TEN
FIFTEEN MONTHS AFTER VESELY AND FARR first laid eyes on pastoral Llano Cheve, red and blue and yellow tents dotted the lime-green meadow, making it look like calico. Smells of steaming food and broiling meat and boiling coffee mixed with the music of guitars and harmonicas. People wandered from tent to tent, searching out friends long not seen, hugging and shaking hands. Expeditionary cavers, a small and insular clan, become preternaturally convivial at tribal gatherings. It was like a mountaineering expedition base camp, yes, but perhaps more like an original rendezvous, the fabled gathering of mountain men in America of yore.
For all the joy of reunion, this was deadly serious business, experienced, proficient technicians and scientists determined to venture where humans had not gone, ever, in conditions of extreme hazard. Unusually low water levels promised easier passage through sumps, and all the cavers were eager to get started. Before anyone could begin exploring the cave, teams of riggers had to fix ropes on all the vertical sections, from 50-foot “droplets” to 500-foot Saknussemm’s Well. Readers may be familiar with the term “fixed ropes” from mountaineering, where these aids are nice indeed to have. But climbers can, and do, perform major ascents without them. Cavers, on the other hand, need fixed ropes, for obvious reasons. Free-downclimbing something like Saknussemm’s Well (a not atypical pit in supercaves) was simply not an option.
Fixing ropes in Cheve was not a matter of stringing one long rope down into the depths. To rig Saknussemm’s walls, for instance, the riggers had to install fourteen separate fixed ropes. So many individual sections were required to protect the ropes from dangerous, abrasive areas and the cavers from waterfalls. Every rope junction required a rebelay, or routing anchor.
To set a rebelay, a rigger hung in harness hundreds of feet above the cave floor, with frigid water pouring and spraying all around. Using a four-pound hammer and a handheld bit, or sometimes a ten-pound battery-powered drill, the rigger then made a hole three-eighths of an inch in diameter three inches deep into the solid rock. He next blew dust out of the hole with a metal tube, hammered a steel sleeve into it, inserted a threaded bolt through a stainless steel hanger’s collar, and screwed the bolt into the sleeve in the hole in the rock wall. Then he had to repeat the whole process, because every rebelay anchor point required two bolt-and-hanger setups for redundancy. Then he and the other riggers had to repeat that whole double-hanger process thirteen more times, because Saknussemm’s Well required fourteen rebelays.
WITH THE “NYLON HIGHWAY” (AS CAVE explorers call miles-long and complicated rope arrays) ready for traffic, team members made it to the bottom of Saknussemm’s Well. The top had been quite a pleasant place by supercave standards, cool and dry, and much of the trip down had provided stunning views of the giant pit’s flowstone walls, glowing white and gold in the cavers’ headlamps as if illuminated from inside.
At the bottom, though, they felt as if they were standing inside a car wash. About 250 feet down, a waterfall gushed out of Saknussemm’s wall, and by the time that water plunged another 250 feet it was moving at more than a hundred miles per hour. Water does not compress (this is why bridge-jump suicides are as messy as their skyscraper counterparts), so when it hit a caver’s helmet traveling that fast, it felt like someone was dumping buckets of gravel from on high. Adding to the maelstrom was a strong wind that blasted the spray around with astonishing force. Travel time for a caver with a light load, after the rebelays were in place, was five hours from the entrance to the bottom of Saknussemm’s Well. With a typical expeditionary caver’s full load of fifty to eighty pounds, it took team members longer, seven to ten hours, depending on skills and fitness.
Beyond Saknussemm’s Well, the going got wetter and stayed that way for some time. The in-cave stream, having gathered considerable force, flowed away from the bottom of Saknussemm’s Well and down through a series of shelves not unlike salmon ladders, which was what the cavers named them. More drops and waterfalls eventually brought them to a subway tunnel–like passage, half a mile long, that was nearly level. After a few more short drops and climbs, the cavers found the perfect location for Camp 2, a level, sandy area 2,641 feet deep, 3.1 miles and thirty-three rope drops from the entrance. (An earlier location, Camp 1, at about 1,300 feet deep, had been abandoned because it was judged too close to the surface.)
Various teams pressed on until a major sump stopped them at about 3,140 feet deep. As always, the initial strategy at the sump was to find a way to swim through, climb over, pass around, or go beneath it. Diving was still the choice of last resort. In this case, creative climbing led to a bypass high above the sump. They named this airy, exposed route—“sporting,” cavers call such places—Skyline Traverse. Beyond it the lead team, Jim Smith and Ed Holladay, entered an impressive 50-foot-wide, 900-foot-long passage with a dropping ceiling, and then nobody heard from them for a long time.
BILL STONE HAD STOPPED FOR A quick breakfast at the old Camp 1. He was eating when he heard Smith and Holladay, hardware clanking, finally climbing back up toward him. Well before arriving, Smith started yelling at the top of his lungs, “Booooty … booooty!”
“What happened?” Stone asked, when the two appeared.
Smith smirked at his partner, who was barely able to contain his own mirth. Finally Smith gave the real scoop: “We just busted this sucker wide open. We’ll crack a kilometer on the next push.” It was a bold prediction but, as things turned out, a correct one.
At the Skyline Traverse’s end, Smith and Holladay had negotiated a 50-foot vertical pitch, then stepped over a giant, delicately balanced boulder they titled, respectfully, the Widowmaker. After passing around the big sump and dropping several more pitches, they relocated the main flow of water, appreciably more muscular down here. The next passage revealed the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of caves, which, after hours of ugly crawls and scary drops, can ambush explorers with stunning beauty. They downclimbed a series of giant wormholes of exquisitely sculpted black-and-orange rock, leading to a series of deep pools that descended like the steps of a giant staircase. The pools were filled with aquamarine water so clear they could see pea-sized pebbles many feet below the surface. They called this area of the cave the Swim Gym.
Toward the end of this expedition, Smith and Holladay followed the big stream that flowed on down beyond the Swim Gym. An impassable wall of boulders stopped their final thirty-three-hour marathon. Finis, for the time being. The expedition had pushed Cheve to 3,406 feet deep and almost seven miles in total mapped length. Seven, of course, was only the one-way mileage. It was a fourteen-mile round-trip and the second seven were hardest, because they were all up. Much was dead vertical, but not all. Here and there the gradient eased and the ceiling was high enough to obviate the need for crawling or stooping. Such areas were sufficiently rare that they had a special name: “walking passages.” Even these were not truly easy, because the cavers, already fatigued from hours of rappelling and downclimbing, were carrying at least thirty-pound packs, wearing suits that were soaked and mud-caked, often wading through water from ankle- to chin-deep, and contending with either strong head- or tailwinds.
So just walking out was bad enough, but most of the trip out was not like that. There were roughly ninety vertical faces steep and long enough that the cavers had had to rappel them on the way in. Every one of those had to be frogged back up on the way out. Some, like Saknussemm’s Well, required detaching from one rope at a rebelay point and reattaching to another, a tiring and complicated process that was also, along with diving, one of the most dangerous aspects of supercaving.
Vertical walls were often washed by powerful cascades of freezing water, and even the redirected ropes could not avoid all of them. Bill Stone had climbed on the big walls of Yosemite, and he likened coming up out of Cheve to ascending El Capitan, through a waterfall, at night. The big difference, of course, was that when you topped out on El Cap, you knew it was over. In a cave like Cheve, when you “topped out” by hitting bottom, the worst was yet to come.