PART THREE: GAME OVER
FORTY-ONE
ON OCTOBER 28, 2003, about six months after Bill Stone’s thwarted expedition decamped, a Mexican rancher named Pedro Pérez was walking to his home in the village of Santa Ana Cuauhtémoc, population 783, in the same area as Cheve Cave. Santa Ana occupies a small saddle 4,249 feet high, between two mountains of the Sierra Juárez. Pérez’s route took him close to the San Miguel River, which flows through the bottom of a deep canyon called the Star Gorge. Pérez had lived here all his life, and knew the sounds of the San Miguel almost as well as he knew his wife’s voice in all her moods. Heavy rains this year had the river roaring like never before.
When Pérez reached the riverbank, he stood and stared. The San Miguel was flowing at about twenty times its normal volume, a churning, boiling torrent of chocolate-brown water and creamy foam. Suddenly, without warning, the river simply disappeared into a huge maw in its bed. The hole was almost 100 feet in diameter and about 40 deep. Where the river went after pouring into the huge hole, Pérez could not imagine.
News of the new sinkhole spread quickly through the Cuicatec community and from there to Mexican cavers, who knew that Bill Stone would be interested in it. He was, so much so that it became the primary target of his USDCT 2004 Cheve expedition. He thought it possible that if they could enter the sinkhole during the dry season, it might prove to be a “back door” to Cheve, far above. It was the same kind of hope he had held for Pe?a Colorada, exactly twenty year earlier.
His expedition had three targets. The first was the new sinkhole. The second was an existing cave upstream from the sinkhole called Star Gorge Cave. The third was a large “recon zone”—an unexplored area that Stone wanted to learn more about—high up in the nearby Aguacate Cloud Forest, a forbidding area of pits, snakes, and cacti at about 8,000 feet on a mountainside above a nearby village called San Francisco Chapulapa.
Stone led an expedition down to Mexico in 2004. He and Andi Hunter, the strong and striking Alaskan outdoorswoman, were now officially a couple; in addition to them, the core team had five other members. A former race-car driver who now lived in Pennsylvania’s Amish country and was a manager for the New Holland tractor company, tall, talkative David Kohuth (Ko-HOOTH) was an experienced, indefatigable caver. Gregg Clemmer, an award-winning historian and a lifelong caver, built like a fireplug, hailed from Germantown, Maryland. Wiry, affable Ohioan John Kerr, the technowizard who had been such an invaluable part of the 2003 expedition, accompanied the team as well. Jim Brown, quirky and introverted but also one of the world’s top cave divers, came along to penetrate any potential sumps. Finally there was newcomer Ryan Tietz, handsome as a film star and tough as nails, who had just graduated from Texas A&M. Ultimately, the expedition would include thirty-eight cavers from eight countries.
The 2004 expedition left Austin, Texas, on February 12 in two overstuffed red trucks and David Kohuth’s Jeep Grand Cherokee. After two days of nonstop travel, the caravan finally pulled off the road at 2:00 A.M., and the cavers rolled out their sleeping bags and got some much-needed rest. The next morning they were awakened by the sweet smell of sugar cooking in a nearby mill. A few hours later, they rolled into Cuicatlán, a town of about fifteen thousand guarded by red, thousand-foot-high cliffs.
The next day, Stone and Hunter met with local Cuicatlán officials to secure permission for their expedition. That done, they headed for a popsicle stand—even in February, Cuicatlán was baking by afternoon. As they crossed the street, an armed policeman in blue fatigues, eyes hidden by dark aviator glasses, halted them. Stone and Hunter braced themselves for a third-world imbroglio. The man in blue, however, broke into a broad smile. Introducing himself as the chief of police, he whipped out the February 2004 Spanish issue of National Geographic magazine, which featured Bill Stone’s article about the 2003 Cheve expedition. El Jefe wanted an autograph, which Stone gladly provided.
The journey to their caving destination resembled passing through a series of successively smaller air locks. From Cuicatlán, the team traveled six miles northwest and thousands of feet higher to Concepción Pápalo, a village of several thousand and home to another local authority with jurisdiction over the land where Cheve Cave’s entrance was located. They then continued northwest over the top of the mountain on the western flank of which Concepción Pápalo perched and headed down the other side to Santa Ana Cuauhtémoc. It was near there, the previous October, that Pedro Pérez had first spotted the huge sinkhole.
The cavers hacked space for their main base camp out of the jungle near the Star Gorge sinkhole. Over the next few days, pack trains of mules, horses, hired locals, and the cavers themselves hauled thousands of pounds of food, clothing, equipment, and other supplies.
Stone and the team quickly found the gigantic hole in the now virtually dry riverbed. During the rainy season, it would have been, as Pérez had asserted, big enough to swallow the river. The hole resembled a pit such as might have been excavated by one of those huge “bunker buster” bombs—except that this one had no discernible bottom.
Doughty Gregg Clemmer free-climbed almost 20 feet down the steep, rocky wall on one side of the hole and could see only more gaping space. The “wall,” though, consisted of very large boulders precariously balanced. Knowing that anything—or nothing—could cause a deadly collapse, Clemmer wisely decided to climb back out.
Before the team could explore further, those teetering, truck-sized boulders had to be removed. For most expeditions that would have been game over right there, but not for one of Stone’s. He had brought along two five-ton-capacity electric winches made by the Warn Company, as well as fourteen GM Ovonic electric-car batteries to power the winches. Once attached to solid rock walls or giant trees, the winches could extract boulders from the riverbed like a dentist pulling huge teeth.
There was serious work ahead, but also cause for celebration, given the size of that sinkhole. Those who might have wondered if their leader ever cracked a smile, let alone a laugh, had their answer that night. Fueled by excitement and good spirits of both kinds, the team had a rousing sing-along in the kitchen tent after dinner. Stone, wearing what looked like a turquoise turban and a huge smile, sang and strummed accompaniment on his guitar, despite a right index finger swathed in bandages. Andi Hunter kept the lyrics flowing with a sheaf of sheet music she had brought. Even Jim Brown, hard of hearing and slightly bemused, joined in for a chorus or two.
On February 17, thinking it wise to start by following the path of least resistance, Stone put the whole team to work on Star Gorge Cave. By the time they were ready to leave camp, at midday, four more explorers had arrived. Two were Americans; the others were a couple, Jan Matthesius and Pauline Barendse, Stone expedition regulars who had come all the way from the Netherlands. Veteran cavers all, they strode into camp with the bright eyes and high energy that typify the beginning of every expedition. They could not have suspected that the coming weeks would present challenges and agonies unlike anything any of them had encountered before.