SIX
SEEING THOSE SOUTHERNERS WITH THEIR VERTICAL gear had produced an epiphany for Stone. Marion Smith’s “Mexico” sparked another. He soon learned that Mexico was home to gargantuan caves that dwarfed even Fantastic Pit. It was also 2,500 miles from RPI and Troy, New York. Five dollars was not small change to most college undergraduates in those days, including Stone and many of his caving friends. Mounting a Mexican caving expedition, like putting together a major mountaineering effort, was exorbitantly expensive in both time and money. It appeared that neither finances nor RPI’s demanding academic schedule would allow a Mexican expedition. But showing an early flash of both the ingenuity and the determination that would mark his later exploits, Stone hatched a plan. He approached RPI’s Geology Department and offered to photograph and map geological features in Mexico if the department would authorize the work as a legitimate, credit-earning project. The department head bit. Stone and his cohorts still had to scrounge money and family cars, which they did. But for the next three years, they spent twelve weeks a year—six in summer, six in winter—making Mexico’s great caves their classrooms.
BILL STONE GRADUATED FROM RPI in 1974 with a B.S. in civil engineering. He spent the next year there earning his master of engineering degree in structural engineering. He could have looked at MIT, Stanford, and Caltech, but serious cave explorers have a way of wrapping their lives around that activity with unusual fervor. So instead of Cambridge or Palo Alto, Stone ended up in Austin, at the University of Texas. U.T. Austin had perfectly respectable doctoral programs, but that was not the only, nor perhaps even the main, reason for Stone’s choice. If Boulder, Colorado, with the Flatirons in its backyard, was a prime breeding ground for top climbers, Austin, with its proximity to great caves American as well as Mexican, played a similar role for cavers.
Stone came away from RPI and upstate New York with more than just a degree. During his time there, he met a pretty, sensitive young woman with lustrous dark hair. A Syracuse native, Patricia Ann Wiedeman was pursuing her B.S. in physical therapy at nearby Russell Sage/Albany Medical College. Like Stone, her academic focus was science. Probably more important, Pat enjoyed sports and the great outdoors. She especially liked hiking, backpacking, and climbing—and, once Stone introduced her to it, caving. They fell in love while Stone was at RPI, and their relationship survived the separation involved when he headed off to U.T. Austin and she stayed back in New York State to finish her own degree.
Within greater Austin there was one bull’s-eye concentration of cavers, in an enclave of slightly seedy houses with big storage areas and small rents on Kirkwood Road. America’s best cave explorers dwelled here, and Bill Stone took right up with them. They called themselves the Kirkwood Cowboys, and many did live something like the fabled cowpunchers of yore, working temporary jobs to save enough money for caving trips. When their supplies ran out, ending their expeditions, they hightailed it back to Austin for days of drudge work and nights of epic parties, not unlike the cowboys’ shenanigans in Dodge and Tombstone.
Appearances aside, those Austin cavers were highly skilled and deadly serious. Their goal was the obverse of Hillary and Tenzing’s historical ascent to the top of the world: Austin’s explorers were determined to find the world’s bottom. They had the techniques and tools to match that ambition, and they believed that one of Mexico’s caves would take them to the last great prize.
Dropping Hell Hole had opened the first phase of Stone’s caving career. A 1976 Mexican expedition launched the second. Stone accompanied another rising superstar, Georgian Jim Smith (no relation to Marion), then arguably the best caver in North America. The year before, Smith, just twenty, had co-led an expedition that broke the world’s depth record, about 4,300 feet, in a formidable French cave called Gouffre de la Pierre Saint-Martin. Now Smith and Stone went on a three-week trip to explore a cave named Huautla (WAWT-la) in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca (Wa-HA-ca).
Huautla, a hard two-day drive from Austin, was Stone’s first excursion into a giant Mexican cave and introduced him to things he could not have imagined. Water, every caver’s greatest enemy, made the strongest early impression. December was very wet that year. Foaming rivers roared down through Huautla, creating huge waterfalls so powerful that it felt to Stone as though the cave walls were resonating like gigantic drums.
Such a description may puzzle readers with no experience of caves, as well as those who have been in only the comfortably dry touristic versions, with their elevated walkways and fantastic light shows. Water, though, is as much a part of caves as darkness. A big cave like Huautla, viewed in profile, looks something like a tree, with a vast network of tiny branchlets on the surface connecting to larger branches farther down, which themselves come together still deeper in major pits and passages.
To oversimplify somewhat, the dissolving action of slightly acidic water in limestone substrata creates most caves, including all of the giants like Huautla. (There are two other types, one created by sulfuric acid, the other by flowing lava.) It takes more water to carve out bigger caves than small ones, and supercaves like Huautla require the highest volume of all. Deep in such caves, explorers encounter watercourses big enough to satisfy the most avid whitewater kayakers. What’s fun on the surface, however, is more likely to be fatal underground. When rainy seasons swell these torrents, they can make sections of the cave impassable, trapping explorers down deep or simply carrying them away.
Beginning in 1965, other teams had explored Huautla to a depth just over 1,000 feet. In 1976, the first major expedition to return to Huautla in eight years was a joint effort between Richard Schreiber and Bill Stone. In all, elements of the expedition spent three weeks exploring Huautla, camping underground for five full days and nights at one point, which in itself was something of a breakthrough. (To put this in perspective, by then climbers had been living in camps on the earth’s highest mountains for half a century. Because of its greater challenges, extended subterranean camping was still in its infancy.) Finding a way around a lake previously thought impassible, they got down to 2,600 feet. Given the depth they had reached, and the volume of water flow they were finding, and the magnitude of the cave’s features, they started to believe that Huautla could go and go—perhaps to the very bottom of the world.
Pulled by the call of that deep, from then until 1988, Stone led or participated in a dozen Huautla expeditions. Preoccupied with his doctoral work, he was not, however, part of a major 1977 Huautla expedition during which six cavers pushed the envelope further than anyone had by living at almost 1,800 feet for twelve days, using over a ton of technical climbing gear and 3,600 feet of rope. At 2,800 feet, the cavers had to rappel through a tremendous waterfall, equal in volume to ten urban fire hydrants gushing at full force. A quarter-mile farther on, they reached the San Agustín Sump, the subterranean lake that had forestalled all expeditions since its discovery by Jim Smith and Bill Steele earlier that year.
In common usage, a sump is a place, lower than its surroundings, where liquid collects. Think of the typical basement sump, from which a sump pump draws water, or the gooseneck sump in pipes beneath sinks. Sumps are the same kinds of places in caves, writ very large: long, winding, flooded tunnels. In places they are so tight that divers have to stop, doff their tanks, push them through, and then follow, donning their equipment again only when the passage widens sufficiently.
That description really does not do the procedure justice, though, because you remain connected to your air tanks only by the regulator hose and mouthpiece. It takes not much force at all to yank the mouthpiece from between your teeth, and if that happens, in what is almost certain to be zero visibility, your chances of finding it again before you drown are not so good. In other sections, sumps can be bigger than the biggest highway tunnels, hundreds of feet across and thousands of feet long, and these present their own challenges.
Given the mortality rate among divers who would later try to probe them, “terminal sumps” was an accurate double entendre. At the time, though, they were thought impassable. One of the more famous cavers of the day summed it up succinctly: “A sump is God’s way of telling you the cave ends there.” They named this one for the region above: San Agustín Sump.
In 1979, Stone co-led an expedition into Huautla to “crack the sump”—that is, find a way to get past it. Cavers always try, first, to find a dry way past a sump. If that proves impossible, the last resort is scuba diving through the sump. The 1970s were just a couple of decades removed from scuba diving’s Stone Age, but that did not slow cave diving’s rapid growth. The combination of clunky equipment, hordes of bright-eyed tyros, and the dearth of formal training programs made the ’70s the deadliest decade of all for a notoriously lethal activity. (Cave-diving technology today is sophisticated and computer-based, but it remains scuba’s deadliest application.)
Stone took those 1970s techniques and equipment down to the sump, along with two other cave divers, Tommy Shiflett and Steve Zeman. Instead of full-sized air tanks, Stone would dive using two “pony tanks,” small side-mounted cylinders that scuba divers normally carry only as emergency backups. Over his wet suit he would wear a climbing harness tied to a heavy rope because, though the current was not too strong where he would enter the water, he feared that the sump might end in a waterfall that would suck him over its lip and drown him deep in the cave. To save weight, he would haul down into the cave neither fins nor a buoyancy compensator (an inflatable vest divers use to float on the surface and maintain neutral buoyancy at depth) nor the lead weights divers wear to counteract the positive buoyancy of their bodies, their wet suits, and the gas in their tanks.
What ultimately transpired illustrated vividly why the ’70s were so deadly for cave divers. Stone submerged into San Agustín Sump’s murky, 64-degree water (35 degrees below body temperature, it’s worth noting) and swam into a descending tunnel. Without weights, his buoyancy pinned him to the top of the tunnel, and without fins, he could not propel himself forward. To move on, he had to flip over and, like one of those ceiling-scurrying demons in horror movies, crawl along upside down.
Stone started with 3,000 psi in his small primary tank. After perhaps fifteen minutes, he was down to 1,900 psi and consuming 100 psi with each breath. At 40 feet deep and looking into a bottomless abyss, he knew it was time to turn around. He yanked three times on the line, the signal for his buddies to pull him back. Nothing happened.
At that depth, Stone was no longer stuck to the ceiling. In fact, he was not buoyant at all. The water pressure had squeezed so much buoyancy out of his wet suit that he was suddenly sinking. His long, soaked line began dragging him down even faster into the bottomless sump. Without a buoyancy compensator, he had no way to stop sinking. Without fins, his bare feet provided almost no propulsion. The faster he sank, the deeper he went, and the deeper he went, the faster he sank. A cave diver’s ultimate nightmare, and one from which Stone could not save himself by awakening.