Decades later, effort revived to retrieve body from cave shaft
James Mitchell was a 23-year-old chemist from Winthrop whose death made national headlines in February 1965 when he died of exposure while exploring a cave in central New York.
After being lowered into a narrow 75-foot-deep shaft by two friends, Mitchell somehow got stuck in a stream of frigid water flowing at 10 gallons per minute as his two friends from Cambridge tried frantically to help.
Days later, after a rescue team was flown from Washington on the vice president's jet, efforts to retrieve Mitchell's body had failed, and the cave was blasted shut in the young spelunker's honor.
But the many limestone entrances to the cave, about 20 miles east of Utica, N.Y., were never fully closed, leaving Mitchell's body without a private resting place for the past 40 years.
Now, Christian Lyon, 36, an actor from Los Angeles and the son of the local Dolgeville, N.Y., mayor, has returned to not only retrieve Mitchell's body, but also make a documentary about Mitchell's death and the recovery, which is planned for this weekend.
`` I want to do justice by Jim," Lyon said from Dolgeville yesterday. ``I was not alive when this happened, but for some reason he matters to me."
Mitchell mattered to a lot of people, especially cave explorers. His death was a milestone in the spelunking world, with rescue teams forming around the world after his much-publicized tragedy. In fact, the National Speleological Society in Washington gives a James Mitchell Award for outstanding scientific papers.
On Feb. 13, 1965, Mitchell, Hedy Miller, and Charles Bennett, all friends from the Boston Grotto of the National Speleological Society, set out to explore Schroeder's Pants Cave.
Mitchell, attached to a nylon rope, descended more than 60 feet in the cave toward a pit Lyon said is big enough to fit a house in. Press reports said that, exhausted from walking nearly a mile to the cave in knee-deep snow and crawling through parts of the cavern 18 inches high, Mitchell was unable to make it back to Miller and Bennett and became stuck 10 to 15 feet below his partners as frigid water washed over him.
He was declared dead about a day later, and $500,000 was spent in an effort to retrieve the body.
Charles Bennett, now 63 and a scientist with
Mitchell's family is from Waterville, Ohio, and when contacted by Lyon about the rescue, they approved of the project and said they hoped to bring the remains home. The family would only agree to work with Lyon if they were not contacted by the press, he said.
Lyon said members of the original rescue team and Mitchell's family will gather in Dolgeville on Friday and begin the private rescue on Saturday, led by a caver who has been inside the cave, which is said to be one of the trickiest in the Northeast.
Once recovered, the remains will be passed over to the New York State doctor of forensics who, with the local coroner, will bring the remains to a local morgue for examination.
James Mitchell's remains will be cremated, with some of his ashes given to family members and the rest buried near the site of the cave, where the Lyon family placed a marker years ago marking the tragedy, which affected that family as well. Lyon's grandfather discovered the cave in 1947, and the marker and cave are on family property.
``It's going to probably be overwhelming for me, but also a great sense of relief and closure," Lyon said. ``If my documentary and the book I plan on writing never see the light of day, and my only success is that I retrieved Jim's remains, then that will still be one of the greatest moments of my life."
