FORTY-TWO
SOME CAVES ARE MORE WELCOMING THAN others, and Star Gorge Cave ranked near the bottom. For starters, thousands of vampire bats roosted on the ceiling of its entrance chamber. Though they hung upside down, these bats managed, by way of some very acrobatic elimination, to deposit daily many gallons of bloody liquid excrement on the cave floor below. There it collected into stinking, fetid, germ-ridden ponds about the consistency of yogurt. The bat guano was no laughing matter. Following a 2001 reconnaissance in Star Gorge, caver Marcin Gala contracted histoplasmosis, a fungal infection in the lungs that can fatally destroy one’s respiratory system if not treated promptly. It required two full weeks in the hospital and copious doses of powerful antifungal medications to save him.
Having passed that gauntlet, the cavers worked their way 600 vertical feet to the bottom of Star Gorge Cave and began digging. There was no airflow through this cave, and the atmosphere down deep quickly became foul. Back in Maryland, the bearded, photogenic scientist Bart Hogan, whose inventive skills equaled John Kerr’s, had created little blower units and attached them to long hoses. These he’d then connected to a Bill Stone rebreather unit. The setup allowed one blower to remove stale, carbon-dioxide-laden air while the other pumped fresh oxygen in.
This was cave digging at its worst—or best, for those who relished such a challenge. It took an hour of hiking from camp and another of descending into the cave just to reach the end where digging was taking place. During the expedition’s first days, even the hiking could be treacherous, taking the cavers down steep, rain-slicked paths laced with slippery roots. But as the days passed and the trails dried, the cavers started looking forward to these walks under blue sky and good sun. The scenery was spectacular up there, emerald, boulder-strewn meadows interspersed with fields of coffee plants and stands of bamboo. The altitude provided spectacular views of the dramatic mountains that surrounded them.
Another hour of rappelling and downclimbing brought cavers to the dig, where they would spend the next seven, highly unpleasant, hours. Their excavating system resembled a giant human centipede. Deep in the hole, one caver hacked and chopped away at the concrete-hard earth, either filling a bucket beside her or pushing the dirt back to a partner, who put it in a bucket. That was passed back from caver to caver, until those farthest to the rear pulled the buckets out and dumped their contents in the open cave. Filled with sand and gravel, each bucket weighed about fifty pounds. Twenty buckets constituted a good day’s haul—about a ton of material, in other words, which produced a gain of 6 to 12 feet, depending on the consistency of the dirt.
By the time their shift ended, the workers emerged from the dark of the cave into the dark of night, their hike back up to camp illuminated by stars and moon, when clouds did not obscure them. After three days of digging without breakthroughs in Star Gorge Cave, Bill Stone moved some of the troops to the big upstream sinkhole, the one first observed by Pedro Pérez. By now, the riverbed was dry and water no longer presented a hazard. A team led by Gregg Clemmer dug down 4 feet through the sinkhole’s sandy bottom, about 40 feet below the riverbed. Just after sunset, Clemmer, deepest in the hole, poked his custom-designed titanium digging tool (it resembled a crowbar) through the dirt into … nothing. He quickly bashed an opening 2 feet in diameter. Clemmer saw going cave; what lay beyond provided more encouragement after a few hours of work than the downstream dig had produced in days.
There was another shallow hole about 15 feet to the left of the one where Clemmer had been working. Stone put diggers to work in there, too. The first hole was dubbed the “right-hand dig” and the new one the “left-hand dig.” Clemmer, toiling now in the left, squeezed through a narrow opening at the hole’s far end. He wormed farther in and was digging out the floor to enlarge the passage when he spotted a mass of daddy longlegs hanging from the ceiling inches above his face. Seen from a distance, a daddy longlegs colony looked like a giant black beard growing on rock. Seen from inches, the insects looked like big, scary spiders. For the life of him Clemmer could not remember whether they had a venomous bite. As long as he did not breathe or move, the colony was quiet. When he did either, the black beard burst into frantic motion. It could have been a scene straight from a Stephen King novel.
While trying to lie absolutely motionless, wondering what a thousand daddy longlegs could do to the unprotected human face, Clemmer felt wind. It was a strong, steady breeze, as though he were lying in front of a house fan, and it was the closest a cave came to waving a flag proclaiming, ENTER HERE. It was such an exciting discovery that he forgot the daddy longlegs and scooted right out to tell the others. Everyone, Bill Stone included, agreed that this was damn good news indeed.
Despite their proximity, the two descending tunnels presented different challenges. Diggers working the right-hand tunnel were hacking and scooping their way through a tight crack plugged with mud, sand, and solid rock. It was excruciatingly difficult digging, but there was little danger of collapse. That wasn’t the case in the left-hand dig, where, despite the winchers’ best efforts, much of the ceiling still consisted of delicately balanced boulders that could dislodge at any time.
The explorers had to be steel-nerved to keep bashing around in there, hour after hour, day after day. Andi Hunter spent one such long day kneeling in the tunnel with just inches of clearance between the top of her helmet and two massive boulders. The giant rocks leaned against each other like a couple of shoulder-to-shoulder skid row drunks, each propping the other up and neither secure in its own footing. The seam where the boulders leaned together was directly over Hunter’s head. If one or both came down, she would be squashed like an ant under a boot heel. Working with surgical caution all day, she managed to avoid that fate, but it was even more exhausting and stressful than usual.
By the end of Saturday, February 21, Clemmer and his mates had dug a shaft 15 feet deep and about the diameter of a big truck tire. There was good news and better news: no daddy longlegs and strong, steady airflow blowing out of the hole. Clemmer felt that airflow was one of caving’s golden clues. There was even a whisper of breath in the previously dead-calm right dig. Things were looking up. Or, rather, down, and in the topsy-turvy world of supercaves, that was a very good thing indeed. Their sense of good fortune, however, would be short-lived.