There is something wired into certain people that ordinary life simply cannot satisfy. The same impulse that sends people jumping out of planes, summiting Everest in whiteout conditions, or free-climbing sheer rock faces with no rope. The pull toward the edge of what is possible and the places most people would never go.
Cave exploration sits firmly in that category. Dark, tight, unmapped, and completely unforgiving of mistakes. For most people, it is incomprehensible. For others, it is irresistible. On November 25th, 2009, a 26-year-old named John Edward Jones crawled into Nutty Putty Cave in Utah. He took a wrong turn. He never came back out.
Humans are obsessed with extreme sports, but things can go wrong faster than you'd think
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John Edward Jones was an avid cave explorer who wanted to see what the infamous Nutty Putty cave was all about
Nutty Putty Cave is a hydrothermally formed cave system located in Utah County, Utah. It's a network of narrow, winding passages that had become a popular destination for recreational cavers and families looking for an underground adventure. It was not considered an especially dangerous cave by experienced explorers. It had been visited thousands of times before.
On November 25th, 2009, John Edward Jones, a 26-year-old medical student, arrived at the cave with three others to explore a section known as the Big Slide, a vast underground space that was well-known and relatively accessible.
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Image credits: Brandon Kowallis / brandonkowallis.com
He thought he was going down a narrow passage that had a turnaround point, but he was mistaken
The group decided to venture further and check out a tighter passageway known as The Birth Canal. It was cramped and claustrophobic, as the name suggests, but it had a turnaround point at the end, a place where you could reverse direction and come back out the way you came. It was the kind of passage that pushed your limits without putting you in genuine danger. That was the understanding, at least.
John took a wrong turn. Instead, he crawled into an unmapped passageway that branched off from it. It was a passage that had no turnaround, no exit and no room to manoeuvre. He was headfirst, angled downward at roughly 70 degrees, in a space that measured approximately 10 inches by 18 inches, roughly the width of a piece of A4 paper. He could not push himself back up and was catastrophically stuck.
Image credits: Brandon Kowallis / brandonkowallis.com
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Instead, he became stuck in a cave passage that was no wider than a piece of A4 paper
The group raised the alarm, and rescue teams began arriving at the cave. What followed was an hours-long effort involving dozens of people working to extract a man from a space so small that most of them could not even reach him. Early attempts focused on attaching a pulley system to John to try to pull him free, but the physics of his position was working against them.
Rescue teams drilled into the surrounding rock, attempting to widen the passage enough to give John room to move or to give rescuers better access to him. The drilling made progress, but not enough. John had now been trapped, headfirst and inverted, for many hours. The physical toll of that position alone was becoming critical. Those closest to the situation knew the window was narrowing.
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Image credits: Brandon Kowallis / brandonkowallis.com
He was stuck upside down for hours, and rescuers couldn't find a way to get him dislodged in time
Cave explorer and YouTuber Brandon Kowallis joined the rescue effort. He was told that John had been drifting in and out of consciousness. And he had begun talking about seeing angels and demons around him. Whether it was the result of oxygen deprivation, physical trauma or something else entirely, it painted a picture of a man whose grip on the present was slipping.
The rescue team made the decision to send Kowallis back into the cave as a fresh set of eyes on the problem. He crawled in far enough that his feet made contact with John's, and he called out to John. There was no verbal response. What he heard instead was a single deep, gurgling breath. He saw some movement before John went still and unresponsive. Kowallis later said he feared that extraction might be impossible.
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Image credits: Nutty Putty Cave / nuttyputtycave.com
He reportedly said he was seeing angels and demons around him in his final moments, a detail that still haunts rescuers
By midnight, Kowallis was asked to go back in one more time to check John's vitals. Given the headfirst position John was in, getting a stethoscope to his chest was extraordinarily difficult. Kowallis did his best. He could not detect a heartbeat. He could not detect breathing. John's torso still retained some warmth, but the rest of his body had dropped to roughly the same temperature as the rock surrounding him.
A paramedic was sent in after it was confirmed there was enough space for them to fit, and John Edward Jones was officially not alive. He was 26 years old. He had been trapped for approximately 28 hours. The cause was cardiac arrest and suffocation, the inevitable consequence of hours spent inverted in a space that gave his body no room and no mercy.
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After the incident, the cave was sealed off permanently, with John's body still inside
Getting John's body out of the cave, given its position and the nature of the passage, was judged to be extraordinarily dangerous for any rescuer who attempted it. The decision was made to seal Nutty Putty Cave permanently. John Edward Jones remains inside it to this day. The cave was closed shortly after and has never been reopened.
His final recorded words had been spoken to a fellow rescuer named Susie Motola, who had climbed in to speak with him while he was still conscious. Trapped upside down, hours into the ordeal, John had said: "Hi Susie, thanks for coming, but I really, really want to get out. I'm going to die right here. I'm not going to come out of here, am I?"
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The Wilderness and Environmental Medicine Journal recorded 81 caving fatalities in the United States over a 28-year study period. But what makes John's story particularly painful is that Nutty Putty Cave specifically had already demonstrated, multiple times, exactly what it was capable of. In 1999, two teenage Boy Scouts became stuck in separate incidents within the same week, one remaining trapped for over 14 hours.
In 2004, a 16-year-old explorer became wedged upside down in a narrow passage and spent 14 hours trapped before 100 rescuers successfully freed him with a complex pulley system. Just months later, a 28-year-old man found himself in a near-identical situation. The pattern was clear enough that authorities took action, and the authorities closed the cave entirely due to extreme safety concerns.
It was only permitted to reopen in 2006, after a rigorous safety management plan was established. The new system required online registration, a mandatory reservation fee, and a strict daily visitor limit. The intention was to make Nutty Putty safer. Three years after it reopened, John Edward Jones crawled into an unmapped passage and never came back out. The cave was sealed for good shortly after. This time permanently.
Would you ever attempt a dangerous hobby like caving? Tell us what your upper limit of adrenaline is in the comments!
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