TWO
BUT DEATH TRUMPS ALL, and other considerations would have to wait. Yeager—or, rather, his corpse—was now the expedition’s responsibility, like it or not. The Mexican authorities, never entirely comfortable with these big cave expeditions, which caused unrest among some insular and superstitious locals, were going to be very unhappy about the death. Worse, they might even want the body, but had none of the skills necessary to retrieve it themselves. That job would fall to Bill Stone, his co-leaders, and the other cavers. The problem was that nobody had recovered a corpse from so deep in a cave like Cheve.
Supercaves present more hazards than any other extreme exploration environment. Just descending into and climbing out of them is exorbitantly dangerous. Recovering a body, dead or alive, from deep within any cave is even worse, increasing that danger by an order of magnitude. The same year Chris Yeager died, a caver named Emily Davis Mobley broke her leg only four hours and several hundred vertical feet from the entrance of a New Mexico cave called Lechuguilla—big but far less hazardous than Cheve. It took more than one hundred rescuers four days to bring her to the surface. One expert estimated that every hour of healthy-caver descent time equaled a day of ascent in rescue mode in Lechuguilla, which was noted for, as cave explorers put it, “extreme verticality.”
“Extreme verticality” describes perfectly the part of Cheve through which Yeager’s body would have to be hauled. From its entrance, the cave drops like a steep staircase almost 3,000 vertical feet, over a total travel distance of 2.2 miles, before it begins to level off somewhat. It is not one smooth, continuous drop. Those 3,000 feet include innumerable features and formations, with the odd level stretch, but Cheve’s main thrust here is down. One giant shaft alone is 500 feet deep. Like rock climbers, cavers call such vertical drops “pitches.” There are also shorter pitches—many of them, in fact—as well as waterfalls, crawl spaces, walking passages, lakes, huge boulder fields, and many more formations, unique and almost impossible to describe except with a camera.
In the entire cave, there are ninety pitches requiring rappels. Thirty-three of those lay between Yeager’s body and the surface, including that 500-foot monster. So going back up that way with a body on a litter, at virtually every one of those thirty-three pitches, recovery teams would have to install haul systems of ropes and pulleys and counterweights. The bigger the wall, the more complex the hauling system.
Rigging such haul systems there, particularly on the big walls, would be more dangerous than rappelling down and climbing back up such faces. The work would require that fatigued cavers hang for hours high in the air, in the dark, sometimes under streams of cold water, in painfully biting harnesses, setting bolts and hangers and pulleys. All that would be even before beginning the hauling, which would entail the use of living human bodies as counterweights, among other unpleasant and dangerous tasks. There is more to body recovery, but this gives a hint of its complexity.
Yeager’s father, Durbin, arrived several days after the accident with another relative and a caver friend from Indiana. The body, meanwhile, had been secured temporarily not far from the accident site. There followed a week of discussions between the expedition leaders and the Yeager contingent. Stone, not surprisingly, took the lead for his side. He and the others felt strongly that putting expedition members at great risk to retrieve a dead body was unwise. An accomplished climber himself, Stone pointed out that mountaineers often buried fallen comrades in situ. (At the time, something like 130 climbers had died on Everest, and most of those bodies were still up there.) Stone also pointed out, perhaps indelicately but correctly, that recovering the body would be much easier if it were left in the cave for several years, allowing it to desiccate. A smaller team could then more safely retrieve the bones.
Heated discussions followed, particularly between Stone and his co-leaders and Yeager’s friend from Indiana. Finally, the law was laid down: no one would be going into Cheve to get that body. In the end, Durbin Yeager understood that a recovery attempt would invite more accidents, and he reluctantly agreed to have his son’s body buried in Cheve Cave.
Eleven days after the accident, expedition members carried Chris Yeager’s corpse (in what condition can scarcely be imagined) up a short distance to a sandy alcove where an appropriate burial site had been located. They dug a proper grave, interred Yeager with an expedition T-shirt, conducted a Christian burial service, and erected a tombstone with words inscribed in carbide-lamp soot.
The body problem had been solved, but the Mexican authorities remained agitated. Local officials understood that expeditions could make important discoveries, which in turn could stimulate tourism, as had happened in, say, the Central American countries with Aztec and Mayan ruins. The expeditions also contributed cash to local economies when they bought supplies, rented buildings, and hired local porters.
But the cavers also caused unrest among residents, most of whom believed, despite the best efforts of Stone and other leaders, that the gringos were stealing gold and precious artifacts. The locals objected more strenuously to cavers’ incursions for religious and spiritual reasons. To them, the caves were home to deities, as sacred as cathedrals and mosques are to Christians and Muslims. The idea of foreigners living in them, defecating and urinating and having sex and leaving garbage, was highly offensive—as those activities would have been in the Vatican or the Grand Mosque of Mecca.
A caver’s death was more than enough to upset the apple cart. The cavers knew that the law was different down here. People were sent to jail for any reason, and sometimes for no reason. And there might have been worse places than Mexican prisons, but they were very close to the bottom of the list.
The expedition leaders were ordered to report to a police station in nearby Cuicatlán. There, the attorney general for the state of Oaxaca grilled Stone long and hard over the telephone. Amazingly, the official demanded that Stone and the others produce Yeager’s body, and there were hints about jail if this was not done. Eventually, Stone convinced the man that he could well have more bodies on his hands if he insisted on seeing Yeager’s. All right, the attorney general growled, but if anybody else dies from now on, a body will be produced—or else. This had never been required before. To Stone’s way of thinking, it was absurd. It was also, he felt with some resentment, another consequence of Yeager’s recklessness.
Surprisingly, the authorities did not evict the team from Cheve or Mexico, and for a brief while Stone thought they had all dodged a bullet. But then a new request to end the expedition arose, and it came from a source as undeniable as the Mexican police, though for different reasons.
The request came not from Oaxaca but from Indiana. Chris Yeager’s parents felt that it would be inappropriate to have cavers shambling back and forth over their son’s fresh grave in the sandy passage. Cheve was now a burial site; time should be allowed to pass before active exploration resumed.
The expedition abided by the family’s wishes, though it meant ending an effort, only recently begun, for which many had sacrificed time and money and had already put themselves repeatedly at great personal risk. In truth, had it been up to Bill Stone alone, the expedition would have continued. Aware of that, some were appalled. How could you keep going—it was just a cave, after all—with the body of a freshly killed young man in there, and on your conscience as well?
Stone operated in a different frame. He liked to point out that ships coming to the New World routinely lost 30 percent or more of their crews. Nor, he said, had deaths ever stopped explorers like Scott, Amundsen, or Lewis and Clark. Turning to more recent efforts, he also derided—publicly—NASA’s timid approach to space exploration. But the decision at Cheve was not his alone to make.
As word of Chris Yeager’s death and its aftermath circulated, it caused a rift in the caving community. A serious, science-minded minority, familiar with the precedents of exploration history, tended to find the in-cave burial acceptable. A much larger, more casual majority thought it abhorrent. By summer, though, the controversy had cooled, turning the spotlight away from the expedition and Yeager’s death. Stone, relieved, felt that the incident was behind him.
But it was not. In early 1992, Yeager’s Indiana friend, with Tina Shirk’s help, organized an expedition to recover the body. They were fortunate to have assistance from a team of gifted Polish cavers, who brought Yeager’s body to the surface in three days. The Poles were very good, but the retrieval was easier than it would have been a year earlier, for the very reason Stone had stated to Durbin Yeager. Decomposition had done its work, and the body, while not just a skeleton, did come out in pieces.
Once again, news of “the infamous Chris Yeager incident,” as Stone came to think of it, ignited fresh controversy. Many American cavers, Stone among them, were outraged that an upstart team of foreigners had invaded “their” cave. Others, especially Yeager’s friends and family, supported the effort.
The fact that two other expedition leaders and Chris Yeager’s father were involved in the original decision to leave the body in place seemed to get lost along the way. Partly that was because the outspoken Stone’s larger-than-life ways and brusque manner helped make him a natural lightning rod for criticism. Several magazine journalists who spent relatively brief periods with Stone found him less than ingratiating. Their articles in widely read, influential publications such as Outside, National Geographic Adventure, and The Washington Post Magazine reflected that, describing him variously as “domineering,” “obsessed,” and “pompous.”
Stone’s hard-driving, type-A way of going alienated some in the caving community as well. Two of the cavers interviewed early in the research for this book had identical responses when Stone’s name came up: “He’s an a*shole.” A third echoed that, adding, “And people die on his expeditions.”
But it is important to note that the majority of people who have actually gone down into the earth with Stone praise his courage, intelligence, strength, and especially the indomitable perseverance that, decade after decade, enables him to keep pursuing a goal that, each time he nears it, recedes like a mirage.
Not genetically disposed to niceties, Stone also inherited at least two of the hard personality traits found so often in great achievers, explorers not excepted: he is a classic alpha male, and a type-A personality as well. One especially salient type-A characteristic is extreme impatience driven by a maddening sense of urgency. It’s an open question whether such people suffer fools or delays less gladly. For them, everything from mowing the lawn to mounting great expeditions feels like a losing race against time, which always seems to be running out.
Niceness aside, type-A and alpha-male tendencies do confer certain advantages, like the willingness—need, some would say—to take on challenges that to the rest of us seem incomprehensible at best and insane at worst. Like spending thirty years pursuing the deepest cave on earth, for example. Well before the twentieth century’s end, in fact, knowledgeable sources were drawing comparisons between Bill Stone and the driven, brilliant, death-defying Italian climber Reinhold Messner, unquestionably the greatest mountaineer of all time.
The comparison had merit, but one of its corollaries was less frequently mentioned. True greatness is rarely achieved without collateral damage. Like Messner, Stone pursued Olympian goals with relentless, single-minded passion, and it cost both dearly: marriages, families, lovers, security, friendships, and the lives of friends as well.
Stone curtly and unapologetically denied my request to accompany one of his Mexican supercave expeditions as part of this book’s early research. A first meeting with him took months to arrange, partly because of his frenetic schedule and partly because he wasn’t overly excited at the prospect of frittering away precious hours with a writer. By the time he finally did submit to an interview, I found it hard not to expect some extraordinary combination of Captain Ahab, Mr. Kurtz, and Spider-Man.
Perhaps, though, that should not have been surprising. What ordinary man, after all, would sacrifice everything for the privilege of going to hell?