

They strung the line 400 feet from the entrance to John’s tunnel, then gave a speaker to Ryan. Salt Lake County crews brought a telecom, a set of two radios that transmitted by way of a cable line. Rescue commanders on the surface also knew how much thoughts of his family helped John in his dark prison. The baby was due on Ryan’s birthday, June 13. John told Ryan about his wife, Emily, about their life together in Virginia, about their 1-year-old daughter, and his child on the way. The best way to bring him back from that abyss, Ryan discovered, was to ask about his young family. John oscillated between calm, coherent conversation to helplessly thrashing his legs in sheer panic.

“Well, when we get you out of here, I’ll be your workout buddy,” he said. “It would be so much easier for you guys to get me out of here if I wasn’t so fat.” The two talked about their missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and spoke Spanish together - Ryan had served a Spanish-speaking mission in Texas, John in Ecuador.
#John jones nutty putty free
John, a devout Mormon, had connected with several of the volunteers who had tried to free him through a shared faith. To remind him he wasn’t in the hole alone. He brought a water pouch filled with Gatorade and stretched the attached tube down to John so he could drink. When Ryan reached John, he loosened the knots earlier rescuers had tied around his legs. “Why did you guys put me here?” John replied. I don’t want to be on my head,” John told Ryan when he arrived. The plan was, rescuers thought, their last, best hope: John was beginning to lose touch with reality in the darkness. They had medicine ready to give John intravenously immediately after they freed him. Next the crew would pull as hard as it could. Ryan would then try to shift John from the 8 1/2 inch wide side of the crevice where he was stuck, moving him to the slightly wider side of the fissure. When the new system - drilled into the rock - was finished, the team would inch John up. Ryan would stay with John during the reconstruction effort. They initially created the pulley system using climbing cams, but the anchors couldn’t get a strong grip in the layer of powdery calcite that coated the cave’s walls. Shortly after he arrived, rescue crews got a set of heavy-duty air chisels and drills they would use to rebuild a pulley system designed to pull John out of the fissure.

As scary and depressing as he felt John’s predicament was, he had a job to do. With fluids pooling dangerously in his head and lungs, the shock of the injury could kill him. John had been trapped nearly upside down for 12 hours. The crevice was at the end of a cramped tunnel, and rescuers had realized hours earlier that extracting John’s 6-foot, 200-pound body would likely break his legs.

At 6-foot-1 he’s taller than most cavers, yet is whip-thin, flexible and seemingly immune to claustrophobia.īut when he reached the narrow crevice trapping 26-year-old John Jones in Utah County’s Nutty Putty Cave, he had to fight back tears. Since he was 4, he has spent most of his free time exploring caves and more than once acted as a trapped victim for Utah Cave Rescue, a group his father helped found. Ryan Shurtz usually feels at home underground. Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of the Nutty Putty rescue.
