Herb and Jan Conn married in 1944, climbed the rocks at Carderock outside Washington on Sundays while Herb worked for the Navy Department, and in 1946 packed a panel truck and drove west. On a trip to Devils Tower the next year they saw the Needles, and in 1949 bought twenty acres four miles from Custer to be as near the spires as they could get. They built a house into a hollow in a small cliff, called it the Conncave, moved in about two years after that and lived there without electricity or running water for something like sixty years. Between them they made more than two hundred first ascents in the Needles, and Jan was the first woman to free climb Devils Tower. In 1959 a graduate student named Dwight Deal needed two companions in order to use his permit to survey Jewel Cave, and asked the Conns, who agreed to go once. Over the next twenty years they mapped 62.36 miles of it, on more than seven hundred trips and better than six thousand volunteer hours. Right up to 1959 the Park Service reckoned the whole cave about two miles long. Herb worked out why its winds rise and fall with the barometer and published the explanation in 1966, designed the lighting still used on the tour route, and helped build the trail. Their account of it, The Jewel Cave Adventure, appeared in 1977.
Getting there
43.8415, -103.5456
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
