THIRTY-SIX
IN 1990, THE SOVIET UNION BROKE up into fifteen separate republics, some of which kept disintegrating into even smaller pieces. The Republic of Georgia was one that aftershocks continued to crack, enthusiastically aided by Russia.
In 1992, the province of Abkhazia, abetted more or less openly by Russia, went to war to gain its independence from the Georgian republic. Their “country” was landlocked within Georgia, but ethnic Abkhazians felt more affinity with Russia and declared themselves a separate, sovereign nation. Georgia sought to preserve its union. It was the latest eruption of an ethnic conflict that had been going on since the Middle Ages, and it retained much of that epoch’s brutal flavor. The warring factions killed and tortured each other’s soldiers, old people, women, children, babies, dogs, farm animals—anything that moved, really, for two years. Both sides perpetrated atrocities with gruesome ingenuity and lack of discrimination about targets. That made Abkhazia one of the best places on earth for outsiders, including even Ukrainians, not to be.
Among the war’s many casualties was cave exploration on the Arabika Massif. The conflict “officially” ended in 1994, the same year that Bill Stone’s Huautla expedition produced such tragedy and triumph in Mexico, but the killing and atrocities never entirely died out, flaring up periodically here and there like small, deadly fires in a burned-over forest.
Ukrainian cavers finally returned to the Arabika Massif in August 1999, although conditions in Abkhazia remained unstable. This was a Ukrainian Speleological Association expedition, organized and led by Yury Kasjan, a rugged and self-effacing Ukrainian, then thirty-eight, who was among the world’s top cavers and who would thereafter play a vital role in the search for the deepest cave.
Unlike Bill Stone, who led most expeditions he accompanied, Klimchouk routinely delegated leadership to carefully chosen, younger veterans, leaving himself the role of strategist and doyen. He had several reasons for doing so. One was that Europe’s caves were no friendlier a country for old men than Mexico’s. Decades of extreme caving had taken a toll on his body, which happily accepted the occasional rest. More important was Klimchouk’s conviction that supercaves required multigenerational efforts, which in turn needed some kind of inheritance mechanism.
Kasjan, a muscular, cheerful, sandy-haired man, now forty-nine, lives in Kiev. He was born in 1960 in western Ukraine in Sniatyn, a town of about ten thousand that dates from the twelfth century. As a child, he had Indiana Jones dreams, longing for travel to distant lands and grand adventures in them. The passing years tamed Kasjan’s expectations a bit, but probably less than most people’s. After secondary school, he attended Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk National Technical University of Oil and Gas, that country’s equivalent of an institution like Texas A&M. He pursued a degree in geology, a field that seemed to offer some potential for Indiana Jones adventures.
Poking around in caves, of course, also dovetailed perfectly with that desire. Kasjan explored his first one in 1978 with a student speleological club from his hometown. Whatever “romantic” notions he held about caving were dispelled by the trip, which involved much of what cavers do best: digging and exploring dead ends. Later, he moved to the city of Poltava, also in Ukraine, and created a speleological club there, which still flourishes.
Today, when not leading expeditions, Kasjan works as an “industrial mountaineer,” a relatively new, extraordinary profession that uses caving (and mountaineering) equipment and techniques to perform technical work on vertically extreme structures—skyscrapers, giant radio towers, oil rigs, and the like. Many of the same vertical techniques and equipment are used in both caving and mountaineering, but somehow the term “industrial caver” doesn’t have quite the same ring.
Married twice, both times to cave explorers, Kasjan has two sons, Sergey and Denis, and a daughter, Anastasia. All are involved in speleology, the sons at the expeditionary level, his daughter more casually—so far. A three-time president of the Ukrainian Speleological Association, he is now editor-in-chief of the magazine Svet (Light), the association’s official journal.
In major ways, Klimchouk and Kasjan perfectly complement each other. As both acknowledge, Klimchouk’s caving passion is science-driven. Kasjan’s has a more practical, engineering-inspired bent—somewhat like Bill Stone’s, in fact. He derives immense satisfaction from solving practical, technical problems, such as those involving complex rope systems, huge vertical work, and intricate dives.
Kasjan first visited the Ortobalagan Valley in 1989 with a group from Poltava. He returned several times, and came back as leader of the Ukr.S.A.’s August 1999 expedition. An important goal was to explore those “windows” that had been identified earlier but not entered. Kasjan divided his team into two groups. One tried the lower window first, climbing from a nearly vertical wall into a passage that descended gradually for about 2,000 linear feet before ending in a closed chamber 1,600 feet beneath the surface. (Seen in profile on maps, this cave system looked very much like diagrams of the chambers and passageways in Egypt’s great pyramids.)
That left the upper window. Klimchouk and Kasjan both knew that this window might be the magic portal. They also knew how unlikely that was. The numbers in caves here were as unforgiving as those in Mexico. Klimchouk, ever the scientist, quantified how things had played out over the years. Of hundreds of leads, 95 percent went nowhere; 4 percent yielded more depth and distance; only 1 percent produced substantial breakthroughs. Still, it was impossible not to feel excited. Klimchouk, and the scores of expeditionary cavers he recruited, had spent the better part of twenty years working up on the Arabika Massif, and by then all their hopes were focused on that hole in the wall in Krubera.
Alexey Zhdanovich, a young caver from the Ukrainian city of Uzhgorod, spearheaded this last push. Rappelling down into P43, he secured his desscenders and hung there momentarily, looking through the window and into the tunnel as far as his light would penetrate. Hauling himself through the portal, he unclipped from the fixed rope and crawled into the darkness. This tunnel extended in the opposite direction from the one accessed through the lower window. It was also larger, big enough that Zhdanovich could crawl on his hands and knees, rather than slithering along on his belly.
He did not have to crawl for long. Before going 150 feet, he came to the lip of a pit in which a dropped stone took four seconds to hit the bottom. The shaft eventually proved to be 255 feet deep and unlocked the remainder of Krubera. This find was the critical turning point in Krubera’s exploration. After Zhdanovich’s lead through the upper window, other teams descended to almost 2,500 feet before the 1999 expedition ended. They stopped not because they ran out of cave but because they ran out of rope, supplies, and time.
When Kasjan and his crew finally emerged from Krubera, blinking in the painful sunlight, fellow expedition members presented them with bouquets of fresh flowers and mugs of good red wine. Everyone on the expedition knew that something very important had happened: Klimchouk’s prediction that Krubera would turn out to be a true supercave had been validated. So had his faith in Yury Kasjan.
Breaking camp and derigging a cave is not usually the most joyful part of an expedition; it’s more like the end of a party, when the lights come up and people realize that it’s time to go home and that they will greet the next morning with a roaring hangover. This time, though, was different. Kasjan and his team members went about their mopping-up duties with unusual good cheer, buoyed by the knowledge that the cave was still going. It took a lot to make these people of endless winters and dark history smile, but what they had just found deep in Krubera was more than enough.