FOUR
VESELY AND FARR WERE THE FIRST to see some of the great cave’s most impressive features. The next day, they stumbled onto one of its darkest secrets. The Entrance Chamber, it turned out, had at some ancient time been used for rituals and sacrifices. Human sacrifices and, to judge from the small, shockingly white bones, many of the victims had been children. Their skeletons lay beneath a cantilevered slab of stone, the killing altar, thrusting up out of the gloomy Entrance Chamber’s swirling mist. Later, the pair would learn that these rituals had been carried out by ancient Cuicatecs, Native Americans who had lived in the region a thousand years before the conquistadors arrived and whose descendants inhabited the region still.
Leaving that site and its remains undisturbed, they returned to the giant, windy portal. Just beyond its opening they found a wall, which they rappelled 25 feet to its bottom. They kept following the stream down the steeply sloping cave floor for about 250 feet, where it disappeared into jumbled piles of rock. They retreated, but returned the next day, their last, and descended the same vertical shaft and kept going, rappelling three more short drops of 25 to 30 feet each. The stream reappeared and continued to flow down one side of the section they were descending. They explored about another half mile of virgin cave, turned back, and called it a trip.
VESELY AND FARR RETURNED to the cave twice in 1987, bringing additional troops both times. Though most people shudder and hug themselves at the word “cave,” envisioning horribly claustrophobic crawl spaces, supercaves are characterized more by vast open spaces, many of them vertical. On their second foray, in December, they retraced their original route down the series of short drops, followed the stream until it disappeared into a wall, squeezed through a tight vertical opening, and came to the first of Cheve’s many remarkable features. It was a huge room, about 150 feet wide and 250 feet high (the U.S. Capitol dome tops out at 288), with a floor that sloped steeply downward.
Beyond, they encountered more vertical pitches requiring rappels, wending their way through sprawling boulder gardens in the intervening sections and then, thankfully, finding a nice stretch of smooth bedrock. Two more short rappels and they stood at the brink of Cheve’s first major drop, a pit 165 feet deep. They named this the Elephant Shaft, because it was big enough to have dropped elephants into. The two were experienced at this kind of thing, but even for them, rappelling into a pit like the Elephant Shaft was serious business, requiring balance, guts, specialized equipment, and the experience to use that equipment. Take any one of those out of the mix and fatal results were likely, as Chris Yeager’s death would demonstrate in 1991.
Rappelling—making a controlled slide down a rope—is as essential to cave exploration as ice axes and crampons are to mountaineering. Until the 1920s, cavers clambered down rope ladders or had themselves lowered by teams of hefty assistants. Hand-over-hand descents were practical only for very short drops. Rope ladders were safer but awkward, exhausting, and prohibitively heavy for long descents. Brawny helpers cost good money and might wander off with a comely lass or stupefy themselves with strong drink. In addition, descents of hundreds of feet required the use of substantial hardware—winches, revolving drums, and scaffolding. As the complexity increased, so did the likelihood of failure.
Developed by mountaineers in France after World War I, body rappelling initially involved running rope back beneath the crotch, forward around the left hip, up across the chest, and back over the right shoulder. The technique was hard on the groin; worse, it was easy for a rappeller to separate from the rope, with predictable results. By the 1930s, climbers were using metal devices that fastened them securely to the rope, but caving’s huge loads and long, wet, mud-greased ropes required “industrial-strength” rappelling devices for control. An enterprising southern caver named John Cole answered that need, in 1966, with what cavers now call the rappel rack, in which the descent rope wove through the stainless steel (or, now, aluminum or titanium) rack’s bars.
Racks helped revolutionize caving, but they were not perfect. There are right and wrong ways to feed the rope through the rappel rack’s bars. The wrong way was called “the death rig.” When a caver leaned back on a death rig, all the rack’s bars popped open, launching the hapless victim into what cavers, with typically black humor, call an “air rappel.” The vast majority of air rappels are fatal.
Vesely and Farr tied off one end of a long rope, tossed the other into the void, threaded their racks, and rappelled to the Elephant Shaft’s bottom. There the beams of their headlamps revealed a big, roaring stream foaming down over a series of pitches, one short waterfall after another, the rushing so violent that fog hung in the air. Many of the falls collected in plunge pools, turquoise water in bronze-colored basins whose outflow created the next fall. Going deeper still, the cavers rappelled down a face of rock like burnished gold, beside a frothing 100-foot waterfall that filled the air with ghostly wisps of mist.
They descended another 200 yards or so of steep passage, and then the cave played a trick on them. The downclimb ended and the floor suddenly started to rise. Scattered with huge breakdown boulders, the giant ramp continued up for about 100 yards, then leveled briefly before dropping again, more steeply, perhaps at about the angle of a ski jump. This precipitous section, which they would name the Giant’s Staircase, was covered with boulders perched so precariously that a light touch could have sent some rampaging down the steep slope.
At the bottom of the Giant’s Staircase, they came upon one of those features that seem extraordinary on the surface and, down so deep, stretch the imagination almost to its breaking point. It was a shaft 50 feet in diameter and 500 feet deep. For people who have never stood at the lip of such a pit or rappelled to the bottom of one, those three digits have no visceral impact. Cavers understand this. Talking about big drops in caves, they often refer to how long it takes a tossed rock to hit bottom. It took six seconds for a rock to hit the bottom of this pit, which was long enough for it to have reached terminal velocity, or 124 miles per hour. Counting the seconds out—one thousand one, one thousand two—helps take the measure of such a shaft.
Vesely and Farr were now about 2,000 vertical feet deep and 1.5 miles from Cheve’s entrance. It is all too easy to reel off numbers like those and move right on, bringing to mind the famous remark by Joseph Stalin that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic. To properly appreciate supercave exploration, it is important not to let one’s mind and eyes glaze over at the sight of such numbers. Three miles on a level path—or even a mountain route—in daylight is one thing. Three miles immersed in absolute darkness, drenched by freezing waterfalls, wading neck-deep through frigid lakes, spidering up and down vertical pitches, scrambling over wobbling boulders, and belly-crawling through squeezes so tight you must exhale to escape them, is quite another. And 2,000 vertical feet is two-fifths of a mile. Imagine climbing the stairs of two Empire State Buildings in daylight, dry and unburdened. To get out, Vesely and Farr would have to do it in the dark, soaking wet, heavily loaded, on rope the diameter of a man’s index finger.
The only proper name for such a fantastic pit, they felt, had to come from fantasy. They called it, fittingly, Saknussemm’s Well, after the fictional cave explorer Arne Saknussemm in Jules Verne’s classic novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. With limited rope, they were able to descend only half its depth before stopping on a bridge of beautiful, pale rock called flowstone. Looking like milk frozen in midflow, the formation was calcite, the white, crystalline form of limestone. Flowstone is always wet, and therefore slick. Perched delicately there, they peered down into blackness that devoured every lumen of their powerful headlamp beams. There was, quite obviously, much more cave yawning before them. Lacking additional rope, they could only retreat.
Just how does one “retreat” from 2,000 feet deep within the earth? Rock climbing, slow and brutal with the huge loads they carried, was never an option. Cavers like Vesely and Farr needed a way to go right back up the rope they had just slid down, using some swami-style, gravity-defying magic. Ironically, the magic they found came not from swamis but, quite possibly, from cavemen.
IN 1931 AN AUSTRIAN MOUNTAINEER NAMED Dr. Karl Prusik “invented” a knot that slid up a rope but, when weighted, grabbed and did not slide down. Sailors had long used the same configuration, nautically known as a sliding hitch. Exactly when sailors came up with their knot—if, in fact, it was original with them—seems to have been lost in the mists of history. But reef knots and granny knots ten thousand years old have been found, still tied and holding, in plant-fiber ropes. If cave dwellers could do that, might they not also have tied sliding hitches?
Dr. Prusik is generally credited with first using the sliding hitch for mountaineering. French cavers soon imitated climbers, “walking” back up ropes with Prusik knots. These knots worked, but they slipped on wet, muddy, and icy ropes. Little machines were better. The first mechanical ascender appeared in 1933, and all ascenders still work the same way, sliding freely up but, when weighted, locking securely in place with a toothed, pivoting cam that bites the rope.
Cavers use two mechanical ascenders, assembled in a “sit-stand” configuration, to climb long ropes. One ascender is attached to the seat harness and chest harness. The rope runs through it. Another, also attached to the rope, is held in one or both hands. Hanging from it is a rope with loops for both feet at the bottom. To climb, the caver hangs from the chest ascender, which supports her weight. She raises her feet, which allows her to slide the handheld ascender up the rope. She then stands in the foot loops and the chest ascender slides up the rope, grabbing as soon as she weights it again. Repeated over and over, the motion looks like a frog kicking, and the technique is called “frogging.”
So, having abandoned their airy flowstone balcony, Vesely and Farr frogged their way out of Cheve. They were certainly excited and encouraged, but they wore a self-defensive armor of skepticism, as well. Supercaves teach those who explore them any number of things, and skepticism is a big one. The numbers work like this: hundreds of promising leads produce a few dozen explorable passages, which, most often, end in piles of boulders or flooded tunnels or simply blank walls. Once in a great while, an explorable passage will go, and once in an ever-greater while, one will just keep going. But those, the fabulous ones that have no stop in them, are rare.
Even so, both Vesely and Farr were thinking that, just maybe, this cave could be the real deal. For one thing, it was still going. For another, it was located in karst country. For yet another, air was really honking through this cave, and it had to be going somewhere. Finally, the size of features like Saknussemm’s Well indicated that this cave had been forming for a very long time. (Water is an irresistible force but not a fast one; it takes eons to create something like Saknussemm’s Well.)
Vesely and Farr were not alone in feeling so. The population of world-class expeditionary cavers was, and remains, smaller even than elite mountaineering’s. By 1988, word had spread through the tribe, and in March of that year Vesely and Farr led their first true expedition to Cheve, a team of seventeen that included some of America’s most stellar cavers.
One stood head and shoulders above the rest—literally and figuratively. His name was Bill Stone. Then thirty-six, Stone had already devoted almost a decade to discovering the world’s deepest cave.