FORTY-FOUR
THE NEXT MORNING, THE EXCITEMENT WAS palpable. People walked around camp with new spring in their steps and smiles on their faces. Today would tell the tale, whether long or short; it would bring some kind of resolution. Pauline Barendse led a team of three men down into the pit. At its bottom they explored a number of narrow, shoulder-width passages that descended like household stairs. One led to a hole that was blocked with rubble but could be dug out the next day. On their way back, they climbed the pit’s far side and located a window high enough to require a bolt climb. If they had not yet unlocked Cheve’s back door, they at least had not dead-ended.
Using computerized projections based on the team’s survey data, Stone determined that the right- and left-hand dig passages would eventually merge. Not soon, but it would happen if they just kept digging. Unfortunately, work on the right had produced no rewards like those of the left-hand dig. It was Sisyphean labor. The point person, often Andi Hunter, filled a bucket with gluey mud and yelled. Team members behind her hauled it out. Before it was out of sight, another bucket was pushed down to Hunter, who filled that one and sent it up, then did the whole thing all over again. When Hunter tired, another digger took her place. As the pit deepened, foul air became an increasingly serious problem because there was no wind in this dig. They attached a longer tube to the oxygen generator and kept on working.
On February 26, over on the left, after some hammer-and-chisel work, Pauline Barendse squeezed through a hole that unlocked almost 150 feet of new passage—which, as passages in caves are wont to do, then just stopped.
On top of everything else, it began to rain. Water flowed down into both digs but was most troublesome in the right, where it streamed down into the hole occupied by the upside-down point digger, flushing mud into ears, eyes, and mouth and adding another layer of misery. It kept raining. And raining. Everything that goes up must sooner or later come down, including team spirit. To Bill Stone, it was obvious that three days of steady rain, on top of the unrelenting labor down under, was killing morale. One of the biggest encouragements had been that strong wind blowing out of the left-hand dig. But it had gradually weakened, then simply stopped. That may have had something to do with a pressure change occasioned by the weather system that had brought rain. Whatever its cause, to have such a strong, steady breeze just disappear was unusual and unusually discouraging.
Without the wind to follow, Stone knew, their work underground was now more educated guessing than logical pursuit. The fact was not lost on other expedition members. Even the perennially sunny Andi Hunter was hurting. After the second day of steady rain, she just holed up in her tent and skipped dinner. If Hunter was down that low, the others’ spirits had to be in worse shape.
On the third morning of rain, Stone wanted to investigate the dome of the pit that Barendse had found in the left dig. He took along Hunter and Jim Brown, “Inspector Gadget,” so called because of his fondness for, well, gadgets. He might have seemed an odd choice—while the Inspector was a world-class cave diver, he was much less experienced using a rappel rack, mechanical ascenders, and a heavy drill. But Stone had an ulterior motive. As the years and expeditions had passed, he had become better at monitoring his team members’ physical and psychological states. On one expedition, he had seen the partly deaf, introverted Brown become completely alienated from everyone else. That could be like putting a spoonful of vinegar into a bottle of fine wine; the vinegar did not sweeten, but the wine was invariably fouled. So it was with groups, and he could not let that happen here. He wanted to help Brown by spending some special time with him.
They set off for some climbing. Hunter was an experienced mountaineer and rock climber, accustomed to dicey leads on high faces. Clambering with big packs of rope and vertical gear through the left-hand dig, where so many boulders appeared to be held in place by nothing more substantial than sand and gravel, was nerve-racking. Stone, whose experienced eye gave him an edge here, estimated that it would take just two hammer whacks to dislodge some of the huge rocks and precipitate a cave-in.
The trio made it past the boulder gauntlet uncrushed, but at that point Stone had to return to base camp on an errand. That left only Hunter and Brown to do the climb, and that really meant Hunter. Even with her strength and skill, it would be challenging. Hunter put her climbing harness on over her mud-slimed caving suit. Then she slipped a sling over one shoulder and hung from it the hammer drill, battery, blow tube, wrench, hangers, bolts, screws, dynamic climbing rope, and static caving rope. All told, the equipage came to more than fifty pounds, heavy enough for a fit backpacker on the surface, a brutal load for vertical work in a cave. Bolt climbing was rather like setting rebelays in reverse, going up instead of down. To start, she drilled a hole as far over her head as she could reach with the heavy drill-battery combo, placed the hanger and bolt, clipped two étriers to the hanger, and stepped up into the étriers’ foot loops. Then she did it all over again and again, and again. Each new bolt took her higher off the pit floor. It was an agonizing, and agonizingly slow, way to gain height.
Hunter had bolted her way to within two placements of the dome’s top, a truly valiant effort, when she ran out of gas. Fortuitously, at that moment she spotted a small ledge, hooked her butt onto it, and finished her bolt work that way. As if on cue, Bill Stone returned down below. He climbed the rope Hunter dropped down, and together they surveyed a number of tight passages—“cracks” would be a better description—emanating from the top of the dome. Bolt climbing is the vertical equivalent of digging, dangerous and exhausting work with no guarantee of reward at its end, and they reaped no rewards here, despite all her hard work. She, Stone, Brown, and the other teams did not get back to camp until ten o’clock that night. When they did drag in, they were exhausted and discouraged.
By February 29, with no dramatic discoveries in Star Gorge, Stone decided to start hedging his bets. He, Hunter, and John Kerr began scouring the surrounding high country. It was decidedly unfriendly terrain. Time and water had carved the region’s limestone surface into a dangerous jumble of holes, ledges, and stalagmite-like spikes. Between the ledges and the ridges were depressions of varying depth, with cacti and sharp rocks at the bottoms of most—natural booby traps. It was also snake country. Overall, it was a bad place to explore and a worse one to fall in.
They were not wandering around randomly with their fingers crossed. From education and experience, speleologists and geologists are able to “see” beneath the surface of the earth, the way we might see ocean bottom through very clear water. Stone and the other two hacked their way up a mountainside of hard, metamorphic rock until they found a strip of limestone. The meeting of these two types of rock creates a kind of “golden zone” where caves form. The impermeable metamorphic rock, which water cannot penetrate, channels flowing water to the softer, soluble limestone, where, sooner or later, it finds a crack or hole. If a variety of other geological stars align, it creates a cave. Because streams and rivers flow more or less continually, scientists who search cave country with limestone substrata like these look first to the agents of change, those rivers and streams, and follow them in the hope that they will disappear into the ground. Before long, Stone’s team found a three-foot hole into which part of a stream flowed and disappeared. Like most other leads, however, this one proved false. Wherever that water went, it was no place humans could follow.
They pressed on like this for several more hours without finding any going caves, but at one point their search did produce a revealing moment for Stone. As Andi Hunter, in the lead, was hacking away through thick brush, Stone saw printed in white on the back of her blue T-shirt a map of Cheve Cave. Members of the previous year’s expedition had all been given the shirts. At that moment, with his intimate knowledge of Cheve Cave’s relation to the area’s surface features, Stone realized that they must be standing directly above that cave’s deepest point. Teased by Cheve, he could only shake his head and take out his frustration on the undergrowth.
Their reconnaissance having failed to produce anything of value, Stone began considering another sinkhole as a last resort. This one, which he knew offered going cave, was in the bed of the Aguacate River about a half mile southwest and uphill of the village of San Francisco Chapulapa. A recon team that Stone had accompanied had first found the Aguacate River Sink in 1989. In 1994, an offshoot group from the main Huautla effort penetrated it a half mile and almost 600 feet deep before a sump stopped them. Though near the nightmarish Charco Cave, the Aguacate River Sink Cave was more user-friendly, 80 feet wide and 50 feet from cave floor to ceiling. The fact that it aligned with the same heading as Cheve Cave, 330 degrees, led Stone to believe that it was another “stitch” in the long but still disconnected line running all the way down to the Cheve resurgence.
The days had stretched into weeks, and the team had been working itself into exhaustion. Bill Stone wanted to avoid another expedition-ending mutiny. It was time, he decided, to call a meeting.