"There's some really great stuff back here! It really opens up the higher you go," hollers back Rodney Mulder.
The giggles echo up and down the dank passageways of Timpanogos Cave National Monument as more cavers scramble to peek in the black crevice, barely wide enough for human passage.Few have ever set foot in this particular passage. For that matter, until this year few had ever set foot anywhere off the now-asphalt pathway that twists its way through the Timpanogos Cave system.
But every weekend since May 10, volunteer cavers from one end of the Wasatch Front to the other have been participating in a painstakingly tedious project of exploring and mapping the three caves that the Timpanogos Cave National Monument comprises.
Armed with Brunton compasses, battery-powered headlamps and rappelling gear, the volunteers are pushing and squeezing themselves into virtually every passage and crevice in the cave system, often wiggling into holes like a hand into a rubber glove.
Sometimes the dripping passages open up onto breathtaking never-before-seen chambers of pristine and fragile geological formations that take untold thousands of years to form.
Most times they simply dead-end in the limestone rock that combined with air and water to create one of the rarest caves in North America.
Despite the fact millions have traipsed through the caves, they are among the least understood in the National Park System - a factor that has drawn veteran cave explorers to a "tourist cave" they might otherwise avoid.
"Most of the cavers feel this is a once in a lifetime chance to see the off-trail things this cave has to offer and to actively participate in its preservation," said Rod Horrocks, a professional cartographer and the project director.
"The formations are so delicate that this mapping project will be the only chance anyone will actually have to see it, probably for decades."
This is not the first time the cave system has been mapped, but it is the most complete, already doubling the known length of the cave. And it marks the first attempt to transfer the data to computer.
"In order to protect the cave system, we need to know what's there," said Mike Tranel, chief ranger at Timpanogos Cave and a major proponent of the project. "It's a matter of knowing where the passages are, and how the air flows and interacts with the surface. It's a live cave with water still coming in and formations still growing."
Knowing how air and water gets into the cave is critical in the management of the cave, Tranel emphasizes. For decades, man has altered the natural flow of air and water by boring connecting tunnels between caves, blocking certain entrances and, in decades past, actually removing formations and filling in entire chambers.
The first of the three caves, Hansen Cave, was discovered in the fall of 1887. The cave was a popular tourist attraction for locals, as well as a mining company that in 1892 and 1893 removed two train-car loads of formations for building stones and for use in things like jewelry, lamps and coffee tables.
Timpanogos Cave was discovered in 1915 and then "rediscovered" six years later. Later that same year, in October 1921, Middle Cave was discovered, and the following year the three caves were designated a national monument.
In 1939 the three caves were connected by man-made tunnels. "There were things done in the 1930s that caused a lot of damage to the cave system," Tranel said. "There was not much understanding of cave systems and how they work. Now we are trying to correct some of those things."
While little can ever be done to restore Hansen Cave to its former glory, the National Park Service would like to return the entire Timpanogos Cave system to a more natural condition, restoring natural air and water flows, and reintroducing animals - primarily bats - that once made their home in the caves.
"We can't make it 100 percent the way it was before man impacted it," Tranel said. "But the idea is to restore it as close as we can."
For Utah cavers, the project is a labor of love. With some 450 "wild" caves in Utah waiting to be explored and mapped, the clubs - the Timpanogos Grotto, the Salt Lake Grotto and the Wasatch Grotto - are instead devoting their spare time to a cave most agree has been irreparably damaged by man.
The project has already consumed 1,500 volunteer hours, Horrocks said, not to mention the time and expense of Park Service employees.
The Timpanogos caves were first mapped in 1974, but the survey measured only the main passageways. The 1991 survey is exploring every nook and cranny, and already the mappers have doubled the known length of the cave and discovered new passages and rooms in pristine condition.
"We are finding new passages, very inaccessible passages where the formations are extremely fragile," Tranel said. "Just crawling through there, we break off formations that took thousands of years to create."
Once the new passages are mapped and photographed, the areas will be off-limits, even to park service employees.
Horrocks had wanted to map the cave for years, but until Tranel arrived the political climate was not yet right. That, combined with the perfection of the computerized Geographic Information System, which allows the Park Service to monitor changes in geological formations over time, made the time right.