Blind Descent_ The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth - James M. Tabor
PROLOGUE
As the fifteenth century began, we believed, absolutely, that the earth was flat.
As the twenty-first century began, we believed with equal certainty that every one of the earth’s great discoveries had been made. Almost a century had passed since Peary first trod the North Pole and Amundsen the South. Hillary and Norgay summited Mount Everest in 1953, Piccard and Walsh dove the deepest ocean in 1960. Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969. We played golf and drove a dune buggy there not long after. Surely that tolled discovery’s death knell.
But flat-earthers were wrong, and so were those who had prematurely mourned the death of discovery. When the third millennium rolled around, one last great terrestrial discovery did still await: the deepest cave on earth. The supercave.
Extreme cave exploration is just as exciting, difficult, and deadly as any pioneering feat in mountains, oceans, polar regions, or even off-planet. When he learned about supercaves, Buzz Aldrin said, “I’d thought there could be no environment as hostile as the lunar surface. No more.” Thus Aldrin would not be surprised, nor should anyone be, that we stood on top of the world in 1953, but the year 2000 came and went without our having found the bottom of it.
Alien, bizarre, and deadly they most certainly are, but supercaves are not only about adventure. Bill Stone, one of the two great supercave explorers featured in this book, bristled when an interviewer for NationalGeographic.com asked how he would describe his brand of “adventure.”
“Let’s first dispense with the adventure label,” Stone shot back, adding that “modern, high-tech exploration, which is what I do, is quite different. The objective is to advance our knowledge of the frontiers by bringing back new data.” Science, in other words, and, indeed, caves are scientific cornucopias as well, furthering research in areas as diverse as pandemic prevention, how the earth was formed, extraterrestrial life’s origins, new petroleum reserves, and Mars missions.
And yet, the search for the deepest cave on earth is the greatest epic of discovery and adventure you’ve never heard of. Despite its drama, danger, and valuable contributions to science, extreme cave exploration remains largely unheralded. In part this is because we prefer our heroes clean and beautiful. Think of our grandest exploration icon, Neil Armstrong: immaculate and pure, his knightly suit burning white against the gray moon and black space. Caving, on the other hand, is by its very nature dirty, dark, and wet.
But there is something else. We’ve had photographs of mountaineers since the nineteenth century and moving pictures of them almost as long. Good underwater footage from the 1940s exists. And we watched Neil Armstrong actually take his great first step. But for most of its long history, cave exploration remained out of our collective sight and mind. Only quite recently have sophisticated batteries and digital recording technology made it possible to take cameras far down into supercaves, which are thousands of feet deep and many miles long. So while their mountaineering, aquanaut, and astronaut counterparts basked in the limelight, extreme expeditionary cave explorers labored in the dark both beneath the earth’s surface and above it.
In fact, the subterranean world remains the greatest geographic unknown on this planet—called “the eighth continent” by some. Mountains, ocean depths, the moon, and even Martian scapes can be—and have been—revealed and explored by humans or our robotic surrogates. Not so caves. They are the sole remaining realm that can be experienced only firsthand, by direct human presence.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, three crucial things had become clear about the last great terrestrial discovery. First, it probably would be made within a decade. Second, it would almost certainly be made in one of two places: the Abkhazia region of the Republic of Georgia or the state of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. Finally, one of two men would lead the discovery team, which would earn him a place beside the likes of Amundsen and Hillary in the pantheon of exploration. They were the Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk and the American Bill Stone, both of whom had devoted their lives to the search for the bottom of the world.
Caves invite juxtapositions of opposites: light and dark, surface and subterranean, safety and terror. Alexander Klimchouk and Bill Stone are both in their fifties, but otherwise they are about as different as men can be, fitting nicely into that list of opposites. Klimchouk is short and slight. Stone is towering and muscular. Klimchouk is quiet, self-effacing, and avuncular. Stone is bold, brash, and commanding. Klimchouk has been happily married to the same woman for decades. Stone divorced in 1992 and has since had a series of relationships with strong, attractive, accomplished outdoorswomen. He is currently engaged to the cave explorer Vickie Siegel, with plans to marry in May 2010. They are alike, however, in two key ways: both are scientists and explorers in the classic tradition of Magellan, Amundsen, and Armstrong, willing to risk everything, including their lives and those of others, for the ultimate discovery.
Other explorers and scientists understood the historic nature of such a discovery. They also understood that, for the reasons noted above, it might go relatively unnoticed, which would be doubly tragic. First, because whoever risks everything for such a goal and accomplishes it deserves all the recognition and reward we can bestow. But second, and perhaps more important, this discovery would be not only monumental but sad, marking, as it would, the end of humankind’s millennia-old search for the earth’s ultimate secrets. So exciting—and perhaps unnerving—was the prospect of this saga’s finale that normally staid National Geographic magazine had to borrow a phrase from Jules Verne to describe it: “The Race to the Center of the Earth.”
As the new millennium dawned, the stage was thus set for an exploration drama unlike any since Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott competed, head-to-head, with results both horrible and historic, for the South Pole.
This book is the story of the race to make the last great discovery, and of the men and women who won and lost it.
PART ONE
STONE
Rule No. 1: Nothing is impossible (unless it violates the laws of physics).
Rule No. 2: Bend the laws of physics if you can.
—Bill Stone
ONE
STOP.
We have a fatality.
BILL STONE, HALF A MILE DEEP and three miles from the entrance in a Mexican supercave called Cheve, did stop. Red-and-white plastic survey tape hung across the narrow passage he had been ascending. The message, scrawled on notebook paper, was affixed to the tape at chest level, where it could not be missed. Afloat in the cave’s absolute darkness, the white paper burned so brightly in the beam of Stone’s headlamp that it almost hurt his eyes. The time was shortly before midnight on Friday, March 1, 1991, though that made no particular difference—it was always midnight in a cave.
Stone, a hard-driving man with a doctorate in structural engineering, stood six feet, four inches tall and weighed two hundred hard-muscled pounds. He was one of the leaders (two veteran cavers, Matt Oliphant and Don Coons, were the others) of an expedition trying to make the last great terrestrial discovery by proving that Cheve (pronounced CHAY-vay) was the deepest cave on earth. He had brown hair, a long hatchet face, a strong neck, intense blue eyes, and a prow of a nose angling out between them. Stone was not classically handsome, but it was a striking, unsubtle face men and women alike looked at twice.
Not just now, though. Having been underground for almost a week nonstop, he was gaunt, haggard, and hollow-eyed, his cheeks rough with scraggly beard, and he resembled somewhat the Jesus of popular imagination. A week underground was long, but not extremely so by supercaving standards, where stays of three weeks or more in the vast underground labyrinths were not unusual.
With three companions, he was halfway through the grueling, two-day climb back to the surface from the cave’s deepest known point, something like 4,000 vertical feet and 7 miles from the entrance. The note and tape had been strung just before the expedition’s Camp 2, where four others were staying. They explained to Stone what had happened. At about 1:30 P.M. that day, a caver from Indiana named Chris Yeager, twenty-five years old, had entered the cave with an older, more experienced man from New York, Peter Haberland. Yeager had been caving for just two years, and going into Cheve was, for him, like a climber who had been on only small Vermont mountains suddenly tackling Everest. This is not a specious comparison. Experts affirm that exploring a supercave such as Cheve is like climbing Mount Everest—in reverse.
Not long after he arrived in camp, more experienced cavers nicknamed Yeager “the Kid.” Seriously concerned about the younger man’s safety, a veteran, elite cave explorer named Jim Smith sat Yeager down for what should have been a sobering, thirty-minute lecture: don’t go into the cave without a guide, carry only a light daypack at first, learn the route in segments, get “acclimatized” to the underground world before going in for a long stay. The warnings fell on deaf ears. Yeager started his first trip with a fifty-five-pound pack, planning on a seven-day stay.
Yeager’s problems began soon. Just three hours into the cave, he did not properly secure his rappel rack (a specialized metal device resembling a big paper clip with transverse bars, built for sliding down long, wet ropes with heavy loads in caves) to his climbing harness. As a result, he dropped it. The rappel rack is a critical piece of equipment for extreme cave exploration, probably second in importance only to lights. Without his, Yeager could not continue.
Yeager used his partner’s rack to descend to the area where his had landed. Given that a rappel rack is about 18 inches long and Cheve Cave is almost unimaginably vast and complex, this was rather like looking for a needle in a thousand haystacks. Yeager was lucky indeed to find his rack, which allowed him to continue down with Haberland. They did not keep descending for long, however, because they quickly got lost and could not relocate the main route for forty-five minutes.
After seven hours, they arrived at the top of a cliff that had been named the 23-Meter Drop because it was exactly that, a 75-foot free drop from lip to pit that had to be rappelled. By supercaving standards, where free vertical drops hundreds of feet long are common, this was little more than a hop down. Haberland went first, completing an easy rappel without incident. At the bottom he detached his rack from the rope, then moved away to avoid any rocks Yeager might dislodge.
Above, Yeager was wearing standard descent equipment, which included a seat harness similar to those used by rock climbers but beefed up for the heavier demands of caving. A locking carabiner (an aluminum loop, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, with a hinged “gate” on one side) connected the harness to his rappel rack, and the rappel rack connected him to the rope. The rope wove through the rack’s bars, like a snake sliding over and under the rungs of a ladder, providing enough resistance for a heavily laden caver like Yeager to control the speed of his descent.
Before going farther, Yeager had to transfer his rack from the rope he had been descending to a new one that would take him to the bottom of the 23-Meter Drop. He made the change successfully, leaned back to begin his rappel, and realized instantly that something was wrong. The rope did not stop his backward-tilting motion. Instead, he kept going, as if tipping over backward in a chair. Somehow his harness had become separated from the rappel rack, which was still attached to the rope.
Instinctively, he lunged to grab the rope and the dangling rappel rack. Had he been carrying no pack, or even a light daypack, it’s possible that he might have saved himself by holding on to the rope, or to the anchor bolted to the wall, or perhaps even setting up something called a body rappel. But that would have required almost superhuman strength and would have been extremely difficult even without any load. His fifty-five-pound pack made any such self-arrest impossible, and in another instant he was dropping through space. He fell so quickly that he did not even have time to scream.
Falling rocks can shatter and ricochet like shrapnel; Peter Haberland had moved off and sheltered behind a boulder, so he did not see Yeager land. He realized something was wrong only when he heard a rush of air and the crunching impact of a long fall ending on solid rock. Praying that Yeager had dropped his pack, Haberland called out, but he got no answer.
Within seconds, Haberland found Yeager, lying beside the bottom of the rope. He was in a pool of water three inches deep, on his right side, his face partly in the water, his arms stretching forward, as if reaching for something. Yeager’s right leg was broken, the foot rotated grotesquely 90 degrees so that while the body was on its side, the foot pointed up. He had no pulse or respiration, but Haberland turned his face slightly anyway, to keep his mouth and nose clear of the water.
Haberland rushed down to the Cheve expedition’s Camp 2, a twenty-minute descent, where he found two other cavers, Peter Bosted and Jim Brown. They left a note hanging from red-and-white survey tape and rushed back up to Yeager’s position with a sleeping bag and first aid supplies. When they arrived, they found that some blood had run from his nose, but there were no other changes. All three attempted CPR without success. Chris Yeager was dead.
Understanding precisely why the accident happened requires a detailed knowledge of caving equipment. But the root cause was not equipment failure; it was “pilot error.” Yeager entered the cave with too much weight, became fatigued, misused his equipment, and, last and worst, failed to properly secure the locking carabiner that connected his harness to the rappel rack. He apparently made this mistake not just once but twice, the first instance having caused the rack’s earlier loss.
LEARNING OF THE ACCIDENT, Bill Stone could only shake his head in dismay. He had been uneasy about Yeager’s presence in camp in the first place. Yeager; his girlfriend, Tina Shirk; and another man traveling with them had not been part of the original expedition. After climbing some volcanoes, the three had traveled to the Cheve base camp. Shirk was a competent caver who had been in Cheve the previous year but, with a broken collarbone, was not caving just then. The other man had told Shirk and Yeager that, earlier, he had secured permission for Chris to go into the cave. There is some disagreement about that, but Stone, for one, knew nothing about it. As far as he was concerned, the trio had “crashed” the expedition.
Yeager’s death affected everyone. Peter Haberland later wrote in a caving magazine article that he was “shattered at that moment.” Tina Shirk was devastated. Other reactions ranged from anger at an overzealous rookie to grief over a young man’s death to horror at the reality of a body decomposing down in the cave. For his part, Bill Stone was saddened by the needless loss of a young man’s life. He was angered because Yeager’s death left the leaders and the team with a thorny problem that could be solved only by endangering others. And he was afraid, not so much of recovering Yeager’s body, but that his death might abort the expedition. They could have been on the verge of finding the way into Cheve’s deepest recesses and, it was not ridiculous to assume, possibly into history as well. But now it seemed likely that this expedition’s time had run out all too soon.
Stone was completely committed to the expedition’s mission, financially, emotionally, and physically. The intensity of his work, and his no-nonsense style, left no doubt about that in anyone’s mind. He was thirty-nine years old, and if time had not run out for him, he could hear his body clock ticking. Thirty-nine was pushing the upper limit for activities like extreme mountaineering and deep caving, which make such ferocious physical demands on participants.
Like an Olympic athlete who trains for a lifetime to spend minutes chasing gold, Stone knew how precious an opportunity had just been snatched away. It was especially galling to have it stolen by someone who, he believed, had no business being in Cheve in the first place.
Also like an Olympian, Stone was aware that his golden opportunity might never come again in this supercave called Cheve—or anywhere else, for that matter.
HUAUTLA 1994
February 1992: Left to right: Ian Rolland, Rob Parker, and Dr. Noel Sloan training with Cis-Lunar MK-II rebreathers in a hyperbaric chamber for the 1994 Huautla expedition’s diving. Rolland and Parker, world-class cave divers both, later died in separate accidents, demonstrating the activity’s extreme lethality. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Bill Stone)
March 1994: The United States Deep Caving Team’s 1994 Huautla expedition in Oaxaca, Mexico. Standing, left to right: Barbara am Ende, Paul Smith, Tom Morris, Wes Skiles, Kenny Broad, Steve Porter, and James Brown. Kneeling: Noel Sloan (left) and Bill Stone. The only core team member not shown is Ian Rolland, who would also be the only one not to return. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Bill Stone)
Left: April 1994: Camp 5, perched above Huautla’s deadly San Agustín Sump, was about 4,300 vertical feet deep and 4 miles from the cave entrance. An adjacent waterfall roared like a 747 engine. Screaming to make themselves heard, cavers were constantly soaked and cold, and they slept on nylon hammocks strung from rock bolts above the portable platform. (Kenny Broad nearly died falling from one). Ziploc bags were the latrines. Right: May 1, 1994. Barbara am Ende about to dive the San Agustín Sump with Bill Stone. Ian Rolland drowned earlier using the same MK-IV rebreather. Am Ende and Stone’s six-day penetration of Huautla, beyond all hope of rescue, ranked as one of the century’s greatest, and least heralded, exploration achievements. (Photographs copyright ? 2010 by Bill Stone)
CHEVE 2003
February 2003: Two miles of new rope, freshly washed, drying in Llano Cheve before rigging begins on the cave’s ninety vertical drops, one more than 500 feet long. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Peter R. Penczer)
February 2003: Bill Stone prepping vertical gear—rappel rack, helmet with specialized light he helped design, red harness, black caving boots, red waterproof pack. The expedition’s blue kitchen tarp is in the background. The six-foot-four Stone started at 200 pounds and finished at 175. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Bill Stone)
March 2003: Bart Hogan in Cheve’s upper Entrance Chamber. The entire chamber could have contained three Boeing 757s. Behind Hogan, the floor dropped steeply to a large portal through which strong wind roared—the first sign of the cave’s ultimate size. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Frank Abbato)
March 2003: Bart Hogan on the natural altar in Cheve where ancient Cuicatec Indians sacrificed humans—including children—to their gods. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Frank Abbato)
March 2003: Marcus Preissner rappels a section of Angel Falls, 1,100 feet deep in Cheve Cave. “Redirectionals” pull the rope away from plunging water. The immensity of supercaves and their absolute darkness make vast panoramic shots extremely difficult; the entire Angel Falls rappel was five times longer than the section shown here. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Ken Davis)
March 2003: Marcus Preissner 3,000 feet deep in the vast Low Rider Parkway. Though impressive, the Parkway was not especially huge by Cheve standards. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Ken Davis)
March 2003: Mariano Silva high-line traversing over the Swim Gym, below 3,000 feet. Later, John Kerr would almost drown here. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Gustavo Vela Turcott)
March 2003: John Kerr squeezing out of Through the Looking Glass, the viselike 160-foot breakdown passage pioneered by Bill Farr. Just beyond yawned the A.S. Borehole, big enough to hold dozens of diesel locomotives. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Bill Stone)
March 2003: Robbie Warke, 4,300 feet deep, about to rappel into mighty Nightmare Falls. Bill Stone, who climbed in Yosemite, remarked that exploring Cheve was like descending El Capitan, at night, in waterfalls, and then doing it all over again—upward—to get out. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Bill Stone)
March 2003: Mariano Silva at Sump 1 in Cheve, 4,600 feet deep. John Schweyen first dove here in 1991 but was stopped by a constriction 330 feet in and 65 feet deep. The 2003 Cheve expedition’s overarching goal was to “crack the sump.” Further exploration might then prove Cheve the deepest cave on earth. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Gustavo Vela Turcott)
March 26, 2003: British divers Jason Mallinson (left) and Rick Stanton make final equipment checks in Sump 1. Using homemade rebreathers, they forged a new route that passed the constriction which had frustrated all progress since 1991. Beyond Sump 1, they discovered almost a mile of narrow, steeply descending river canyon separated by huge lakes. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Bill Stone)
On April 6 and 7, 2003, Mallinson and Stanton were joined by divers Rich Hudson and Bill Stone for a final twenty-seven-hour push. They passed Sump 2 but were eventually stopped by a ceiling collapse in an air-filled tunnel. The 2003 expedition cracked Sump 1, but did not establish Cheve as the Mount Everest of caves. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Bill Stone)
CHEVE2004
February 11, 2004: The 2004 Cheve expedition core team. Rear, left to right: Andi Hunter, Bill Stone, David Kohuth, and John Kerr. Front, left to right: Ryan Tietz, James Brown, Bill Mixon (whose Austin, Texas, home was the jump-off point), and Gregg Clemmer. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Bill Stone)
March 7, 2004: The 2004 expedition produced more frustration than discovery. After others declared the Aguacate cave (possibly connected to Cheve) dead-ended, Andi Hunter fought through this squeeze and discovered a new route. It paid off in Aguacate with the discovery of more than a mile of largely horizontal tunnels leading toward the presumed junction zone with Cheve. This expedition encountered more tight spaces than giant vertical drops, which prevailed in 2003. Squeezes present their own unique hazards. Sometimes the only way to rescue irretrievably stuck cavers is to break bones. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Bill Stone)
March 11, 2004: Andi Hunter spent five hours bolting this climb 150 feet above the Aguacate cave floor. Bolting was both dangerous and grueling. She used the twelve-pound drill to make three-inch holes in the wall. In the holes she secured stainless steel rock anchors, to which she then bolted steel hangers. From those she hung slings with carabiners and étriers (stirrups). Then she did it all again, gaining about 4 feet each time. (Before cordless drills, cavers did it all by hand.) (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Bill Stone)
March 21, 2004: Ryan Tietz dishwashing deep in the Aguacate cave. Light was the most precious resource. When not moving or working, explorers often turned lights off to save power. That preserved batteries, but could invite The Rapture. The 2004 expedition discovered 3 miles of new cave but did not establish the Cheve system as the world’s deepest. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by John Kerr)
KRUBERA
In 1976, Alexander Klimchouk, then nineteen, had already been exploring caves for eight years. He and a teenaged team established Uzbekistan’s Kilsi Cave as the deepest in the Soviet Union, at 3,328 feet. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Marcus Taylor, courtesy of Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
1986: Alexander and his son Alexey at Kujbyshevskaja Cave on the Arabika Massif. In Eastern Europe, cave exploration is immensely popular. Children start caving as young as four. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Marcus Taylor, courtesy of Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
2004 CALL OF THE ABYSS KRUBERA EXPEDITIONS
August
August 2004: Base camp. Supercaving is like climbing Mount Everest in reverse. This expedition’s fifty-six cavers from seven countries required five tons of supplies and needed four camps 2,297, 3,986, 4,593, and 5,381 feet deep. Two-week stays underground were not unusual. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
August 2004: Senior management. Klimchouk routinely delegated leadership. Here he confers with diver Gennadiy Samokhin (center) and supercave veteran Nikoley Solovyev. The three combined almost a century of extreme caving experience. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
August 2004: Rugged, self-effacing Yury Kasjan, then thirty-eight, rounded out the leadership. He first came to Krubera in 1989 and spearheaded many later expeditions. His occupation is “industrial mountaineering”—he uses supercaving’s vertical techniques on skyscrapers and giant towers. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
August 2004: The entrance shaft drops 190 feet beneath Krubera’s mouth. This perching caver weaves the rope through a bobbin rappel device while four others pay close attention. An incorrect rappel rack setup is called, not hyperbolically, “the death rig.” (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
August 2004: As in extreme mountaineering expeditions, 99 percent of supercave activity supports 1 percent at the sharp end—those exploring the deepest virgin territory. Here a “Sherpa” brings 160 pounds of supplies down a tight section of the 500-foot Big Cascade. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
August 2004: Supercaves’ vast dimensions are one reason expeditions remain underground for weeks. Surveying is another. Every foot of new cave must be surveyed and recorded, as Julia Timoshevskaja is doing below 5,000 feet. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
In late August 2004, Gennadiy Samokhin returns from his history-making dive. In 32°F, zero-visibility water he pushed Krubera’s limit to 6,037 feet, establishing it firmly as the deepest cave on earth. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
August 2004: Combat fatigue. Nikoley Solovyev, just up after fifteen days underground. (See the earlier “senior management” photo.) Cavers typically lost a pound or more a day in Krubera. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
Late August 2004: Gennadiy Samokhin, blinded by the light but ecstatic. Bravest of the brave, Samokhin was that great rarity among cave divers—one who was old and bold. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
October
October 2004: The smaller October expedition still required massive support: 2,200 feet deep, Igor Ischenko (left) and Emil Vash haul sixteen forty-pound packs down a 300-foot drop beyond the Lamprechtsofen Meander. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Ekaterina Medvedeva, courtesy of Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
October 2004: Ekaterina Medvedeva, then twenty-one, was born in Kiev and began caving at fourteen. The only woman on October’s team, she lauded “the perfect atmosphere between expedition members.” (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Ekaterina Medvedeva, courtesy of Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
October 2004: Left to right, Igor Ischenko, Emil Vash, and Kyryl Gostev below 3,000 feet. Vash, then twenty-two, worried about doing well in Krubera. Exhausted and discouraged, he wrote at one low point, “I’m in the Dragon’s a*shole.” Regardless, Vash performed admirably. He was also the expedition’s most gifted chronicler. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Ekaterina Medvedeva, courtesy of Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
October 2004: Bernard Tourte passing through the nightmarish, 330-foot long Way to the Dream Meander. Discovered earlier by Dmitry Fedotov and Denis Kurta, it was ugly and tortuous, but it opened the way to the last great terrestrial discovery. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Sergio Garcia Dils, courtesy of Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
October 2004: Igor Ischenko perching over the entrance to a sump at 6,170 feet, close to the bottom of the world. Though he holds a flashlight, in 2004 Ischenko and most European cavers still used traditional carbide lamps as primary lights. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Ekaterina Medvedeva, courtesy of Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
October 18, 2004: Bottom of the world, 6,825 feet deep. Yury Kasjan (left) and Igor Ischenko, photographed by Ekaterina Medvedeva. Like other ultimate places—Everest’s summit, the Challenger Deep, the North and South Poles—it was unimpressive to look at, as the discoverers’ quotidian name suggested: Game Over. Nevertheless, the last great terrestrial discovery’s significance was beyond measure. Henceforth, explorers would have to look off-planet for ultimate discoveries. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Ekaterina Medvedeva, courtesy of Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)
October 18, 2004: The thrill of victory—sort of. Making the last great terrestrial discovery left even redoubtable Yury Kasjan too exhausted to smile. Indefatigable Ekaterina Medvedeva looked happier, but both knew that the worst was yet to come—getting out. (Photograph copyright ? 2010 by Alexander Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss Project)