Hello everyone, and welcome back to Scary Interesting. In this video, we're gonna go over three cave stories that have all of the elements that make cave exploring terrifying. There are tight squeezes and horrific injuries, but they're gonna be different than you expect.
You'll see what I mean, and as always, viewer discretion is advised. [intro music] New South Wales is an Australian state that sits on the country's eastern side, and the very first people to reside there are believed to have arrived in the area around 60,000 years ago. In what is now New South Wales live the Burra Burra people, and living in an area of about 4,100 square miles, they occupied land that included The Blue Mountains, which is a range of deep valleys, high ridges, and dangerous terrain.
One particular spot that the territory includes is a system of caves that the people referred to by a word that translates to "dark places", but today, it's known as the Jenolan Caves. The history of these caves goes back much, much further than the aboriginal Australians who explored them tens of thousands of years ago though. Speleologists have determined that the cave's beginnings go back to around 340 million years, making it the oldest known open cave system in the entire world.
They're also some of the most visited, too. With artwork left behind by aboriginal people on the walls, along with marine fossils and beautiful calcite formations, the things to see inside the Jenolan Caves began drawing tourists in droves in the early 1880s. By the start of the 20th century, exploration and mapping of the system expanded greatly, and all of the work was done by candlelight.
And the resulting discoveries earned the Jenolan Cave status as a world-class cave system that includes 25 miles of passages and more than 300 entrances. As tourism increased the caves, so did efforts to make them as visitor-friendly as possible. Permanent lighting, stairs, and handrails were added to some sections, making the cave accessible to almost everyone.
And with such an expansive system, the Jenolan Caves offers tourists a variety of experiences. The portions that have been retrofitted with manmade safety features are known as "show caves". The next and more challenging step-up from that experience, tourists can also opt to visit 10 different "dark caves", which also feature stairs and handrails, but offer a more natural setting with the absence of permanent lighting.
Lastly are the aptly named "adventure caves", and they are completely untouched and can be self-explored or visited as part of a guided tour. Surprisingly, it's actually the adventure caves that have produced the fewest emergencies despite being the far riskier option. In fact, most medical technicians and cave rescuers in the area have never even been called to an emergency inside the adventure caves.
But that all changed in early of 2024. On the afternoon of March 30th, six cavers from the National University Caving Club of Canberra arrived at the Jenolan Caves for a four-hour self-guided cave excursion. Despite its touristy reputation, the caves are a favorite destination for the club due to its location and the untouched portions, so the group was well-acquainted with the system, but not the area they were planning to explore that day.
Either way, once they arrived, they wasted little time gearing up and made their way toward the entrance. For the better part of those four hours, they squeezed through body-sized tunnels and around tight obstructions while exploring a section of the cave containing a spot called "The Rho Hole". This would be the last but most claustrophobic restriction of the day.
When the group reached The Rho Hole, the first four members started worming their way through the closed quarters before the last two members, Tim and Eliza, would go. The two decided that Tim would go first, so he ducked his head into the tunnel opening and started to inch his way toward the exit. What none of them knew until they entered this section, however, was just how tight the walls go the further in you go.
It was easily the most challenging squeeze any of them had experienced, but the first four made it through with little issue. As Tim was scooting forward on his elbows with his shoulders folded in to make his profile as thin as possible, he quickly came up to a bend, but a full body's length from the tunnel entrance. This also happens to be where the hole goes almost completely vertical and is still super tight, so traversing it requires a bit of twisting and turning.
Tim contorted his body to match the contours of the tunnel at the bend, but almost immediately, he knew something was wrong. A piece of rock jutting out of the tunnel wall had caught him just right to pin him in place. He tried wiggling and squirming to try to get himself free, but he couldn't go forward or backward.
In just seconds, he was completely trapped, and as a result, so was Eliza in behind him, because this was the only exit in the vicinity. More alarmingly though, the position of Tim's body when he got stuck started a clock he may have known nothing about. He was almost totally upside down, and if you know the infamous story of the Nutty Putty Cave incident, you're likely well aware of how dangerous this is.
For those not familiar with what happened at Nutty Putty Cave, in 2009, two brothers went caving when one of them entered a crevice he thought was a tunnel. By the time he realized dead end, it was too late, and he was almost entirely upside down with no way to push himself back up the slope. For almost 28 hours afterward, hundreds of rescuers worked to try to free him, but the extremely tight passages and the angle he was stuck at made it an incredibly challenging effort.
Then, tragically, the following day, the man passed away from cardiac arrest as a result of the position he was trapped in. In this upside down position, the heart has to pump a lot harder than usual to keep blood circulating throughout the body. After a long enough period of this increased workload, the heart will simply give out, and relatively speaking, it won't take long for that to occur.
When Tim realized he was legitimately stuck, he called out to the others, but no one who had already been through the restriction could get back up to him. So, at 7:20 pm, the call came in to emergency services that had rescuers rushing to the Jenolan Caves. And as soon as the rescue leader arrived, he knew this would be an extremely complex attempt due to the space limitations all around where Tim was and his inverted positioning.
Before any work to free him could get underway, paramedics entered The Rho Hole to check on him and provide him with water. While this was happening, the rescue leader came up with a plan. Noting the piece of rock that had Tim pinned in the tunnel, he believed the key to freeing him was to chip away at the tight walls.
So, entering the cave headfirst and face up, the rescue leader made his way to just below where Tim was suspended upside down. After he explained to Tim what was about to happen, he pulled out a drill and started making holes in the jutting portion of the rock wall to make it easier to chip away. Like a mechanic would lie underneath a car, he worked at the rock above him as the drill sprayed shards into both him and Tim's faces.
When he was satisfied that he could start chipping away, he pulled a chisel out and told Tim to stay as still as possible. Then, just inches from Tim's nose, the chisel started to make contact with all as he carefully swung it. For almost 10 hours, the rescue leader worked away at the rock by himself in the tight, dark confines with Tim's life hanging in the balance.
But, finally, at 4:45 on the morning of Easter Sunday, Tim was able to advance through The Rho Hole, and he would walk out of the Jenolan Caves that day under his own power. Behind him, Eliza cautiously maneuvered her way through the tunnel and walked out shortly afterward as well. And despite their ordeal and how disastrous it could have been, both he and Eliza were in good spirits.
As it turned out, the area where Tim got stuck was only about 130 feet, or 40 meters from the cave exit, meaning he became trapped less than 10 minutes from the end of his adventure that day. On November 6th, 2021, friends George, Melissa, and Mark met up for a day in the outdoors together. They set off in the direction of a cave known to be the deepest in Britain and part of the longest system in Wales.
Altogether, the cave has nearly 40 miles, or 64 kilometers of tunnels, and the only thing more intimidating than the maze-like network beyond its many entrances, is its name. It's name is Ogof Ffynnon Ddu, which is Welsh for "Cave of the Black Spring", but the abbreviation "OFD" is more commonly used to reference it. It's located in the Upper Swansea Valley in South Wales, and it was discovered in 1946 by members of the South Wales Caving Club.
Around one o'clock that afternoon, the three passed through one of the entrances and began what they expected would be a five-hour exploration. For about twenty minutes, they crawled through the tight network of tunnels on their way to explore lesser-visited areas known as the caves The Smithy and Upper Smithy. After a while, they came to a rift, and connecting the two ledges of the rift were three large boulders that had fallen from above sometime within the previous 10,000 years.
This just so happened to have created the perfect bridge from one ledge to the other for cavers. So, the three passed over the boulders with no problem and kept going before learning that the tunnel they were in was a dead end. They then turned around and started heading back the way they came, with George bringing up the rear.
Once again, they reached the rift with the boulder bridge, and Melissa and Mark made it over without issue. But when George was making his way over the boulders, the rock gave way under his weight. George then disappeared into the darkness of the rift, and the only sign of him was a loud thud as he hit the rock floor below.
Melissa and Mark immediately screamed for him and shined their headlamps into the rift, and there they saw George was lying on his stomach motionless. One of his legs was clearly broken, but that was probably the least of his injuries. That's because the fall was about the equivalent of a three-story building.
The two quickly decided that Melissa would stay with George while Mark left to get help. Melissa then lay on the ledge on one side of the rift, calling George's name, and a few minutes passed before Melissa heard George groan. It was a horrible gurgling sound, but at least he was still alive.
Soon after, he started to respond to Melissa's calls for him and seemed to be loose enough to know what was going on. Suddenly though, he cried out in pain. Melissa then watched as George turned his body so that his head would be above his feet.
When he fell, he landed on a downward slope with his head lower than his legs. It wasn't an extreme angle, but it was enough to put pressure on his insides, and the pain was almost unbearable. George was clearly suffering from internal injuries, and the pressure on his midsection made it hard to breathe.
Even more horrifyingly, the other problem was the large hole in his cheek that was filling his throat with blood, which was the source of all the gurgling sounds. He had also lost a lot of teeth, which only increased the amount of blood continually blocking his airway. Even still, in several agonizing movements, George managed to claw himself 180 degrees and roll himself onto his back.
Finally, he just lay there in intense pain from all the movement, but he was at least a little more comfortable and was able to keep from choking. With that sorted out, George figured he could just lie there and wait until help arrived. Melissa, on the other hand, had no idea what was going on below her.
All she heard was George's primal screams of pain, and she assumed that he was dying. In her mind, if George lost consciousness, he might never wake up again, so she started barraging him with questions about his life, girlfriend, and work. George only responded to everything with one-word answers, but as long as he was talking, he was alive, and that's all that mattered.
While she had her hands full keeping George awake, Mark was racing through the corridors of the cave system. It would end up taking him a half an hour to exit the cave, get his cell phone, and place a call to emergency services. By the time they arrived at George's side, he had been lying there for more than four hours.
It was immediately clear to medics that George suffered massive injuries-- the extent of which couldn't be determined or effectively addressed until they got him to a hospital. As he was being assessed, outside the cave, rescue volunteers were showing up in droves. Before long, 300 of them had arrived, ready to assist in getting George out.
It was then decided that he would need to be strapped to a backboard and carried the entire distance. Getting him to safety would require a different exit route, too. Going back the way he came in was out of the question because of the many tight squeezes and sharp turns along the path.
Unfortunately, all the more accessible routes were much longer than the way he'd come in, but even still, to save him, the only reasonable plan of attack was to take him to the top entrance. Medics then splinted George's leg and gave him a few shots of morphine, but it clearly wasn't enough as he cried out in pain. Around 4:30 on the morning of November 7th, he was finally lifted from the rift, and his long journey to the outside world began, although concerns were still high that George wasn't going to make it.
With ropes rigged to the backboard, George was lifted, pulled, and pushed in a number of directions to get him to the large tunnel that would begin to lead them out. And while it was the biggest tunnel in the cave, there were still several sections that would be a challenge. One stretch of the cave rescuers would have to navigate was an underground river that was chest-high on many of them.
It wasn't as simple as just crossing it though; they'd have to transport George more than a mile downriver. Then beyond that, the rest of the way was full of vertical shafts and other challenging obstacles. When they finally reached the last tunnel, which was tall enough and wide enough to fit them, more than 250 volunteers formed a human chain and passed George to one another in the direction of the exit.
When he finally saw the sky above him at 7:45 pm on November 8, 54 hours had passed since he entered the cave. The trip to the opening alone took him two full days. He was then rushed to a vehicle, then to an ambulance, and finally, he arrived at the hospital.
Once he was there, the extent of George's injuries could finally be assessed, and the list was extensive. In addition to a leg with a compound fracture, a large hole in his cheek, and a handful of missing teeth, George's jawbone was broken in several pieces which was determined to be the cause of the opening in his face. Additionally, he had three broken ribs, a dissipated collarbone, a lacerated spleen, a collapsed lung, and a broken bone in his wrist.
He would end up needing two surgeries on his jaw and leg to rebuild both, but George survived it all despite the odds. Sometime later in his retelling of the experience, George said he was climbing over the rift one moment, and the next moment, he was flailing in mid air. When he came to, he knew he was in a lot of trouble.
Then between the time of the fall and when medics arrived, George wavered between believing he was going to escape with his life and not caring if he died. Maybe the most painful part for him, as he joked afterward, was answering all of Melissa's questions. He remembers lying there, thinking that he just wanted her to shut up already, but in a clear state of mind, he knew that her efforts were crucial to his survival.
He also doesn't have any memories of about 12 to 18 hours of being carried out, but he fondly remembers the last stretch when he passed by hundreds of happy faces that showed up to save his life. George ultimately made a full recovery and still lives for adventure in a number of settings, including both dry and underwater caves. In 1995, a team of scientists and avid cavers came across a rather unassuming hole in the Alps along Germany's western border with Austria.
It had been sitting there for centuries, but considering how small it was, it's understandable that it was missed until then. When it was spotted, the team had low expectations of how deep or extensive the inside might be, so imagine their surprise when they realized they'd stumbled on the country's deepest and longest-known cave system. Dubbed "Riesending Cave", which fittingly translates to "massive thing", the system includes nearly 12 miles, or 19 kilometers of tunnels that run to a maximum depth of 3,766 feet, or 1,148 meters.
There's something notably different about this cave than many others covered on the channel though. Riesending Cave is considered a pit cave, meaning it's mostly vertical. From the entrance, the cave immediately drops more than 1,300 feet, or 400 meters through a pretty wide shaft.
This ends in a short horizontal area called The Collector. From there, the cave is out to descend a tighter and more extensive shaft that drops as much as 1,640 feet, or 500 meters. From there, the cave goes horizontal once again in an area called The Long Strait, and this extends another 4,900 feet, or 1,500 meters.
Now, among the group that discovered the Riesending Cave in 1995 was physicist, speleologist, and cave enthusiast Johann Westhauser. Almost 20 years later, on June 7th, 2014, Johann and two colleagues squeezed their way into the entrance to Riesending Cave to begin what they considered a routine exploration. Johann in particular was intimately familiar with the cave, having been inside its shafts and chambers many times before.
At 52 years old, there was also no slowing down for Johann, and the highly technical cave was still well within his ability level. It was around lunchtime when the three cavers entered Riesending, and a little more than 12 hours later, they had made it to an area called Six Bays near the very end of The Long Straight. Then at 1:30 am on the morning of June 8th, a loud noise interrupted their exploration, and a moment later, Johann was hit in the head and chest by a massive rockfall.
It's unclear what caused the large chunks of rock to rain down on him, but it was certain that Johann was in trouble. The blow to his head would have been much worse if he hadn't been wearing his helmet, but even with it, the rockfall gave him life-threatening injuries. The other two cavers rushed over to check on his condition, and it was immediately clear that Johann would not be able to make it out under his own power.
He was It was relatively coherent, but his struggles to walk or even remain on his feet indicated that getting him to safety would require much more equipment and manpower than they had between them. And all three of them knew this was an incredibly dangerous scenario they were facing. There was no cell phone or radio reception inside the cave, and they were about as far away from the entrance as they possibly could be.
The distance from the area where Johann was injured to the entrance was almost 4 miles, or 6 kilometers, and a 12-hour climb for a perfectly healthy caver. And the longer they delayed doing something, the longer it would take for help to reach Johann. So they decided that one of them would remain behind with Johann while the other set off alone to reach the entrance and call for help.
Later that night, three groups of rescuers arrived outside of Riesending Cave and began to make their way into the tiny entrance. One of the first things they did was set up a communication system that would allow those inside the cave to relay and receive information using text messages. This system is called a cave link system, and it utilized wires that the rescue teams ran from the entrance all the way to Johann's location.
Obviously, this would be a crucial piece of equipment for such a challenging and tactical rescue. More generally, the difficulty of what rescue teams were undertaking came down to three things: distance, space, and cave configuration. Johann was at considerable distance from safety because he wasn't able to walk out; he'd have to be carried by hand through some very narrow passages.
On top of that, about half of the route out of the cave was completely vertical. As the three rescue teams continued to make their way towards Six Bays, the location of Johann's accident, more help continued to arrive from both Germany and Austria. State and federal police helicopters transported rescue volunteers and crucial supplies to the cave entrance.
And by the next day, a full-scale operation had formed outside the cave. When the first rescue teams made it to Johann, they assessed his condition and the situation, and determined that there was no way he could get out under his own power at all. As things continued to get organized, messages from inside the cave were being sent through the cave link system to those in charge.
Considering that Johann had a brain injury and was rendered immobile, one of the first priorities was getting a doctor to him, but it would take three agonizing days before one reached the accident site deep inside Riesending Cave. When several physicians finally made it to him on June 11th, they believed he had a traumatic brain injury, but determined that he was well enough to be moved. With that settled, work got underway throughout the cave to set up ropes, pulleys, footrests, and more that would aid rescuers in extracting Johann from the cave.
This would go on to be a colossal effort. Like, for example, one Bavarian mountain rescue team used about 90% of the total equipment they had and others contributed just as much. While this was going on, Johann, the doctors, and several cave rescue team members waited in Six Bays until everything was ready to go.
By the time that moment came, it was already June 13th, and Johann had been in the near-freezing cave, unable to move for five days. After Johann was cleared by physicians to be transported out, he was wrapped in what resembled a large red sleeping bag insulated with styrofoam, with only his face visible. This was to keep him warm and prevent him from becoming hypothermic.
Johann was then placed on a stretcher that would be connected to the rope system that rescuers needed days to set up. And although his condition required medical intervention at a hospital right away, rescuers weren't going to rush anything. If there was any hope at all in getting Johann out alive, they'd have to move meticulously.
Additionally, rescue organizers had to consider the well-being of the individuals working to save Johann. To keep the situation as manageable as possible and allow rescue teams to rest, organizers set up six different temporary camps with the goal of moving Johann in stages split up by these camps. Finally, just past 5:30 pm on June 13th, the process of removing Johann from the cave got underway.
One of the most technical spots for rescuers to negotiate was actually right where the accident took place. Six Bays is a tangle of narrow corridors and short vertical shafts, and in fact, it took almost eight hours for rescuers to get Johann to the first camp, just less than 300 feet, or 91 meters above the scene of the rockfall. Once there, the rescue team took a brief moment to catch their breath before continuing on.
Thankfully, they were by then in the horizontal Long Straight, and the next few thousand feet or so would be the easiest section. "Easy", however, is a relative term, and while the team was able to get Johann to the second camp just more than two hours after arriving at the first, it took another 12 to go the next 300 feet and the better part of another day to reach the third camp. In order to get to the third one, rescuers had to get Johann through a short section of a couple hundred feet that was extremely tight.
If you've ever been inside an MRI machine, the closeness of this space inside Riesending Cave is comparable. So, strapped securely to the stretcher, Johann was lying on his back, staring at a ceiling that was only millimeters away from his nose. And he stayed like that for more than 12 hours while rescuers pushed and pulled his stretcher through the tight squeeze at a hair at a time.
Finally, just after noon on June 15th, the team had reached the third camp, putting them right at about the halfway point. It had certainly been slowgoing to that point, but things were about to get even slower because next, the rescue team had to pull Johann vertically for the better part of 3,100 feet, or 950 meters. The short passage to the third camp also took a lot of the rescue teams which worked in groups of 15 people.
At any given time as well, as many as 60 rescuers were inside the cave working to get Johann to the surface. After giving him about 10 hours to rest on the third camp, the process of hoisting him upward got under way. It was a grueling operation that required as much strength and manpowers could fit inside the cave.
And unfortunately, there wasn't any machinery that could be brought in to make lifting the stretcher easier on the rescuers, so this is where they had to get creative. With Johann attached to one end of several ropes, rescuers were attached to the other ends with harnesses and acted as counterweights much like the way an elevator functions. Utilizing a pulley system, the cavers attached to the ropes would essentially allow gravity to pull them down while the stretch on the other end traveled upward.
It was a process with a lot of starting and stopping, and it took nearly eight hours to raise Johann to a small ledge that served as the next camp. It would then require another 26 hours to reach the one after that, and an additional 28 hours to get Johann to the final camp. By that point, it was the afternoon of June 18th-- 10 whole days since the rockfall struck Johann.
Yet, his condition was stable, his demeanor was calm, and his awareness was fairly lucid. Throughout the entire journey, he kept one of his arms inside the red sleeping bag and the other free to provide what little help he could in pushing himself toward the cave exit. Then, during the late morning of June 19th, rescue results of the cave finally got their first look at Johann as they peered down through the small cave opening.
Finally, at 11:44 am, he was lifted out of the cave and met with the cheers of hundreds of rescuers who had spent 11 long days working to save his life. Johan was then carried over to a waiting helicopter and transported to the hospital. The road to recovery would be a long one, but by 2016, he was able to get back to caving.
This was the second-largest cave rescue ever undertaken anywhere behind only the rescue of a Thai boy's soccer team and their coach in 2018. During the 11 days it took to get Johann out of Riesending Cave, more than 700 rescuers took part in the rescue, representing the countries of Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Croatia, and more. In 2015, it was announced that the total cost of Johann's rescue would be close to 1 million euros, and according to reports, Johann was expected to pay back a large portion of that amount.
The rescue was also so extensive that it took six years to clean the cave, as more than one ton of garbage related to the effort needed to be hauled out. Riesending Cave was also sealed shortly after Johann's rescue and it now requires a special permit to enter. If you made it this far, thanks so much for watching.
If you have a story suggestion, feel free to submit it to the form found in the description, and hopefully, I will see you in the next one.
