TWENTY-EIGHT
IT WAS LUCK OR THE GRACE of God, depending on your worldview, that prevented the rock slab, which weighed hundreds of pounds, from ripping Stone right off the rope. When it peeled off the wall, its trajectory plopped it perfectly in his lap. He clutched the tombstone and screamed “ROCK!” as a warning to the others. Then, feet braced against the cave wall, he shoved the slab out toward the middle of the pit in a desperate attempt to avoid hitting Hunter, right beneath him. She felt the whoosh as it passed very close, dropping 250 feet and exploding like a bomb on the cave floor.
Almost miraculously, no one was hurt or killed.
RIGHT BEHIND THE RIGGERS CAME THE Sherpas. Some were less experienced explorers earning their spurs doing grunt work, but all were expected to carry a load every trip down. Food, sleeping bags, pads, diving gear, batteries, stoves, fuel, tools, on and on. It was hard, dangerous, exhausting work. One veteran of many load carries, David Kohuth, described it as “working like an animal. A mule. Just exhausted, always.”
It was not unusual to see Sherpas rappelling down the 500-foot, vertiginous walls of Saknussemm’s Well with two or even three red waterproof packs, each weighing up to forty pounds. There were those fourteen rebelays in Saknussemm’s shaft, each requiring a stop to switch ropes. At times, many people were on the rope in that huge shaft, moving or halted at rebelays, their silver-blue LED lights glowing and floating like fireflies in mist.
John Kerr did yeoman Sherpa duty throughout the expedition, but his early trips, even with a relatively light load, were rough going. At one point, he was traveling down through the cave with a more experienced group, which, moving faster, inadvertently left him behind. (Given the constant noise of wind and water, and the intense concentration on route and rocks, and the enveloping darkness, that’s not as hard to do as it might seem.) Alone, Kerr lost the route but didn’t realize it. He arrived at what he thought was a wadable sump. Kerr strode right in. Suddenly the sump’s bottom dropped away and, with a big pack on his back, he was swimming—struggling—to keep from going under. He made it to the other side, shaken. Later he learned that the proper route bypassed that sump entirely.
Having narrowly escaped drowning, Kerr was lost in one of the world’s biggest supercaves. Eventually he heard another group passing through and joined them, but his initiation rites were just beginning. Not long after, alone once more (he hadn’t been able to keep up with the second group, either), he found his way barred by a cylindrical, sheer-walled pit, called the Piston, with a river roaring through its bottom. The passage continued lower down, on the Piston’s far side. To continue, Kerr had to traverse a section of vertical wall by clipping his carabiner to ropes running horizontally across it. When he got out to the midpoint of the traverse, the rope’s sag put him just a few feet above the raging water.
At that critical point, his feet slipped off the wall and his heavy pack pulled him over backward, leaving him hanging upside down with his head a foot over the water. After a mighty struggle, Kerr was able to right himself and continue on. But if the traverse line had been a bit longer, putting Kerr’s head into the river under all that pack weight …
BY MARCH 25, THREE CAMPS WERE in place. Camp 1 was an emergency bivouac 1,263 feet deep, not normally used. Camp 2, at 2,581 feet deep, was big and, as cave camps go, comfortable, but always windy. Camp 3 was located where it had been on earlier expeditions, a series of shelves high on one side of the cave, 4,078 feet deep and more than 5 miles from the main entrance. It took two days to travel from the surface to Camp 3. Regaining the surface was always a two- or three-day trip.
By this time, all of the camps were occupied. People streamed through them more or less continually on their way into and out of the cave. Standard operating practice here, as elsewhere, was hot bagging, described earlier. One woman caver recalled that the experience reminded her of some primitive mating ritual, lots of alpha males jockeying for female attention. With the ratio sometimes ten men to one woman, things could get very interesting.
In the same vein, plastic groundsheets did a good job of protecting sleeping bags from abrasion, but they had their drawbacks when it came to romancing on stone. The distinctive crinkle-crinkle sound they made, impossible to ignore, was Cheve’s equivalent of creaking bedsprings. Some people were annoyed, but others were inspired. Before long, the entire campsite might be crinkling as though invaded by a flock of crickets. Though that kind of noise was unavoidable, participants did try to preserve some decorum by keeping the moaning and screaming down.
Cave cuisine was intended to maximize caloric intake; palatability was second. Cavers routinely burned six thousand to eight thousand calories a day. Stone, with precious little body fat to begin with, lost twenty-five pounds on some expeditions. Accordingly, they cooked up huge batches of freeze-dried and dehydrated food—dried meats, spaghetti, rice, potatoes—on their small stoves. To vary the glop routine, they snacked on nuts, jerky, chocolate, peanut butter, and candy bars.
With no way to dry soaked clothing or to clean mud off themselves (other than bathing in frigid underground rivers), the campers were always wet and always dirty. That made the risk of illness and infection greater, as did the fact that sunless environments depress the immune system. Those risks were increased even more by the cave’s water, which flushed not only their own urine but also effluent from the surface, where the nearby towns’ and villages’ sewage disposal was primitive or nonexistent. All of this made tough work for the cavers’ skin. After several days in-cave, it cracked and split, especially on the hands, giving microbes openings that, by their scale, they could drive trucks through.
Conserving light was just as important as saving weight, so unless they were working or hunting for the latrine, cavers turned their lights off and hung out in the dark, sleeping, tossing, turning, putting off the next latrine trip, or just … thinking.
Even just thinking could cause trouble in a supercave. Veteran Texas caver R. D. Milhollin made his first Cheve entry during the 2003 expedition. Reaching Camp 2, he and his three companions settled in to eat and sleep for a day or two. Wanting to conserve batteries, they kept their lights off except for essential tasks. After not very long, though, they confessed to one another that the cave was doing strange things to their minds. Milhollin was hearing phantom noises and seeing flashing lights. His girlfriend kept seeing skulls floating in the darkness.
They decamped promptly the next morning.
That experience, enough to disturb even the most stalwart souls, was actually mild compared to the really bad thing a big cave could do to one’s mind, as Andi Hunter discovered.