Rowland Cave

Rowland Cave, a natural limestone formation in a remote valley of the Ozark Mountains in Stone County, was a popular mid-century venue for cave explorers (commonly known as spelunkers), until a tragedy involving a team of spelunkers who were trapped by a flash flood in the spring of 1965 cost the life of a Navy Seal who had led the team’s rescue. The incident made international news at the time, and fifty years later the recollections of the spelunkers were the subject of a lengthy article in a national edition of the Washington Post, which was reprinted by many newspapers across the country. The state eventually closed Rowland Cave and erected a fence at the entrance owing to obvious safety hazards, fragile ecosystems inside the cave, and an endangered population of gray bats.

The cave’s small entrance was at the foot of a valley about a mile off Arkansas Highway 14 near the community of Fifty-Six (Stone County), seventeen miles north of the county seat of Mountain View (Stone County). Articles in Arkansas newspapers promoted it as a site for spelunkers and geological explorers, but that ceased before the twenty-first century, when it was closed permanently. Parts of the many miles of the cave were never explored owing to collapsed cave walls and potential danger. Common speculation was that the cave might connect with Blanchard Caverns about twenty miles away, which the U.S. Forest Service was about to develop before the 1965 incident.

Rowland Cave was discovered early in the twentieth century by John Rowland, who named it after himself. John Harkleroad eventually bought the land, developed the cave entrance, and opened it to tourists in 1958. He ran electrical wire down to the cave entrance and hung lights from the ceiling for some distance inside. Fall, winter, and early spring rains often filled the cave entrance with water and made exploration dangerous, so it was open to tourists only from May 1 through Labor Day. Harkleroad said a group of well-equipped spelunkers from Memphis had claimed to have explored as much as four miles of the cave.

A group of spelunkers from Batesville (Independence County) had been exploring the cave for some time and mapped the passages. The four who entered the cave in early April 1965 were Steve Wilson of Batesville, Hogan Bledsoe of Lake Village (Chicot County), Mike Hill of Batesville, and Hugh Shell of Batesville; the first two were students at what is now Arkansas Tech University in Russellville (Pope County), Hill was a student at what is now Lyon College in Batesville, and Shell was an accountant. They planned to continue their cave mapping on the expedition.

Hours after entering the cave, they discovered that a flash flood had filled the entrance to the cave and cut off their return, unless they were willing to try to swim underwater about 400 feet through the darkened flooded tunnel. They would explain that they really were not worried because they were in a dry, lit part of the tunnel and had water and food for several days. Realizing that people were by then probably at the cave entrance, they flickered the lights at the entrance on and off to signal that they were safe. But more rain was forecast, and a crowd that eventually reached 300, including relatives of the spelunkers, neighbors from Fifty-Six, and civil defense and other rescue groups, gathered around the cave entrance. Water in the cave continued to rise from heavy rains in the area. Observing the rising waters, men from the state Civil Defense headquarters telephoned the U.S. government in Washington DC, which during the night dispatched three rescue experts from the National Capital Rescue Squad by plane to Memphis. The Arkansas State Police met the divers at Memphis and brought them to the cave about 4:30 a.m.

One of the divers with underwater head gear swam the 400 feet and found the spelunkers, who were weary and cramping but unalarmed. They had kept warm by candles and by building a tent with ponchos. Seven divers wearing rubber wetsuits to keep warm in the frigid water laid a rope through the water into the chamber where the men were.

When the first navy diver found them, it was decided that they needed more air, so the rescue was delayed while the Civil Defense director at Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) sent five tanks and a compressor to the cave. Each of the spelunkers was given a short lesson on scuba diving. One by one, the divers brought the spelunkers underwater into the mouth of the cave, where they climbed into a small boat and paddled to the entrance. The crowd applauded each time a diver and spelunker came ashore. The doctor examined each spelunker when he got ashore and pronounced each of them well, until the final team: Wilson and navy diver Lyle E. Thomas, a thirty-nine-year-old Kansas native who was a highly decorated naval officer. As Thomas rose in the boat to step ashore he gasped and fell back into the boat. A doctor and several nurses were at the water’s edge and tried to resuscitate him. The doctor said he died of a heart attack.

The cave continued for a time as an attraction for explorers and adventurers. A Sunday article in the Arkansas Gazette in 1970, which promoted several Arkansas caves, described Rowland Cave thusly: “The entrance is in a large funnel-shaped sinkhole with a walkway and steps descending down into it. Only a small portion of this huge cave has lighting and walkways. There are several passages which branch out and go for several miles. The tour leads through barren limestone solution channels back to a room where there is a large chunk of flowstone which has fallen from the ceiling.”

For additional information:
Albright, Charles. “Found.” Our Town Column, Arkansas Gazette, August 21, 1963, p. 1B.

“Arkansas Beauty Under the Ground: A Directory for the Spelunker Set.” Arkansas Gazette, May 17, 1970, p 9F.

Bever, Lindsey. “The Dramatic and Deadly Rescue of Explorers Trapped in a Cave—53 Years Ago in America.” Washington Post, July 10, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/07/09/the-verge-of-panic-the-entire-time-a-survivor-remembers-diving-to-escape-a-flooded-cave/ (accessed October 13, 2026).

Dumas, Ernest. “Navy Diver Dies as Four Are Rescued from Cave.” Arkansas Gazette, April 6, 1965, pp. 1A, 4A.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas