A Man, a Cave and a Dream


"It comes a man's time to do something special in the world-and a man's got to do it"


Condensed from The Huntsville Times        Allen Rankin


   For millions of years the inner caverns of the great cave in the heart of an Alabama hillside had lain in blackest darkness, unseen by human eye.  Probably Stone Age men had taken shelter in its yawning entrance, as had the Indians later.  But if primitive peoples ventured very far back into the cave mouth, they left no sign.

   More recently, a few daring local hillmen had made their way 2000 feet down the cave's awesome throat.  But, intimidated by the slippery heights and evil-looking depths, and by the overpowering darkness, they went no farther.

   Then, one bright July morning in 1952, two amateur spelunkers (cave explorers) came from Huntsville, 35 miles away, to have a try at it.  One, young Don Fulton, a newspaper-man, was looking for a Saturday outing.  The other, Jay Gurley, a dark-haired man of 29 with brooding brown eyes, was looking for something more-his place and function in life.

   Gurley had a minor job at Redstone Arsenal, the Army's guided-missile laboratory.  He didn't like it, and he seemed to be going nowhere.  Worse, on his salary he wasn't making ends meet-he and his wife and three children were cramped up in a house trailer.

   On weekends, to get away from his immediate problems, Gurley had begun exploring some of the hundreds of caves in the surrounding Appalachian foothills.  Inevitably, he had contracted spelunker fever-the passion to probe some secret depth where no one has ever been.

   This Saturday morning he and Fulton had come to forsaken Gunter Mountain, 11 miles from a highway and a mile walk from the end of the nearest rural lane.  At first they didn't see the cave's tree-screened entrance.  Then, feeling a draft, they followed the cool air through the brush-and walked into the biggest cave mouth either of them had ever seen.  Arching 40 feet high and 128 feet wide, it looked big enough to swallow New York's Grand Central Terminal.

   Five hundred feet within, as the tunnel grew dark and they turned on their powerful gas lanterns, they began to see why others might have been discouraged.  Housesize boulders cluttered the floor, which pitched up and down jaggedly-up to peaks near the ceiling, down into chasms deep enough to take a 12-story building.

   They found a tunnel cut by a stream, and followed it to an open place blocked by a cliff.  Climbing along the cliff's edge, they came to a slick 40-foot ledge little wider than their bodies and sloping downward over a chasm.  Inching across on their bellies, they sensed rather than saw that they were entering a second cavern-one so vast that their lights could reach neither the ceiling nor the sides.

   In six hours they traversed 2000 feet.  Then, at the foot of an enormous "frozen waterfall" of shining pink stone, they found scrawled on the rocks the names of other spelunkers, with dates.  "Let's see if we can't go on," Gurley said.

   Pushing deeper, they came upon a fantastic collection of cave treasures:  gleaming red-gold and jewel-like in their lanterns' light were forests of stalagmites, cast in fanciful shapes.  Sculptured from eons of dripping water were bearded stone giants standing with arms eternally upraised.  There were towered temples sheltering stone angels and devils in their shadows; charming stone glades peopled with stone fairies and hobgoblins surprised by the light; delicate lacework and tiny flowers in stone.

   They saw that they were in a seemingly endless room.  Along its walls were rich-red-limestone formations like draperies; from its ceiling hung icicle-like stalactite chandeliers.  In places, the floor and ceiling formations joined to make soaring columns.  From the grandeur of this eerie, dimly-lighted hall a name came ready-made to Gurley's mind-the "Cathedral Room."

   As he and Fulton moved from wonder to wonder, Gurley noticed that something was missing:  there were no other spelunkers names!  "You know," he said, trying to keep his voice casual, "I think we're the first to get in this far."  His heart pounded so loud he wondered if Fulton could hear it.

   Knowing something of geology, Gurley tried to comprehend the time it had taken to create all this.  He listened to the spink of dripping water.  Countless ages of these drops, each evaporating, leaving its bit of mineral deposit, had sculptured (at the rate of about one cubic inch a century) the colossal statuary here.

   Sometime in that seventh hour Jay Gurley changed.  "Look," he told Fulton, his voice breaking with excitement, "finding this thing-just seeing it-is probably the most important thing we'll ever do.  Somebody must build walkways so others can see it."

   It was 10 p.m. by the time they found their way out of the cave and drove back to Huntsville.  Stepping into his trailer, Gurley greeted his wife:  "We discovered a great cave today.  I think I'm going to buy it."   "Buy it!" Helen Gurley stared at her mud-covered husband.  "Buy a cave?  A hole in the ground?"  She dropped to the sofa.  "What," she said, "would you plan to use for money?"

   For two months Gurley fought his wild impulse.  Then, putting up as security everything he had-trailer, car, even cameras, to borrow $400 for a down payment, he bought the cave from a farmer for the price of the 160 acres of rocky land above it.  "It comes a man's time to do something special in the world," Gurley told his wife.  "The finger points.  Something says, 'You, there!  You do this!' and a man's got to do it.  Are you with me?" 

   Helen Gurley loved her husband, even at his craziest.  "Of course I'm with you," she said quietly, "if this is what you really want." 

   Gurley didn't have $5 of his own at the moment.  He did, however, get up the price of an ax, a crowbar and a 20-pound sledge hammer.  Every night after office hours he made the 70-mile round trip to the cave.  He hacked away at the trees and brush around the cave mouth, broke up the rocks and boulders obstructing the way to the inner cavern.

   It is not possible for one man with a hammer to pound a trail through a mile of rock barriers and chasms in the dark.  Or to lug 600 tons of sand, a 60-pound bucketful at a time, from a 70-foot deep stream bed to smooth the trail.  Or to drag in and saw up great logs to build stairs up and down steeper places.  And no one realized this more than Jay Gurley.  But what else was there to do?

   Helen helped.  The Gurley children helped.  Jay hired whatever unskilled labor he could-a few high-school boys; an old man showed up bringing his own ax and saying, "I never did like to see a man work alone." 

   But the brunt of the ordeal fell on Gurley.  In the first two years he smashed in his chest with a slip of the sledge hammer, broke his ankle, ruptured himself wrestling with a boulder and contracted double pneumonia working in the dampness.  Still he kept battering away.

   Toward the end of the second year a big break came.  William L. Grafton, an executive engineer at Redstone, became interested in the project and formed a small corporation with Gurley, agreeing to keep him in groceries while he continued his battle.  Quitting his job, Gurley moved his trailer and family to the cave mouth to work there full-time.  The county offered to bulldoze a trail from the cave site to the nearest connecting road.  Things were looking up!

   But the following spring, things looked hopeless again.  Gurley had cleared about the first 1000 feet of the cave.  Then the rain-swollen river in the cave's inner chambers rose, flooded the tunnels and canyons and wiped out most of the trail.

   By the night of May 3, Helen's birthday, Gurley was in a black and despairing mood.  From the cave he had brought her a piece of red travertine for a hearth in a house they might never have.  "I wish," he said lamely, "that I could give you something better."

   "You can give me something better for now," Helen said.  "You can show me what this is all about.  You can take me to the Cathedral Room-tonight."

   This was a moment Jay had dreaded.  "But you're not a cave crawler."

   "I will be tonight," Helen said.  They went in at ten o'clock.  Jay waded the icy stream in the tunnel.  White-faced, but without a whimper, Helen made it, too, and thence across the narrow 40-foot ledge leading into the inner cavern.

   It was well after midnight when they reached the Cathedral Room.  "Well, this is it," said Jay.  "Wait, and I'll give you a better view."  Taking both lanterns, he climbed the tall stalagmite he called "The Tower."  From this height, he beamed the lights so that they glinted over acres of ghostly, jewel-gleaming shapes and figures.

   "Well," he shouted, "what do you think of it?"  Silence from below, except for the rollicking echo of his voice.  Jay scrambled down and rejoined his wife.  "I said, 'What do you think of it?'"

   Helen Gurley couldn't speak.  She was crying.  Finally, quoting Jay's own words of three years before, she said, "I think 'It comes a man's time to do something special in the world!' I think it's wonderful that you're the one who's going to make it possible for everybody to just walk in and see it all!"

   Jay's arm went around his wife.  "That we're the ones." He said.

   After that night Jay Gurley knew he would never give up.  He and Bill Grafton mapped out a new trail-a "high road" along the taller cliffs of the cave's floor, above the flood-threatened tunnels and canyons.  The new route called for blasting a tunnel through 240 feet of solid rock that stood between the plateaus forming the first and second chambers.  Gurley never could have handled the tunnel alone.  But along came John Vinson, a Tennessee ex-miner and master-dynamiter, to offer his services.  The cave rocked and shuddered with the blasts.

   In five months-on Christmas Eve, 1956-the tunnel was finished.  And by spring of 1957 the new road-and a tour for paying sightseers-extended 1500 feet into the cave.  There the yawning Stream Canyon, 50 feet deep and 400 feet wide, stopped both road and tour.  Building a bridge was financially out of the question.

   "There must be another way across," Gurley kept saying.  And one day he found it-a mud-filled, boulder-strewn ledge.

   It took nearly two years for Gurley to scoop out the mud and, with hand-operated hydraulic jacks, pry the 25 and 30 ton boulders inch by inch, until they toppled into the canyon below.  But when he finished, in July 1959, the ledge formed a natural road of stone, wide and smooth enough to drive a jeep to the back of the Cathedral Room.  Forty miles of wiring and 80,000 watts of light ran alongside and above it.  After seven years of struggle, Jay Gurley, his family and friends had performed one of the most difficult feats in the rugged history of caving.

   Today some 24,000 tourists a year come to gaze at the wonders of Cathedral Caverns-especially at Goliath, the world's mightiest stalagmite, 60 feet tall and 200 feet in girth.

   Jay and Helen Gurley have found something they believe in.  They might have found it in countless other places.  For their cave is but one of the myriad wonders that lie beneath or around or above us, that give us a faint glimmering of the inexhaustible mysteries of the universe.

   One thing Jay Gurley has seen clearly:  the goal itself is less important than what the struggle to reach it does for the struggler.  In striving to make an easy path to a mountain's heart, the Gurley's have acquired assets that cannot be measured in tangibles.  Their biggest finds have not been made in a cave at all, but in smaller, even more remarkable regions of inner space-within themselves.