We’re all familiar with Natural Bridge Caverns, but it may come as a surprise that the cave system continues to grow. Since its discovery in the 1960s, the family-owned caverns have been explored and carefully preserved.
Recently, a new cave was located on family land, called Wild Cave. It was discovered by T. Dexter Soechting, after steam was spotted rising up from a narrow crack in 2019.
Brothers Brad and Travis Wuest, the president and vice president of Natural Bridge Caverns, respectively, and experienced cavers, explored Wild Cave in early 2021.
“It’s it is hard to describe how incredible it feels to go where no human has ever before been,” explained Brad Wuest.
During that discovery, in the southernmost reaches of Wild Cave in a room called the “House of Cards,” surveys revealed that it lay only 300 feet from the existing end of Natural Bridge Caverns. That spurred the recent new expedition, with the belief that the two caves may be connected. So, this week, the crew trekked seven hours to the far northern extent of Natural Bridge Caverns.
”It’s a place called ‘Hope’s Mantle’,” said Brad Wuest, of the farthest known reaches of the cave. “Our hope is to connect to another cave system that we recently discovered and explored that is only now 300 feet away from connecting.”
The trip, which included incredible sights, was not easy. It required some tight squeezes, but also revealed travertine pools, untouched cave structures, and more.
“We will be going through some very, very large passages as well, will be repelling down pits and walking through deep mud, will be wading through several small lakes inside the cave,” said Brad Wuest.
The discovery would have added 1,398 feet to the existing Natural Bridge Caverns system. That would be enough to move Natural Bridge Caverns from the eighth longest cave in Texas to the sixth. However, it wasn’t to be.
“After about seven hours of hard caving we arrived at Hope’s Mantel excited to discover what lay below. After rigging the pit we descended and surveyed a beautiful room, however, the passage beyond that point was filled with flowstone formations and breakdown rubble,” said Brad Wuest. “We pushed every lead in the area but couldn’t make it through, although we could feel airflow indicating a small connection somewhere through all that breakdown. In all we were able to close the gap by 50 feet this time, so now the two caves are only 250 feet apart.”
The result was disappointing for the moment, but the brothers plan to try again and keep exploring. More unexplored parts of the cave are believed to exist.
“We’ll never stop exploring, especially given there is still so much to learn and discover. Just in the last two years, we’ve found large chambers filled with breathtaking speleothems, crystal clear travertine pools of water, pits that go down to the aquifer, and beauty never before seen by anyone in the world. We know there are more big discoveries waiting beneath our feet,” said Travis Wuest.
“We’ve got to continue to keep discovering because that’s, you know, that’s who we are. That’s what we’re all about,” said Brad Wuest.
On Saturday and Sunday at Natural Bridge Caverns, the public will have a chance to see the results of the latest exploration as well as take part in cave crawls and learn about rope techniques used in caving. Natural Bridge Caverns will also launch an Explorers blog this summer, giving fans an inside view of the efforts by the team to better understand this incredible natural wonder, sharing videos and photos of trips, and providing education on bio-diversity and paleontology.