CAVE DIVING in UTAH - Meet Wendell Nope - Utah Cave Diving Legend .

So he climbed in to see if there was going passageway. He got in as far as he could go and started just backing out backwards, and his feet actually got accidentally onto the left side, which is the side you cannot get out, and immediately he was stuck. And it took six minutes to get him back to the other side where he could back out. And if you hear him talk, it was the longest six minutes of his life. All right. Good evening. Benjamin Hadfield, Teach Me To Dive. I'm a technical dive instructor here in Idaho and Florida, and I've got the distinct privilege and honor of interviewing tonight Wendell Knope. Wendell is absolutely amazing, and I'd rather him tell you more about his story than me because it's a good one. Wendell, thank you so much for taking some time with me tonight. How are you doing? Best day ever. I love it. Every day above ground is a miracle. Well, Wendell, you're pretty into diving. How did you get started in diving? Well, that's a little bit of a funny story. I married a gal from Utah. I'm originally from Louisiana. I married a gal from Utah, and she said, if you want to marry me, you've got to take me scuba diving in the Bahamas. So we took some private scuba diving lessons. We went to the Bahamas, and the first time that I dropped down into the ocean, I thought, where have you been all my life? And that was the beginning of a long and pleasant relationship that I've had with scuba diving. That is amazing. So married a gal. You got scuba diving certified. So I'm guessing at that point, you moved to Utah. I was living in Utah at the time. This was in 2000, and I wanted to marry her pretty bad. So that was a small price to pay, and she has said since that she has created a monster. I would guess that. Now, at that point, were you working with public safety? Yes, sir. I've been a police officer all my adult life, 41 years in law enforcement. But the last 32 has been with the Utah Department of Public Safety. I retired in December 2021. What was your final role with the Utah Public Safety? I was a sergeant and assigned as an instructor at the police academy. And one of my collateral duties was as the DPS dive team trainer. So I was a police academy instructor for cadets and for canine handlers. And my other assignment was to train the dive team, the 10 dive team members on the state police dive team. Oh, so you're an ERDI instructor? Yes, sir. Awesome. What a great organization. So you've had the opportunity to go out and do a few saves and some recoveries as well, I'd imagine. Over 100 recoveries. I myself have had hands on 13 of those, but either as a safety diver or a buddy diver for in excess of 100. Okay. Now, I want to get into the cave stuff as well. So I'm going to preload a little bit to let people know that we're getting to caves and that's extremely interesting. But I want to hear more about public safety. What was the craziest, toughest, challenging recovery that you've been a part of? That would also be the most dangerous recovery that I was a part of. There was a three-year-old child that drowned in Lake Powell, Utah. And right in the marina, just fell off the dock and drowned. And that marina is a floating marina and it's controlled by a computer. And there are hundreds of cables going from the different corners of the docks down to 10,000 pound cement blocks. And every few days, this computer re-evaluates the GPS coordinates of each of the docks and makes adjustments so the dock stays in the position that it's supposed to. And so this child drowned 114 feet deep. And my dive partner and I had to make our way through these cables down to the bottom where a sector scan sonar unit had found the body with the sonar. And so we had a down line that led us within arm's reach of where the child's body was. But we had to go through these cables to get to it. And the going down part was challenging enough. But coming back up, it caused us, because of having to maneuver and the overall circumstances, caused us both to go into 19 minutes of decompression while I'm carrying a child up through those cables. And so I really believe that that was the most dangerous one. I mean, there have been a couple others that were challenging or dangerous also. But that was the one that I believe was the biggest challenge and danger to me of all of them. So how did you end up moving over to the teams as an instructor with ERDI for Utah Public Safety? So I became a diver in 2000 when I married my wife. And I was just like everyone else who stays in this for a while. I just couldn't get enough. So I progressed up to dive master and wasn't satisfied there. Continued on to instructor. And when I was on the dive team as an instructor, I started out as a recreational instructor. And as we talked about it with our legal people and everything, we realized that that was just not enough. Now, by this time, I had quite a bit of experience already. I believe I was already a cave diver and advanced trimix diver also. And so when we contacted ERDI, we explained what we wanted. And so they actually had an individual that was traveling across the country who stopped in and spent about four hours, I think it was, grilling me and going through my documentation and the different activities that I had been involved in. And to be quite honest, I had been training our team according to the standards that ERDI and another agency had. However, I didn't have credentials to issue any certifications. And so I went through a rather lengthy process with ERDI to become a emergency response diver instructor through ERDI. And I've had huge success since then. Absolutely. You are well regarded and with ERDI as well. And your name is spoken almost halitones, that's for sure. I know the Carney's pretty well. They're amazing people, that's for sure. They speak highly. So you progress up this portion and you become an instructor trainer with ERDI. How does CAVES get involved? I mean, you're in Utah. Nobody really thinks about CAVES, Utah, and diving. Those are three interesting things we put together. For a long time, that was a pretty well-kept secret. But the truth is that we have some underwater passages in Utah. We have had people die. At least one person that we know of died in an underwater CAVE passage. And so when we became aware of this, my bosses didn't particularly feel the same way as I did. But I felt like, you know, if there's another death, we're going to be called to go and recover that body. And I had no interest in going into a CAVE for a recovery without the proper training. So I took it upon myself to go down and become certified. And then once I got in a CAVE, as weird as it may sound, I love wreck diving. But once I got into a CAVE, I didn't do another wreck dive for, I don't know, like four years. Because CAVE diving is something that is my hobby, I guess you would say. A hobby of hobbies. Then, when I came back, you know, I'm just a poor state cop, really, at this point. And I didn't have the money to go down to CAVE country two or three times a year like many people do. So I started looking around Utah to see if there was maybe a diveable CAVE or two here. And the U.S. Geological Survey folks turned me on to multiple sites that had the potential for CAVE diving. One particular site in Logan Canyon is just a wonderful CAVE. It's a wild CAVE. Prior to me and another gentleman discovering it, it had never been dived. And so we have laid, at this point, 2,300 feet of CAVE line into this system. And it's just a wonderful experience. It's a cold and frigid, but wonderful experience to dive in this particular CAVE. What's the water temp in Logan Canyon for that CAVE? It fluctuates, depending on the time of year, between 38 and 43. Okay. So typical for a high mountain. I get that. Right on. And you've laid a third of a mile of line into that? 2,300 is what we've done so far. The CAVE continues. One of the problems is that there are multiple restrictions. And so to go any further, we have to have stage bottles. And when you're diving with the stage bottles, it's hard to get through a couple of the restrictions. And so it takes us almost an hour to get back to the point where we would need to continue on past the 2,300 foot mark. So it's a logistical thing. And it's tight. It's a small passageway. So it's not like a big Florida CAVE where you can scooter through or anything. All the water comes out at a pretty high flow rate. And so we can't even swim. We have to Spider-Man crawl from the entrance pretty much all the way to the 2,300 foot mark. Oh wow. So it's a rabbit hole the entire time. Pretty much. There's a pretty nice video, a 50-minute video of me diving through this CAVE on my personal website. And it's public, so anyone's welcome to take a look at it. It's actually one of the coolest things I've ever done is this particular little video production. Right on. What's your website so we can put that out there? It's www.windolenope.com. Then you would click on the scuba diving link. Then you would click on the CAVE diving link. And then just scroll down and there are multiple options there of videos. And one of them is my video made of me going through this CAVE. Nice. So www.windolenope.com, right? Yes, sir. All right. We'll make sure to get that into the notes as well so that people can go visit that and check that out. That'll be awesome. Yes, sir. So there's a great video on this. It's taking you an hour to get into that. Now you're doing this all open circuit as well, if I remember right. Yes, sir. Oh, my goodness. Now, are you planning on maybe moving into some sort of sidemount rebreather to maybe get a little bit more distance? I'm not, sir. I'm a pretty trad and true open circuit diver. To have more dive time, I'm going to have to bring more gas in with me or stage some bottles in to go beyond where we're at right now. 2,300. Now, here's the question. How many people have crawled through this CAVE with you now? There have been more people walked on the moon than have come through this CAVE. And so the people that I know of, it would be seven. It's really quite challenging. You have the water temperature for one thing, and then you have the high flow rate as a second point. There's a lot of energy spent Spider-Man crawling through the CAVE, and it just wears you down quite a bit. And that's all I can say. Sure. Absolutely. So tell us about the entrance to this CAVE. If memory serves, it's really pretty much a small pond and a river right there. So describe the entrance to this CAVE for me. So the springhead is probably 30 feet by 30 feet. There's a crack in the mountain that is small enough that you have to be side mount to get into it. In fact, you have to wiggle into it to get into it. And the flow rate is high enough that at least at the entrance, if you turn your head sideways, it'll blow the mask off your face or it'll make your regulator free flow. Once you get inside, it is not quite as torrentious of a flow, but it's still high flow. You can't hardly swim through it all. If you were to try to use your fins, you'd go through your air so fast that you wouldn't even make it a thousand feet. So we dive it side mount. The U.S. Forest Service actually owns the spring and talks with them. They have said they do not want the mouth to be opened up big enough so that a back mount person could get in. There's a university just down the canyon, and they don't want some bulletproof college kid to get up there and think that they can get inside. Of course. So once you get in, there's a resting point. The cavern opens up slightly. What's the biggest cavern in this Logan Canyon to get to? There are two places where the underwater passageway comes up into a dry area. And in this dry area, the passageway becomes now a stream or a small river, whatever you want to call it. The largest of these passageways so far, the air passages, is about 300 feet long and about, I'm going to say, 40 feet wide. Then at 2,300 foot mark, there is a giant, it's like a dome room, if you will. There's a waterfall coming out of the ceiling that looks like something out of Goonies. And it's just a beautiful sight. And it's tremendously gratifying to arrive there because you've just spent a lot of your energy and a lot of your BTUs, heat energy in your body, getting there. And it's almost mystical how beautiful it is. It's amazing. It's incredible. So you get into cave diving and obviously you're with the National Speleological Society as well, cave diving section as well. How did that happen? Well, the NSSCDS and the International Underwater Cave Rescue and Recovery Organization sort of looked at me as one of the people in the state who might be able to interact with the federal government and other government entities. And so I was asked to be more or less the cave custodian, if you will, to make sure that the cave line is secure and that each year it has to be repaired a little bit. And so because of my police background, they felt like I was a good choice for the state of Utah to be a representative of the organizations. Gotcha. Right on. So what cave diving certifications do you have and who are they with? I have certifications as a full cave diver through TDI and NACD. Okay. And NSSCDS. And I have a DPV or a scooter certification through TDI and NSSCDS. I have a cave recovery specialist through IUCRR. Okay. That's something I'm really quite proud of. Nice. Now, if I remember correctly, there was a pretty hairy incident one time when you guys were first exploring Logan Cave where your buddy got stuck. Yes, sir. This was several years ago. And my buddy, there was an offshoot passageway that had sort of two ways of getting in it. The right hand side of the column, you could get in pretty easily. But the left hand side of the column was quite small. In fact, you couldn't enter in or exit from the left side of this column. It's kind of like your nostrils, if you will. One side was larger than the other. So he climbed in to see if there was going passageway. He got in as far as he could go and started just backing out backwards. And his feet actually got accidentally onto the left side, which is the side you cannot get out. And immediately he was stuck. And it took six minutes to get him back to the other side where he could back out. And if you hear him talk, it was as long as six minutes of his life. And it's just a tight, it's a tight cave. The Florida caves, if you're only mildly claustrophobic, the Florida caves, you can negotiate them well. Some of them are huge caves. This is not such a cave. It's small getting in and it's small all the way through with multiple restrictions that you have to wiggle through. Wow. Wow. And but all this eventually leads into Rick Springs and Moon Pool. Now, the Moon Pool is a feature that that is at the far end of this large open space that I've told you about. It was 300, about 300 feet long. And at that point at the Moon Pool, the passageway goes back. It goes back to being a full, fully underwater passageway. It it no longer has any airspace at all. And you have to go another thousand feet until you get to where the waterfall is. We call that the back part of the cave. And at the back part of the cave, when you come up into it, it's much like a big dome like auditorium, if you will. Probably about 80 feet high and maybe 100 feet in diameter. I'm just not not sure. Maybe it's not quite that big, but it seems plenty big enough when you come out and then you see that waterfall and it's it's truly magical. Gotcha. So how did you get the. So we've got this lovely photo that you have of Rick of the Moon Pool here. How did you get this photo? So that is a photo of the waterfall itself. And it is 38 feet high or it comes it comes almost comes out almost from the ceiling, about 38 feet high. And that picture really is a good representation of the waterfall itself. And just just a beautiful thing to think that you have you have swam through an underwater passageway, two thousand three hundred feet. Then when you pop your head up, this is what you see. And it's just it's like a fantasy movie that you're a part of, to be honest with you. I get that completely. Wow. So you took a camera in with this and just with your cave lights, it looks like you lit it up. Yes, sir. Wow. That is fantastic. So let's see. Tell me a little bit more about some of these the photos for your website here. We've got quite a bunch of photos in here. See that right here. We don't know. But Rick Springs, where is this entrance at? That is Logan Canyon. And there's Rick Spring itself has a good marker on the highway. That is actually the link that goes to the video that I was talking about earlier. And you see me when you see that video, you see me getting into the the the crack in the mountain and the crack actually follows a fault, a fault line that goes through the mountain where the mountain has cracked. That's that video right there that you're that you're showing that link is is a really quite an interesting video. I will make sure to get a link to that in the show notes here as well. Absolutely. So here we have the wonderful waterfall. Where is this? OK, this is this is a picture of part of the passageway. And that just shows at that particular point, it's about three feet high and about four feet, maybe five feet wide. And that just shows how tight the passageway is. Wow. So you mentioned in this that there's several major restrictions. Help us understand what you consider a major restriction. For example, the the entrance itself, normally you have to wiggle into it. I'm I'm five foot six and I'm, you know, about medium weight and I can get into it with just a little bit of squeezing through the opening. There are two other restrictions. One of them is called the deadbolt restriction. And you actually have to go in about half a body length, then turn to your left, move forward a couple of feet and then turn back to your right. Otherwise, you just can't get through. And there's another one where you have to turn actually completely sideways. And you can see these restrictions in the video there in that deadbolt restriction. You see me enter it. And when you see me enter the restriction, it looks like from the camera's view that I'm trying to swim through solid rock. And then you see me slip through it and we continue on. That is that picture that you have in the middle there is a passageway that is not yet passable. Each year, this particular passageway gets larger because of the amount of water that flows and the rate that it flows and it just eats away at the walls and the floor and the ceiling. And I'm thinking in a year or two, that passageway will be passable. And we don't know where it goes. We don't know how far it would go. But we're looking forward to finding out. That is absolutely amazing. Let's see. Continuing down. And so I'm guessing this is the diving season at high flow point. What's high flow? How many feet per second? You know, I don't know that scientific aspect of it. However, this picture that you're showing in the middle there, you cannot get into the into the spring at all at this stage. It'd be like swimming up a fire hose. You literally you can't even approach the entrance. Even if you try to pull yourself, it's just so much hydrology going on. And that walkway normally is about two feet out of the water. And you can see that at that high flow stage there, it is coming up over the top of the walkway. Goodness, that is crazy. And here? OK, that that is that is about as high as it gets. That's about an 18 inch boil. And when it's that high, the picture just above is what you would see further downstream of Rick Spring. And that is that is major, major high, high flow there. That spring is fed from snow melt water. And so it it it shoots up like a fire hose or a drinking fountain and it is just so powerful there. There's just no chance you have to wait until the boil is down to maybe a half inch to an inch and then you can get inside. Wow, that is just amazing. Absolutely amazing. Got some photos of friends. Where's this picture taken? OK, so, of course, that's myself on the lower right. The gentleman on the left is Richard Lamb, Dr. Richard Lamb, a veterinarian here in Utah. He and I are the ones who discovered this durable passageway. That's his son, Thomas, standing above us. And we took that more or less as a celebration picture that we had an extremely successful day. We were all just so gratified. And there happened to be some tourists standing at the at the point where you normally see where tourists normally would be taking pictures. They saw us come out of the water and we talked to them and asked them if they would mind taking a picture of us. So that's a rather famous picture there. Nice. That is amazing. So you're pretty into sidemount, obviously, overall. So talk to me about your setup. What kind of what rig are you using for sidemount? So I've had the same sidemount rig since I first got into sidemount in about 2005. Oh, wow. And it is a it is actually a homemade rig. The company that makes the BC has asked me not to name them as the as the makers, the original makers of the BC, because they don't want any vicarious liability or anyone else trying to imitate it. But it worked perfect for me. I got some instruction from some old timers who they just dive with with their old original gear that's been renovated. And I've had other sidemount units and they just don't quite work as well as this homemade unit. And so people laugh at me when I show up in Florida with it. But you know what? It's worked great for me. And it's sort of a little bit nostalgic when I show up with my old my old reliable rig. And, you know, I listen to guys debate about this system or this rig versus that rig. But it's all custom made for my physique. And so I have an absolutely no nothing dangles. Everything snaps into its exact space. I don't have to make any buckle adjustments. It all is it's custom made. I have a nice shoemaker shoe repair person that helped me. And so I designed it and made it so it fits me like a glove. Nice. I dove for many years with twin 108s. But I'm a little bit older than I was years ago. So now I dive with twin 85s. Okay. Now, why have you chosen to go LP 85s versus HP 100s? It's just the way I went. I don't have anything negative to say about 100s. I have a pretty good breathing rate. And I've discovered that I can't go quite as far as I used to with the 108s. But then when I put on a couple of stage bottles, then I'm good to go for anything that I need to do here in the state of Utah, at least. Sure. Now, you said there's other caves in Utah that you dive? Where else do you dive in Utah? There's caves. There are three other caves that are readily diveable. Those three caves, however, are what I would call muddy caves. Such that when your exhaust bubbles hit the ceiling, globs of mud from golf ball to softball size actually fall from the ceiling on top of you. I just don't like that sensation. And so I dive predominantly Rick Spring. And I would say that's where all but about three or four of my Utah cave dives have taken place. Interesting enough, as I think about this, you were the first to dive Rick Springs. So that means most of these spots, you got to name the spots. Yes, sir. How did you come up with the Moon Room or the Dead Bolt? How did you decide to name them those? Well, Richard Lamb, he takes a lot of credit for that. He named the Moon Pool. Rick Spring is the official geological name of the spring. Richard named it Ichiban, which is a Japanese word for number one or the greatest. He named it Ichiban Cave System. But everyone calls it Rick Spring. There's a particular side passage, it's sort of like a horseshoe, and we named it the Rabbit Hole. You can go in and come out the other side of the Rabbit Hole. There are a couple of other kind of interesting names that Richard mainly has named the different places. And I don't have an ego about such things, so whatever name is given to it is fine with me. Right on. Wendell, you're absolutely amazing and excited. I appreciated the invitation to come out and dive with you. Unfortunately, I am not a cave diver. I am a technical cold water diving, deep diver, wreck diver, but not a caver as of yet. We'll work on that, though. So I appreciate you. Well, just be careful, sir, because if you're anything like me, I loved wreck diving. Part of the reason that I was happy to go be a cave diver, of course, was we knew about some caves in Utah. But I thought cave divers, as far as I know or have ever heard, have extraordinarily great finesse skills in diving. I thought, oh, this will make me a better wreck diver. That was until I got inside the first cave. And as I said, it took me four years to get back on a wreck after I became a wreck diver. I mean, after I became a cave diver. Right on. So be careful. What I'm saying is be careful because cave diving, as far as I'm concerned, is poor man's space travel. There you go. That's fantastic. By the way, I looked at your photos and I know what rig you're running, but I won't say it on air for here. At least I think I do. I've got a pretty good idea. So fantastic. Well, Wendell, thank you for taking the time with me. I appreciate it. I look forward to diving with you soon and going from there. Yes, sir. Give me an invitation. I'll come up there. I got an itch to see what's going on up in Idaho. Well, I've got something better for you. We'll invite you out to Yellowstone. Oh. That's our summer project is Yellowstone. So we'll talk about that offline and I'll make the invite and you come up and join us, please. Yes, sir. Thank you. Perfect. Well, Wendell, what's next? Well, I enjoy doing what I'm doing now. I don't have any goals of going five or six hundred feet in some South American cave or anything like that. But the level of cave diving that I do now and I've begun to do some more wreck diving. The level I'm at right now, I would call an advanced middle of the road technical diver. I don't have interest in doing 10 hour submersions or anything like that. I've decided I'm not going to pursue rebreathers. I'm just going to enjoy the level I'm at now for as long as I can. There you go. That's awesome. Well, there you guys have it. Wendell Knope, amazing retired DPS officer, as well as the former. As far as I'm concerned, he was the king of all training for ERDI in Utah as well. If you listen to ERDI talk about him, he's whispered and talked about in hushed tones a lot of times and very, very well respected. Discovered and dove caves in Utah. I mean, who would have thought there's cave diving Utah? But here's Wendell to prove that it is possible. Twenty three hundred feet through a rabbit hole to the moon pool in Logan Canyon. Now we've heard about that kind of here and there, but this is the man. Again, my name is Benjamin Hatfield. Teach me to dive. I'm a technical dive instructor. I do a lot of cold water diving, a lot of deep diving and a lot of wrecks, but nothing like Wendell. He's my hero, that's for sure. Wendell, thank you so much for coming on. I didn't know that you would call me.