John Jones’ Final Descent

Story 1: The Permanent Tomb of John Jones. John Edward Jones was a 26-year-old medical student.

He was a husband and a father to a young daughter with another baby on the way.

On November 24th, 2009, he was home in Utah for Thanksgiving and decided to explore

Nutty Putty Cave with a group of friends and family. It was a place he remembered fondly

from his childhood, but it had been years since John, now a six-foot-tall, 200-pound man,

had been caving. The group entered the cave around 8:00 PM. About an hour in,

John, his brother Josh, and two friends decided to find a popular feature

called the Birth Canal, a notoriously tight but manageable passage. John went first,