The Bottomless Pit

Revisiting a Local Legend

By: Autin Goodsell

Every so often, a cave project comes along that feels bigger than just checking off leads or updating a map. This one started with a message from Jef Walker, a member of the American Fork community, asking whether we had any information on a place locals called the Bottomless Pit. His father had heard stories about it for decades, rumors of a vertical drop so deep that rocks never hit the bottom. Jef eventually found the entrance himself, and now he wanted to know what was really down there. For both him and his father, this was unfinished business.

With Jef's support, we committed to fully documenting the cave: a detailed 2D map, a 3D LiDAR scan planned for later this year, and a complete video walkthrough. Our team set out in early November 2024 with a clear goal, get in, map everything we could, and bring back something lasting. Not just for the Walker family, but for the grotto, the caving community, and anyone who had ever heard the stories about Utah's so-called bottomless pit.

History and Background

Over the past few decades, cavers began using the names "Bottomless Pit" and "The Great Deep" interchangeably, a mistake that stuck and eventually worked its way into maps, notes, and trip reports. It wasn't until we started preparing for this project and digging through old Timpanogos Grotto tech notes that the mix-up became clear. The cave we were heading into was the Bottomless Pit. The Great Deep is an entirely different cave, and its true location has been lost for some time.

The confusion likely traces back to a series of visits in the 1970s and '80s, including a well-known trip by the Utah County Mountain Rescue Team. They lowered one of their members into the fissure using a winch and cable system. He reportedly heard rocks falling for 45 seconds before being pulled back up. The team later returned and reached the bottom, estimating the depth at around 275 feet. Somewhere in those years, the two names began being used for the same cave.

As for the real Great Deep, it's still out there waiting to be rediscovered. So while this project helped resolve a long-standing mix-up, it also left us with another mystery to chase.

Project Goals and Planning

When Jef Walker reached out, this wasn't casual curiosity; it was a personal mission tied to decades of family history and local legend. With his family's support, we set clear objectives: document the Bottomless Pit with a modern 2D survey, film the entire descent, and return later this year with the Caveatron to complete a 3D LiDAR scan.

The project was scheduled for early November 2024. Thanks to earlier rigging trips by Cybele Blood and Sam Bona, we didn't need to haul in rope or bolt the cave ourselves; everything was already in place, which allowed us to focus our time on the survey and documentation. Our team included Blake Goodsell, Jake Healey, Corbin Gurnee, Gary Bingham, and me. Blake handled the sketching while I filmed the descent with a helmet-mounted camera. Gary, a friend of Jef Walker's and a longtime local, served as our guide up the mountain.

The hike itself deserves its own warning. Without local knowledge, the route is brutal, full of bushwhacking, steep terrain, and scree fields. Gary's help in navigating the cleanest path to the entrance saved us considerable suffering and made the whole trip possible. Once we arrived, we got ready quickly and started the survey.

The Cave and the Descent

The Bottomless Pit is, at its core, a fissure, tall, narrow, and trending north to south. The entrance is a small slot tucked into the bottom of a sinkhole, tight but not especially difficult. Once inside, it drops about 20 to 30 feet to the first landing, where there's just enough room for a couple of people to stand. Like most of the cave, this section is exposed to rockfall, so staying on the rope at all times is strongly recommended.

From the first landing, the cave splits. You can go either north or south; both routes reconnect below, but the north side is cleaner, straighter, and far safer. The south route is looser and sends a near-constant trickle of debris down the walls onto anyone below. The entrance funnel channels almost everything into the south side, meaning that descending that way involves a steady shower of falling pebbles and dust. We stayed on the north route except when surveying the south side required otherwise.

The cave continues down through a series of muddy landings and boulder piles, each one giving the illusion of a floor until you rappel past it and realize it's a boulder choke. Most of these landings dead-end to the south and continue to the north, forming a kind of repeating pattern all the way down. A proper Y-hang on the north side below the first landing kept the rope off the walls and significantly reduced debris from above, one of the better rigging decisions made on the earlier trips.

Deeper in, the character of the cave shifts. The walls transition from mud-covered and loose to bare, clean rock. The final bolt was placed above a tight vertical crack, the furthest point safely accessible on rope, and we treated this as both the end of the survey and the bottom of the cave. Dropping rocks down that final lead, we could hear them bouncing for what sounded like another hundred feet or more. The sound fades into silence rather than landing with a thud, which lends some weight to the old legends. The air down here is clean, and the formations are untouched: soda straws, flowstone, and delicate features that haven't been buried under mud and runoff like the upper sections.

We also shot a survey line across a tall void trending north, about 77 feet of open space above a steep wall. Accessing it safely would require bolting a traverse, and even then, it's unclear whether more cave lies beyond. From the top-down view, it appears to be a continuation of the fissure rather than a horizontal passage, and the geology supports that reading.

Survey and Mapping

Surveying a vertical pit like this is never straightforward. Even though the cave follows a single main fissure, working in a nearly continuous drop introduces its own challenges; aligning stations, maintaining communication, and coordinating movement on rope all take considerably more time and effort than a horizontal system.

With ropes rigged on both the north and south sides, we had some flexibility. Blake and I used the landings as checkpoints: I would typically descend first, shoot a couple of stations, and then Blake would follow to sketch. The landings were essential for staying coordinated; they gave us safe spots to meet, compare notes on station locations, and verify data before continuing down.

Despite the tight walls and shifting debris, we completed the survey in a single push. The final map puts the cave at 405 feet in length and 204 feet in surveyed depth. It isn't massive by Utah standards, but what sets the Bottomless Pit apart is its sheer verticality. Looking down from any point in the cave, the darkness stretches beneath you in a way that feels both impressive and unsettling. When something falls into the final crack at the bottom, it doesn't land; it simply disappears. You never hear it hit, and it's gone. That feeling of depth without closure is what gives this cave its character and what made people call it bottomless in the first place.

What's Next

Later this year, we plan to return with the Caveatron to complete a full 3D LiDAR scan of the Bottomless Pit. That will produce a detailed digital model of the cave, something that goes well beyond a paper map and captures the true scale and structure of the pit. Once complete, we'll bring everything together: the 2D map, the 3D model, and both the raw and edited video footage.

The full package will be shared with Jef Walker and his family, who made this project possible. For them, it's a chance to finally see inside the cave that has been part of their family's story for decades.

The Bottomless Pit may not be truly bottomless, but it holds a piece of local history that deserves to be properly documented. And now it is.

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