Nutty Putty Cave has not been touched by daylight since 2009. The sandstone labyrinth west of Utah Lake was permanently sealed after the death of 26-year-old John Edward Jones, whose final hours, upside down, wedged in a passage scarcely wider than a human torso, became one of the most widely discussed and haunting incidents in modern caving history. The cave, once a modest local challenge for Boy Scouts and hobby cavers, was closed with Jones’s body still inside. Officials considered recovery too dangerous; the walls were unpredictable, the passage too restrictive, and the risk of further fatalities unthinkable. Nutty Putty became, in the starkest possible sense, a tomb.

Yet, in an age where technology reconstructs what the earth has reclaimed, the cave has opened once again, not physi

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