FORTY-SEVEN
TWO HOURS LATER, STONE ARRIVED IN Camp 1 himself and learned more. The couple had told Bart Hogan that they had not gone beyond the point where Hogan and Kerr themselves had stopped, the edge of a small stream. If that was true, they had not really explored virgin passage. They would have only retraced Hogan and Kerr’s footsteps. Stone was glad to hear it; Hunter was not the only one upset.
At the end of that day, the newcomers wrote in the expedition log, “After reaching the end of today’s exploration [meaning, presumably, the stream where Hogan and Kerr had turned around], we reluctantly returned to cave camp, then on to the surface.” In other words, they had not passed into virgin territory.
On March 18, Stone and the others descended to that stream and beyond. Later, he noted in the activity log, “it was obvious from the boot prints that they had gone much further.” There was nothing anyone could do, but no one was happy about it. John Kerr said, “You know it’s bad when you have to rank your friends’ character by the number of meters that constitutes ‘a little way downstream.’”
STONE’S TEAM PUSHED ON TO A chamber a full mile beyond the cave’s “terminal” sump. The tunnel soon constricted, forcing them to crawl on their bellies. This was John Kerr’s element. He took the lead with his titanium tool and burrowed 150 feet forward. Hogan, crawling a good distance behind, called to Kerr. No reply. Hogan called again and again, with no response. He was beginning to fear the worst—that Kerr might have suffocated—when the other man finally came backing out with frightening news. The tunnel’s ceiling had collapsed on him, burying the length of his body to eye level.
“I had to back out fast to get a breath,” he reported calmly. Nevertheless, he had just had as close a call as Stone’s recent brush with a falling drill. If the ceiling collapse had buried his arms and face—which it had come close to doing—Kerr would have died a most unpleasant death by premature burial.
There’s no indication that the cavers viewed Kerr’s experience as a bad omen, but subsequent events must have left some of them wondering. During a trip to the surface from Camp 1, Andi Hunter planned another culinary surprise for her teammates. She cooked up a big pot of black beans and brought it back down to camp, where she added spices, sauce, and sausage for a chili con carne feast.
Everyone ate heartily, then bedded down for the night. Before long, little depth charges started detonating in Hunter’s stomach, and she was not alone. Soon the camp was resonating with thunderous flatulence, and then sufferers started rushing to and from the latrine, 100 feet away, in a steady stream. Before long, violent vomiting added itself to the vicious cramps and diarrhea. Food poisoning had sabotaged Hunter’s good intentions.
Stone was singled out for particularly devilish punishment. While Hunter was off at the latrine, Stone used his pee bottle. Conserving light, as always, he missed the bottle and urinated instead on their sleeping bags. It was not his first unpleasant encounter with pee bottles. Two days earlier, again in the dark, he had picked his up, taken a long, lovely piss, screwed the bottle’s cap on, and gone back to sleep. The next day, foraging for some granola bars, he’d opened their Nalgene bottle container and found them marinating in vile yellow liquid.
When Stone himself finally made it to the latrine, he found it overflowing with vomit, runny excreta, and toilet paper. He also found that they were down to their last few sheets of the latter. Wet with his own urine, his gut clenched, barely suppressing the urge to blow vile matter out of both ends, he and Kerr dug a new hole and put it to use immediately. So much for the romance of exploration.
ON MONDAY, MARCH 22, still without a major breakthrough, Stone, Hunter, Brown, Kerr, and Hogan returned to the surface after more than a week underground. Disappointed that their own effort had produced nothing, they were happy—“overjoyed” might be a better term—to hear that the death karst teams had explored one of their caves to more than 1,000 feet deep. Two cavers, Pavo Skoworodko and Artur Nowak, remained up there, but they had no more rope.
On Wednesday, the five cavers, followed by a burro train, ascended to the high death karst camp, at 8,000 feet. They passed through strange terrain, forests of hundred-foot trees festooned with green moss and snakelike vines, and through thickets of a plant called mala mujer (evil woman). It was a pretty thing, with delicate white flowers and shiny, maplelike leaves, but poisonous spikes on its stems and leaves can inflict the worst sting of any nettle-type plant known, causing extreme pain and ugly rashes that can last for days, leaving ugly blotches that often remain for months.
The high camp occupants had named the new cave J2. Jaskinia is the Polish word for cave. J2 was still going. Stone well understood that this was their endgame. Cheve was blocked at its deepest point by breakdown. Charco ended in a terminal sump. The Aguacate River Sink Cave had tightened to the tunnel that almost killed John Kerr. The Star Gorge caves had gone nowhere. This was their last, best hope. They desperately needed J2 to go.
Five days later, a final-push team spent eighteen hours in J2, reaching a maximum depth of about 1,500 feet. That was good news, and the cave was enlarging the deeper they went. The final passage was about 15 feet wide and 50 feet high. At about 1,300 feet deep, several streams joined together to produce a powerful river that they followed to the edge of a huge chamber. There, the river shot out into black void. A strong wind blew down into it, as well. The cave clearly went much, much deeper. But, out of rope, they could go no farther.
Once again, many weeks of excruciating labor and extraordinary risks had produced more frustration than fruition. At the bottom of J2 were encouraging signs—growing passages, increasing water flow, and wind. They had to be going somewhere. Since J2 was between the main Cheve Cave and its resurgence down at the river, it was reasonable to expect that it might turn out to be the missing link, or a part of it, that Stone had been seeking.
But it had not done so, and another twenty years might elapse before it did. Spirit unbroken, Stone—astonishingly—vowed to return, saying, “We have no choice but to go back and leave J2 as a target for a follow-up expedition.” His determination was admirable, but despite decades of work, he had not proven Cheve to be the deepest cave on earth.
It remained to be seen, halfway around the world, what Alexander Klimchouk and his cavers would prove about Krubera in 2004.