cave explorer named George Beck, from Pennsylvania, mounted a couple of caving expeditions into Tapeats Amphitheater in the late 1950s after running across a photo of Thunder Falls coming out of the canyon wall that was published in an Arizona Highways magazine. Beck got into Thunder Cave to where the water gets deep, found Tapeats Cave, and saw the waterfall entrance to the cave behind Dutton Spring in Deer Canyon. His access was first by way of the Thunder River Trail and later the Don Finicum shortcut, a bushwhack down the end of Monument Point long before the Monument Point trail was built. His early attempts to explore Tapeats and Dutton Caves were foiled, however. On one trip, a guy came down with a fever and they got him out of the canyon just before he became incapacitated with the mumps. On another trip, a fellow slipped on the Bright Angel Shale just east of Thunder Spring, sped down the slope on his back toward a cliff, and stopped himself from going over by wrapping his arm around a barrel cactus. That mess naturally required another premature evacuation.

Beck enrolled in the University of Arizona which was closer to the Grand Canyon so he could pursue his explorations. He organized a caving group at the U of A in 1959 to help‹this is where I got involved with him‹and that group sent a couple of teams to explore Thunder and Tapeats Caves. With Beck at the lead, and with a couple of military surplus one-man life rafts from fighter planes, we saw the three-quarter mile accessible part of Thunder on the first try during Easter, 1960. Beck then got drafted into the army and was out of the game for a couple of years. A second attempt was made to reach Tapeats the following year by others in the group but we only got into Thunder again. I made it over to Tapeats but didn¹t get past the entrance complex. Beck got out of the army and together we went back to Tapeats in 1963 with some explorers I was running around with at Arizona State College. Using rubber dry suits, Beck and I got to see the 1.1 miles of accessible river passage in Tapeats that trip, but found no signs that anyone had been much past the entrance complex. We also got into Deer Canyon on another trip that year, but found Dutton Cave to be inaccessible due to the overhanging waterFall.

Beck later organized a mule pack trip, laden with five or six foot lengths of steel pipe, to Dutton Cave. I hiked in a day or two later after which we assembled the pipe into a mast from which we hung a cable ladder. Using the ladder, we climbed up through the waterfall to the entrance. After all that work, we found that the cave only went in a couple tens of feet before pinching down to an impassible crack. An nps river patrol removed the pipes as trash some years ago.

Another Cave lies behind Cheyava Falls which cascades from the middle third of the Redwall Limestone some 700 feet to the floor of Clear Creek Canyon. This was first entered by one of the Kolb brothers decades ago when they hauled logs, wire and other materials down from the plateau in order to build a frame that hung out over the Redwall cliff. One of the brothers was lowered from the frame 250 feet down to the cave entrance using a block and tackle. This was an overhung free fall drop. Before reaching the cave, a thunderstorm came over, the brother at the top tied the dangling brother off, ran for cover from the lightning, and after it was over finished lowering the dangler to the cave. This story is recounted in Kolb¹s book without any exaggeration as far as I can tell, based on the junk they left behind on their route.

For example, when I was climbing out of the canyon, I got cliffed out under a fifteen-foot Supai ledge. I followed it looking for a break and came upon a pine tree that reached more than halfway to the top. It looked promising, so I took a second look and saw that the top branches had been all mashed down years ago. I figured this was the route the Kolbs used, so I climbed the tree. By standing on the mashed down top I noticed I could see and just reach a wire dangling over the edge. With a balanced pull I was up and over.

The second exploration was made by a couple of guys who, if I remember the story right, were respectively an adventure writer and a Swiss climber. In the 1950s they took a spool of goldline rope and starting at the top of the Walhalla Plateau, descended all the cliffs to the bottom of Clear Creek Canyon. They accomplished this mostly by wrapping the rope around a tree at the top of a given cliff giving them a double line down, rappelling down, and pulling the rope after them. In some places, they tied the rope to a tree, threw the rest of the rope and spool over the edge, and rappelled down the single line. Once they were both at the bottom, they cut the rope off as high as they could reach and continued on. We also found their detritus on the old Kolb route, including the spool which was in a ravine somewhere in the Supai. They rappelled into Cheyava Cave, took a quick look around, and went over the edge the next seven hundred feet or so to the bottom of the Redwall cliff. They then hiked out via Phantom Ranch.

In 1964, I got together with Tom Aley and Art Lange who were gung-ho canyon cavers, and another guy, and we followed the route the earlier intrepid folks had taken from the top of the Walhalla Plateau. We used several hundred feet of cable ladder coupled with rope belays for the Coconino, a Supai drop or two, and the Redwall overhang. This represented a pretty modern innovation at the time. The cave has a huge entrance, sixty or more feet high, but in short order we hit a fifteen-foot waterfall that the Kolb brothers claimed they had scaled with a ladder. Their ladder was still there and was made from a couple of nailed together 2x6¹s with metal straps for steps. Guy wires were threaded vertically through the ends of the straps. The ladder had only been getting spattered for a few decades so we used it. Above this ladder, and maybe a couple of hundred feet further in, the cave pinched down to a flooded crawlway. Too bad. The fun was getting there.

Peter Huntoon