This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The story of the attempt to rescue John Edward Jones from Nutty Putty Cave last November is a tale of adventure, heroism, faith and tragedy. It confirms some of humanity's highest values, including the willingness of rescuers to risk their own safety to try to save the life of someone else. It also confirms the wisdom of state authorities to seal the cave entrance, thereby securing Jones' final resting place and foreclosing the possibility that another cave explorer could someday share his fate.

Jones went exploring in the cave, located about 60 miles south of Salt Lake City in Utah County, with a group of family and friends on Nov. 24 last year. He went looking for a passage called the Birth Canal, but chose a different one, probably by mistake. Searching for a place to turn around, he kept going deeper into the narrow tunnel, eventually becoming lodged upside down in a vertical shaft. He was trapped.

A pair of compelling articles in The Salt Lake Tribune last weekend detailed the excruciating efforts to free Jones. Unfortunately, after coming frustratingly close, rescuers were unsuccessful.

Their work included rigging an elaborate system of ropes and 15 tandem pulleys, anchored in holes drilled in the rock of the cave walls. After tying a rope to Jones' legs, a team of rescuers tried to pull him from the fissure. The rig worked briefly, but a stone arch failed under the pressure of the rope, sending a carabiner into the face of one rescuer, injuring him seriously. Attempts to rig the system again could not be completed before fluids accumulating in Jones' brain and lungs, due to his upside-down position, killed him.

After Jones died, rescuers realized that they had no way to retrieve his body. The geometry of the cave made moving a corpse through the narrow, corkscrew passage impossible. So, after being defeated in their attempts to remove John Jones while he was alive, rescuers also had to leave him behind. It was a terrible ordeal for Jones' wife, Emily, who was expecting the couple's second child at the time, for the rest of his family and for the rescuers.

Though Jones was the first to die in the cave, he was not the first who had been trapped. Another man had to be rescued from the same passage five years before. The cave was closed for a period, then reopened under a special arrangement with a spelunking organization that enforced safety rules. But that wasn't enough to prevent Jones' death. Some cave explorers objected that it would have been enough to seal only the passage that entombed Jones. But out of respect for the victim and his family, and to prevent another tragedy, closing Nutty Putty permanently was the right call.