Living in landlocked Missouri hasn’t kept Gary Burger from experiencing world-class diving right here in his home state.
Burger, a partner at Cantor & Burger law firm, is a staff diver with West End Diving. Many weekends he leads underwater tours of Bonne Terre Mine, which produced lead ore from 1860 to 1962 and is now the largest freshwater dive resort. Burger shows divers the railroad cars, shovels, helmets, ore carts and other equipment left behind when the mine closed. “It’s a huge maze, with five levels of tunnels crisscrossing different ways,” he says.
Many St. Louisans might not realize such a rich diving opportunity exists so close to home, but the mine is world-renowned within the diving community, Burger says. “It’s really unique, and people visit from all over the country and the world.” Recently, The Travel Channel visited to film an episode for one of its shows, and in the ’80s, Jacques Cousteau filmed a TV special there.
Burger has been diving for only five years, but already he’s earned a handful of certifications, including in the areas of stress-and-rescue, technical and cave diving. Missouri’s abundance of long, extended cave systems are what sparked Burger’s interest in cave and underground diving. “I like the beauty of the underwater ecosystems that are all over the world, and these caves are their own ecosystems,” he says. Only a handful of other spots in North America have caves similar to those in Missouri, including Mexico and northern Florida, he explains.
Although Burger has spent most of his underwater time in Bonne Terre Mine, he also has experienced dives all over the world, including in Belize, Jamaica and Turks & Caicos. He’s ventured into the underwater caves of Mexico and Florida and explored the shipwrecks off Florida’s coast.
Earlier this year, he traveled to the Northern Galapagos Islands from the main islands, an 18-hour boat ride. “It’s a cleaner station, so big fish from all over the ocean come there to be cleaned,” Burger says. “I saw eagle rays and hundreds of hammerheads and other sharks. The ecosystem is amazing.”
[the routine]
WEEKLY ROUTINE | I run and bike regularly, but they say you burn more calories diving than any other physical activity. That’s because you’re not only exercising the whole time, but also generating energy to keep yourself warm.
TRAINING techniques | Learning how much air to breathe underwater is probably the most vital technique. You can’t breathe too little, because you’ll build up carbon dioxide in the body, which hurts and you end up breathing more later. The longer you dive, the more you learn the balance between exerting yourself enough to do what you want to do underwater, but not using up too much air.
By Stephanie Zeilenga
Photo: Charles Barnes
