Exploring Down Below

Exploring Down Below

If Jim Goodbar had his way, he would spend his days in the dark. But he’s not depressed; he’s hungry for places few people set foot—the unexplored realms deep in the belly of the earth.

Goodbar is one of the country’s premier cavers—men and women who think nothing of dropping into a hole in the ground just to see where it goes. One of the federal government’s top cave specialists, Goodbar helps set national policy on the management of caves and the surrounding areas of broken bedrock, sinkholes, and disappearing streams that are the above-ground signs of underground wonders.

Goodbar, who works out of the Bureau of Land Management’s office in Carlsbad, N.M., (pop. 25,625) got bit by the cave bug at age 9, when his parents took the family to visit a commercial cave in Boerne, Texas. As the tour guide described the cave, Goodbar’s dad noticed a small crawl space just off the main trail.

“He shoved a flashlight in my hand and said, ‘Check it out,’” Goodbar recalls. “I crawled in, and after a while, Dad was saying ‘Come back! The tour is leaving!’”

It was too late. Goodbar felt himself drawn farther and farther into the inky hole as he shimmied through the darkness.

His father eventually persuaded the boy to rejoin them, but Goodbar was hooked. As a young man, he would drive 460 miles from his home in Dallas to the Carlsbad area nearly every weekend. There are literally hundreds of caves here, tucked inside the Guadalupe Mountains and the surrounding gypsum flats—the legacy of an ancient marine fossil reef that once covered parts of Texas and New Mexico. When the sea evaporated 250 million years ago, rainwater seeped into the crevices of the reef, eating away at its limestone heart and carving out vast underground chambers. The process was fueled by hydrogen sulfide gas seeping up from the rich oil reserves in the area, widening the passageways in two of New Mexico’s most awe-inspiring wonders—Carlsbad Caverns National Park and nearby Lechuguilla Cave.

Though both have been mined for decades—first for bat guano for fertilizer, later for scientific discoveries and tourism dollars—the two caves remain largely a mystery, even to this day. Researchers continue to discover new microbe species in the caves that they hope may hold the key to cancer cures or answers to how life might develop on other planets.

Carlsbad Caverns has about 30 miles of surveyed passageways, Lechuguilla has 105, “and who knows how many more,” says Dale Pate, a cave resource specialist with the National Park Service.

Goodbar helps in the research projects and pushes the boundaries of numerous caves. At Carlsbad in 1985, he and National Park Service caver Ron Kerbo rigged helium balloons to float climbing cord 255 feet to the top of the cave’s Big Room. They looped the cord around a stalagmite near the ceiling and climbed straight up, where they discovered another 800 feet of passageways. They named their find the “Pearly Gates” and the “Spirit World.”

“People like Goodbar push it to the edge and take a lot of risks,” says Larry Henderson, who managed Carlsbad Caverns when Kerbo and Goodbar were crawling through tunnels on its ceiling.

“A good caver can’t be completely sane. I’ve done a lot of caving with those guys, and they go places I only go under duress.”

Goodbar says he just cannot walk away from a cave passageway until he knows where it goes.

“Some of them are tortuous. You have to crawl or wriggle though. It would be easy to stop, but then you wouldn’t know the true treasures underground. There’s nothing like knowing you are the very first person to see it, to go where no one else has ever been.”

His eyes sparkle like a 9-year-old shining a flashlight in the dark of his first cave. “You can’t know unless you go.”

Susan Church is a psychologist and freelance writer in El Paso, Texas.

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