In June 2017, Newell Campbell mailed a manuscript to Hans Bodenhamer: a decade-by-decade history of Montana caving stretching from 1912 up through 1980, assembled from letters, trip reports, and memory. It was a remarkable piece of work — and for a long time it sat on the site as a single scanned PDF that was hard to read on a phone and invisible to search.
That’s fixed. The full history is now a proper web page on nrmg.org: pages 1–32 transcribed into structured timeline tables and readable prose, with the original scan and a cleanly typeset new PDF edition both embedded at the bottom for download.
Read it here: Newell Campbell’s History of Montana Caving (members only)
What’s in there: Newell’s cover letter to Hans, the abbreviations key, three big timeline tables (1912–1961, 1962–1970, 1971–1980), and Appendix II with Sections A through D covering the people, clubs, and expeditions that shaped the era.
Newell closed his letter with a line we took to heart while getting this online — “Then it’s your turn!” If you’ve got trip reports, photos, or stories from the decades since 1980, send them in. We’d like to keep the history going.
Huge thanks to Newell for the work, and to Hans for keeping the manuscript safe until we could do it justice.