Faces of Southeast Missouri: Gerry Keene

Gerry Keene is an avid caver who is active with Southeast Missouri Grotto, an organized group of cavers concentrating on exploration, education and conservation of caves in the Ste. Genevieve and Perry County areas.

Photo by Aaron Eisenhauer

When introducing new people to caving, Gerry Keene advises them to channel their inner eight-year-old. He says caves are dark and dirty, full of streams and tough terrain that cavers need to crawl over, under and through.

“As an adult, you’re like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ But if you look at it like a kid, you’re like, ‘Yes! Go for it!’” Keene says. “You've got to reprogram your sense of adventure back to what it was as a kid, what was really fun, and then you can really enjoy the environment.”

A friend introduced Keene to caving in 2012. They both signed up for a beginning caving course through Southeast Missouri Grotto, an organized group of cavers concentrating on exploration, education and conservation of caves in the Ste. Genevieve and Perry County areas.

“Everything's different about it, and you're either scared to death of it and you never do it again, or you’re like, ‘Hey this is cool. I want to do it some more.’ I was in that latter category,” Keene says. “It was a lot of fun, and I’ve basically been doing it for the last 12 years.”

Keene, a financial advisor with Prudential, is now vice-president of SEMO Grotto and says he loves caving because it's a sport that challenges him physically and mentally. He says a cave is a completely different world than the world above ground: It’s a pitch-black environment that is often muddy and wet, with climbing and crawling through difficult terrain.

Keene says time loses meaning in a cave, and cavers measure time in terms of transit — knowing a particular feature is 15 minutes from the entrance, for example.

“You see things that the vast majority of people do not see or ever experience,” Keene says. “There's places under the ground that no human being has ever been — a virgin cave — and that's pretty wild.”

Keene says SEMO Grotto participates in conservation, doing clean-ups of caves. They recently worked through Mystery Cave, the fourth-longest cave in Missouri. The cave has a sinkhole that washes trash into the cave.

SEMO Grotto also monitors the biodiversity of caves, such as water quality and types of animals present, such as fish, bats and salamanders. Keene says SEMO Grotto is involved in cave rescue if a person or an animal get hurt in the caves. Keene himself found a dog that had been missing for weeks in one of the caves in Perry County and organized others to bring the dog to the surface, so it could be returned to its owners.

Four of the five longest caves in Missouri are in Perry County, which has roughly 700 total caves, “and we’re regularly finding new caves,” Keene says.

Keene says his personal focus with the Grotto is on introducing new people to the hobby of caving.

“It's something that I find very rewarding,” Keene says. “It's a lot of fun to watch people and see their excitement of this new environment.”