THIRTY-FIVE
ALEXANDER KLIMCHOUK WOULD MAKE THE ARABIKA Massif world-famous, but he was not the first speleologist to set foot there. That honor went to an extraordinary Frenchman named édouard Martel. A lawyer-turned-cave explorer who is generally acknowledged to be “the father of speleology,” Martel came in 1902. He was traveling on a press junket arranged exclusively for him by the Russian government, anxious to stimulate Black Sea tourism. Martel obligingly published an account of his travels, titled to make readers associate the region with one of Europe’s legendary vacation spots: La C?te d’Azur Russe (The Russian Azure Coast). Chapter 16, “L’Arabika Massif,” described his visit to the Ortobalagan Valley, where he explored a cave, known today as Martel’s Cave, whose mouth is only a few hundred yards above Krubera’s.
Close on Martel’s heels in the Arabika Massif came the Russian scientist Alexander Kruber. If Martel’s visit had more to do with boosting tourism, Kruber’s interest was purely scientific. During 1909–10, Kruber performed field studies and issued a number of publications about his findings. For these and other geological works he is regarded as the founder of karst science in Russia.
The Russian Revolution, two world wars, global economic crises, and countless regional conflicts diverted eastern European attention from cave exploration for five decades. Finally, in the 1960s, Georgian scientists began looking anew at Arabika’s possibilities. Despite primitive equipment and vertical techniques, these early explorers managed to descend about 700 feet in several Arabikan caves, leading them to believe that the massif warranted further investigation. Ironically, it was one of the shallower descents that would ultimately validate their expectations. This was an open-mouthed, 200-foot shaft penetrated in 1960 by a scientist named Leonid Maruashvili. Perhaps sensing the pit’s potential, Maruashvili named it Krubera, after Alexander Kruber.
Tantalized by the Arabika Massif’s potential, over the next two decades a number of expeditions came, saw, and kept right on going. Their explorations appeared to contradict rather than confirm the plateau’s promise, revealing no caves deeper than about 780 feet. By the late 1970s, virtually all speleologists had turned their attention elsewhere.
Virtually, but not all speleologists. Enter, in 1980, Alexander Klimchouk, now twenty-four and the leader of the same Kiev Speleological Club that had provided his first taste of caving thirteen years earlier. Klimchouk was a rising star in the world of cave science and already committed to finding the deepest cave on earth. Rather than join other clubs working elsewhere, Klimchouk chose to focus on Arabika.
It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of that decision, and hard, as well, to fully explain it. Certain people seem blessed with a genetic affinity for particular phenomena, whose miracles they reveal for the rest of us. Edison understood electricity with every vibrating cell in his body. Amundsen, an icy man himself, was as at home in the polar scapes as white bears and black orcas. Alexander Klimchouk, who began going underground when he was eleven and (as noted earlier) published his first scientific paper at fourteen, had such affinity with the subterranean world.
That intuitive faith—call it a sixth sense, for lack of a better term—kept pulling him back after the entire speleological community had abandoned Arabika and moved on. Sounding as much like a mystic as a scientist, he would ultimately attribute the attraction to “other, sometimes mysterious, feelings.” (Emphasis added.)
There were also concrete reasons, of course. As a karst scientist, Klimchouk saw one great advantage in Arabika: thick layers of limestone stepping continuously from those high mountains all the way down to the Black Sea. Those layers held out the possibility that Arabika’s caves might also go all the way down to the Black Sea, 8,000 feet lower. This flew in the face of the conventional wisdom, which held that the central caves of Arabika could not be hydrologically connected with the shore because of other geological barriers.
Finally, Klimchouk thought he knew the reason why previous cave explorers in Arabika had come away empty-handed. Traditionally, their investigations had been, both literally and figuratively, quick and dirty. Patient by nature, made thorough and meticulous by training, Klimchouk was suspicious of that superficial approach, which he called “quicksearch.”
Quicksearch started, literally, at the top. Speleologists of the day tended to look for cave entrances in big sinkholes because (as Carol Vesely and Bill Farr knew) sinkholes often signal the presence of caves beneath. However, in the high Caucasus massifs, glaciers had dramatically altered the original karst landscape, which had indeed been riddled with sinkholes. Glacial scouring removed the uppermost limestone, including most of those sinks, and filled many that remained with glacier-transported debris. Understanding this, Klimchouk knew that more attention should be paid to small entrances and fissures, located not within sinkholes but … everywhere. This obviously required not quicksearch tactics but efforts both exhaustive and systematic.
The quicksearch philosophy reigned not only above ground but below it, as well. After finding an opening, speleologists then made their way into a cave until something—a boulder choke, a squeeze, an underground river, whatever—stopped them. Rather than beat heads and hammers against such obstacles, they just moved to new shafts and passages. The underlying assumption was that there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of holes in the ground around here. If one didn’t work, it was easier to pick up and move on to a new one than to slave away like hard-rock miners. Klimchouk and his teams would not turn away from obstructions. Instead, they would adhere to a “no dead ends” philosophy.
That thinking paid off as early as 1980, when Klimchouk demonstrated that in Arabika, sinkholes were not the only way down and, as well, that size really did not matter, at least on the surface. That year, he became intrigued by a cave mouth, not much bigger than your toilet seat, lurking beneath a crumbly limestone ledge. Other explorers had seen it and kept right on going. Klimchouk, however, thought it was worth a closer look, and how right he was. That tight mouth proved to be the beginning of what is now known as Kujbyshevskaja (KOO-bye-chef-Sky-ya) Cave, almost 4,000 feet deep.
Klimchouk saw that it was important to abandon quicksearch not only underground but in relation to time as well. He understood that of all the earth’s geographic and natural phenomena—mountains, oceans, rivers, the atmosphere—caves were the least likely to yield ultimate secrets to casual suitors. They would demand more grueling, deadly, and unrewarding persistence than any other terrestrial feature, persistence that might well require not just years but generations of exploration.
Inspiration, of course, was only one of discovery’s parents; perspiration was the other. Klimchouk and his teams of cavers put their sweat, and sometimes their blood, where their theories were. In one instance, it took them three years, from 1983 to 1986, to clear out just one boulder choke 2,200 feet down in Kujbyshevskaja Cave. They called this obstruction Ugrjum-Zaval, a name as ugly as the work required to clear it. Ugrjum was a very big boulder choke, a 300-foot vertical shaft 10 to 15 feet in diameter completely filled with rocks and boulders and pouring with 32-degree glacial meltwater. On the surface, digging of that magnitude would be done with big Caterpillar power excavators and clamshell cranes. Down deep, humans did the work with hand tools, ropes, pulleys, and endless determination.
IN THE ORTOBALAGAN VALLEY, KIEV CAVERS made dramatic progress. In Kujbyshevskaja Cave, they pushed below 3,500 feet in 1986 through a series of boulder chokes—Ugrjum-Zaval was just one—previously labeled “hopeless.” In the early 1980s, Klimchouk teams’ discoveries in the Ortobalagan Valley attracted other caving organizations from the former Soviet Union. Coordinated by Klimchouk, the whole Arabika Massif was divided into discrete search areas, and all expeditions adopted his systematic, “no dead ends” approach. By the end of the 1980s, some thirty-six Arabikan caves deeper than 300 feet had been explored, including seven caves deeper than 1,750 feet and three caves deeper than 3,300 feet. In addition, the dye-tracing experiments Klimchouk conducted in 1984 and 1985 proved that there were indeed hydrological links with resurgences on the Black Sea shore, thus confirming his earlier suspicions and revealing the world’s foremost potential for supercaves.
In Krubera Cave, Klimchouk’s teams almost unlocked the whole Arabika Massif system. A vertical section in Krubera called P43 (because it was a pitch of 43 meters, or 141 feet) began about 700 feet deep and dropped another 140 feet. Between 722 feet and 820 feet cavers identified, but did not penetrate, two openings, called “windows,” in the cave wall. This was not a violation of the “no dead ends” system. As long as the cave kept going down, it made sense to follow its path of least resistance. But when they could go no deeper in Krubera, Klimchouk and his cavers decided to see where the two windows might lead. Opportunity was beckoning beyond those two dark portals. It was time to go through them.
And so they would have done, were it not for the war.