3/13/2023 0 Comments Nutty putty cave john jonesThe Grotto set up an online reservation system that only allowed one group in the cave at a time, and the entrance to the cave was padlocked shut at night. Nutty Putty Cave was closed in 2006 citing safety concerns and only reopened in May 2009 after a cave management plan was signed with the Timpanogos Grotto. Concern mounted in 2005 after the tragic drowning deaths of four young Utahns in a nearby cave on "Y" Mountain. It's not for nothing that three of the cave's tightest squeezes are called "The Helmet Eater," "The Scout Eater" and "The Birth Canal."Īll six of those trapped cavers made it out of Nutty Putty alive, but the local sheriff's office and search and rescue crews grew tired of making regular trips out to pull tourists from the cave, and they worried that the next accident would be fatal. "They put themselves in situations that they probably wouldn't have if they had just stopped and thought about it for a minute."įrom 1999 to 2004, six different people became stuck in one of Nutty Putty's narrow passages. "A lot of the people going to Nutty Putty were first-timers, or they were on a date with their girlfriend and wanted to show off or whatever," says Downey. Since Nutty Putty was such a popular cave, attracting thousands of visitors a year, it was perhaps inevitable that a few amateur cavers would get themselves into trouble. Analyses done on the clay in the 1960s found that it was composed of tiny particles of silicon dioxide (the main component of sand) roughly 3 microns (less than 0.0001 inches) in diameter. ![]() Like Silly Putty, the clay would change from a solid to an elastic fluid when lightly squeezed.ĭowney says that the clay was even "sound active," meaning that if you yelled at it, it would ooze and move. The most recognizable characteristic of the cave was the strangely viscous clay oozing from some of its walls, which the cave's first explorer, a man named Dale Green, compared to Nutty Putty, the original product name for Silly Putty. A survey conducted in 2003 was able to map 1,355 feet (413 meters) of cave to a depth of 145 feet (44 meters) from the surface. Perhaps because of its hydrothermal past, temperatures inside Nutty Putty stayed around 55 degrees Fahrenheit (12.7 degrees Celsius) year round. ![]() ![]() It was very characteristic of a hypogenic cave." "It had tight squeezes that opened up into a big room, then back to another tight squeeze. "Traditionally, these types of caves are very complex and feature lots of domes and three-dimensional passages, which was true of Nutty Putty," says Paulson. Paulson explains that Nutty Putty is what's known as a hypogenic cave, formed when superheated water is forced upward into a bed of limestone, and minerals in the water eat away at the rock above to create cave shafts. Nutty Putty is also a limestone cave, but instead of being dissolved by water dripping in from above, it was created from the bottom up by hydrothermal activity. Almost all caves form in limestone, which, over long periods of time, is slowly eaten away by slightly acidic groundwater.
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