[Nmcaver] Blue Hole--Lake Michigan connection!

[DONALD G. DAVIS]

      I was given this as a recent clipping (no date) from the UNM Daily
Lobo.  We've all heard the wild tales that "X Cave connects to Carlsbad,"
but this is the first impossible connection story I've read that claimed
the connection was underwater.  The author unfortunately does not state 
his original source for the assertion.
							--Donald Davis

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                               ---COLUMN---

                           MY STRANGE NEW MEXICO

*Diver deaths spawn rumors of underground waterway

by Mike Smith
Daily Lobo

      About 120 miles east of Albuquerque, on the eastern edge of the town
of Santa Rosa, N.M., lies a tiny oval of blue water--a spring-fed sinkhole
about 80 feet wide and 81 feet deep--known as the Blue Hole.

      Sometime ago a group of scuba divers dove into the Blue Hole, eager
to explore every nook and fissure of the smooth-walled sinkhole.  After
climbing out, they realized one of their divers had disappeared.

      Six months later, the body of that diver finally surfaced, but not
in Santa Rosa.  It was discovered, the story claims, in Lake Michigan--
more than a thousand miles away--naked, waterlogged and with much of its
skin scuffed off, as if it had been pushed and scraped through miles of
rocky tunnels.

      If the story is true, one of the longest underground waterways in
the world could lie directly beneath us.  Perhaps the direct water route
across the continent searched for by the explorers Lewis and Clark
actually exists--underground.  Andrea Sachs, in a Dec. 19, 2004,
Washington Post article, wrote that there is a protective metal grate
covering a spring that produces about 3,000 gallons of fresh water per
minute on the Blue Hole's limestone floor.  And, she wrote, that grate
also seals off an elaborate network of caves that twists southward 200
miles, down to Texas.

      "I don't think anyone knows just how extensive that system is," said
Si Minton, owner of New Mexico Scuba Center.  "No one has ever explored
the total cave system below Blue Hole."

      "The only maps (of the cave network) are apparently sketches made by
rescue divers.  There are reportedly some rooms below the sink, and it
goes to 250 feet with a going passage beyond," said Mike Poucher,
cartographer for the National Speleological Society Cave Diving Section. 
"How far does it go?  No one knows."

      Poucher said the grate blocking the cave system was installed in the
early 1980s, after at least four divers died in the caves during the
previous decade.

      In March of 1976, the Albuquerque Journal reported two of these
deaths, detailing how a group of 10 university students were diving in the
Blue Hole one morning, how 21-year-old David Gregg and 22-year-old Mike
Godard failed to resurface, and how it took the State Police multiple
dives to recover their bodies.  In 1979, two other divers got lost and
died in the caves.  Their bodies were recovered as well.

      That the bodies of all who drowned in the Blue Hole's caves were
quickly accounted for suggests that the Lake Michigan story really is only
rumor, as does the area's geology.

      "The odds of there being a hydrologic connection to the Great Lakes
from New Mexico are about as remote as finding a wormhole to transport you
there across time and space," said scientist Mike Spilde, UNM's resident
cave-geology expert.

      "In other words, it just doesn't exist.  First, it would require a
continuous rock stratum capable of supporting caves to be present all the
way from New Mexico to the Great Lakes, which there isn't.  More
importantly, the body would have to get past the huge hydrologic barrier
of the Mississippi River.  The river acts as a giant collecting system,
moving not only surface water to the ocean, but a lot of subsurface water,
too.  The body would have to swim upstream to get to the Great Lakes," he
said.

      So, perhaps the story isn't so strange after all.

      However, in 1976 and 1979, as the young divers swam their ways
silently through dark caves deep beneath the New Mexico desert, feeling
the walls for a way back out, the truth of the story was probably strange
to them.  As they lost their way, their headlamps dimmed and died, their
air supplies seeped away in panicked moments, and they swam from this life
into the wide unknown that follows.  The events of their mornings could
not have felt entirely normal.


Mike Smith is a UNM history major and the author of _Towns of the Sandia
Mountains_, available Oct. 30 from Arcadia Publishing.  Suggest strange
topics for his future columns at culture at dailylobo.com.