Amateur & professional cavers alike flocked to explore the narrow passages of the Nutty Putty Cave, located west of Utah Lake in Utah County, Utah. The cave was first discovered in 1960 & once averaged 5,000 annual visitors & was a favorite spot for local Boy Scout troops & college students. The location earned its name because the walls of the cave oozed a thick, clay-like substance that resembled the texture of Silly Putty. Under the entrance of the cave snakes 1,400 feet of limestone tunnels & chutes that were formed from the ground up by hot rising water from hydrothermal activity.
Caving, which can also be known as spelunking or potholing, depending on where you live, is the exploration of cave systems. Because The Nutty Putty Cave attracted experienced cavers & curious tourists alike who traveled from far & wide to explore the treacherous passageways the cave had to offer, amateur explorers would sometimes find themselves in dangerous situations within its narrow, snakelike walls.
At the start of the millennium, a total of six visitors found themselves stuck within the passages of the Nutty Putty Cave, but fortunately, these individuals were able to be successfully rescued. Because the local sheriff’s office & rescue teams were growing weary of conducting large rescue operations & the fact they were fearful that one day one of these accidents might be fatal, they decided to close the cave off from the public in 2006.
However, due to an intervention from the Timpanogos Grotto, a society dedicated to the conservation of caves, the Nutty Putty Cave was reopened to the public in May 2009.
With its reopening, the Grotto created an online booking system that limited only one group of explorers into the cave at a time. At night, the entrance to the cave was padlocked to prevent trespassers from entering. Despite these safety measures, within only six months of the cave’s reopening, a visitor took a wrong turn which proved to be a fatal error.
In November 2009, 26-year-old John Edward Jones was a second year medical student living in Virginia with his wife, Emily & their 1-year-old daughter, Lizzie. The couple was expecting their second child in June 2010, seven months later. John was born on January 21, 1983 in Sandy, Utah & hoped to eventually work as a pediatric cardiologist.
According to his obituary, John was a remarkable person who strived to experience every good thing in life & achieve excellence in everything he did. He was said to have a wonderful nature, fantastic sense of humor & a genuine love of people.
John traveled to Utah with his family for a Thanksgiving visit at his parent’s Stansbury Park home & since they were in the area, John’s brother Josh decided to organize an excursion to the Nutty Putty Cave. Josh felt that because the Nutty Putty Cave opened into a big room before it stretched into snaking, narrow fingers of tunnels, it was good for all levels of experience & something the whole family could enjoy.
John & Josh were the two youngest of seven children in their family & they were well versed, experienced cavers, who spent their childhood exploring caves alongside their father, who just so happened to run the Utah Cave Rescue.
By 2009, John was no longer the slender teen he had once been, though still in shape, he stood at 6’0” & weighed 200# & had not been inside a cave in many years. The Nutty Putty Cave was also a more challenging cave than he was previously used to exploring in his younger days.
It was two days before Thanksgiving, November 24, 2009 when John, his brother Josh & nine other close friends & family members set out for the Nutty Putty Cave while Emily & Lizzie stayed back home. The group entered the cave at 8 pm & since children were also present, they decided to split off into two groups to allow the more experienced cavers to venture into the more challenging areas of the cave.
All was well during the first hour of exploring & the more experienced group explored a large chamber known as the Big Slide before John, Josh & two friends broke off in search of The Birth Canal, one of the cave’s narrowests spots.
Sadly, John came upon an entrance to what he believed to be The Birth Canal & began to crawl through. As he crawled deeper & deeper into the earth, the passage became progressively narrower & it took all of his might to push himself into a nearly impossibly small space. Since John extensively researched the cave, he believed that he was going to break through to a larger cavern where he could then turn himself around & come back out the way he had just crawled through. Tragically, John was unaware that he’d mistakenly made a wrong turn & rather than entering The Birth Canal, he had actually ventured into a passageway of Bob’s Push into an unnamed crevice in an uncharted part of the cave because the area is too small for most cavers to reach & map.
Before he realized his grave error, John likely gave one last push forward & as he did, he exhaled the air from his chest which gave his body the room to wriggle through an L-shaped spot that measured 10 inches wide & 18 inches high, smaller than the opening of a front-load washing machine. As John breathed in again, his chest expanded, wedging his body inside the dark tunnel. Beginning to panic, he realized that he needed to turn around, but because the crevice engulfed his body, he realized in horror that he was stuck. As he struggled in panic, his body only slid further down into the narrower 8.5 inches wide area.
In the meantime, 23-year-old Josh was searching for his brother & eventually came upon John, initially believing this would become yet another family adventure story. He recalled a time that his father had gotten stuck back when they were kids, but eventually worked himself free.
As Josh continued to crawl through the muddy, narrow walls, his apprehension steadily grew. As he reached the corkscrew area, Josh also found himself stuck & as he laid his eyes on John, panic began to set in when he saw his brother’s feet & the fact that his body appeared to have been swallowed by the rock.
The two devout Mormon brothers began praying together for guidance to work through this horrific situation. Josh worked his way free, wrapped his feet around John’s calves & began pulling. John’s body began to inch up, but because he had nothing to grasp, as soon as Josh released him, John slipped back into the narrow crevice. At this moment, Josh realized that there was no way he was going to be able to free his brother & he wondered how anyone would. John was not only stuck in a terrifyingly small, pitch dark space, but he was unimaginably stuck upside down in a 70 degree angle, one hand wedged under his body, the other forced backwards.
Josh knew that he needed to quickly get help for John, fully aware of the grave situation his brother was in. As Josh climbed out of the cave’s entrance to call 911 while a friend went into the tunnel to stay with John, John was 400 feet inside the cave & 100 feet below the earth’s surface.
Josh, now aware that help was on the way, crawled back into the cave to take his friend’s place. While they waited for rescuers, the brothers made small talk in an attempt to distract their minds from the desperate situation. They discussed Josh’s girlfriend & whether or not Josh should also enter medical school as his big brother did. They sang hymns & continued to pray together, John praying that he would be saved for his wife & kids.
After about an hour, Josh began to hear the voices of the rescuers at the cave’s entrance & despite the fact that he didn’t want to leave his brother, he went to find them, knowing that his brother’s life was in that little crack within the cave. John reassured Josh that it was okay, saying, Go get ‘em, brother.
Susie Motola was the first rescuer to arrive at 12:30 am, now Wednesday, November 25. It was just after 9 pm when her rescue pager sounded while she was in the middle of moving into her new house. Without hesitation, she dropped everything & headed down the long, dark dirt road in her Toyota 4Runner, to the cave’s entrance.
Susie inched her way through the cramped limestone tunnel through the 60 degree heat & uncomfortable humidity, snaking through the earth with a rope tied around her ankles so rescuers could pull her to safety if she got stuck. Thirty minutes after she entered the cave, her headlamp fell upon a pair of navy & black running shoes which stuck out the end of a narrow 135-foot tunnel.
As she came upon John she said, Hi, John, my name is Susie. How’s it going? John responded, Hi Susie, thanks for coming, but I really, really want to get out. It appeared that his body had been swallowed by the rock & despite her small stature, Susie was unable to fully extend her extremities. However, Susie was an experienced caver who knew the ins & outs of Nutty Putty Cave.
By the time Susie reached John, he had been trapped for over three hours & she assured the young man that she would get him free lickety split. She tied a webbed rope around his ankles & in dismay, realized that getting him out of that cave was going to be like swimming backward against a very strong current.
John’s situation was extremely dire since the human body is designed to work upright & the heart works with the force of gravity, not against it. Trauma physician, Doug Murdock, was notified that John was stuck upside down & he knew that the young man was running out of time.
According to Dr. Murdock, Being upside down, your body has to pump the blood out of the brain all the time, something that our body is not designed to do & because of this, the entire system begins to fail. As Dr. Murdock made his way to the scene, he was fully aware that blood & fluids would be pooling in John’s brain & lungs, his circulation would be slowing, capillaries leaking & toxins building up in his blood. If he wasn’t saved soon, those toxins would eventually rush to John’s heart & kill him.
Because there are few studies about the long-term effects of being upside down, Dr. Murdock could only guess that John had maybe 8 to 10 hours to live.
Susie, who was busy trying to save John, had also been stuck in the Nutty Putty Cave at one time; she recalled the panic starting to rise as she told herself to just breathe. Eventually, millimeter by millimeter, she was able to free herself. She wracked her brain, trying to think of a way to free John & led a string of rope from John, back to the rest of the team in an open area at the cave’s entrance. The team furiously pulled, but lacked the power & the friction on the rope from the cave’s walls were too strong. She helped him shift positions, but was unable to lift him.
Susie stretched a water bottle down to John’s right arm which was forced backwards so that he could tip the bottle forward. She watched as the water poured down his arm, hoping some might reach his mouth. She also cut off his jeans in hopes it would free up some space. To help keep John calm, she also joked that he would have a story to tell his wife & she asked him if he’d like to get pancakes once he was free.
During their time together, they discussed religion & the fact Susie was also LDS, but had fallen away from church teachings in recent years. As precious time continued to tick by, Susie noticed that John’s voice grew more nasally while his breathing grew more labored as his lungs began to fill with fluid.
Trapped in the complete darkness of the cave, John had no sense of time & according to rescuers, after he had been trapped for over eight hours, John believed he had been there for two days.
Out of ideas, Susie climbed out of the cave after two hours to allow another rescuer to take her place. The team on the outside of the cave was in the process of rigging a pulley system that was anchored to the tunnel’s walls with a series of climbing cams to help solve the friction issue. The cams were pushed through a thick layer of powdery calcite that coated the cave’s walls & then the rope was strung through the attached pulley.
The process was painfully slow & each trip into the tunnel to pass another piece of gear took nearly an hour. As the hours passed, more rescuers from all over Utah continued to arrive as the Utah County Sheriff’s Office set up a command center as the rescuers gathered to run through idea after idea.
6 gallons of vegetable oil was ordered to help slide John out. They considered explosives, but determined that neither of those methods would work. They tried to widen the rocky corkscrew to get ready for John’s exit, but after an hour & a half, they’d only drilled through 6 inches of rock. Because the area was so tight, jackhammers couldn’t be utilized.
In the meantime, John’s wife Emily sat by the phone, hoping & praying for a call to let her know that her husband was free. John & Emily fell in love while they were students at Brigham Young University when John was 20. As they stood on top of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building in downtown Salt Lake City, the ground was sprinkled with rose petals & John sang a song he’d written while strumming his guitar as he proposed to Emily. The two married in 2006 & John decided to attend medical school at the University of Virginia so Emily could be closer to her family.
As the sun began to rise on November 25, Emily couldn’t stand to wait by the phone for another minute. She decided to load their daughter Lizzie into the car & head to the cave with John’s parents. As they arrived, they were met with over 100 people who were frantically trying to come up with a plan to successfully free John as well as ambulances, fire trucks, a life flight helicopter & police SUVs were on standby.
Emily could only imagine how scared her husband must be & pictured being there to hug him when he was freed.
The rescue team utilized the pulley system, but found that John’s feet were hitting the tunnel’s low ceiling as his body was pulled up. His heart was struggling to continue to beat, his legs in desperate need of circulation & by this point, any contact with his legs caused John to scream out in agony.
The simple geometry seemed impossible. The rescue team realized that because of the angle of the tunnel, they would be unable to bend John’s body backward without breaking his legs. Because of his already weakened state, this would potentially cause his body to go into shock which would likely kill him. The cams that anchored the pulley system were also unsteady because of the weak calcite where they were tethered. By this point, John had been trapped upside down for 12 hours.
The team constructed a new system that was drilled into the rock that would hopefully slowly inch John up & out of the cave to safety. By this time, John was beginning to lose touch with reality & he spoke to rescuer Ryan Shurtz, Help me get out. I don’t want to be on my head. Ryan asked him, Why are you on your head & John responded, Why did you guys put me here?
As Ryan reached John, he loosened the knots that earlier rescuers had tied to his legs & stretched a tube down to him that was attached to a pouch of Gatorade so that John could drink. He tried to offer John comfort as he rubbed his leg & told him that he wasn’t alone. They discussed the LDS church & spoke to each other in Spanish since John had served a Spanish-speaking mission in Ecuador while Ryan served in Texas.
John told Ryan that he was sorry he was so fat since it would have been much easier for them to get him out if he were smaller. Ryan joked that when they got him out, they could be workout buddies & he watched as John fluctuated from moments of calm to moments of sheer panic, one moment having a calm conversation & the next, furiously thrashing his legs.
Ryan spoke with John about his wife & daughter to help keep him calm & learned that their second child was due on Ryan’s birthday, June 13. Rescue crews brought a telecom, a set of two radios that were transmitted by way of a cable line that was strung 400 feet from the entrance of the tunnel, down to John’s location. Ryan held the speaker & stretched as far as he could as Emily shouted through, I love you! Just keep fighting! John cried as he responded, I love you! I love you! Tell Lizzie I love her! I’ll get out & I’ll come see you!
By the time the pulley system was finished, it was 4 pm on November 25 & John had been trapped for over 19 hours. The rope fed its way through nearly 15 tandem pulleys that were drilled into the wall of the cave. Ryan guided John through what to expect, Ok John. I need your help, I need you to make sure you are pushing with your hands. I’m going to push you this way.
With each tug, John’s body moved a little more out of the crevice until his feet hit the low ceiling & he screamed. Ryan instructed the teams to lower him so that he could rest. On the third time of pulling, Ryan was able to stick his head into the crack to allow John to see the first human in nearly 24 hours.
Ryan told John to look at him as he asked him how he was doing & John replied, It sucks, I’m upside down. I can’t believe I’m upside down. He managed a smile as he admitted that his legs were killing him.
After a 20 minute rest, the team began to pull again & Ryan was hopeful as John began to inch back up. As Ryan pictured John hugging his wife & daughter, being there when his second child was born, he suddenly felt a screaming pain as he blacked out.
As Ryan came to, he saw that blood was everywhere, his jaw felt broken & he could feel his eye swelling shut. He realized that the stone arch had shattered under the pressure of John’s body as the rescue team pulled him up. With this, a heavy metal carabiner sailed straight at Ryan’s face.
Tragically, he realized that when the stone broke, John’s body slid right back down into the hole again. Ryan spoke to John despite the fact that his tongue had nearly been severed in half & assured him that another rescuer would come down to take his place.
Ryan’s father, Dave Shurtz, headed into the cave to take his son’s place & as he reached John, he heard John say, I’m going to die right here. I’m not going to come out of here, am I? Dave told John they would get him out as John continued to ask about Ryan’s wellbeing.
Dave noticed that John began to grow quiet, his breathing slowing. He attempted to wrap a rope around John’s waist as he lowered himself into the wider part of the crack, but the space was too small to get the rope around John’s body. When he asked John to suck in his stomach, John didn’t respond & then Dave realized he was stuck. After fifteen minutes, he was able to free himself.
Dave furiously tried to drill in order to get the pulley system back into a hole that was too small as he wiped sweat from his face, the humidity unrelenting. As Dave made his way out of the cave, he pulled someone aside from the Utah County Sheriff’s Department to let them know that John still had a heartbeat, but he was dying.
Another rescuer, Brandon Kowallis, a member of the Utah Cave Rescue, crawled into the cave to take Dave’s spot & brought the telecom so Emily could talk to John again. She had just finished praying with the family & told John to rest for a minute & take a break before pushing again. At this point, she was sure that her husband would somehow be okay.
Before Brandon went down to sit with John, he was informed that his health was quickly deteriorating & John had been talking about seeing angels & demons around him. By the time Brandon reached him, John was no longer conscious & he knew that without John’s help, they would be unable to contort his legs around an overhang to get him out. Brandon could hear John’s breath, which by this time was deep & gurgling as if his lungs were filling with fluid. His feet began to move & then frantically kick until he was once again still.
Brandon then heard what was likely a final gasp. Unsure if John was still alive, he & other rescuers continued to work for several more hours to widen the opening & after two hours, they’d advanced only 2 inches. Tragically, at 11:56 pm on November 25, 2009, minutes before Thanksgiving, a paramedic crawled into the cave & pronounced John dead after he had been lodged head down for 27 hours.
Rescuers inside the cave were now tasked with the horrific job of informing John’s family that he hadn’t made it.
When Emily was given the devastating news of her husband’s death, she was baffled & couldn’t understand how they could be sure that he was dead since they hadn’t found a pulse on his legs in hours. She was terrified that they would all leave while John was still alive. Brandon told her that he had heard John dying so Emily forced herself to climb into John’s parent’s car & drive away, leaving her husband behind.
On Thanksgiving morning, November 26, the following day, John’s family was faced with another devastating blow when they were told that John’s body wouldn’t be able to be removed from the cave. They were horrified as they were informed that removing John’s body after death would have been far more difficult than when he was alive as he would now be unable to assist them by pushing himself up from the tunnel, unable to twist himself through the rocky corkscrew.
Despite their immense grief, the family agreed since they were unwilling to put the rescuers in more danger, accepting that the Nutty Putty Cave would be John’s final resting place. They were told that the cave would be officially sealed off to prevent future injury or death.
On December 9, 2009, the entrance of the cave was sealed off with concrete. The Jones family mounted a plaque at the cave’s entrance to memorialize John while a second plaque honors the search & rescue team who desperately tried to rescue him.
Emily realized that she would have no gravesite to bring her children to, but at the same time, she knew how much her husband loved the outdoors, Utah & wide open spaces & felt it a fitting spot for him.
Ryan, who was badly injured in the cave, comforted Emily during John’s funeral, assuring her that John would always be with her. After his injury, Ryan’s lip had swollen to the point that it dropped over his chin & he was only able to drink an Ensure shake through a straw, his tongue riddled with stitches. Ryan expressed that despite the passage of time, it remains painful to speak about John, who he believes he would be friends with had he survived.
Susie, the rescuer who was first to reach John, also struggles with John’s death as she continues to go over strategy after strategy as to what they could have done differently, unable to stop thinking of the young man who died alone, terrified in a dark hole.
Of the 137 rescuers who had been at the scene, only six had been able to reach John in the cave. The fact that John’s body could not be retrieved, also haunted Susie as well as the fact that they had been so close, but unable to rescue him.
Since Susie hadn’t been there when John’s family told the rescue team that they did not blame them for John’s death as they knew they had risked their own lives to save his, Josh called her. He asked her many questions & the two poured their hearts out about the blame they each felt, Susie for being unable to save John & Josh for planning to trip to the Nutty Putty Cave & voicing his desire to find a tight passage. Josh could never forget how he found his brother & the appearance of his body swallowed by the rock.
Susie & Josh ended up wading through their grief together & built a friendship that revolved around their love of the outdoors. When Josh plans a group camping trip, mountain biking or kayaking outing, Susie gets an invite.
Some of the rescuers who desperately tried to save John, but were unable to do so, were so scarred that they never returned to caving.
Meanwhile, Emily holds the peace she found after saying the final prayer with John’s family which has never left her. She believes that John is still watching out for them & their family remains a family. After John’s death, Emily headed back to Salem, Virginia to be close to her family & she delivered their baby boy John on June 15, 2010 & named him John.
After John’s death, Josh decided that he wanted to be more like his big brother so he dedicated himself to the church & decided to pursue pre-med just like John had. However, he found that any lapse in judgement caused him to be flooded with guilt, shame & depression. He experienced night terrors as well as other side effects of PTSD. At times, while he was out driving alone, he would repeat I’m sorry over & over.
Josh made the decision to leave the church since he couldn’t shake the guilt & shame over John’s death. After he was diagnosed with PTSD, he moved to San Diego & started seeing a psychiatrist. During sometime around his fifth visit, he realized that he’d never actually cried over his brother’s death in the years since. He allowed himself to sob & then declared that he was healed.
At the time, Josh didn’t acknowledge the depth of his depression & grief & over a decade later, he was diagnosed with POTS: Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome which is any disorder of the autonomic nervous system. It causes an abnormal rise in heart rate upon standing that can cause dizziness & fatigue. According to the National Institute of Health, it is often found in those with high levels of anxiety.
During an annual Jones brothers retreat in 2022, Josh & his brother Mike, who was also in the Nutty Putty Cave on that horrific day, hike to a plateau in Arizona & Mike led Josh through a breathwork session. Josh said he felt like he split wide open that day & he & his brother sobbed together. As tears poured down his face, he felt close to John & the shame he forced down for so many years came to the surface & was replaced by the love he held for his brother.
In 2016, the movie, The Last Descent, was released & is based on John’s rescue attempt. In 2017, PBS produced a documentary that focused on search & rescue teams & featured John’s case, titled Search & Rescue. In 2019, the TV series, Fascinating Horror ran an episode titled, The Nutty Putty Caves. The Jones family feel that the interest in John’s story helps keep his memory alive.
Emily remarried three years after John’s death, changed her name & gave birth to two more children. She feels that her husband, Donovan Sanchez, has helped her pick up the pieces of her life & guide her through her grief. Sadly, she has received a great deal of backlash & hate for moving on & remarrying. During an interview on the 15th anniversary of John’s death in November 2024, Emily indicated that she is finally shedding the layer of grief that she’s been carrying. She sees John in Lizzie & their son, John & at least once a year, they head back to Utah to visit his parents. She visits the cave less often than she used to & acknowledges that life can be both tragic & beautiful at the same time.
References:
- The Salt Lake Tribune: Nutty Putty: ‘We’re going to get you out’
- The Cleveland Clinic: POTS
- The Salt Lake Tribune: 15 years after a man died in the Nutty Putty Cave, his family & rescuers still struggle to escape the darkness
- The Salt Lake Tribune: ‘I really, really want to get out’
- Brandon Kowallis: The Nutty Putty Cave rescue & the death of John Jones – One rescuers perspective
- Medium: The man sealed shut inside a cave for eternity
- Legacy: John Jones
- Wikipedia: Caving
- YouTube: PBS Utah – Search & Rescue
