Being stuck in that position for going on 23 hours now makes it very difficult for him. On the 24th of November 2009, Jon Jones, a 26-year-old medical student and devout family man, was back home in Utah with his pregnant wife and their young daughter for the holidays. During the stay, he and a group of 10 other friends and family members arranged a trip down to the Nutty Putty Cave system.
This was a supposed beginner's cave located near the family's home in Salt Lake City, but the trip would quickly turn into a hellish nightmare, causing one of the most unusual and arguably terrifying deaths in caving history, leading to the Nutty Putty Caves being sealed shut forever. This is the story of the Nutty Putty Cave incident. Be warned: this is not a story for those with claustrophobia.
The Nutty Putty Caves, first explored in 1960, were notorious for their narrow and slippery passageways, twists, and turns. The cave system is accessible by a narrow hole just 30 inches wide and was reported to be an extremely popular beginner's cave, welcoming anywhere from five to twenty-five thousand visitors a year. However, after a series of high-profile rescue missions between 1999 and 2004, the cave's safety was widely and publicly called into question.
All of these incidents involved people becoming stuck in the smaller passageways of the cave, including a 23-year-old man who became stuck for more than seven hours just meters away from the place where Jon Jones would find himself trapped. In another incident, a local teenager became stuck upside down for an entire night before he could be rescued. Because of these high-profile incidents, in May 2006, the Nutty Putty Cave entrance was gated and rendered inaccessible.
For several years, local cavers— or spelunkers, as they're known in the U. S. — battled local authorities who were threatening to close the cave for good.
Officials stated that the caving system was a ticking time bomb and that it was only a matter of time before somebody was killed. However, local spelunking groups argued that shutting the cave down would be unfair to serious cavers and that people should take more responsibility for their own safety. It's apparent from the comments and letters written into local papers that some people felt extremely passionate, even indignant, about its potential closure.
One letter to Utah's oldest newspaper demonstrates this: "I'm tired of the government deciding it knows what is best for us. Nutty Putty Cave has been a fun spot for me; both of my sons now love going to that cave. I hope somebody can tell me how many people have been hurt or killed; I haven't heard of any.
Possibly a sign telling of the risks involved should be placed by the cave so that we as Americans can decide for ourselves what is best. " As the war waged on, finally, in September 2007, the caves were officially closed to the public while a new volunteer management team was put in place. This was a last-ditch attempt to prevent the cave's complete and permanent closure.
Then, in March 2009, the Nutty Putty Caves reopened with a brand new cave management plan. The new plan enforced a process that required would-be spelunkers to apply for a permit 21 days before their visit and agree to follow certain safeguarding procedures, such as having a minimum of two people per visiting group that were, and I quote, "experienced cavers. " So it was under these circumstances that 26-year-old Jon Jones and his then 23-year-old brother, Josh Jones, plus nine other members of their friends and family, entered the Nutty Putty Caves on the 24th of November 2009.
When the group entered the cave at 8 PM local time, they would have been confident. While Jon and his brother had not visited the Nutty Putty Caves before, they had spent much of their childhood exploring Utah's caves. In fact, as a small boy, Jon had more than once acted as a trapped victim for the Utah Cave Rescue Team, a group his father had helped found.
But the reality was that Jon and his brother hadn't been spelunking in years, and there is a great deal of debate as to whether Jon and his brother could act as experienced cavers on behalf of their group. Nonetheless, for the first hour, everything went well as the party explored the largest room in the cave, called the Big Slide. It was at this point that his brother, Josh, and their two friends challenged each other to go further on into the next part of the cave, taking on one of the most difficult to navigate areas known as the Birth Canal.
This part of the cave is so tight that only a few people can actually access it. Eventually, the Birth Canal passageway opens up into a small room. Several people had become stuck in the Birth Canal previously, but Jon, a fit, healthy, and slender man in his prime, wasn't worried.
Heading through the passageway first, with his brother behind him, Jon wriggled on just his stomach down what he thought was the entrance to the Birth Canal, but Jon unknowingly had taken a wrong turn down an unmapped passageway via a route known as the Corkscrew, a place where only the smallest and most flexible of cave explorers could fit. As Jon pushed forward, the passageway became tighter and tighter, and he became unable to turn back. When he saw what looked like a small opening at the end of the crawl space, he continued on with hopes of being able to turn around.
Unfortunately, this is where things took a turn for the worse, because Jon was crawling headfirst into a 10 by 18-inch fissure that dropped straight down. Worse still, Jon had sucked in his chest to slide past a lip of rock. to get into the fissure, meaning that when his chest expanded again, he became completely trapped in an area the size of a small front-loading washing machine.
John made several attempts to free himself; it was no use. It was at this point that he began calling for his brother. When Josh finally found John, for a split second he thought that this would be a silly story to tell later on that evening.
But as he examined the situation more closely, dread settled in. Josh made several desperate attempts to free his brother, but none of them worked. In fact, he had made the situation worse.
John had slid further down into the passage and was now completely upside down, with both of his arms pinned to his side, unable to move at all. It was at this point that the two brothers realized that they needed help. Josh alerted the rest of the group and left a friend to stay with John as he rushed out of the cave system to a nearby hill to get reception and call 9-1-1.
Knowing help was on the way, he went back down into the cave where his brother was still pinned upside down. It would be three hours before help would arrive. At 12:30 a.
m. , the first rescuer arrived on the scene. It was Susie Mottola, a local volunteer, who immediately rushed to the scene when she received a message on her pager.
Right away, Susie realized that John's predicament was much, much worse than she had thought. She knew she had to keep John calm, and so she greeted him and told him that he'd be out in no time and not to worry, to which John replied, "Hi Susie, thank you for coming, but I really, really want to get out. " Susie tried absolutely everything she could think of to pull John out, including cutting off part of his jeans to free up some space.
But after two hours, Susie was exhausted and unsuccessful. She was forced to crawl back up to the surface, where at this point both his wife and his daughter and around 30 rescuers had arrived on the scene. They, a very concerned but calm group, were brainstorming plan after plan.
They discussed everything from breaking John's legs to lubricating the walls with several gallons of oil, but eventually they decided upon a system of ropes and pulleys to hoist John out legs first. This pulley system would be aided by drilling some of the rock around him to create more space. Members of the rescue team made their way to John with the equipment, but they ran into problems.
The rock wasn't coming away quickly enough, and removing what did come away from the wall was proving impossible to do safely—not least of which because the rock was falling back down onto John. Back at the surface, the rescue team, now in their hundreds, were all becoming increasingly concerned. Things were moving slowly.
Each trip to pass a piece of gear to John's location, 700 feet deep within the cave, took an hour, and only one person could ascend or descend down the passageway at a time. To make matters worse, when rescuers told on-site trauma surgeon Doug Murdock that John was upside down, Doug made the team aware that this likely meant that John would only have 10 hours before his organs would fail. The human body is designed to be upright; the heart works with the force of gravity, and if it can't, blood and fluids quickly begin to pool in the brain and lungs, and eventually it becomes extremely difficult to breathe.
On top of this, the heart begins to work overtime, and it becomes increasingly difficult to pump blood around the body, which can lead to cardiac arrest. This was something Susie noticed within the first hour of working to free John: a distinct rattling noise coming from his chest, a clear sign that fluid was pooling in John's lungs. He was already starting to asphyxiate.
The rescue team decided that the immediate goal should be to get John out of his dangerous position to alleviate the pressure on his lungs. The team got to work immediately to install the first system of ropes and pulleys, but they quickly ran into several problems. John's legs and feet couldn't bend back around the curve of the shaft he had slipped into.
On top of this, the lip of rock that he had breathed in to slip past was catching on his chest. It was, as one official put it, the worst possible place to be stuck. Nonetheless, the team managed to hoist him up enough to elevate his position slightly and administer IV.
Unfortunately, just moments later, this first pulley system failed, and John slid back down into his original spot. At this point, John was swinging in between a state of calm and panic, and so a decision was made to bring a two-way cable radio into the cave so that John could speak with his wife. The conversation was tense, but it did serve to keep him calm enough for the next system of ropes and pulleys to be installed.
Finally, after 19 hours, a team of eight were ready to pull, but there was a problem: each pull was agonizing for John, and the team had to pause several times to avoid breaking his legs. And then a glimmer of hope—on the third pull, John was lifted up high enough to make eye contact with his rescuer, who later commented that his eyes were red, his face was dirty, but that he seemed fine otherwise. When the rescuer asked him how he was, John said, "It sucks.
I'm upside down. I can't believe I'm upside down. My legs are killing me.
" The rescuers saw that even though John was complaining, he had a smile on his face, and then on what was to be. The fourth pull disaster struck. They had a raising system that was helping to hold him in position.
One of the devices that was part of that system failed, and Mr Jones actually ended up falling back into the area where he had been stuck for so long. The system had failed. The entire team fell backwards.
When the team regained composure, they realized that the worst thing imaginable had happened: a bolt that was drilled into one of the cave's walls had come out, causing part of the cave to crumble. This had hit the lead rescuer in the face, causing him to momentarily black out. Worst of all, Jon had slid back down into the crevice and had now become completely unresponsive.
With the rescuer closest to Jon now needing medical attention, a second lead rescuer took his place, satisfied that Jon was, in fact, still breathing. In a state of desperation, the new rescuer somehow managed to slip a rope around Jon's waist, but he himself became stuck and needed help from other members of the team, sustaining multiple injuries in the process. A third lead rescuer made a last-ditch attempt to free Jon by desperately drilling away the rock around him, but it was no use.
The entire team was exhausted; Jon was barely breathing and was still unresponsive. He had gone into cardiac arrest, and tragically, there was nothing anyone could do. It was at this point that Jon's wife, Emily, was informed of the situation.
Jon was technically alive but unconscious. In her desperation, she believed that he could still survive the ordeal and continued to radio down. In one of her final communications with Jon, she said, "I know you've been pushing so hard for so long.
Why don't you rest for a minute and take a break? Then you can push again. " At this point, while they couldn't officially confirm it, rescuers suspected the worst, and so a brave paramedic was sent down to take a pulse, confirming what everyone had suspected.
At 11:56 PM on the 25th of November 2009, John Edward Jones was pronounced dead, 28 hours after he had initially become stuck. Emily was initially in complete disbelief; she refused to believe that her husband could die from such a simple mistake and did not accept that a pulse taken from the leg could indicate that he was dead. Eventually, officials managed to calm her down, agreeing that they would do everything in their power to remove her husband's body from the cave.
Not wanting to let a grieving widow down, the team discussed what was reported to be some rather distasteful plans to get Jon's body out, but this would prove to be impossible. Even if they were able to free Jon, his lifeless body would not be able to twist properly in order to be fully removed from the cave, at least not intact. It was decided, given everything that had transpired, that it was simply too dangerous for the rescue team to attempt to remove his body.
So, a decision was made to seal the entrance of the cave with concrete, with John's body inside forever. Jon's family had a plaque installed on the entrance of the cave in his memory. Later, the family would release a statement where they said that John Edward Jones, husband, father, and pediatric cardiologist in training, would be remembered for his "good nature, delightful sense of humor, strong work ethic, a genuine love of people, a masterful ability to relate to children, a love of and unwavering faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and his commitment to his family as an amazing husband, father, son, and brother.
" To this day, John’s remains are still inside the cave, serving as a harrowing reminder of the very real risks of cave exploration. This is the Real Horror Channel, the place for all things really horrifying. If you enjoyed this video, please consider liking and subscribing, and I'll be back with more real horror soon.
