When 26-year-old John Edward Jones went on a spelunking trip to Utah’s famous Nutty Putty cave in November 2009, he never expected to become an urban legend.
But after his caving adventure went horribly wrong, Jones suffered one of ‘the most horrifying deaths imaginable’ when he became trapped upside-down in a terrifyingly small crevice.
Nearly 15 years after the tragedy, Jones’ body remains entombed inside the cave, and his death has become a cautionary tale about the dangers of spelunking.
This is the story of the Nutty Putty Cave Incident.
The Nutty Putty cave
Located around 55 miles outside of Salt Lake City, for years the Nutty Putty cave was a well-known tourist attraction and was widely regarded as a good ‘beginner cave’ for wannabe explorers.
First discovered in 1960, the cave quickly became famous for its unusual formation, full of narrow, winding passages which opened up into a series of huge subterranean caverns.
The different sections of the cave were labelled according to difficulty, with names like The Birth Canal, The Aorta Crawl, The Scout Eater, and The Maze providing warnings to potential spelunkers.
‘It was a crawly little cave,’ said Richard Downey, treasurer and historian of the Timpanogos Grotto which once managed access to the Nutty Putty.
‘There were also some larger passages. It was believed to be really easy and that’s why all of your Boy Scouts and locals went in with flashlights and sandals and things. You had to work hard to get in trouble,’ he told How Stuff Works in November 2023.
Due to its popularity, which saw thousands of visitors descend upon the cave every year, it was inevitable that a few inexperienced cavers would eventually find themselves in trouble.
From 1999 to 2004, six people became stuck in the cave and had to be rescued. Although they all made it out of Nutty Putty safely, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office became weary of the safety hazards and feared the next incident would be fatal.
As such, in 2006 the cave was shut down to the public for three years while the Timpanogos Grotto implemented a number of safety procedures, including padlocking the entrance at night and setting up an online reservation system for wannabe spelunkers.
They thought the upgrades would make the cave safer for exploration. They were wrong.
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.
Entering the Nutty Putty cave
For the first hour or so of their excursion, things appeared to be going well for the Jones brothers- they had explored the largest section of the cave, nicknamed ‘The Big Slide’, and were eager to head even deeper into the depths.
John suggested they explore a section of the cave known as ‘The Birth Canal’- an extremely challenging route that involved squeezing through a long, narrow passageway which eventually opened up into a large, cavernous area. He first heard about the route as a young boy and had been eager to explore it for years; not taking into account how much he’d grown physically in the interim.
The pair discovered an extremely tight opening in the walls which they wrongly assumed to be the entrance to the Birth Canal, and crawled into the tiny hole. John went first; wriggling deeper and deeper into the narrow passage headfirst under the assumption it would soon widen and open up into a large cavern.
But unbeknownst to the brothers, they weren’t in the Birth Canal at all- they had accidentally taken a wrong turn and headed into an unmapped part of the cave. John kept pushing further into a tunnel which had no endpoint, squeezing himself into the crevice without any means of turning around.
So John kept going forward, still thinking he was in the Birth Canal. Eventually he came across a fissure in the rock which dropped down nearly straight down in front of him, which he thought opened up into a cavern which would give him a chance to turn around.
So John sucked in his chest to investigate the fissure, sliding his torso over a lip of rock and down into the 10-inch-wide side of the crevice. But when his chest expanded again, he was stuck. Attempts to free himself only made John slide deeper into the hole, and he soon found himself trapped upside-down, with his hands pinned to his chest, in a crevice which measured just 10 by 18 inches- smaller than the entrance to a front-loading washing machine.
At this point, all he could do was wait and pray.
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.
After saying a quick prayer, Josh left his brother and headed back to the surface looking for help, and soon drew a large crowd of volunteers and professionals.
The first person to arrive on the scene, Susie, was a local rescue volunteer who immediately dropped everything to come and help John. After inching her way down the tunnel with ropes tied to her feet, she finally encountered his trapped body, nearly three hours after he first got stuck.
‘Hi, John, my name is Susie. How’s it going?’ she asked.
‘Hi, Susie, thanks for coming, but I really, really want to get out,’ John’s voice replied.
‘Oh, no worries, John,’ she told him. ‘You’re going to be out of here lickety split.’
Susie tied a rope around John’s feet and tried to pull him out herself, but due to the tightness of the angle and the narrowness of the cave, there was no way to manoeuvre his body out of the crevice he had become stuck in.
What instead transpired over the next few hours was an intense brainstorming session from all members of the 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.
Due to the narrowness of the cave, the system took hours to install, and despite there being a large team of rescuers, volunteers, emergency services, and a rescue helicopter outside, only one person could directly access John at a time.
John, meanwhile, was starting to struggle. Having been stuck upside-down for a long time now, he was starting to have trouble breathing and his heart was beating twice as fast in order to counteract the gravity to push the continuous flow of blood out of his brain.
Nevertheless, once they got started the pulley system appeared to be working, and slowly but surely John found himself getting lifted out of his subterranean prison. He was able to communicate with his wife via a two-way radio which had been brought in to him, and at one point he had even been lifted high enough to make eye contact with the rescuer closest to him.
‘How are you?’ the 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 pulley’s had collapsed under the strain and flown off the wall, sending John plunging right back into the crevice- even deeper than before.
At this point, all hope was lost. One of the rescue team tried to re-enter the tunnel to drill a new hole and tie a fresh rope around John’s legs, but almost became stuck himself and had to crawl out of the cave.
John himself had also 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.
A doctor was eventually able to reach him and pronounced the cave diver dead of cardiac arrest and suffocation on November 25.
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.
According to Downey, many of the volunteer rescuers had become so traumatised by the experience that some of them never entered a cave again.
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.
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