FORTY-THREE
ON FEBRUARY 23, ANDI HUNTER WROTE in the expedition log: “The reports below chronicle what happened on the 21, 22, and 23 of February and give a sense of hope and despair that accompany every expedition undertaking real exploration.”
That morning, Gregg Clemmer’s group kept chopping away in the left-hand dig while others were burrowing into the right-hand one. Stone, with Andi Hunter and four men, left camp at dawn, heading for a new pit several miles to the north that had been reported the previous day by a local resident. After a few hours of exploring, they found the pit and rappelled into it. Only 300 feet deep, it went nowhere, but it was not without some exciting features. It contained a significant population of hand-sized spiders and giant millipedes, bright yellow and blue (coincidentally, the colors of the Ukrainian flag) and four inches long. When touched, they secreted foul-smelling acid from glands along the sides of their bodies. Jules Verne would have been pleased by such exotica.
Sunday, February 22, was market day throughout the region, so Stone and Hunter went shopping for seventy-five pounds of fresh food. When they returned, Gregg Clemmer was waiting.
“You want to see something neat, just wriggle on down that old left hole there,” Clemmer urged.
By this time, the dig channel had veered under the riverbank, where trees grew. When Stone reached the tunnel’s end, he found wind blowing out strongly enough to make the dangling tree roots wave around like giant insect feelers. That, Stone agreed, was neat indeed, even neater than Clemmer knew just then. Cheve Cave, far above them, breathed in all day long. This lower cave blew out. The air Cheve was sucking in above might be blowing out right here. And that might indicate the very thing they had come all this way to find: connection.
The next day, Stone decided to abandon the Star Gorge Cave. The digging team’s Herculean efforts had added some length, but had found no moving air. Worse, they had begun to hit saturated sand, which meant, before long, a sump. That, plus the absence of airflow, convinced Stone to concentrate their forces on the two digs upstream at the sinkhole.
Even with extra hands, it was grueling work. The cavers contorted themselves into bizarre positions, then hammered and picked away, not infrequently standing on their heads, facedown in holes that, despite Hogan’s oxygen pumps’ best efforts, soon became stagnant. It was Charco all over again, and if it did not change soon for the better, it could become a spirit killer.
The work was already taking a toll, especially on the less experienced. One afternoon in late February, first-timer Ryan Tietz sat beside the entrance to the right-hand dig. His surroundings were grim: ugly chewed earth, lacerated roots, dirty light. A muddy five-gallon bucket sat in front of him. Coils of rope and power cords snaked around his feet. Over his head, the rocks were dyed bright green by some weird moss or lichen. Smeared with mud, he sat, heels drawn up, arms crossed, and elbows on knees, his face rough with two weeks’ growth of beard, his eyes vacant and unfocused in what combat veterans call the “thousand-yard stare.” Two weeks earlier, he had been bright-eyed, grinning, bursting with youthful energy. He was not grinning now, not by a long shot.
It was a measure of this kind of caving’s severity that Tietz could appear so discouraged despite the fact that on the previous day, February 23, the happy digger John Kerr had made another encouraging find in the left-hand dig. Working at the tunnel’s far end, he was chopping out compacted earth and pulling rocks free one at a time, as though dismantling a giant puzzle. He had been doing this for so long that the monotony had lulled him into a kind of trance. Then, finally, he pulled a big rock out of its socket and, lo and behold, there was neither soil nor rock beyond. There was nothing, in fact, but beautiful, beckoning empty space.
Playing his light through the gap, Kerr quickly determined that he had opened a hole in the ceiling of a bedroom-sized chamber below. Eureka! That was very good, but there was something even better: he felt a strong, cool wind blowing out of the hole, against his face. That meant a big cave beyond.
Kerr, Stone, and Hunter pursued the lead. They widened Kerr’s hole and dropped down into the chamber below. At its far end, the passage continued for about 50 feet before widening into another chamber roughly 15 feet square and tall enough for them to stand in. From there, a brief descent took them to a 30-foot horizontal passage low enough that they had to crawl. Before long, they found themselves at the edge of a pit 75 feet deep and 10 feet in diameter. On the pit’s far side, the horizontal passage continued; it would have to be explored as well. To reach that far side, they would have to rappel to the pit’s bottom, then climb back up the far side. That would require rope, drills, bolts, and technical gear.
It was a major find that called for a meeting over lunch on the surface, where the news energized the entire team. Everyone in camp knew that the next day would be, in many ways, like a battle. It might end in disappointment and misery (and even death or injury, at worst) or it could be the “back door” to miles of passage that just might connect with Cheve.