn baby, John Edward Jones seemingly had the world at his feet.
Born into a large family, John and his brother Josh had been avid cavers when they were children, and sought to rekindle their love of spelunking with a trip to the Nutty Putty cave.
The brothers arrived at the cave with a party of nine other friends and relatives of varying degrees of experience- a fairly large group by caving standards.
Upon arrival, the group soon split off into two groups, with children and less-experienced adults exploring easier sections of the cave while the seasoned spelunkers went deeper.
It was here that things started to go wrong.
The rescue
John’s brother Josh was the first one to find him. Creeping forwards down the crevice just inches behind his brother, his stomach filled with dread when he saw John’s feet sticking out of the tiny hole which had swallowed him.
‘Seeing his feet and seeing how swallowed he was by the rock, that’s when I knew it was serious.’ Josh told the Salt Lake Tribune. ‘It was really serious.’
Josh tried to pull his brother out of the hole, but only managed to inch him up a little. As soon as he let John go, he slid right back into the crevice.
‘There was this, ‘I’m not getting him out,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how anyone is getting him out.’
As they waited for rescuers to arrive, they prayed together. At the end of the prayers, though, Josh could hear his own voice waiver and crack.
John began to comfort him, telling Josh it would be OK and to be good to his girlfriend.
‘The way we spoke’, Josh said, ‘it felt like John knew what the score was.’
What transpired over the next few hours was an intense brainstorming session from a rescue party, who tried every method they could to free John from his subterranean prison. In addition to pulling him, they also tried lubing the walls and drilling away chunks of rock near John, but the hard material and the awkward position made the drilling slow and painful work.
After drilling over for an hour, they abandoned this approach after only managing to drill through a couple of inches of rock.
Disaster strikes
Eventually, the team came up with a plan to pull John to safety using a complex system of ropes and pulleys, which they would attach around his feet.
‘How are you?’ one rescuer asked.
‘It sucks. I’m upside down. I can’t believe I’m upside down,’ John responded. His eyes were red and looked tired but otherwise, had a smile on his face. ‘My legs are killing me,’ he added.
The team decided to take a quick break to regain their strength before making the final push. John was nearly out. But as they grabbed hold of the rope for the fourth and final time, something disastrous happened.
All of a sudden, the entire team fell backwards, and the rope became loose in their hands. The closest rescuer felt something hard hit him in the face, and momentarily blacked out from the impact. At the very last moment, one of the pulleys had collapsed under the strain and flown off the wall, sending John plunging right back into the crevice – even deeper than before.
John himself had become unresponsive. At this point he had been trapped for over 25 hours and his body had begun to break down from the stress and strain.
In a blog post, explorer and YouTuber Brandon Kowallis spoke of first arriving when Jones ‘was in and out of consciousness’ and talking about seeing ‘angels and demons around him’.
‘I went in first’, he wrote. ‘As I wormed my way in I felt my feet touch something soft which ended up being John’s feet. I felt them move and immediately lifted my feet and worked my way horizontally into the crack.
‘After stabilising myself by jamming my body into a narrower section of the crack I began speaking to John asking him how he was and introducing myself. There was no response.
‘I shifted my position a little and tapped him on the leg. I could hear him breathing a deep, gurgling breath, as though his lungs were filling with fluid.
‘Then his feet shifted as though he were trying to manoeuvre his legs out of the crack he was jammed in.
‘The kicking looked fairly frantic and after a second he stopped and it looked as though he had drifted into unconsciousness.’
He added: ‘I continued tapping him on the legs and hip to see if I could get a response, but there was no response.
‘From there I spent a few minutes studying the passage, the positioning of John, and the rig that was set up, to see how we could get him out from here. It looked very bleak. I wondered if it was even possible to get him beyond this point.
‘There was a request to take the radio down to John so that his family could say some words to him. I think it was his father, mother, and wife who spoke to him, telling him that they loved him and were praying for him and that his father had given him a blessing. His wife mentioned a feeling of peace, that everything would be OK. She talked to him about 5 to 10 minutes before I told her that we needed to get back to working at getting him out.’
‘At that point I decided to try using the jack hammer. So we waited for it to arrive and then I carried it down to where John was located. The tool was much heavier than I anticipated and to hold it up while wedging my body in the crack took everything I had. Even then, I couldn’t get a good angle on the rock because of the confined space and limitations in my own mobility and positioning.’
He added: ‘And even if we could get him into a horizontal position, he would then have to maneuver the most difficult sections of the passage he was trapped in.
‘If he were conscious and had his full strength there was a minute chance he could possibly do it. But even if that was the case it looked grim’.
He estimated it could take a week to free him using this method but now it was close to midnight and he was asked to check vitals on John.
‘I didn’t hear a distinct heartbeat, only some ruffling, fluttering sounds that were probably a result of me shaking as I tried to steady myself in an awkward location. I then jammed my hand between the rock and pressed as far up his torso I could go to feel for breathing. I didn’t think I felt anything.
‘I reported my findings to the paramedic above and then crawled out so that he could see if he could squeeze in.
‘He was able to get down to the point where he could feel his feet and confirm he had passed away. John Edward Jones was pronounced dead at 11.52.’
His wife Emily, still outside, refused to leave her husband’s body trapped inside the cave, and the local Sheriff assured her they would recover it.
But even following his death it was deemed too dangerous to attempt to recover his body, and the entrance to the passage he was trapped in was collapsed with controlled explosives.
Once it became clear that John’s remains couldn’t be safely removed from the cave, Nutty Putty was permanently sealed off and John’s family had a plaque put on the entrance of the cave in his memory.
Jones’s body remains entombed inside the dark cave to this day – his death becoming a cautionary tale about the dangers of spelunking.
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