THIRTY-ONE
ALL FOUR DIVERS RETURNED SAFELY TO Camp 3 and then to Camp 2, where they rested overnight before continuing to the surface, having been underground this time for six days and at Llano Cheve for almost five weeks. Several days later, Stanton, Mallinson, and Hudson flew home. Everything that had been done, Stone’s year of planning and organizing and fund-raising, the many team members coming from all over the world, all the work of all those people, had been done for the divers, who had made three dives and gone home. So it went in expeditionary caving.
While Stone and his divers had been exploring sumps, other cavers had been looking for openings in the cave walls above those sumps. A team of Poles led by Marcin Gala climbed and probed for ten days. On their last try they bolt-climbed 130 feet and discovered one tunnel that continued until they were over the midpoint of Sump 1, far below. There breakdown stymied them, but air blew briskly through it and into the tunnel. That air had to be coming from somewhere.
On April 14, Bill Stone, Robbie Warke, John Kerr, Marcus Preissner, and Bart Hogan began to derig Cheve, working from the bottom up, reversing all the hard work of the first weeks to “clean” the cave of everything they had brought in: ropes, camps, refuse, everything except bolts. In one last-ditch effort to bypass the sump, Stone, Kerr, and Preissner bolt-climbed a new route up a dome 230 feet above the cave floor. At first they thought they had found going passage, for here, as in the other tunnel, they felt moving air. But after a short distance, boulders stopped them yet again.
All that frustration might have been enough to sour some explorers on Cheve for good, but not Stone. “None of this stuff up there was known prior to 2003. There was some contention that this might actually bypass over the sump but we just didn’t have enough time to push it,” he remarked at the time.
Not on this trip, anyway.
AND WHAT OF THAT CONCURRENT EFFORT down in Charco, the attempt to slip in through Cheve’s “back door”? Even for world-class veterans, it was a challenge. Stone and a caver named Mark Minton had discovered Charco’s entrance in 1989, and in the ensuing fourteen years many expeditions had pushed its bottom down to about 4,400 feet deep and its overall length to about 2 miles. What made Charco awful, though, was that unlike most caves, it did not enlarge with depth. The inviting, spacious entrance soon constricted to a crawl space, if that. The team’s expedition report noted that much of Charco was “descending ramps, tight-canyon passages, low crawlways, short rope pitches, and some even lower crawlways mostly filled with water … a cheese grater.”
Before long, it was taking the Charco explorers twenty-four hours just to reach the cave’s “business end,” so they began camping at a site established in 2000, 1.5 miles from the entrance and about 2,200 feet deep. It was nasty even by cave-camp standards. There was room to sit up, but not stand. Cavers slept on small ledges no wider than a typical TV screen. One wrong roll would drop them 40 feet to the cave river below. The roof of those claustrophobic sleeping ledges was coated with a thick layer of gypsum crystals, which showered down every time the explorers brushed the ceiling. But they kept working and before long pushed down to 3,280 feet, requiring the creation of Camp 2, an even less hospitable site. The expedition members set bolts and hung from the walls in hammocks.
While divers were the spear point in Cheve, diggers ruled in Charco. It was not unusual for a digger to be wedged head-down in a vertical hole so tight that he could neither wear a helmet nor turn his head. To dig, he extended one arm down in front of his face, clawed and scraped material from the front of the hole, and ferried it backward, using his other hand to push the dirt out behind. Working this way, the digger resembled a swimmer doing the sidestroke.
Behind the digger came an assistant, who filled a bucket or pan and passed it back. And so on. Inverted in the hole, a digger was showered continually with dislodged dirt that worked its way into nose, mouth, ears, and eyes. Because carbon dioxide is heavier than air, the hole’s atmosphere became increasingly foul, requiring breaks to avoid blackout. Charco diggers spent many long hours like this.
The object was not just to shove dirt around, of course, but to break through into a new passage, and it was the possibility of such a breakthrough that kept the diggers working through conditions that, even by caving standards, were ugly. By the expedition’s end, they had extended the cave to 4,192 feet deep and about 4 miles long—an astonishing achievement, given the conditions under which they had labored for almost ten weeks. But they did not connect Charco to Cheve, so the discovery of one megasystem still eluded them and Bill Stone.
THE DIVERS HAD GONE HOME, AND now it was time for everyone else to go home, too. The cave explorers of the 2003 Cheve expedition left nothing on the field, as they say in athletics. Completing her first real supercave expedition, Andi Hunter found that the experience had been unlike any other in a life filled with arduous adventures. An experienced mountaineer, she’d learned that supercaving really was like climbing Mount Everest in reverse, with the worst—the ascent—coming last. Any number of times during her climb out of the cave, Hunter found herself hanging on to a rope over some huge abyss, so exhausted that she had no energy, no thoughts, nothing left at all except fatigue and pain. It occurred to her more than once that it would be so easy, and a lot less agonizing, just to let go, fall down into the blackness, and die a merciful death.
She and the others kept going. Writ large, that kind of endurance over ten weeks of work added another 4,133 feet to Cheve’s length and extended its depth to 4,869 feet, making it the deepest cave in North America. At the very end, judging from descriptions, many cavers were so spent that getting out of the cave was a close-run thing. Hunter’s team, for instance, outstayed their food supply, so for two days they had just two candy bars to feed their group of five. When they finally made it to Camp 2, they became subterranean dumpster divers, rifling through seven-year-old trash. They were overjoyed to find moldy hunks of cheese, which they quickly devoured, and filthy old tuna cans, which they unhesitatingly licked clean.
But for it all, they had not proved that Cheve was the deepest cave in the world. After all that gulag labor and Bill Stone’s planning, organizing, sponsor seeking, fund-raising, and third-world diplomacy, Cheve remained only the ninth-deepest cave. Stone had made his first trip to Mexico almost thirty years earlier. He had accompanied or led something like fifty expeditions since, his ultimate goal still unachieved. For just about anyone else, it would have been quitting time.
Not Stone. Not even close. As his 2003 expedition whimpered to a close, he was already thinking about how to make 2004’s end with a bang that would be heard around the world.
He could not have known just then that another legendary scientist and supercave explorer, the Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk, was planning to do the very same thing.