Nutty Putty Cave

• 1. Introduction

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  Nutty Putty Cave sits in Utah County, Utah, just west of Utah Lake, with passages narrow enough to scrape both shoulders at once. For decades, amateur and professional cavers squeezed through its twisting hydrothermal tunnels. Boy Scout troops and college students turned a visit into something close to a rite of passage. In November 2009, an accident there took the life of 26-year-old John Edward Jones, and the cave closed for good soon after. What made this cramped, narrow cave so popular with visitors? And what happened underground that led to every entrance being sealed in concrete?

• 2. Discovery And Naming

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  Dale Green and a group of friends first explored the cave in 1960, pushing into passages lined with a strange, soft clay. Green thought about naming it Silly Putty, then settled on Nutty Putty because it sounded better. The brown clay coating many of the tunnels is silicon dioxide, the same mineral common in ordinary sand. Superheated water built the cave from the ground up, leaving limestone and a mix of other minerals throughout its passages. In total the cave holds 1,400 feet, about 430 meters, of chutes and tunnels. Before it closed, the only way in was a narrow hole cut into the surface. The Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration owns the land, and the Utah Timpanogos Grotto caving club managed the cave until its closure. Within the cave's tightest turns lay a steep, 45-degree room cavers nicknamed the Big Slide.

• 3. Popularity And Danger

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  Four separate rescues freed cavers and Boy Scouts trapped in the tight twists and turns before 2009 ever arrived. Estimates put the cave's yearly traffic at more than 5,000 visitors, many arriving late at night without basic safety precautions. That much traffic wore the stone smooth in several passages, and a fatality was predicted there eventually. A gate went up on the 24th of May 2006, and the cave closed temporarily. Early in 2009, new management put an application process in place to make sure safety precautions were followed. The cave welcomed visitors again starting on the 18th of May 2009, now requiring cavers to apply before entering.

• 4. Stuck Upside Down

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  On the 24th of November 2009, Jones found himself trapped upside down inside a tight fissure deep within the cave. He and three others had left their group to search for the Birth Canal, a tight passage that ends in a turnaround. Jones instead entered an unmapped route near a spot called Ed's Push, mistaking it for the Canal he was looking for. The path ended at a narrow vertical fissure, and believing it was the turnaround, Jones went in head first. He became wedged upside down in an opening that measured just 10 by 18 inches, about 400 feet from the cave's entrance. A large team of rescue workers built a rope-and-pulley system to pull him free. The system failed under the strain and dropped him back into the opening. Over many hours, the strain of his inverted position caused Jones's heart to stop. He was pronounced dead at 11:56pm on the 25th of November, roughly 27 hours after he became trapped. Rescuers concluded it would be too dangerous to try to bring his body out of the cave.

• 5. Sealing The Cave

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  Workers used explosives to bring down the passage ceiling near Ed's Push, not far from where Jones's body lay. The landowner and Jones's family had agreed the cave itself would serve as his final resting place and memorial. Every entrance was then filled with concrete, making the underground system permanently inaccessible. Not every caver accepted the decision without protest.

• 6. The Cave's Legacy

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  Facebook groups formed to campaign for saving the cave, but the petitions did not change the outcome. Separately, a group of cavers cut through the property's gated entrance in an attempt to reach the cave before it closed. Security officials caught them before they got inside, and they were charged with trespassing. The film The Last Descent, released on the 16th of September 2016, told the story of the accident and its aftermath. Nearly a decade later, in 2025, a detailed recreation of the cave appeared inside a virtual reality video game called Cave Crave. Players can now explore its passages inside the game. The game's narration comes from Brandon Kowallis, a caver who took part in the original rescue effort.