TWENTY-SEVEN
LEGEND HAS IT THAT BEFORE EMBARKING on his 1914–16 South Pole expedition, the great British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton placed this “advert” in London newspapers:
Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.
The story is probably apocryphal; historians have sought the actual ad unsuccessfully for decades. Regardless, more than five thousand men did apply for twenty-eight spots on Shackleton’s Endurance team. That says something profound about the human spirit, or possibly about the unemployment level in pre–World War I Great Britain. Probably a bit of both.
One could imagine Bill Stone, preparing for his own 2003 expedition to Cheve, creating some variation of Shackleton’s posting:
Participants wanted for journey to the center of the earth.
No wages, constant wet, cold, and darkness.
Weeks underground.
Safe return doubtful.
(Honor and recognition equally so.)
In reality, Stone’s 2003 expedition advertisement was more sophisticated and upbeat. The United States Deep Caving Team (USDCT) published an impressive color brochure titled
Sistema Cheve 2003 Expedition
The All-Out Push to-2,000 Meters
The brochure was intended to attract both explorers and sponsors, and dangled this dramatic lure: “There is an enormous stake involved…. The expedition may, for all time, establish Cheve as the deepest cave on earth.” How would this be done? By “using advanced life support equipment, radical climbing technology, and lightweight bivouac gear, the team will spend up to a month below–1,000 meters charting territory never before seen by humans.”
It was an extraordinary prediction, given that in 2002 eight caves worldwide were deeper than Cheve. It was not even the deepest cave in North America, that honor still belonging to Huautla by a few feet. Regardless, Stone’s expectations were both reasonable and supported by some persuasive evidence.
Jim Smith’s 1990 dye-tracing experiment had established that water flowed without interruption from the mouth of Cheve all the way down to the Santo Domingo River, a vertical drop of more than 8,000 feet over a straight-line distance of 11.2 miles. What’s more, the dye traveled all that way in just eight days, one of the faster transmissions cavers had observed. Such speed of transit suggested that the water was flowing not slowly through tight crevices but rapidly through big, open streamways. (Though enough tight crevices could also enable such flow.) Then there was the matter of alignment. After Cheve’s first big vertical segment, the cave angled downward for several miles at a gradient of about one to ten, dropping one vertical foot for every ten horizontal feet traveled. If you projected a line dropping at that same gradient, it connected with the resurgence down in the canyon where the green dye had shown up. Finally, several as yet unconnected caves between Cheve and its resurgence lined up, more or less, between them. On the map, they looked like stitches in an incomplete seam. Stone believed that these were all part of one vast megacave, and that connecting them was the key to proving that Cheve was the world’s deepest cave, once and for all.
ADVANCE ELEMENTS OF THE TEAM JUMPED off from Austin, Texas, on February 10, 2003. Establishing base camp was their first objective. It had been six years since a major expedition had lived in Llano Cheve. New growth had healed the brown scars left by earlier inhabitants, so a smooth field of green awaited. Expedition members and locals drove overloaded trucks as close as they could get to the llano, but a washout blocked them a mile away. There they parked, and for several days relays of cavers, antlike, made repeated carries from trucks to camp.
The Cheve 2003 team’s core group—those whom Stone called his “rock stars”—arrived in mid-February. The Americans were Bart Hogan, from Maryland; Ohio’s John Kerr; and Coloradoan Mike Frazier; Robbie Warke came from England, and Marcus Preissner from Germany. Caving is much closer to being a mainstream activity in Europe, and Poland contributed a contingent of rock stars with tongue-twisting names: Kasia Okuszko, Tomek Fiedorowicz, Kasia Biernacka, Pavo Skoworodko, and Marcin Gala.
The team’s ages revealed something interesting. In 2003, Stone was fifty-one years old. Most of the cavers who had formed the 1994 Huautla expedition’s core were about Stone’s age then. All of them—Noel Sloan, Steve Porter, Kenny Broad, Jim Brown, Barbara am Ende, and others—were still caving. But none were doing the kind of extreme expeditionary caving that Huautla 1994 had involved, or that Cheve 2003 would. Stone, obviously, was still not only doing such work but pushing the envelope ever further, organizing and leading the expeditions that did it. The members of his team, however, were all younger. Hogan was forty-three, Kerr forty, Warke thirty-nine, Preissner thirty-four.
The divers formed a separate elite, a kind of Cheve Delta Force. “The point of the spear,” Stone called them. The leaders were Britishers Rick Stanton, forty-two, and Jason Mallinson, forty, two of the world’s best cave divers. Rich Hudson, another world-class Brit cave diver, and Stone himself were the backup dive team.
Another person would play an important role in 2003, a woman from Alaska named Andrea Hunter. Just twenty-five (one wag noted that as Stone got older, his girlfriends got younger), she was coming on her first supercaving trip to learn the ropes and serve as a Sherpa. She had a master’s degree in geology and was an expert mountaineer, diver, skier, and cyclist—a superb all-around outdoorswoman who, rather than being daunted by rough-and-tumble Alaska, positively flourished there. She was tall and tan, with shining tawny hair, freckles, sparkling green eyes, and a thousand-watt smile that rarely dimmed. Andi Hunter turned heads wherever she went, and that included the base camp of a Bill Stone supercave expedition.
When Hunter made her first descent all the way to Camp 3—a two-day trip—she found that Stone had cleared a double space for her in his camping area. He had a sleeping bag all laid out and hot soup waiting. Exhausted, she was touched by his thoughtfulness. Coincidentally, it was her twenty-sixth birthday, so the next morning, Stone gave her a present, an extra-large Snickers bar, and Polish cavers sang “Happy Birthday” to her in their language. She later remembered it as the best birthday she ever had, and it marked the beginning of her relationship with Bill Stone.
Andi Hunter was the latest woman in Stone’s life after his marriage had ended. Barbara am Ende had been his first serious involvement. Their relationship survived the Huautla ordeal, but when Barbara’s ardor for extreme caving cooled, so did Stone’s—for her. After they split up, he became involved with a stunning brunette named Beverly Shade, an expert caver two decades his junior. Their relationship lasted about a year. Then along came Andi.
Before any of that happened at Camp 3, though, tremendous advance work was required. By March 9, the llano was a bustling village with colorful tent domes dotting the meadow. The “mess hall”—denoted by blue tarps hung from trees and the cliff face—housed worktables and big green Coleman stoves fueled by torpedo-shaped propane canisters. Containers of freeze-dried food had been sorted into small mountains.
John Kerr was a wiry, affable electrical engineer with a flat Ohio accent, a quick smile, and unbelievable stamina. He was also gutsy. Not long before, he had done Yosemite’s legendary El Capitan—in reverse. Kerr had rap-pelled the entire length of the 3,000-foot face, then climbed back up using his caver’s vertical rig. Climbers, after summiting, walk down a path on the great formation’s back side. The most unnerving part, he said, was trying to pull up the tail of his rappel rope at the beginning, the better to control his descent. Since the 3,000 feet of it hanging below him weighed several hundred pounds, that was out of the question. The problem, with all that tension, was not slowing down but just getting started. He managed, by deft manipulation of his rappel rack.
Like everyone else, Kerr helped haul gear out of Cheve after the dive at the terminal sump was done. Of greater value, though, was his engineering expertise, which quickly made him the expedition’s tech wizard. He fine-tuned the balky carburetor jets on the Honda generators for the 9,100-foot altitude and fired them up, lighting the camp and charging batteries. When new $1,200 custom-made light-emitting-diode (LED) headlamps intended to replace six hundred pounds of carbide wouldn’t work, Kerr set up a field surgery tent and operated on them right there.
Laboring in base camp, Stone, Bart Hogan, and others stowed thousands of pounds of gear in cherry-red waterproof packs for later hauls into the cave, uncoiled miles of rope, and organized climbing hardware, scuba gear, power tools, and more. At the same time, a separate twelve-person team, led by Mexican cave veterans Matt Oliphant and Nancy Pistole, set up camp five miles north and about 3,300 feet lower in elevation than Cheve base. While the main team probed Cheve, this one, which was officially part of the overall expedition, would push a cave called Charco.
Charco was one of those stitches in the unfinished seam, lining up nicely between Cheve and its final resurgence down in the river. Linking Charco and Cheve would begin to create the megacave Stone believed extended all the way from Cheve’s entrance down to the river. But—there was almost always a “but” in supercave exploration—Charco was hellish even by great cave standards. To reach its working end, a caver could spend three days crawling for miles through space like that under your kitchen table. Regardless, the potential link to Cheve made pushing Charco necessary.
A few cavers harbored a quirky kind of fondness for the awful place; they were called “diggers.” The general population of supercave explorers breaks down into specialist subtribes: leaders and Sherpas, bolters and ropers and riggers, lead climbers and divers and diggers. In this rarefied context, “digger” is not a faintly pejorative label, like “laborer” or “trucker.” “Digger,” like “diver,” conveys respect and gratitude for the performance of particularly dangerous, unpleasant, but necessary jobs.
Diggers are skilled specialists essential to supercave exploration. It is not unusual for a going cave passage to just stop. The most common blockages are breakdown and boulder chokes, but quite often they are not truly terminal. If the cavers can feel air movement coming through a wall of breakdown or boulders, it makes sense to try to find a way through, as Bill Farr had done in Cheve’s earlier days. If no wormhole can be found, it makes sense to dig. But the diggers’ greatest value is not laborious burrowing through the more obvious obstacles. Rather, it is their ability to find passages others cannot. Some people have inexplicable affinities with horses, engines, or children; the best diggers have that same kind of uncanny, instinctive feel for the subterranean earth, an ability to sense openings and going passages not remotely suspected by others.
John Kerr was one of the world’s great diggers: “I’m happy in some little corner [5,000 feet deep] digging in the dirt with my titanium crowbar,” he said in an interview. Diggers endure hours of confinement in squeezes so tight they can barely breathe and can move only one hand—places that would quickly drive most people slobbering, bug-eyed crazy. They dig like giant moles, using tools ranging from their fingernails to high-tech titanium implements to gasoline-powered hammer drills.
Riggers are another subtribe. While others established Cheve’s base camp, the riggers began setting fixed ropes for the supply teams that would follow. Rigging is not just fixing rope for the big drops; a 30-foot fall can kill as surely as a 300-footer. In addition, many traverses—sections of wall that must be crossed horizontally, over yawning drops or roaring waterfalls—had to be rigged.
The little word “rig” does no justice to the sixteen straight days of work it took the team to fix two miles of rope, weighing a quarter ton, before the real Cheve exploration could even begin. The 2003 Cheve expedition brought eight hundred stainless steel anchors and bolts. It was a repeat of all the excruciating labor—the fixing of a double sequence of rebelay bolts—during the first rigging of Saknussemm’s Well.
As they were rigging, the cavers were also “gardening,” removing unstable rock for their own and the following teams’ safety. As they descend, cavers use big hammers to whack away at any rock ledge or flake that looks dicey. Even when not gardening, cavers can be surprised. At one point, Bill Stone was hanging high on a wall in Cheve. Other cavers were milling around on the cave floor, hundreds of feet beneath him, their lights flickering like distant sparks.
Andi Hunter, Stone’s girlfriend by then, stood on a ledge below, acting as his belayer. In other words, as Stone set bolts and climbed higher, he attached carabiners to the bolts and ran his climbing rope through them. Hunter, his belayer, held the other end of the rope. Just like an above-ground climber belaying a partner, if Stone took a fall, she would arrest it from her belaying stance. His drop would be limited to twice the distance between him and his last carabiner. If the rope between him and the belay was ten feet long, he would fall ten feet to the belay and ten feet below it.
Stone jammed his hammer into a small crack in the rock just above his head, wanting only to test its solidity. A tombstone-sized slab of cave wall peeled off and fell on him.