When Dale Green first saw the cavern that would come to be known as Nutty Putty Cave, he wasn't all that impressed.
"It didn't really have anything pretty in it," said Green, who is largely credited with discovering the popular Utah County cavern in 1960. "And there aren't a lot of places where you can stand up, so you're just pretty much crawling around all the time and you get all muddy."
Nearly a half-century later, Green shakes his head when he considers the thousands of people -- many of them students from nearby Brigham Young University -- who have explored Nutty Putty.
"I call it a date cave," said Green, who named the cavern for the soft clay found in some of the cave's 1400 feet of chutes and tunnels. "The kids from BYU take dates out there."
But Brandon Kowalis, who helped survey the cave in 2003, said the draw of Nutty Putty is its relative accessibility and it myriad of challenges for cavers of various skill levels.
"The majority of it is not something you're going to get stuck in," Kowalis said. "But there are some spots, some nooks and crannies, where people might try to challenge themselves by trying to squeeze through."
That was a problem as the cave become an increasingly popular destination for ill-prepared adventurers. By the turn of the new century, the cave was receiving thousands of visitors a year. Experienced caver Jon Jasper recalled arriving one Friday evening to find dozens of people camped outside the cave's entrance, waiting for a turn to explore.
"There were 40 people in the cave and more than that trying to get in," Jasper said.
Officials at the state School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, which owns the cave and surrounding land, were growing nervous . In 2006 -- after a series of incidents involving stuck explorers and the deaths of four adventurers in nearby "Y" Mountain cave -- management of the cave was turned over to the Timpanogos Grotto, a local chapter of the National Speleological Society.
"We were hoping that by limiting access to those with the proper gear, proper leadership preparations and the appropriate skills we could make sure that only the most prepared people were going into the cave," said Jasper, one of the Grotto's volunteers.
Jasper said Tuesday's incident underscored the reality of caving and the dangers that could have befallen any of the visitors to Nutty Putty since Green's discovery.
"Even with everything that has been put in place to help guide people into proper preparation, going into the cave can still be dangerous," he said.
