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Montana

Going Deep

In Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness, a team of cavers reaches new depths in Tears of the Turtle, the nation’s deepest known limestone cave. How much lower does it go?

By Bowman Leigh | The Pulp
A caver rappelling down an in-cave waterfall in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area. File photo

Around 8 a.m. on July 27, 28-year-old Dustin Kisner awoke in his sleeping bag suspended in the air on a portaledge, a device that enables rock climbers to sleep while hanging from a cliff face.

But Kisner was not high on a mountain. He was more than 1,800 feet below ground in Tears of the Turtle, the deepest known cave in the continental United States, hidden in the middle of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. That’s nearly as far from the surface as the top of Mount Sentinel is from the floor of the Missoula Valley. 

Kisner, along with two other cavers, hung there in a cold, dark room, about 20 feet long by five feet wide, accessible only by rappelling into it. Light came solely from battery-powered headlamps, two of which were affixed to each cavers’ helmet, with a third as a backup in their waterproof packs. Below them the ground was more puddle than floor, where they’d piled rocks into a lumpy surface then covered it with plastic sheeting, an attempt to keep things clean in a cave coated in thick mud. To retrieve water, they had to crawl on their hands and knees for 100 feet, including one stretch that required them to lay on their bellies and worm through a hole no more than a foot high and two feet wide.

As alien as the most remote corners of the earth can be, whether the Arctic or deep ocean or the Himalayas, perhaps being underground is most akin to being on another planet — the complete lack of communication, the isolation and disorientation, maybe even reaching places no human has ever been.

Above Kisner and company, somewhere in the limestone labyrinth, were a dozen more cavers moving between camps like underground sherpas. Together they comprised the eighth expedition into Tears of the Turtle Cave since 2006, and Kisner’s second. And inside this hole on the side of a mountain in the Montana wilderness — already one of the most unreachable and detached places in the Lower 48 — they descended into a new frontier. 

That morning, Kisner’s team left what they called Camp Two — also cheekily known as “Camp Dangle” due to the need for portaledges — to venture beyond where the previous expedition in 2022 had stopped, beyond where anyone had been before. 

Hans “Mr. B” Bodenhamer, second from the left, with students from the Bigfork Cave Club. Courtesy photo

Searching for the bottom of Tears of the Turtle can feel a bit like reaching false summits while hiking: the end point is not as it appears. The cave’s tall, narrow canyon passages twist and turn, at times seeming to dead-end only for the cavers to find another opening that continues on, taking them even deeper into the maze.

Back in 2022, the expedition reached a new depth of around 2,000 feet — just past what would later become Camp Dangle. They stopped when they found the path ahead fully submerged underwater. But up above, they spotted a hole in the cave wall. So they planned, on the 2024 trip, to return and go inside.

Kisner’s “push team” — the ones who enter new sections of a cave and survey it, collecting point-to-point measurements that are later used to create a map —  had already been underground for two days when they finally returned to that sump. After spending another day setting up the ropes they would need, on day four they climbed back above the water and entered the high, dry passage. Once inside, they rappelled down into a clean, mud-free wash that branched off from the main corridor. At the end of this downsloping canyon, they found it: a new cave bottom located 20 to 40 feet inside of a 45-degree angled, body-sized, muddy tube. 

“It was definitely scary,” Kisner said, recalling what it was like to lower himself into the tube feet-first. 

Caving in Tears attracts a particularly resilient breed of adventurer: those who dare to descend its narrow, two- to three-foot-wide passages face thick glacial mud, a constant temperature of 37 degrees and near 100 percent humidity, requiring cavers to wear PVC suits to protect against hypothermia. 

It also involves technical ropework and rigging systems. And, because the cave is so deep, multiple camps must be set up within so that cavers can eat and sleep before exploring further, sometimes remaining inside for up to a week. Picture mountaineering basecamps at increasing altitudes but in reverse. The deeper the cavers go, the more gear they need, but their backpack dimensions also can’t exceed 10 to 12 inches in diameter or they risk getting stuck, unable to squeeze through tight spaces. 

In total, this expedition — led by expert spelunkers Pete Johnson and Jason Ballensky — included 17 cavers and took two weeks, from July 20 to Aug. 4. It was the first year that the group set up two basecamps, the first at 1,400 feet below ground and the second, Camp Dangle, at 1,850 feet. 

“It’s a lot of gear, it’s a lot of time, it’s a lot of dedication — all for the love of the game,” said Johnson, who sits on the National Speleological Society’s board of governors and daylights as the owner of a small marketing firm in New Mexico. He started caving after college in 2007 and has spent the last eight summers surveying caves in western Wyoming. Johnson has been to Tears five times since 2014 and turned 40 during this year’s expedition. 

The trips are largely funded by the cavers themselves, sometimes with the help of grants from the NSS, the leading caving organization in the U.S. Ballensky footed the bill for the bulk of the 2024 mission, estimating that he spent around $11,000, while the rest of the team chipped in a combined $5,000. 

Despite the cave’s notorious difficulty, cavers have found themselves pulled, again and again, back to Tears of the Turtle in pursuit of true bottom in the meandering limestone fissure. 

As Kisner lowered himself into the muddy tube, he held a laser rangefinder called a disto, which measures distance, compass bearing, and inclination angle with the push of a button. He flattened his body against the tube’s walls in order to point the laser beam between his legs. Suspended there, tethered to a rock with ropes, Kisner found himself 2,477 feet below ground — a distance comparable to the vertical drop at Montana Snowbowl outside Missoula. 

“Stoked” was the word Kisner used to describe how it felt to reach more than 400 feet deeper than the previous expedition.

And it probably goes deeper still, the trip leaders say. How much, exactly, remains a mystery.

Caving in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Courtesy Photo

Tears of the Turtle was first discovered by Ballensky and Hans Bodenhamer, a science teacher at Bigfork High School. In 2006, the caving partners spied a hole in a cliff below Turtlehead Mountain while ridgewalking deep in the Bob Marshall. 

On the day in late July when Kisner and crew reached the new depth record, Ballensky was back on the surface, enjoying his only rest day of the trip in between hauling gear inside the cave to support the push teams. Earlier that week, Bodenhamer and a group of students in the Bigfork High School Cave Club had been working about a mile and a half away at Virgil the Turtle’s Greathouse Cave, putting down pathways to protect its pristine ancient mud floor from picking up modern-day footprints.

It’s that kind of work that last year earned Bodenhamer — who’s mapped some 150 caves in Montana — recognition from Glacier National Park for his contributions to cave exploration and conservation for more than two decades.

Ballensky, who’s 46 and works as a telecommunications engineer based in San Diego, grew up on a ranch outside Miles City.

As a young boy, his parents took him to visit Lewis and Clark Caverns, Montana’s only tourist cave. After he got home, Ballensky remembers wandering around the ranch looking for holes in the ground, inspired by the parting words of their tour guide who suggested there could be hundreds more caves like it that had yet to be found.

While studying engineering at Montana State University, another fateful discovery would nudge Ballensky toward the world of caving: a book on Montana caves that he still has to this day, the binding now reinforced with duct tape.

“Once I had that book … there [were] a bunch of caves that they sort of knew about, and then there were hundreds of caves that they didn’t have a location [for], sort of rumors,” Ballensky said. “The idea that there’s all these undiscovered caves out there, that was all it took. Suddenly, that was the rest of my life basically.” 

Then Ballensky attended his first “grotto” meeting (grottos are local NSS chapters), where he remembers, some 23 years ago, meeting Hans Bodenhamer. The two would become friends and caving partners, and eventually co-discover more than 80 caves in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. 

Bodenhamer, 66, is also the Tears of the Turtle cartographer. After push teams gather survey measurements inside the cave, Bodenhamer takes the data and draws a detailed map by hand.

Just a couple of days into this year’s expedition, a mishap caused the cavers to fear they wouldn’t get any new data for Bodenhamer to draw.

Ten pack mules hauled the team’s gear — food and all sorts of camping, caving and climbing equipment, including heavy lengths of rope — over 20 miles into the backcountry. But, on July 22, when Ballensky and company expected to rendezvous with the pack train, there was no sign of them. Ballensky hiked in the direction they’d be coming from and soon found a grisly scene: two of the mules, loaded with gear, had stepped off the trail, fallen into a ravine and died. Three other mules without packs had also fallen and survived, but were trapped. 

Ballensky alerted the rest of the crew via satellite messenger, and by 6 a.m. the next morning, the team was cutting a trail up the steep hillside to rescue the trapped mules. They also had to recover their food and gear from the dead ones. Johnson remembers finding his drybag between the two fallen mules and discovering that the food sack inside was covered in blood. 

Once the three trapped mules were rescued, the crew opted to hoof it to avoid any more delays. Grabbing all of the gear they could carry, they hiked about six miles, with a net elevation gain of about 1,000 feet, back to their camp, where they faced the decision of whether to push on with the expedition. 

“It takes a little bit of psychological resilience, I think, for people to be able to do that — to wake up so early in the morning to deal with this mule disaster in 100 degree heat, and then say, ‘OK, we got it done, let’s pivot,’ and actually go after what we’re planning on doing,” Johnson said.

Cavers explore the Double Date Cave in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area. Photo Courtesy of Elliot Stahl

Members of the Tears of the Turtle expedition say they often get asked why they keep coming back. 

Ballensky admits he has a fear of heights and can experience claustrophobia when it gets really tight inside a cave, but says his love for the adventure ultimately takes over.

“It’s that passion for doing it that overrides some of these discomforts and makes you want to push through them,” Ballensky said. 

Others, like Johnson, feel a pull to finish the work they started.

“We’ve all sort of done it as a group. You have some sense of obligation to the other people,” Johnson said. The camaraderie and closeness among the team, he adds, is special. 

Underlying that, though, the thrill of dropping deeper into the unknown can be harder to describe.

“The way I explain it is: If you hear about this trip and don’t have an intrinsic urge to go do it or an intrinsic understanding of why we would do it, I’m probably not going to be able to explain it in words,” Johnson said. “It’s a little bit out there.”

Thinking back to when he got to touch the new bottom of the cave earlier this year, Kisner lights up.

“I’ve caved all over the [country] and I kind of live to cave, so it felt like where I wanted to be was down there,” Kisner said. “Pushing the deepest in the U.S. felt good.” 

The next Tears of the Turtle expedition is on track for 2026, and Kisner, Johnson and Ballensky all plan to be there.

How low can it go? Both Ballensky and Bodenhamer think at least a couple hundred more feet. According to Bodenhamer, the geology of the area suggests that the cave could run another 200 feet deeper, following the downward curve of a fold in the Cambrian-aged limestone, and possibly even farther.

While Bodenhamer doesn’t rappel deep into Tears anymore, he expects the team of cavers to keep returning until they can’t. 

“People aren’t going to forget something that looks like it’s still going,” Bodenhamer said.

“You know what’s really cool though, I think, [is] a mountain climber gets on top of a mountain and they get a lot of credit. There’s not a lot of mountains left, but there’s a fair number of possibilities for caves. Here’s a place on earth that nobody’s been in before.

This story was originally published in The Pulp, an independent, nonprofit news organization based in Missoula. It is republished here with permission.