US newsGoing back for James
Forty-one years ago, a young man named James Mitchell died in a cave in Dolgeville, New York state. His death changed potholing for ever, but his body could not be recovered - until now. Leo Benedictus reportsIt is one of the founding legends of modern caving. For the past 41 years, the story of James G Mitchell has been told and retold by potholers around the world, just as Joe Simpson's escape from Siula Grande (as brilliantly portrayed in Touching the Void) is still feverishly recounted by mountaineers. Except James Mitchell did not escape.
On February 13 1965, Mitchell, a 23-year-old scientist, arrived in the village of Dolgeville, upstate New York. He planned to spend the day exploring a nearby cave with two friends from the Boston Grotto Club - a nurse called Hedy Miller, and Charles Bennett, a Harvard postgraduate. The cave had been discovered 18 years before by two other spelunkers (as cavers are known). Herb Schroeder and George Lyon had named it Schroeder's Pants after the tear Herb received in his trousers as they first explored it.
Though it was snowing on the day of Mitchell's visit, temperatures had been warmer than usual for much of the previous week. He had planned to visit Lyon that morning to discuss the cave - Lyon owned the land the cave lies beneath - but he was not at home, and thus was unable to warn the young cavers about the thick streams of icy meltwater that poured through the caverns they were about to enter.
Caving in New York state is a cramped affair, but the group managed to squeeze through a series of pitch-black, narrow passages until they reached an open chamber. At the centre of this dark chamber, a vertical shaft plunged 80ft down into another cave. A small river was racing down through this shaft, at the rate of about 10 gallons every minute. Undeterred, Mitchell, armed with a foot strap and a waist harness, fixed his safety line and began to lower himself down the shaft in an attempt to reach the deeper cave.
But then, suddenly, he stopped. The line had caught, trapping one of his arms. He tried to jog himself loose and keep descending, but the equipment would not budge. Still calm, his head doused relentlessly with freezing water, he began climbing back up the rope, but his one hand could not grip in the cold and the wet. For 45 minutes, Bennett and Miller tried to haul Mitchell, who weighed 13 stone, back up into the higher chamber. But they could not manage it. "He told me not to worry, that he'd get out," Miller said the next day. "Later on, he could not talk at all."
Finally, Bennett climbed out of the cave to get help. A national "grotto rescue team" flew out on Air Force 2 from Washington DC, and within hours Mitchell's plight became a top news story coast-to-coast. But when the rescue team finally arrived and began pulling on the rope, they soon realised that it was a corpse they were trying to recover.
Mitchell's death made two things clear to cavers across the world: every cave complex needs trained rescue teams stationed nearby - Washington isn't good enough if you are going down a hole in another state. Second, cold water, rather than narrow passages or falling rocks, is the greatest danger in cave exploration.
"It was the first time that people began to understand the risk of hypothermia in caving," says Paula Grgich-Warke, secretary of the British Caving Association. "They didn't realise that when you stop moving you stop generating lots of heat, and that's when you're most at risk." Modern cavers generally wear a fleece undersuit covered with a waterproof PVC layer; in Mitchell's day it was common to go down deep in only jeans and cotton overalls.
Mitchell's death did change the rules of pot-holing, but there was an agonising coda to his story: after three days attempting to haul Mitchell's body back up the shaft, the rescue team decided they would have to drill through the rock to make more space. As they attempted this, part of the cave collapsed, making further rescue efforts unsafe. "Dirt was coming down the shaft," one of the rescuers told reporters. "We had to get the hell out of there." And so, reluctantly, the team decided that the bottom of Schroeder's Pants would have to serve as Mitchell's grave. The entrance was blasted shut with dynamite to prevent future mishaps, and a memorial stone was laid to mark the events of that day.
While the story continued to be told with reverence, and the many lessons from it were gratefully learned, the decision to seal the cave became a source of some controversy. "I am terribly sorry for this death," says one voice on the National Speleological Society's noticeboard, "but I must admit I am also sad this cave has been gated for so many years because of one man's mishap. Why should all others who choose to explore this cave be denied the opportunity because of one person's error in judgment?"
Certainly, advances in caving technique mean that even in such cramped conditions, recovery of a dead caver's remains is now usually possible. And most families, of course, would always wish to get the body back. "It wouldn't be a matter of course now, if someone died in a cave, to leave their body in place," Grgich-Warke says.
Which is why the events of last Saturday will have such resonance to cavers around the world. After three years of planning, an actor called Christian Lyon - grandson of George, the cave's discoverer - gathered a new rescue team. After six hours' work, they finally managed to bring Mitchell's bones to the surface. "It think it's quite meaningful to cave rescue to see what actually needed to happen to remove him from the cave," says Grgich-Warke. "It might have been impossible, given the technology they had available at the time, even if he had survived initially."
Christian Lyon is making a documentary about Mitchell's death, including film of the recovery of his remains, but has satisfied the family that the recovery mission is not just a publicity stunt. "I remember looking through my father's old scrapbooks of the incident from the time I was little," he told the local paper, the Evening Telegram, before the rescue. "Every couple of years I'd gravitate toward those scrapbooks. For some reason, I was attached to the story. It is a historic event, not only in Herkimer County, but in the national caving community as well. Everyone there knows about this tragedy."
Once the coroner has examined Mitchell's remains, they will be passed on to his family for cremation, with some of the ashes being buried near the site. Though some will regret this new end to the legend, James G Mitchell's name will live on in the NSS's memorial prize for young scientists. And it will be several generations before cavers stop telling the story of how he died.
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