Everyone who thinks cavers are crazy will be very happy to know that Jim Borden and Roger Brucker prove it in their magnum opus BEYOND MAMMOTH CAVE. In it Borden documents every complaint he ever had against the elderly dictatorial rulers (I blush in embarrassed pride) of the Cave Research Foundation and tells how he ran roughshod, young, and innocent over the entire caving establishment to find a new cave--Roppel Cave--and explore it to show the bastards. But then past-president of the Cave Research Foundation and senior citizen Roger Brucker, exhibiting his wizardry in conning deception, came slogging up a deep river in Mammoth Cave to make THE BIG CONNECTION with Roppel Cave and thus incorporate Borden's baby into the Mammoth Cave System. Borden squealed like a pig, but eventually made a deal with Brucker, alienated half his friends in his rival organization, the Central Kentucky Karst Coalition, and roared in from the Roppel side to meet Brucker (they had their lieutenants with clubs along with them just in case) and at the point of connection each held his nose with one hand and shook the other's hand with his other hand, and then they roared on past one another with the Roppel crowd exiting on the Mammoth side and the Mammoth crowd exiting on the Roppel side (without guides) just to show the idiots that they knew where the dreaded connection was all along.

Buy this great book. You won't be able to stop reading it once you start, even if you want to (and many might).

Give this book to everyone who thinks people are idiots for going caving. As I remark above, once they read it, no longer will they be in doubt.

Now if you really want to bomb people out, you should give them all three volumes of the AMERICAN CLASSIC CAVE TRIOLOGY;

THE CAVES BEYOND by Joe Lawrence, Jr. & Roger W. Brucker (St. Louis: Cave Books, 1975 in print), in which the famous fruitless Floyd Collins' Crystal Cave Expedition is documented. Sixty people spent a week underground and discovered exactly 13 yards of new cave, but even so, several of them got lost.

THE LONGEST CAVE by Roger W. Brucker and Richard A. Watson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987, in print) in which strong men quail as wire muscled Patricia Crowther squeezes through the Tight Spot to nail the connection of the Flint Ridge Cave System to Mammoth Cave, and John Wilcox utters those immortal words, "I see a tourist trail!"

BEYOND MAMMOTH CAVE by James D. Borden and Roger W. Brucker (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000, in print). Buy it now before the last remaining copies go to the shredders. (We THINK he's kidding about the shredder business - Speleobooks folks)

--Red Watson, past-president of the Cave Research Foundation and co-author of THE LONGEST CAVE