COLUMN ONE : Caves of Wonder, Plunder : Vandals have destroyed formations that took eons to create, and pollution threatens ‘nature’s storm drains.’ After years of neglect, the government is trying to protect our buried treasures.

Protecting the beauty of a cave is a life’s work for men like Jerry Trout. So if the husky federal ranger takes you “caving,” be prepared to follow a deliberately circuitous route in the interest of preserving nature’s underground glories.

Take Thunder Mountain Cave, well hidden in a narrow canyon in the Huachuca Mountains of southeastern Arizona.

With his bare hands, Trout sweeps aside a pile of leaves, strategically placed to conceal a set of weathered steel bars set in the ground. He reaches under the grid and feels for the lock.

The rusting hinges groan as he opens a trap door to reveal a crevice barely the width of his shoulders.

“Let’s go caving!” he says. He wedges himself beneath the gray limestone bedrock. Downward he goes into the black void, hands clenched around a taut yellow rope tethered to an oak tree.

Thirty-five feet down, his heavy boots touch a shelf of damp earth. As he turns in the pitch-dark chamber, a light on his helmet illuminates another narrow opening in the bedrock below. He descends--first feet, then shoulders--into the crack. Then he begins a 400-foot belly crawl through narrow, undulating passages lined with ooze the consistency of peanut butter.

Just when the dank air seems thick as a tomb’s, Trout shouts: “We’re in! No more crawling. Stand up and look at this!”

Four shafts of light from helmet lanterns meet in the main room of Coronado National Forest’s fabled Thunder Mountain Cave. A frozen waterfall glistens like rivulets of orange, vanilla and chocolate ice cream. In fact, they are pristine mineral formations deposited over millions of years by acid water seeping through soluble fissures of limestone.

Drapes, towers and soda straws of calcite sparkle in the light, which also bounces off crystal filaments as thin as human hair. Clear pools of water held back by travertine dams brim with calcite cave pearls. Gnarled tendrils of white helictites extend from the walls like miniature saguaro cactus.

Colorless crickets, in no need of pigment for camouflage, wander across the ceiling. The only sound is the pinging of water dripping from the tips of formations still growing in spaces at a constant 67 degrees Fahrenheit and 90% humidity.

“The dream of all real cave-lovers is to keep one in this condition,” exults Trout, a U.S. Forest Service specialist. His job is to preserve and catalogue dozens of caverns, some secret and some not so well protected, from the encroachment of man. “This is as good as they get.”

Protection of America’s caves and grottoes has been a long time coming. After five years of bickering, federal officials expect to issue enforcement rules for the 1988 Federal Cave Resources Protection Act in October. After that, Trout and other resource agents will have one year to draft a list of significant caves on public lands, then devise plans to manage them.

Officials estimate that there are as many as 4,000 significant caves on federal land throughout the West. Thousands more are in the East, most on private land.

These buried treasures are threatened by increasing urbanization, pollution of ground-water aquifers, mining operations and a growing nationwide thirst for outdoor adventure.

Some, like Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, have been severely damaged by visiting hordes. Others, like the newly discovered Lechuguilla caves, also in New Mexico and regarded as one of the largest and most beautiful in the world, are jeopardized by drilling for oil and gas.

Many caves are little known repositories of unique geological history and havens for shrimp, fish, amphibians and other creatures never seen above ground.

Still others are being discovered almost daily by a rare breed of daredevil whose biggest thrill is to “push the passage”--to find and explore the very bowels of the Earth, and to be the first to do it.

Not surprisingly, these intrepid folks--who reject the familiar term spelunkers as obsolete--are wary of federal efforts. They say they don’t trust government regulators to protect the caves.

For one thing, they’ve watched officials with the U.S. Interior Department and Agriculture Department argue for years over details and definitions of protection codes. And before that, the federal attitude toward caves was mostly one of neglect.

Some cavers vow to keep secret some of the best caves they have discovered on public lands in recent years.

“The most difficult part of caving is finding caves, and the feds don’t have the time or the resources to do it,” said Wyoming caver Warren Anderson, the self-proclaimed ringleader of a so-called “Western cave revolt.” “They’ll never be able to find all the caves we know about on federal lands.”

Not all cavers agree. The conservation-minded National Speleological Society fought for the 1988 act and urges cooperation with federal authorities.

Sympathetic federal officials say they agree that they must do more to preserve these underground treasure-troves and the life forms that inhabit them.

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Caves. Caverns. Grottoes. These are the stuff of legend: home to brigands and vampires, temples for ancestral shamans, and portals to a mother lode of mineral wealth.

In reality, they have provided shelter for bears, bats, even early man. Some, like the caves and recesses at Lascaux in southern France and Monument Valley, Utah, have preserved the artistic and spiritual drives of our ancestors in pictographs made of soot and paint.

Until a few years ago, federal land managers shrugged off most caves as potential legal liabilities better left plugged with concrete and forgotten. Such neglect shut out bats and other creatures that used these natural voids to rear their young and protect them from predators.

It also left many caves vulnerable to people who dynamited open the closures and plundered the caves of stalactites, stalagmites and other mineral formations that took eons to grow in chambers of constant airflow, humidity and temperature.

Caves “are the storm drains of the Earth,” said Ron Kerbo, cave specialist for the National Park Service in Santa Fe, N.M. “When it rains, the water flows easiest through water-soluble limestone and gypsum--that’s where drinking water comes from in much of the country.”

Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the nation’s fresh-water resources comes from ground water. East of the Mississippi River, 45% of these reserves are in gypsum and limestone aquifers, most of them linked to caverns and fissures, Kerbo said.

“But caves are still looked down upon by even some scientists because, in order to observe and study them, you have to crawl around and get dirty and hang your butt over 200-foot drops,” he said. “Meanwhile, cavers are very tight-lipped about caves out of fear that information about them invites abuse.”

Many environmentalists point to Carlsbad Caverns, one of the most regulated caves in the world, as a worst-case scenario. More than 18,000 formations have been vandalized since the caverns were opened to the public in the 1920s.

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Under the new regulations, many pristine caves on public lands will be kept secret by excluding their locations from federal Freedom of Information Act requests--unless it is determined that such information will not create a substantial risk of harm, theft or destruction.

Entry to these caves already requires a permit and accompaniment by a federal cave specialist.

Many of the most famous caves were formed by natural carbonic acid seeping through joints and fissures and then dissolving limestone.

Carlsbad Caverns, Lechuguilla Cave and Thunder Mountain Cave were excavated by sulfuric acid. The acid was created by water mixing with hydrogen sulfide gas fuming up from gas and oil deposits in an ancient sea basin covering much of southeastern New Mexico. The acid dissolved portions of a limestone reef that bordered the sea 250 million years ago.

Still other caves, diverse in size and shape, were carved out of sea cliffs by pounding waves, or hollowed by lava flows, or gouged by flash floods in the soluble gypsum of desert flatlands.

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If the caves require protection, so do their most common residents: bats, which contribute to insect control and the pollination of plants such as the saguaro cactus.

“If caves are destroyed, bats will disappear,” said Carlsbad Caverns National Park Ranger Dale Smith. “If the bats go, the saguaros will disappear too.”

The highest concentrations of life in caves are found in those with large bat colonies such as Carlsbad Caverns, where a historic population of 8.7 million of the winged mammals was decimated by pesticides and the destruction of habitat, including mining guano for fertilizer.

Today, about 250,000 thumb-sized free-tail bats rear their young each year in the caverns over ancient mounds of guano teeming with beetles and mites.

But caves need not be encrusted with world-class formations or house huge bat colonies to be considered significant under the new federal regulations.

Parks Ranch Cave, for example, is a scowling hole beneath a Hackberrytree on the desert plains three miles southeast of Carlsbad Caverns.

“The main thing about this cave is not that it has pretty formations but that it provides ground-water recharge for the entire region,” said Jim Goodbar, cave specialist for the federal Bureau of Land Management. “It also contains permanent pools of water that are home for a species of blind cave shrimp discovered only a few years ago.”

Reaching those pools calls for crab-crawling in knee-deep water through sinuous tunnels encrusted with sugary-white gypsum. Some stretches of the cave are paved with slippery, brown calcite flowstone. The eyes of pack rats nesting in crevices glow red in the electric light of a hard hat.

Half a mile from the entrance, the cave drops suddenly into a second tier where the ceiling hangs only a few feet above large pools of water--home to the shrimp that appear like ghostly shadows in the beam of a flashlight, smaller than a fingernail, plowing in and around banks of silt.

“Nutrients in these pools are replenished by flash floods, which apparently encouraged survival and evolution of a species that may have descended from shrimp that lived here when the place was covered with ocean,” Goodbar said.

Survival of the shrimp depends upon the continued stability of the cave, which is maintained by the BLM. But some fear for the protection of other still-undiscovered creatures dwelling in perhaps hundreds of other caves throughout the West. These caverns are known to cavers who aren’t about to divulge their locations to federal officials.

Anderson, a computer programmer by trade, is one of many who actively oppose the new federal effort on grounds that government officials have failed miserably to manage caves in the past and cannot be trusted to keep the locations of pristine caves a secret now.

Fearing the worst, Anderson said, the entrances of certain caves in Wyoming have been covered with boulders and brush in an attempt to hide them.

“The Forest Service in Wyoming only knows where the trashed caves are,” Anderson said. “But really terrific caves have been discovered since the law was passed in 1988, and every one of them is going to be kept secret from federal land agencies.”

Kerbo, who helped draft the language of the law, finds that distressing.

“They don’t have to tell us where caves are, but if a hotel or a sewage line is built on top of one we don’t know exists, we can’t meet our mandate to protect it,” Kerbo said. “Keeping a cave secret from us only leaves them vulnerable to severe impacts.”

Trout adds that recreational cavers in search of adventure can defile these non-renewable resources as much as insensitive land managers.

“Joe Flashlight-caver I’ve never had a problem with,” Trout said. “It’s the bona fide conservationist caver that drives me crazy. They think they know it all.”

A case in point is Cottonwood Cave, the enormous sloping entrance of which is shaded by maple trees on a remote hillside 6,950 feet above sea level in New Mexico’s Guadalupe Mountains.

In 1960, Trout was among a group that discovered a series of galleries deep inside the cave with extraordinarily beautiful and delicate formations. Within six months of their discovery, 95% of the formations were destroyed or carted away by cavers. Some looters must have been shocked to watch mirabilite needles, which flourish in the 99% humidity of the cave, disintegrate into lines of dust above ground.

But “the 5% of the formations that are left in Cottonwood are world-class,” said Forest Service cave specialist Ransom Turner, who leads tours of the cave, which has four-story-tall stalagmites seemingly standing guard only a few yards beyond the entrance.

Farther still is an 18-inch-wide pipe set flush with the floor and guarded by a massive steel gate. “We’re really getting under the skin of Mother Earth now,” Turner said, plunging feet first into the pipe that empties into crawlways and belly-scraping passages decorated with fossilized snail shells.

Eventually, they emerge on the trail Trout blazed 30 years ago through a series of vaulted galleries where every turn of a hard-hat light reveals breathtaking surprises.

Sparkling mirabilite needles sprout from piles of fallen boulders along the trail’s edges. Chandeliers of clear selenite crystals hang from rock overhangs lined with brilliant yellow veins of native sulfur. Snow-white aragonite flowers cling to cliff sides indented with cavities bristling with calcite crystals resembling a dog’s teeth.

“You know, there’s one thing they couldn’t steal from here,” Turner said, sitting beside a rippling subterranean lake more than a mile inside the cave. “The constant dripping of water creating new formations.”

America’s Buried Treasures

Federal officials agree they must do more to preserve the nation’s underground treasure troves and the life forms that inhabit them. Here are known limestone caves in the United States. Patterns in the map below indicate cave concentrations over a 10,000 square mile area.

No limestone caves are definitely known to exist in Hawaii.

Fact sheet on caves

Number in U.S.: 40,000 to 50,000

Deepest cave in U.S.: Lechuguilla Cave, 1,592 feet deep and still counting, is part of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.

Deepest cave in the world: Reseau Jean Bernard in France, 5,259 feet

Largest chamber is the U.S.: The Big Room in Carlsbad Caverns. It is one-half mile long, 300-yards wide and 222-feet high at its highest point.

Longest cave in the world: Mammoth Cave in Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky is 336 miles long--and still counting.

Most popular cave: Mammoth Cave, visited by 2.5 million people last year.

Cave with the most bats: Bracken Bat Cave just outside San Antonio, Tex., has 20 million bats, giving it the largest number of bats in any cave in the world.

Source: Map data provided by George W. Moors for the National Speleological Society