Merl Dobry and Jim Houtz inch their way through a narrow passage on the way to Brown's Room. Photograph was taken in total darkness at 92 feet.
Houtz: I raced motorcycles too – hill climbs, scrambles, hare and hound – those were suicide runs. I had a Husquvarna 500 cc. I made the Widowmaker in Utah on the first run and failed the next five. See that? (he points to discolored skin from his pinky to his elbow). That’s all scar tissue. Man, I’ve got scars. My chest was grafted, I’ve got knees you wouldn’t believe. I shoulda been dead a bunch of times.
CD: There’s roughly ten percent of the population that science calls High Sensation Seekers – people who are genetically predisposed to being – sort of crazy. A piece on a chromosome is slightly longer and so you don’t produce dopamine at the same levels as most of us, so even from early in life, you’d seek out experiences that put you on the edge. Sounds like you fit the bill.
Houtz, laughing: Good grief. Please don’t tell my wife that. But, I mean, I was very methodical, very detailed in my research – developing plans and specific criteria for going deeper and deeper. But yeah, you think about diving in those days, the early 60’s, people were dying on a pretty regular basis.
CD: So how deep did you go?
Houtz: Well, I did establish some records. Here’s one.
He pulls out a world record he set in an abyssal warm water Death Valley underwater cave called Devils’ Hole, home of the critically endangered Devil’s Hole Pupfish and the place Charles Manson believed he and his followers would find refuge during Helter Skelter. There, Houtz bested a Jaques Cousteau deep diving world record. In 1965, he did 99.6 meters (326 feet) on compressed air in Devils Hole, still the deepest anyone’s gone down there.
Houtz: One time I wound up going down there with a tank that was not full and doing a bounce dive – 325 feet. I was on the way back up when all the sudden it became obvious that there was no more air in that tank. I was probably at 225 feet, all by myself. I had a cable cord – stretched all the way down – so I had something to follow. But you’re in a volcanic fissure under a mountain in Death Valley – it’s not a straight shot up, you’re meandering and following all these narrow passageways.
CD: How’d you get all that way back up?
Houtz: I had two more breaths, possibly three, but the very last breath there was no more pressure on the regulator. It became an issue of mind over matter. I had trained in this particular category for a number of years, but needless to say when I broke the surface in what we called the Egg Room, I was a pretty happy camper.
I also led a rescue there in 1965. There were four youngsters – teens who climbed the fence. One was a Senator’s son. Three went in the water and one got some sense and said, ‘I’m not doing it.’ They did this at night. Once you round that first bend at ninety feet – you don’t know what dark is until you go around that bend. There’s no reflection down there. The walls are limestone. They look smooth, like clouds, but they’re rough. Rub your hands against it and it’ll take the skin right off.
So I was at the Newport Harbor Yacht Club giving a presentation on diving – I have sixty, seventy people and a call came in from the Federal Government. They said, ‘are there any air pockets in those caves down there?’ and I said ‘yeah.’ I get up to Los Alamitos with my guys and this seaplane – a Grumman Albatross was on the runway, engines running. Next thing you know, we’re flying and the hatch isn’t even closed. We tried to land in a place called Ash Meadows on the California/Nevada border, but the plane had to come over a mountain and drop over a very short runway – the pilot tried three, four times and he couldn’t do it.
So we get there from Nellis Air Force Base at daybreak – the media was out in full force. The military, state police. Even a big trailer that served food. We had four guys. I set up my first team of two guys (Author’s note: one of those guys was a diver and Vegas nightclub singer named Harry Wham, who, unbeknownst to Houtz had accompanied Mel Fisher on a failed treasure dive to Cortes Bank in 1957, and would later be murdered by family members in 1981.) and we went in increments – with divers at two junctions to handle decompression issues. I get down into the lower chamber – and there I found a mask with a snorkel on it and a fin. Later I found another item from the other diver. But the point is, when you get that deep, you get nitrogen narcosis. Nitrogen poisoning. It’s a drunken state, and you get lightheaded. Once you get that, it’s far more probable that you’re going to do something stupid, because you feel there’s nothing you can’t do. The only reason I was able to make these dives was because I’d been training for it – for the narcosis.
I went to the surface and notified everybody about what we found. It was a very sad, very solemn moment. I said, ‘I’m going to recover the rest of this equipment and I’ll do one more thing to confirm. So I made one dive to the last little ledge – at 325 feet. At that point, the Devil’s Hole opens up wide, and I can tell you one thing. I know it goes down to over 900 feet. We once let out 932 feet of cable from that point and there’s a current down there – so how much of the cable was bowed from the current, I don’t know, but it’s just, it’s just massive. But down at 325 feet – that’s where I found the remainder of some of the gear – right there, just as big as life. I’m sure that’s where the kid wound up – in the very far depths. He just kept going down. The guys were never found. The only thing down there now is bones.
CD: By now, you’d also been out to the Cortes Bank.
