The Fatal Allure of JACOB'S WELL
By Louie Bond
Pictures & story at: http://www.visitwimberley.com/jacobswell/index.shtml
On the surface, the scene is timeless. Young people have gathered at Jacob's Well to cool off on summer afternoons for as long as anyone can remember, dangling their legs from the knobby knees of cypress trees and leaping into the clear, bottomless depths from the end of a rope swing.
Heedless of the danger lurking beneath the calm surface of the Hill Country swimming hole, many adventurers have answered the siren call of the cave.
At least eight divers have discovered that if you answer that siren call and venture too deeply into the mysterious depths, the mouth of Cypress Creek will quietly swallow you.
"This is the horror story side of it," says Don Dibble, a dive shop owner with more than 40 years of diving experience. "Jacob's Well definitely has a national reputation of being one of the most dangerous places to dive." Dibble has pulled most of the victims' remains out of Jacob's Well himself, and he nearly lost his own life in a 1979 recovery dive. Dibble was attempting to retrieve the remains of two young divers from Pasadena, Kent Maupin and Mark Brashier, when he became trapped, buried past his waist in the sliding gravel lining the bottom of the well's third chamber. Just as he ran out of air, Dibble was rescued by other divers but suffered a ruptured stomach during his rapid, unconscious ascent.
In January 1980, Dibble attempted to seal off the depths of the well by building a grate of rebar and quick-set concrete at the entrance to the third chamber. Six months later, Dibble found the grate dismantled. Divers not only dove with the proper tools to pull off the grate, they also left a note for Dibble. "You can't keep us out," was written on a plastic slate.
Austin writer Steve Harrigan says that while working on a Texas Monthly article, he dove into Jacob's Well at least 20 times back in the late 1970s and early 80s, including a dive to help Dibble install the grate.
"It's a very mysterious place, a place of constant sensation," says Harrigan, who centered a novel around the well in 1984. One of the main characters, a scuba instructor, perishes after venturing too deeply, perhaps as a suicide, or perhaps due to the mind-altering effects of nitrogen narcosis. Harrigan says he never dove below the relatively safe 90-foot level for many reasons, but basically because "I knew my limit."
Through the years, many have successfully explored the first and second chambers of the well. The first chamber is a straight drop to about 30 feet; then it angles down to 55 feet. Nourished by the rays of sunlight that penetrate the crystal water, this cavern area is bright and is home to algae and wildlife.
The second chamber is a long funnel to 80 feet, where there is a restricted opening to the third chamber. Inside the second chamber is a false chimney, which appears to be a way out of the well but has trapped at least one diver. Southwest Texas State University student Richard Patton lost his life in that false chimney in 1983.
The third chamber is a small room with a floor of unstable gravel. Divers must inflate water wings to navigate this chamber successfully, trying not to stir up silt or dislodge the gravel.
The passage into the fourth chamber is very tight, but the San Marcos Area Recovery Team (SMART) was recently able to penetrate it without removing their air tanks. The tightest restriction occurs 15 feet down the next tunnel where there is a knife-edge formation in the ceiling and fine gravel below. The few who have seen the fourth chamber say it is "virgin cave" with fantastic limestone formations and no gravel. Covering the bottom is fine silt that can totally obscure vision when kicked up by one misstep.
SMART divers Dan and Kathy Misiaszek, with teammate Jim Price and an extensive topside team, penetrated the fourth chamber in October, 2000 to videotape the area. "We were not looking for human remains," Misiaszek recalls. "We knew some remains might be found but we sincerely believed the bones had been washed away years ago during the many floods."
The SMART team had already worked for five years with one of the well's surrounding private landowners to take water samples and map the cave for possible recovery missions. Although Brashier's remains had washed out of the well during a 1981 flood, no trace of Maupin had been recovered. Misiaszek spotted the first traces of Maupin down a keyhole opening in the floor of the fourth chamber, more than 100 feet below the surface.
"I first noticed one femur bone, then a second, and as I descended into the keyhole-shaped tunnel, I could see a heavily corroded scuba tank and wetsuit," Misiaszek wrote in a chronicle of the event. "It was obvious we had stumbled upon some human remains... At the bottom of the tunnel lay the corroded scuba tank with attached hoses. The tank was still attached to a shorty 'beaver tail' style wet suit with weight belt."
Misiaszek found a human skull nearby, and then stumbled upon one piece of evidence that led him to believe the remains were Maupin's - a Neptune's Locker Diving Association patch from Maupin's hometown of Pasadena. Misiaszek carefully left the scene intact, but as he finished filming the area, the dive team inadvertently kicked up some silt. Fighting to remain calm in the ensuing blackout, the divers ditched their expensive camera and scrambled for the guideline, following its arrows up to a shallower depth to decompress before surfacing. Visibility was so bad down there, Misiaszek said, that he passed Price along the way and never knew it.
"You couldn't tell up from down, left from right," Kathy Misiaszek says. "You couldn't see your gauges. You were scraping the bottom and banging your tanks on the top. You had nothing to fall back on except your training. We were rather relieved to get out."
The abandoned video camera continued recording until it ran out of tape. The divers returned to retrieve the camera and the remains. They later watched the videotape run in quiet blackness until its end, as if the camera were the eyes of a diver left behind to die. "It was a sobering piece of film," Kathy Misiaszek says.
Even divers who are experienced in open waters have met their fate while cave diving because they are unprepared for the perils they will encounter. The well's last known victim, Austin mail carrier Wayne Wood Russell, was an experienced topside caver and an open water diver, but had never attempted cave diving.
Ironically, it was once impossible to descend into Jacob's Well. Local historians say the artesian spring spumed anywhere from 10 to 30 feet above the ground in centuries past, creating a much heavier flow into Cypress Creek. Documentation from 1924 indicates a flow of 170 gallons per second.
"There's a picture of me at 3 years old at Jacob's Well in the family album," recalls 79-year-old historian Dorothy Wimberley Kerbow. "My dad would throw me into the well. You couldn't sink down because the spring would just bubble you up with such force."
In the 1950s, Kerbow recalls, she and her friends would often visit Jacob's Well, jumping over and around the springs that percolated all along Cypress Creek. It was impossible to go more than two feet below the surface due to the force of the spring, Kerbow says.
According to local legend, the name of the well is a Biblical reference. Early settlers William W. Moon and William C. Winters followed Cypress Creek to its source in the 1850s. They described the crevice in the creek bed which was overflowing with an abundance of clear, cool water as "like unto a well in Bible times."
Many young adventurers have been irresistibly drawn to the winding series of chambers and narrow passageways of Jacob's Well. "In the 1930s, young boys from Wimberley and San Marcos attempted to explore the cave in homemade diving suits made of cut-off water heaters with isinglass peep holes and with an old auto tire pump that forced air through a rubber hose to the diver below. The deepest they got was 25 feet," Kerbow recalls.
Misiaszek says he once felt the call of the well, the only time he thinks his judgment on a cave dive may have been seriously affected by nitrogen narcosis. Although he and Kathy had specifically planned to stop the dive at the third chamber, she had to grab Dan by the foot to stop him from entering the fourth chamber.
The well that has been such a danger to others is now in danger itself. Water authorities warn that ever-increasing pumping and the disappearance of permeable cover in the recharge area could dry up what was once thought of as a "perpetual." When the spring dried up for the first time in history during the summer of 2000, the event was considered by many as symbolic of the region's increasing water shortage and quality problems.
"Jacob's Well is like a canary in a coal mine," says landowner David Baker, who is in the process of giving up his own home and property to form a conservation easement for as much land around the area as possible. "When the spring stopped flowing, it was a wake-up call for everyone. We don't want it to turn into Jacob's Cave."
Baker, who hopes to use his house as an environmental study center open to the public, has dedicated the past 13 years to preserving the site, forming the Wimberley Valley Watershed Association (WVWA) and promoting the well's environmental message to government agencies and the public. In August, a group of scientists and environmentalists gathered in Wimberley to set a plan of action for conducting extensive studies of Jacob's Well.
The well continues to inspire not only scientists, but also artists who find their way to the remote, privately owned but quietly shared spot that Indians revered as sacred ground. Baker and the WVWA host a music and art-filled festival each spring, attracting local celebrities like Willis Alan Ramsey. Oscar- and Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Jennifer Warnes is releasing a new CD titled "The Well" this fall. The title song (co-authored by Doyle Bramhall II) was written during a stay at a bed and breakfast near Jacob's Well. A children's mystery by Marcia Bennett set at Jacob's Well will be published by Eakin Press in October.
"Jacob's Well is the essence of life, creating water every day for thousands of years," Baker says, "but it is also a great mystery, and that, too is a part of its mythology. Some are frightened by that, and some are drawn to it."
By Louie Bond
Pictures & story at: http://www.visitwimberley.com/jacobswell/index.shtml
On the surface, the scene is timeless. Young people have gathered at Jacob's Well to cool off on summer afternoons for as long as anyone can remember, dangling their legs from the knobby knees of cypress trees and leaping into the clear, bottomless depths from the end of a rope swing.
Heedless of the danger lurking beneath the calm surface of the Hill Country swimming hole, many adventurers have answered the siren call of the cave.
At least eight divers have discovered that if you answer that siren call and venture too deeply into the mysterious depths, the mouth of Cypress Creek will quietly swallow you.
"This is the horror story side of it," says Don Dibble, a dive shop owner with more than 40 years of diving experience. "Jacob's Well definitely has a national reputation of being one of the most dangerous places to dive." Dibble has pulled most of the victims' remains out of Jacob's Well himself, and he nearly lost his own life in a 1979 recovery dive. Dibble was attempting to retrieve the remains of two young divers from Pasadena, Kent Maupin and Mark Brashier, when he became trapped, buried past his waist in the sliding gravel lining the bottom of the well's third chamber. Just as he ran out of air, Dibble was rescued by other divers but suffered a ruptured stomach during his rapid, unconscious ascent.
In January 1980, Dibble attempted to seal off the depths of the well by building a grate of rebar and quick-set concrete at the entrance to the third chamber. Six months later, Dibble found the grate dismantled. Divers not only dove with the proper tools to pull off the grate, they also left a note for Dibble. "You can't keep us out," was written on a plastic slate.
Austin writer Steve Harrigan says that while working on a Texas Monthly article, he dove into Jacob's Well at least 20 times back in the late 1970s and early 80s, including a dive to help Dibble install the grate.
"It's a very mysterious place, a place of constant sensation," says Harrigan, who centered a novel around the well in 1984. One of the main characters, a scuba instructor, perishes after venturing too deeply, perhaps as a suicide, or perhaps due to the mind-altering effects of nitrogen narcosis. Harrigan says he never dove below the relatively safe 90-foot level for many reasons, but basically because "I knew my limit."
Through the years, many have successfully explored the first and second chambers of the well. The first chamber is a straight drop to about 30 feet; then it angles down to 55 feet. Nourished by the rays of sunlight that penetrate the crystal water, this cavern area is bright and is home to algae and wildlife.
The second chamber is a long funnel to 80 feet, where there is a restricted opening to the third chamber. Inside the second chamber is a false chimney, which appears to be a way out of the well but has trapped at least one diver. Southwest Texas State University student Richard Patton lost his life in that false chimney in 1983.
The third chamber is a small room with a floor of unstable gravel. Divers must inflate water wings to navigate this chamber successfully, trying not to stir up silt or dislodge the gravel.
The passage into the fourth chamber is very tight, but the San Marcos Area Recovery Team (SMART) was recently able to penetrate it without removing their air tanks. The tightest restriction occurs 15 feet down the next tunnel where there is a knife-edge formation in the ceiling and fine gravel below. The few who have seen the fourth chamber say it is "virgin cave" with fantastic limestone formations and no gravel. Covering the bottom is fine silt that can totally obscure vision when kicked up by one misstep.
SMART divers Dan and Kathy Misiaszek, with teammate Jim Price and an extensive topside team, penetrated the fourth chamber in October, 2000 to videotape the area. "We were not looking for human remains," Misiaszek recalls. "We knew some remains might be found but we sincerely believed the bones had been washed away years ago during the many floods."
The SMART team had already worked for five years with one of the well's surrounding private landowners to take water samples and map the cave for possible recovery missions. Although Brashier's remains had washed out of the well during a 1981 flood, no trace of Maupin had been recovered. Misiaszek spotted the first traces of Maupin down a keyhole opening in the floor of the fourth chamber, more than 100 feet below the surface.
"I first noticed one femur bone, then a second, and as I descended into the keyhole-shaped tunnel, I could see a heavily corroded scuba tank and wetsuit," Misiaszek wrote in a chronicle of the event. "It was obvious we had stumbled upon some human remains... At the bottom of the tunnel lay the corroded scuba tank with attached hoses. The tank was still attached to a shorty 'beaver tail' style wet suit with weight belt."
Misiaszek found a human skull nearby, and then stumbled upon one piece of evidence that led him to believe the remains were Maupin's - a Neptune's Locker Diving Association patch from Maupin's hometown of Pasadena. Misiaszek carefully left the scene intact, but as he finished filming the area, the dive team inadvertently kicked up some silt. Fighting to remain calm in the ensuing blackout, the divers ditched their expensive camera and scrambled for the guideline, following its arrows up to a shallower depth to decompress before surfacing. Visibility was so bad down there, Misiaszek said, that he passed Price along the way and never knew it.
"You couldn't tell up from down, left from right," Kathy Misiaszek says. "You couldn't see your gauges. You were scraping the bottom and banging your tanks on the top. You had nothing to fall back on except your training. We were rather relieved to get out."
The abandoned video camera continued recording until it ran out of tape. The divers returned to retrieve the camera and the remains. They later watched the videotape run in quiet blackness until its end, as if the camera were the eyes of a diver left behind to die. "It was a sobering piece of film," Kathy Misiaszek says.
Even divers who are experienced in open waters have met their fate while cave diving because they are unprepared for the perils they will encounter. The well's last known victim, Austin mail carrier Wayne Wood Russell, was an experienced topside caver and an open water diver, but had never attempted cave diving.
Ironically, it was once impossible to descend into Jacob's Well. Local historians say the artesian spring spumed anywhere from 10 to 30 feet above the ground in centuries past, creating a much heavier flow into Cypress Creek. Documentation from 1924 indicates a flow of 170 gallons per second.
"There's a picture of me at 3 years old at Jacob's Well in the family album," recalls 79-year-old historian Dorothy Wimberley Kerbow. "My dad would throw me into the well. You couldn't sink down because the spring would just bubble you up with such force."
In the 1950s, Kerbow recalls, she and her friends would often visit Jacob's Well, jumping over and around the springs that percolated all along Cypress Creek. It was impossible to go more than two feet below the surface due to the force of the spring, Kerbow says.
According to local legend, the name of the well is a Biblical reference. Early settlers William W. Moon and William C. Winters followed Cypress Creek to its source in the 1850s. They described the crevice in the creek bed which was overflowing with an abundance of clear, cool water as "like unto a well in Bible times."
Many young adventurers have been irresistibly drawn to the winding series of chambers and narrow passageways of Jacob's Well. "In the 1930s, young boys from Wimberley and San Marcos attempted to explore the cave in homemade diving suits made of cut-off water heaters with isinglass peep holes and with an old auto tire pump that forced air through a rubber hose to the diver below. The deepest they got was 25 feet," Kerbow recalls.
Misiaszek says he once felt the call of the well, the only time he thinks his judgment on a cave dive may have been seriously affected by nitrogen narcosis. Although he and Kathy had specifically planned to stop the dive at the third chamber, she had to grab Dan by the foot to stop him from entering the fourth chamber.
The well that has been such a danger to others is now in danger itself. Water authorities warn that ever-increasing pumping and the disappearance of permeable cover in the recharge area could dry up what was once thought of as a "perpetual." When the spring dried up for the first time in history during the summer of 2000, the event was considered by many as symbolic of the region's increasing water shortage and quality problems.
"Jacob's Well is like a canary in a coal mine," says landowner David Baker, who is in the process of giving up his own home and property to form a conservation easement for as much land around the area as possible. "When the spring stopped flowing, it was a wake-up call for everyone. We don't want it to turn into Jacob's Cave."
Baker, who hopes to use his house as an environmental study center open to the public, has dedicated the past 13 years to preserving the site, forming the Wimberley Valley Watershed Association (WVWA) and promoting the well's environmental message to government agencies and the public. In August, a group of scientists and environmentalists gathered in Wimberley to set a plan of action for conducting extensive studies of Jacob's Well.
The well continues to inspire not only scientists, but also artists who find their way to the remote, privately owned but quietly shared spot that Indians revered as sacred ground. Baker and the WVWA host a music and art-filled festival each spring, attracting local celebrities like Willis Alan Ramsey. Oscar- and Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Jennifer Warnes is releasing a new CD titled "The Well" this fall. The title song (co-authored by Doyle Bramhall II) was written during a stay at a bed and breakfast near Jacob's Well. A children's mystery by Marcia Bennett set at Jacob's Well will be published by Eakin Press in October.
"Jacob's Well is the essence of life, creating water every day for thousands of years," Baker says, "but it is also a great mystery, and that, too is a part of its mythology. Some are frightened by that, and some are drawn to it."
The Fatal Allure of JACOB'S WELL
By Louie Bond
Pictures & story at: http://www.visitwimberley.com/jacobswell/index.shtml
On the surface, the scene is timeless. Young people have gathered at Jacob's Well to cool off on summer afternoons for as long as anyone can remember, dangling their legs from the knobby knees of cypress trees and leaping into the clear, bottomless depths from the end of a rope swing.
Heedless of the danger lurking beneath the calm surface of the Hill Country swimming hole, many adventurers have answered the siren call of the cave.
At least eight divers have discovered that if you answer that siren call and venture too deeply into the mysterious depths, the mouth of Cypress Creek will quietly swallow you.
"This is the horror story side of it," says Don Dibble, a dive shop owner with more than 40 years of diving experience. "Jacob's Well definitely has a national reputation of being one of the most dangerous places to dive." Dibble has pulled most of the victims' remains out of Jacob's Well himself, and he nearly lost his own life in a 1979 recovery dive. Dibble was attempting to retrieve the remains of two young divers from Pasadena, Kent Maupin and Mark Brashier, when he became trapped, buried past his waist in the sliding gravel lining the bottom of the well's third chamber. Just as he ran out of air, Dibble was rescued by other divers but suffered a ruptured stomach during his rapid, unconscious ascent.
In January 1980, Dibble attempted to seal off the depths of the well by building a grate of rebar and quick-set concrete at the entrance to the third chamber. Six months later, Dibble found the grate dismantled. Divers not only dove with the proper tools to pull off the grate, they also left a note for Dibble. "You can't keep us out," was written on a plastic slate.
Austin writer Steve Harrigan says that while working on a Texas Monthly article, he dove into Jacob's Well at least 20 times back in the late 1970s and early 80s, including a dive to help Dibble install the grate.
"It's a very mysterious place, a place of constant sensation," says Harrigan, who centered a novel around the well in 1984. One of the main characters, a scuba instructor, perishes after venturing too deeply, perhaps as a suicide, or perhaps due to the mind-altering effects of nitrogen narcosis. Harrigan says he never dove below the relatively safe 90-foot level for many reasons, but basically because "I knew my limit."
Through the years, many have successfully explored the first and second chambers of the well. The first chamber is a straight drop to about 30 feet; then it angles down to 55 feet. Nourished by the rays of sunlight that penetrate the crystal water, this cavern area is bright and is home to algae and wildlife.
The second chamber is a long funnel to 80 feet, where there is a restricted opening to the third chamber. Inside the second chamber is a false chimney, which appears to be a way out of the well but has trapped at least one diver. Southwest Texas State University student Richard Patton lost his life in that false chimney in 1983.
The third chamber is a small room with a floor of unstable gravel. Divers must inflate water wings to navigate this chamber successfully, trying not to stir up silt or dislodge the gravel.
The passage into the fourth chamber is very tight, but the San Marcos Area Recovery Team (SMART) was recently able to penetrate it without removing their air tanks. The tightest restriction occurs 15 feet down the next tunnel where there is a knife-edge formation in the ceiling and fine gravel below. The few who have seen the fourth chamber say it is "virgin cave" with fantastic limestone formations and no gravel. Covering the bottom is fine silt that can totally obscure vision when kicked up by one misstep.
SMART divers Dan and Kathy Misiaszek, with teammate Jim Price and an extensive topside team, penetrated the fourth chamber in October, 2000 to videotape the area. "We were not looking for human remains," Misiaszek recalls. "We knew some remains might be found but we sincerely believed the bones had been washed away years ago during the many floods."
The SMART team had already worked for five years with one of the well's surrounding private landowners to take water samples and map the cave for possible recovery missions. Although Brashier's remains had washed out of the well during a 1981 flood, no trace of Maupin had been recovered. Misiaszek spotted the first traces of Maupin down a keyhole opening in the floor of the fourth chamber, more than 100 feet below the surface.
"I first noticed one femur bone, then a second, and as I descended into the keyhole-shaped tunnel, I could see a heavily corroded scuba tank and wetsuit," Misiaszek wrote in a chronicle of the event. "It was obvious we had stumbled upon some human remains... At the bottom of the tunnel lay the corroded scuba tank with attached hoses. The tank was still attached to a shorty 'beaver tail' style wet suit with weight belt."
Misiaszek found a human skull nearby, and then stumbled upon one piece of evidence that led him to believe the remains were Maupin's - a Neptune's Locker Diving Association patch from Maupin's hometown of Pasadena. Misiaszek carefully left the scene intact, but as he finished filming the area, the dive team inadvertently kicked up some silt. Fighting to remain calm in the ensuing blackout, the divers ditched their expensive camera and scrambled for the guideline, following its arrows up to a shallower depth to decompress before surfacing. Visibility was so bad down there, Misiaszek said, that he passed Price along the way and never knew it.
"You couldn't tell up from down, left from right," Kathy Misiaszek says. "You couldn't see your gauges. You were scraping the bottom and banging your tanks on the top. You had nothing to fall back on except your training. We were rather relieved to get out."
The abandoned video camera continued recording until it ran out of tape. The divers returned to retrieve the camera and the remains. They later watched the videotape run in quiet blackness until its end, as if the camera were the eyes of a diver left behind to die. "It was a sobering piece of film," Kathy Misiaszek says.
Even divers who are experienced in open waters have met their fate while cave diving because they are unprepared for the perils they will encounter. The well's last known victim, Austin mail carrier Wayne Wood Russell, was an experienced topside caver and an open water diver, but had never attempted cave diving.
Ironically, it was once impossible to descend into Jacob's Well. Local historians say the artesian spring spumed anywhere from 10 to 30 feet above the ground in centuries past, creating a much heavier flow into Cypress Creek. Documentation from 1924 indicates a flow of 170 gallons per second.
"There's a picture of me at 3 years old at Jacob's Well in the family album," recalls 79-year-old historian Dorothy Wimberley Kerbow. "My dad would throw me into the well. You couldn't sink down because the spring would just bubble you up with such force."
In the 1950s, Kerbow recalls, she and her friends would often visit Jacob's Well, jumping over and around the springs that percolated all along Cypress Creek. It was impossible to go more than two feet below the surface due to the force of the spring, Kerbow says.
According to local legend, the name of the well is a Biblical reference. Early settlers William W. Moon and William C. Winters followed Cypress Creek to its source in the 1850s. They described the crevice in the creek bed which was overflowing with an abundance of clear, cool water as "like unto a well in Bible times."
Many young adventurers have been irresistibly drawn to the winding series of chambers and narrow passageways of Jacob's Well. "In the 1930s, young boys from Wimberley and San Marcos attempted to explore the cave in homemade diving suits made of cut-off water heaters with isinglass peep holes and with an old auto tire pump that forced air through a rubber hose to the diver below. The deepest they got was 25 feet," Kerbow recalls.
Misiaszek says he once felt the call of the well, the only time he thinks his judgment on a cave dive may have been seriously affected by nitrogen narcosis. Although he and Kathy had specifically planned to stop the dive at the third chamber, she had to grab Dan by the foot to stop him from entering the fourth chamber.
The well that has been such a danger to others is now in danger itself. Water authorities warn that ever-increasing pumping and the disappearance of permeable cover in the recharge area could dry up what was once thought of as a "perpetual." When the spring dried up for the first time in history during the summer of 2000, the event was considered by many as symbolic of the region's increasing water shortage and quality problems.
"Jacob's Well is like a canary in a coal mine," says landowner David Baker, who is in the process of giving up his own home and property to form a conservation easement for as much land around the area as possible. "When the spring stopped flowing, it was a wake-up call for everyone. We don't want it to turn into Jacob's Cave."
Baker, who hopes to use his house as an environmental study center open to the public, has dedicated the past 13 years to preserving the site, forming the Wimberley Valley Watershed Association (WVWA) and promoting the well's environmental message to government agencies and the public. In August, a group of scientists and environmentalists gathered in Wimberley to set a plan of action for conducting extensive studies of Jacob's Well.
The well continues to inspire not only scientists, but also artists who find their way to the remote, privately owned but quietly shared spot that Indians revered as sacred ground. Baker and the WVWA host a music and art-filled festival each spring, attracting local celebrities like Willis Alan Ramsey. Oscar- and Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Jennifer Warnes is releasing a new CD titled "The Well" this fall. The title song (co-authored by Doyle Bramhall II) was written during a stay at a bed and breakfast near Jacob's Well. A children's mystery by Marcia Bennett set at Jacob's Well will be published by Eakin Press in October.
"Jacob's Well is the essence of life, creating water every day for thousands of years," Baker says, "but it is also a great mystery, and that, too is a part of its mythology. Some are frightened by that, and some are drawn to it."
By Louie Bond
Pictures & story at: http://www.visitwimberley.com/jacobswell/index.shtml
On the surface, the scene is timeless. Young people have gathered at Jacob's Well to cool off on summer afternoons for as long as anyone can remember, dangling their legs from the knobby knees of cypress trees and leaping into the clear, bottomless depths from the end of a rope swing.
Heedless of the danger lurking beneath the calm surface of the Hill Country swimming hole, many adventurers have answered the siren call of the cave.
At least eight divers have discovered that if you answer that siren call and venture too deeply into the mysterious depths, the mouth of Cypress Creek will quietly swallow you.
"This is the horror story side of it," says Don Dibble, a dive shop owner with more than 40 years of diving experience. "Jacob's Well definitely has a national reputation of being one of the most dangerous places to dive." Dibble has pulled most of the victims' remains out of Jacob's Well himself, and he nearly lost his own life in a 1979 recovery dive. Dibble was attempting to retrieve the remains of two young divers from Pasadena, Kent Maupin and Mark Brashier, when he became trapped, buried past his waist in the sliding gravel lining the bottom of the well's third chamber. Just as he ran out of air, Dibble was rescued by other divers but suffered a ruptured stomach during his rapid, unconscious ascent.
In January 1980, Dibble attempted to seal off the depths of the well by building a grate of rebar and quick-set concrete at the entrance to the third chamber. Six months later, Dibble found the grate dismantled. Divers not only dove with the proper tools to pull off the grate, they also left a note for Dibble. "You can't keep us out," was written on a plastic slate.
Austin writer Steve Harrigan says that while working on a Texas Monthly article, he dove into Jacob's Well at least 20 times back in the late 1970s and early 80s, including a dive to help Dibble install the grate.
"It's a very mysterious place, a place of constant sensation," says Harrigan, who centered a novel around the well in 1984. One of the main characters, a scuba instructor, perishes after venturing too deeply, perhaps as a suicide, or perhaps due to the mind-altering effects of nitrogen narcosis. Harrigan says he never dove below the relatively safe 90-foot level for many reasons, but basically because "I knew my limit."
Through the years, many have successfully explored the first and second chambers of the well. The first chamber is a straight drop to about 30 feet; then it angles down to 55 feet. Nourished by the rays of sunlight that penetrate the crystal water, this cavern area is bright and is home to algae and wildlife.
The second chamber is a long funnel to 80 feet, where there is a restricted opening to the third chamber. Inside the second chamber is a false chimney, which appears to be a way out of the well but has trapped at least one diver. Southwest Texas State University student Richard Patton lost his life in that false chimney in 1983.
The third chamber is a small room with a floor of unstable gravel. Divers must inflate water wings to navigate this chamber successfully, trying not to stir up silt or dislodge the gravel.
The passage into the fourth chamber is very tight, but the San Marcos Area Recovery Team (SMART) was recently able to penetrate it without removing their air tanks. The tightest restriction occurs 15 feet down the next tunnel where there is a knife-edge formation in the ceiling and fine gravel below. The few who have seen the fourth chamber say it is "virgin cave" with fantastic limestone formations and no gravel. Covering the bottom is fine silt that can totally obscure vision when kicked up by one misstep.
SMART divers Dan and Kathy Misiaszek, with teammate Jim Price and an extensive topside team, penetrated the fourth chamber in October, 2000 to videotape the area. "We were not looking for human remains," Misiaszek recalls. "We knew some remains might be found but we sincerely believed the bones had been washed away years ago during the many floods."
The SMART team had already worked for five years with one of the well's surrounding private landowners to take water samples and map the cave for possible recovery missions. Although Brashier's remains had washed out of the well during a 1981 flood, no trace of Maupin had been recovered. Misiaszek spotted the first traces of Maupin down a keyhole opening in the floor of the fourth chamber, more than 100 feet below the surface.
"I first noticed one femur bone, then a second, and as I descended into the keyhole-shaped tunnel, I could see a heavily corroded scuba tank and wetsuit," Misiaszek wrote in a chronicle of the event. "It was obvious we had stumbled upon some human remains... At the bottom of the tunnel lay the corroded scuba tank with attached hoses. The tank was still attached to a shorty 'beaver tail' style wet suit with weight belt."
Misiaszek found a human skull nearby, and then stumbled upon one piece of evidence that led him to believe the remains were Maupin's - a Neptune's Locker Diving Association patch from Maupin's hometown of Pasadena. Misiaszek carefully left the scene intact, but as he finished filming the area, the dive team inadvertently kicked up some silt. Fighting to remain calm in the ensuing blackout, the divers ditched their expensive camera and scrambled for the guideline, following its arrows up to a shallower depth to decompress before surfacing. Visibility was so bad down there, Misiaszek said, that he passed Price along the way and never knew it.
"You couldn't tell up from down, left from right," Kathy Misiaszek says. "You couldn't see your gauges. You were scraping the bottom and banging your tanks on the top. You had nothing to fall back on except your training. We were rather relieved to get out."
The abandoned video camera continued recording until it ran out of tape. The divers returned to retrieve the camera and the remains. They later watched the videotape run in quiet blackness until its end, as if the camera were the eyes of a diver left behind to die. "It was a sobering piece of film," Kathy Misiaszek says.
Even divers who are experienced in open waters have met their fate while cave diving because they are unprepared for the perils they will encounter. The well's last known victim, Austin mail carrier Wayne Wood Russell, was an experienced topside caver and an open water diver, but had never attempted cave diving.
Ironically, it was once impossible to descend into Jacob's Well. Local historians say the artesian spring spumed anywhere from 10 to 30 feet above the ground in centuries past, creating a much heavier flow into Cypress Creek. Documentation from 1924 indicates a flow of 170 gallons per second.
"There's a picture of me at 3 years old at Jacob's Well in the family album," recalls 79-year-old historian Dorothy Wimberley Kerbow. "My dad would throw me into the well. You couldn't sink down because the spring would just bubble you up with such force."
In the 1950s, Kerbow recalls, she and her friends would often visit Jacob's Well, jumping over and around the springs that percolated all along Cypress Creek. It was impossible to go more than two feet below the surface due to the force of the spring, Kerbow says.
According to local legend, the name of the well is a Biblical reference. Early settlers William W. Moon and William C. Winters followed Cypress Creek to its source in the 1850s. They described the crevice in the creek bed which was overflowing with an abundance of clear, cool water as "like unto a well in Bible times."
Many young adventurers have been irresistibly drawn to the winding series of chambers and narrow passageways of Jacob's Well. "In the 1930s, young boys from Wimberley and San Marcos attempted to explore the cave in homemade diving suits made of cut-off water heaters with isinglass peep holes and with an old auto tire pump that forced air through a rubber hose to the diver below. The deepest they got was 25 feet," Kerbow recalls.
Misiaszek says he once felt the call of the well, the only time he thinks his judgment on a cave dive may have been seriously affected by nitrogen narcosis. Although he and Kathy had specifically planned to stop the dive at the third chamber, she had to grab Dan by the foot to stop him from entering the fourth chamber.
The well that has been such a danger to others is now in danger itself. Water authorities warn that ever-increasing pumping and the disappearance of permeable cover in the recharge area could dry up what was once thought of as a "perpetual." When the spring dried up for the first time in history during the summer of 2000, the event was considered by many as symbolic of the region's increasing water shortage and quality problems.
"Jacob's Well is like a canary in a coal mine," says landowner David Baker, who is in the process of giving up his own home and property to form a conservation easement for as much land around the area as possible. "When the spring stopped flowing, it was a wake-up call for everyone. We don't want it to turn into Jacob's Cave."
Baker, who hopes to use his house as an environmental study center open to the public, has dedicated the past 13 years to preserving the site, forming the Wimberley Valley Watershed Association (WVWA) and promoting the well's environmental message to government agencies and the public. In August, a group of scientists and environmentalists gathered in Wimberley to set a plan of action for conducting extensive studies of Jacob's Well.
The well continues to inspire not only scientists, but also artists who find their way to the remote, privately owned but quietly shared spot that Indians revered as sacred ground. Baker and the WVWA host a music and art-filled festival each spring, attracting local celebrities like Willis Alan Ramsey. Oscar- and Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Jennifer Warnes is releasing a new CD titled "The Well" this fall. The title song (co-authored by Doyle Bramhall II) was written during a stay at a bed and breakfast near Jacob's Well. A children's mystery by Marcia Bennett set at Jacob's Well will be published by Eakin Press in October.
"Jacob's Well is the essence of life, creating water every day for thousands of years," Baker says, "but it is also a great mystery, and that, too is a part of its mythology. Some are frightened by that, and some are drawn to it."
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