It was a wonderful fall afternoon yesterday as we climbed out of the manhole entrance to Indiana Caverns. Colin Wieckowski, the youngest member of the cave development team, turned to me and said " they (his friends) would never believe what we are doing in there. I never got this muddy as a kid." That was coming from a farm boy growing up on the sinkhole plain south of Corydon not far from the cave. We walked straight to the hydrant to wash off an extra 10 lbs of mud each of us was toting.

This is my third venture in the show cave development area so I should have known what I was getting into. However time seems to dim my memory of how hard and how nasty the work of developing a show cave can be. It is no wonder that only cave explorers or the government undertake show cave development these days. The government has such deep pockets and has no problem with spending our money, so they still develop an occasion cave at a cost probably quadruple what a private developer would spend. Cavers are used to being in miserable places crawling on their belly in cold water with their head tilted sideways and one eyeball under water. They love caves so much that they want to show their favorite places with the public.

Yesterday afternoon I found myself standing in high top boot deep suck mud at the bottom of the drop from the Indiana Caverns entrance passage down into Big Bone Mountain Room. The afternoon’s task was to start making a level area big enough for the base of our 3 story staircase that will bring visitors down into the heart of Indiana Caverns. The only problem was the age-old breakdown present at the bottom of this drop when cave explorers first entered Big Bone Mountain two years ago was now buried under 2-3 feet of suck mud and large rocks that fell from the floor of the passage above in a rain event about three weeks ago. This was not a good development!

The new entrance to Indiana Caverns is in the basement of the visitor’s center. Right now the visitor’s center basement is a dirt walled bathtub of 5,000 sq ft and the cave entrance is the equivalent of the bathtub drain. When a heavy rain hit, after a few minutes waterstarted running down the bathtub drain and into the cave. As this water tumbled over the edge of the drop off and fell 30 feet to the floor below, it began loosing mud and clay that held large rocks wedge into the upper part of the canyon passage in place. Soon rocks weighing several hundred pounds and several tons of the sticky clay were being dislodged from their resting place for the last 15-50,000 years and heading down. The day after the rain, the cave crew had to send more rocks and mud that had been loosed and were precariously perched down too.

Now three weeks later, we were down there dealing with the consequences. Over the course of 3-4 hours Friday afternoon, each of us got completely stuck numerous times in the goo. We were all wearing high top rubber boots. The depth and holding power of the sticky clay mixture was such that often our socked foot would come out of the boot when the boot itself would not budge. As the oldest, the youngsters often had to help me extricate myself. It would have made a great video. We could see humps in the suck mud that represented rocks that had fallen and were now standing on edge or on end completely bured in this sticky morass. Our job, if we accepted it, was to uncover and remove them.

All of our cave team are cavers so everyone had experienced being in gross places and miserable situations. However I had the feeling that none of them were overly joyed to be a part of the project today. Soon all our tools-sledgehammers, picks, mining bars etc were so muddy that it was nearly impossible to keep a grip on them. We were often reduced to using our gloved hands to scoop up gobs of suck mud and throw it down into opening in the breakdown where it would not interfere with the base level for the staircase.

It was truly miserable work. We finally were able to undercover a few rocks and reduce them to rubble with a combination of sledgehammer blows in addition to drilling small holes and placing small explosive charges. Finally quiting time came. We had made some progress. Everyone would have two days to recuperate and forget how fun it was before Monday arrives and we get to do it again.

Last night this experience got me thinking back to 1972 when I was young and we were drilling the 55 ft shaft at Squire Boone Caverns. That was undoubtedly the hardest and most miserable experience of my life. Then I thought back to developing the Dripstone Trail tour at Marengo Cave in 1979-80. I walked off the job for a few days in the midst of drilling that tunnel. That was probably the second worst experience of my working life.

Now here I am again stuck in the suck mud after having spent the summer in the eqivalent of a dry swimming pool drilling a cave entrance in 105 degree temperatures of the hottest year of my lifetime. This probably already qualifies for the third hardest experience of my work life. Let’s hope it doesn’t move up any higher on the list. Cave development probably isn’t for everyone. I am not as young as when I experienced #! and #2. What did I expect? I really should have known – shouldn’t I ? But the years had dimmed my memory of the pain and hardship. Maybe that is the way it is supposed to be? Most of us probably wouldn’t take a risk or undertake a challenging project, if we really could see what would be required of us. Oh well, too late to think about such things now!! I still have another day to rest before we go back at it.