Caver's remains heading home 41 year after he diedJune 26, 2006, 4:40 PM EDT
DOLGEVILLE, N.Y. (AP) _ After an emotional weekend, Bill Mitchell drove home on Monday with most of the cremated remains of his brother, who died 41 years ago while exploring a treacherous cave.
It took six workers about four hours on Saturday to recover the bones of James Mitchell, which were scattered at the bottom of a 60-foot drop-off inside Schroeder's Pants Cave, with more remains found 30 feet farther below. Mitchell's body had been locked inside since Feb. 13, 1965, when the 23-year-old Massachusetts chemist died of exposure while hanging from a harness above a cavern.
Bill Mitchell, now 62, who hadn't been inside a cave since his brother died, collected them all.
"It's amazing for him to have done all that," said Christian Lyon, a Dolgeville native who had the blessing of the Mitchell family and local officials to recover the remains and film the event for a documentary. "He was going on emotion and adrenaline. He had a purpose to be there. Had it not been his brother, he might not have made it. The bones were all over the place. He probably had 2 percent of his energy left, and he was shivering like a leaf.
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Tragic tale ends with recovery of remainsBy JESSICA ARSENAULT-Telegram Staff Writer
Published: Monday, June 26, 2006 11:15 AM CDT
DOLGEVILLE - A team of spelunkers wrote the final chapter of a 41-year-old story over the weekend, as they recovered the remains of a young cave explorer who died in 1965 doing what he loved.
Fulfilling Dolgeville-native Christian Lyon's long-time ambition, and bringing closure for the young cave explorer's family, the team brought James G. Mitchell's remains out of Schroeder's Pants Cave that has for so long been his tomb.
“There's a bunch of emotions,” said Lyon, 36, son of Dolgeville Mayor Bruce Lyon, after emerging from the tight squeezes of the cave. “There's finally closure and I'm just glad I could do this.”
A team including Lyon, Mitchell's brother, Bill Mitchell, who is now 62, spelunkers Kevin Dumont, Gary Burns, Mark Tracy and Michael Choo, Lyon's cousin Kortney Crane and his brother Matthew Lyon began entering the cave to perform the solemn and tedious task of recovery at about 10:30 a.m. Over the course of three hours, team members came and went from the cave as a few took the lead in the actual recovery process.
“It's wet and it's cold,” said Matthew Lyon, whose pants were soaked with water and whose arms bore scrapes and mud, a testament to the cave's tight passages.
Security was tight around Schroeder's Pants Cave just outside Dolgeville Saturday as nearly 50 people gathered for the momentous occasion. State troopers, including members of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Herkimer County Coroner Chris Moser took the lead in keeping curious would-be spectators at bay, and dictating to those with cameras what could be photographed.
There was hushed conversation and milling about the scene as everyone waited expectantly for the crew to resurface. Some passed the time by searching for Herkimer Diamonds among rocks littering the ground. Finally, at 1:20 p.m., word was relayed out of the cave that the team and James Mitchell's remains were on their way out. A silence fell over the small crowd as people pressed closer with eyes fixed on the cave's mouth.
Bill Mitchell emerged first, followed closely by Christian Lyon, who carried the young spelunker's remains in a bright blue coroner's bag. Those remains were quickly whisked away on their way to a local morgue.
Lyon, having just experienced the climax of a three-year project, took a moment to himself as he was racked with emotion.
“Tired, cold, overwhelmed,” he summed up his feelings. “But I'm feeling good now. I'm glad I could do this with Bill. I can't imagine what he must be feeling.”
Among James Mitchell's remains was his helmet, inscribed with his National Speliological Society number and the names of caves he explored before his unfortunate trip into Schroeder's Pants Cave.
Mitchell was a 23-year-old spelunker from Massachusetts who attempted to explore Schroeder's Pants Cave on Feb. 13, 1965. Due to conditions he was not prepared for, Mitchell got stuck dangling in a vertical shaft where ice-cold water poured over him for hours until he died. At the time, a cave rescue team was unable to retrieve his body. Officials attempted to seal the cave with dynamite, which later proved to have been unsuccessful.
The helmet found Saturday, along with the original metal tripod Mitchell used to lower himself into the cave's shaft where he died, a helmet and jacket worn by Doug Bradford, who was a member of the original rescue team in 1965, and a number of other artifacts from the event will remain in Dolgeville to form a small museum in honor and remembrance of Mitchell. A small amount of his cremated remains will be buried under a headstone placed above the cave.
“He will forever be linked to this cave,” Lyon said.
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www.herkimertelegram.com/articles/2006/06/26/news/news02.txtEdited to add the following:
Going 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 reports
Tuesday June 27, 2006
The Guardian
It 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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