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The Tragedy of John Jones | Sealed Forever in a Cave

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A 26-year-old medical student went into a Utah cave for a Thanksgiving adventure and never came back out.

On the night of November 24, 2009, John Edward Jones crawled into a hydrothermal cave system called Nutty Putty, southwest of Utah Lake in Utah County, looking for a tight passage nicknamed the “Birth Canal.” He never found it. Instead, near a spot called Ed’s Push, he took a wrong turn into an uncharted fissure and got stuck upside down, 400 feet into the cave and 100 feet below the surface, in a crack barely 10 by 18 inches wide.

• Jones became wedged headfirst at a 70-to-80-degree angle after crawling into an unmapped fissure near “Ed’s Push” while searching for the “Birth Canal” passage.
• More than 100 emergency personnel and volunteer cave rescuers spent roughly 27 hours trying to extract him, at one point hoisting him several feet with a rope-and-pulley rig before a cave anchor sheared out of the soft rock and dropped him back into the fissure.
• Jones was pronounced dead at 11:52 p.m. on November 25, 2009, and his body was left inside the cave, which was sealed with explosives and concrete in early December 2009.

A Wrong Turn 400 Feet Underground

Jones entered Nutty Putty with a group of family and friends during Thanksgiving week, a trip meant to retrace a cave he’d explored as a teenager. Nutty Putty is known among Utah cavers for its narrow, twisting hydrothermal passages, and the “Birth Canal” is one of its notorious squeezes. Somewhere past Ed’s Push, Jones diverted off the known route and dropped headfirst into a fissure that wasn’t on any map. He got stuck almost immediately, inverted, with his shoulders and hips pinned against rock on either side.

That inversion turned out to be the deadliest part of the accident. Hanging upside down for hours forces the heart to work against gravity just to keep blood circulating, and combined with the crushing pressure on his chest restricting his breathing, Jones’s body was fighting a losing battle long before rescuers could reach him.

The 27-Hour Rescue

Word reached emergency crews quickly, and more than 100 personnel and volunteer cave rescuers eventually cycled through the operation, squeezing one at a time into the same tight corridors Jones’s group had used. Given the geometry of the fissure, the plan settled on hauling him out by his legs using a rope-and-pulley system anchored into the rock. It worked, briefly — rescuers raised him several feet off the bottom of the crack.

Then the anchor sheared out of the soft cave rock. The rigging collapsed, and Jones fell back down into the fissure he’d been stuck in for the better part of a day.

Rescuers had him rising out of the fissure — until the anchor tore loose from the rock and he dropped straight back down.

Cardiac Arrest and a Death Underground

By the time crews were regrouping to try again, Jones’s body had been inverted for far too long. He lost consciousness as his heart gave out under the strain of pumping blood against gravity while his breathing remained restricted. He was pronounced dead at 11:52 p.m. on November 25, 2009 — roughly 27 hours after he’d first become stuck — the cause listed as suffocation and cardiac arrest.

Rescue officials then faced a second, brutal decision: whether to keep trying to pull his body out. They concluded that further extraction attempts would put rescuers at serious risk given how narrow and structurally unstable the fissure was. That kind of trade-off is a recurring nightmare in confined-space rescue work, echoed in other close-call stories like climbing rescues that go wrong when the terrain itself becomes the danger.

Sealing Nutty Putty for Good

The Jones family, Utah County officials, and the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration agreed to leave John’s body where it was rather than risk more lives. In early December 2009, crews detonated explosives to collapse the cave ceiling near the fissure, then poured concrete into the entrances, sealing Nutty Putty Cave permanently. It remains closed, with Jones’s body inside, to this day. For anyone drawn to the pull of underground spaces — whether it’s divers chasing sinkholes on farmland or families touring built-out underground homes — Nutty Putty stands as the reason cavers now treat unmapped, uncharted squeezes as off-limits, full stop.

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