FORTY-FIVE
ON MARCH 3, STONE CONVENED THE entire team to discuss the expedition’s next move. He complimented everyone on their incredible commitment and hard work, reiterated their accomplishments, such as they were, and laid before them the available options for continuing. With little progress being made elsewhere, the group elected to focus on the Aguacate River sinkhole and the high, waterless “death karst” region (as they had started calling the unfriendly area) Stone and Hunter had braved earlier. Though the hike had been difficult, it had revealed thirty-five new pit entrances. On Saturday, March 6, the entire crew moved four miles southwest to San Francisco Chapulapa, a rough little village that made Stone think of a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, complete with dusty streets, stray dogs, and ramshackle buildings.
Sunday, March 7, began the expedition’s fourth week. John Kerr, Ryan Tietz, and a group of Poles who had arrived a few days earlier took one of the team’s two-way radios and climbed up into death karst country to establish a high camp. Meanwhile, Bill Stone, Andi Hunter, and Jim Brown went into the Aguacate River Sink Cave. To do so they had to bypass yet another cave danger. Coral snakes, their red-and-yellow beauty belying the fact that they possessed one of the most lethal neurotoxins on earth, had been seen in this cave.
Luck was with them that day, because no snakes were waiting to bite unwary feet touching down on the cave floor. After the big entrance shaft, the roof dropped quickly, leaving a crawl space through which the Aguacate River flowed into this cave. Thanks to the incessant rain of the last few days, every stream and waterfall was swollen and roaring, but there was still enough airspace between the river’s surface and the low chamber’s ceiling to allow passage. As it turned out, a short crawl brought them to a huge waterfall plunging over the brink of the first of four shafts that would take them ever deeper into the main cave.
The plunging water in all of these drops was impressive, and Andi Hunter’s rappel of the second pitch produced what may be the single most memorable image of the expedition. James Brown, hanging to one side, photographed Hunter in profile. Her yellow waterproof suit and red helmet glowed brightly against the cave’s dark wall. Solid torrents of water beat down on her as she rappelled. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her mouth was flung wide open, as though caught in mid-scream. All around her droplets of water caught the light from Brown’s flash, glittering like tiny suspended rubies, and a huge boulder in the foreground, polished by millennia of falling water, glistened like polished agate.
Their last rappel deposited them in the cave’s main tunnel, half a mile long, 30 feet wide, and 30 feet high. They soon arrived at another powerful waterfall, this one pouring down from a cylindrical chamber that rose, like the bore of an immense piston, into the darkness above them. The flow here, Stone estimated, was twice as powerful as that coming through the entrance. There were only two possibilities for its source: either a sinkhole farther upstream or water from feeder caves higher on the mountainside. It begged for exploration, but they had no drill or bolts to climb up the chamber’s wall. Walking on, they arrived at a sump, where Jim Brown, happy at finding a bit of his element, hopped right in to probe for submerged passages. Alas, he found none.
Dejected, they headed out, but before they had gone halfway Andi Hunter spotted something.
“Hold on,” she said. “Check that out.”
It was a slot, about half as wide as a computer monitor, where the cave floor and wall met.
“Give me a minute,” she said and promptly slithered through.
“You’re not going to believe this,” she called back. Stone followed, forcing his big, rangy body through with some difficulty, and soon they were together at the upper edge of a sizable room with steeply sloping walls composed, in places, of hard mud. Cutting steps like mountaineers of yore, they climbed down to the chamber’s bottom, where a hole 3 feet across extended down into darkness beyond the reach of their lights. Here, again, was reason for hope. Without ropes, they could not enter it, but they would come back.
That night in base camp, Stone was encouraged. The new chamber, called Andi’s Room, aligned with the general heading, 330 degrees, of all the other stitches that Stone believed would ultimately connect and lead down to the resurgence.
“If I’m reading this map right,” Stone said to Hunter, “I think I know what might come next. The passage will jog east, descend a little way, then pick up the 330 heading again—beyond the sump.”
He did not need to add that if they bypassed the sump, they might find the missing link to Cheve Cave itself. They had to investigate, but first they would need to establish a camp down in the cave. They bedded down on the surface, feeling more optimistic but also more anxious. It had come down to this: the chamber beyond Andi’s Room was their last hope.