Volunteers down under: Cave cosmetics restores untouched underground to perfection

SULLIVAN, Mo. -- All it took was a little epoxy glue and a Popsicle stick to spread it.

Within a minute, Michael Carter had put back together what drips of mineral-laden water took thousands of years to form.

"That's it," said Carter, sitting on his heels in the pitch black, with the light of his helmet shining on a foot-tall stalagmite.

Carter was admiring the 20th stalagmite (a calcite deposit on the floor of caves) that he has helped glue together in Fisher Cave. The cave is the largest and most spectacular of 46 caves in Meramec State Park, near Sullivan in southern Franklin County.

Carter, 31, fell in love with caving as a high school student and has worked most of his adult life as a cave tour guide. He recently returned to college and dreams of becoming a park ranger.

Carter loves exploring something never seen before -- what is untouched and perfect. He knows he can never return Fisher Cave to its pristine state, but he wants to try.

That's why he led a group of volunteers three to five weekends a year over the past five years in finding and carefully cleaning hundreds of broken stalagmites. They've recovered broken pieces from canyons formed by underground streams.

Matching the pieces to their stumps in the dark is like working a giant puzzle that seems nearly impossible to solve.

"But we'd rather spend our time trying than watching a baseball game," says Carter, 31, who grew up in Hazelwood and Kirkwood. After working mostly as a cave tour guide, he is now studying geography and geology and working in the library at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, Mo.

Carter has been working closely with Jonathan Beard, who works for the adhesive product company 3M at its plant in Springfield. Beard has been experimenting with hundreds of 3M glues in a privately owned cave near Springfield where vandals have struck. The owner has allowed Beard to use the cave as a kind of laboratory.

Because it's such a technical and laborious process, Beard is among only a handful people across the nation gluing together cave deposits, according to Jim and Val Werker, co-chairs of the National Speleological Society's conservation division. The Werkers, of New Mexico, have also been hired by commercial caves across the nation to repair broken speleothems and are writing a book on the subject.

"It's very tedious, and it's a lot of work," Jim Werker said. But his wife added, "It's very rewarding when you put it together."

Beard says he has reattached speleothems in seven states and in about 100 caves in Missouri. Of the Missouri caves where restoration work has been done, Fisher Cave is the only one open for public tours.

So far, Carter has led other volunteer cavers in cleaning about 250 stalagmite pieces. They lay the fragments out on three blue tarps, where they can study their color, diameter, break point and colored rings of dormancy and activity to get some idea of where the pieces might go. Then they load them into a red wagon and pull them around looking for their bases.

Hundreds of stalactites (deposits hanging from the ceiling) have also been broken, but hardly any of the fragments remain in the cave, Carter says. Because they are not as dense as stalagmites, they either shattered into pieces too small too repair or were carried out as souvenirs.

For Carter, it's a chance to give back to the place that first got him excited about caving. Carter's father took him on the flashlight-lit tour of Fisher Cave in 1989, when Carter was 16 years old. A group of cavers was in the cave exploring, and Carter was immediately captivated.

"My mind exploded," he said. "I had no idea people did this for fun."

After high school, he worked as a tour guide at several caves and at Fisher Cave in 1997.

Carter didn't notice the piles of muddy stalagmites in the stream canyons until 1999 while visiting the cave. That made him think of Beard's work with glue and how he might be able to help restore the cave where he had found his passion.

"I'm doing what I can in my own little area of nature," he said.

And, he said, since Fisher Cave is public, people can learn about the fragility of caves and appreciate the improvements.

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On the Net:

www.mostateparks.com/meramec/cave.htm