THIRTY
AFTER SEVERAL MORE DAYS SPENT CARRYING gear down to the sump, Mallinson and Stanton were ready to dive. They would be the first to explore Cheve’s Sump 1 since John Schweyen, in 1991, had penetrated about 330 feet and to a depth of about 75 feet, before the narrowing fissure passage stopped him. From the outset, Bill Stone had not intended to repeat Schweyen’s route. He and Rick Stanton had studied the area’s geology, and both felt that at some time in the past a fault had shoved the tunnel eastward. By starting off in the direction opposite from Schweyen’s, they believed, divers could bypass the constrictions and the tunnel would eventually resume the desired direction.
Preparing the gear was critically important, but no more so than preparing the mind. There was no type of diving in which the risk of panic was greater. Some felt certain that this panic had killed the veteran caver Rolf Adams in Hole in the Wall Cave, and stories were legion of cave divers who had drowned with plenty of air in their tanks. Knowing this, Stanton in particular had evolved a protective ritual he performed before every dive.
He found a quiet place and visualized the route, using experience gained from his many previous dives to anticipate problems and prepare solutions for them. It was essential to avoid tension and “target fixation,” as pilots call the tendency to focus on one thing to the exclusion of other important inputs. Stanton took himself through the dive’s critical phases, working out every detail—tying off guidelines, doffing gear to push through tight squeezes, maintaining perfect buoyancy control. He also tried to anticipate things that might go wrong and to mentally rehearse solutions—cutting through line entanglements, using his gap reel if lost, switching to alternate regulators.
After donning his black dry suit, weight belt, and red helmet with three yellow and green lights attached, Stanton was first in the water. Sump 1 was a circular pool about 30 feet in diameter, with turquoise water and ridged stone walls the color of brass. Near its edge, the pool was about waist-deep. The water temperature was 64 degrees. There was no appreciable current. Standing there, Stanton strapped the rebreather to his chest. With Rich Hudson’s help, he went through his lengthy predive checklist. He spit into his mask to prevent it from fogging, rinsed it, put on the mask and his bright yellow fins, and waited for Mallinson, who was soon in the water and ready. With final “okay” signals to Hudson, Stone, and others in the sump, they submerged and disappeared.
Stanton led, finding the route. Mallinson followed, running white safety line out from a black reel. The water was cold, but they were comfortable in their dry suits. The visibility was 6 to 8 feet. Their headlamps bored small tunnels of light into the dark water as they frog-kicked slowly forward. Before long, the tunnel turned almost 180 degrees and they were swimming in a direction that they’d figured should take them beyond the sump’s previous terminus. Stone had been right. After about 80 feet they reached an airbell, which they passed through. They were 25 feet deep and 197 feet in when they swam over a hole in the tunnel’s floor. It was tempting, but they opted to leave it for later. At 361 feet in they found, in the tunnel’s right-hand wall, a hole big enough to swim through. Both divers immediately understood the significance of this “window.” They slipped through the hole and surfaced 35 feet later in the main river passage continuation. They were greeted by the roar and crash of cascading water.
Stanton and Mallinson had just found a way past the terminal constrictions that had thwarted John Schweyen in 1991 and all progress for the years since. In so doing, they’d created the very real possibility that Cheve would go, and keep going, all the way down to its fabled resurgence at the bottom of Santo Domingo Canyon. And if it did that, Cheve, the long-shot candidate for world’s deepest cave, would achieve that status by a very long shot indeed.
The two divers shucked out of their gear and started walking where no humans had ever gone before. Scooping booty, the cavers’ dream. It was dicey terrain, a tight, smooth canyon that descended very steeply, carrying the main Cheve stream down in a tumult of spray and whitewater. Several hundred yards brought them to two 40-foot waterfalls, which they bravely downclimbed without ropes. Viewing these falls later, even Stone was impressed, admitting that he would never have attempted them without a rope. Given the Brits’ audacity, the double waterfall’s eventual name, Mad Man’s Falls, was appropriate. After the second waterfall, they found the passage enlarging and leveling. Here they rested, snacked, and talked excitedly about what they had discovered and what lay ahead. They moved on, still in high spirits. But dark and labyrinthine caves, perhaps more than any other of earth’s realms, will delight one second and destroy all hope the next. Before long they came to a second sump that stopped them cold.
Disappointed, the divers dragged back to Sump 1, estimating that they had traveled about 1,500 feet and descended perhaps 150. (Their total distance traveled and descent distance, revealed by later survey, would turn out to be twice that.) Those two slick and tricky waterfalls precluded hauling diving gear down to Sump 2, so they swam back through Sump 1 to their waiting companions. They had been gone six hours, and had spent ninety minutes underwater and the rest exploring on the surface.
After resting on the surface up in Llano Cheve, on April 5 Stanton and Mallinson dove through Sump 1, fixed ropes on Mad Man’s Falls, then carried scuba tanks and weights to Sump 2. The next day, they dove Sump 1 again, followed by Bill Stone and Rich Hudson. Stone was no mean cave diver himself, but Stanton and Mallinson were in a class by themselves, so, diving with their own rebreathers, they remained the spearhead. Mallinson led through Sump 2 while Stanton spooled out the safety line just behind him. The dive took them through a passage shaped like a flattened oval about 16 feet high, 10 feet wide, and 40 feet deep. They swam 950 feet and surfaced in a boulder-walled pool with no obvious exit. Not willing to give up after having come so far, they stripped off their dive gear and spent four hours searching for a way on, without success. Checkmate. Again.