THIRTY-THREE
OTHER THAN DEPTH, CHEVE AND KRUBERA caves have very little in common. Krubera is situated at 43 degrees of latitude, some 1,800 miles farther north than Cheve. It is located in the contested region of Abkhazia in southeastern Republic of Georgia, north of the Black Sea. There, once upon a friendlier time, chain-smoking Russian men in Speedos and more sensibly attired women frolicked in salt water that, at 77 degrees Fahrenheit, was just brisk enough to counteract their copious infusions of vodka. From the shore of the Black Sea, the land rises dramatically to the Arabika Massif, a large mountain mass that is part of the western Caucasus Mountains; Krubera is within the massif.
To reach the cave in winter, modern explorers travel by helicopter. That’s not as easy a trip as it sounds. In January 2005, a helicopter full of cavers and supplies crashed when it caught a rotor tip in the snow while trying to land in low visibility near Krubera’s mouth. Everyone on board was injured, several people, including the pilot, seriously. Only sheer luck saved that expedition from multiple fatalities even before anyone set foot in the supercave. When the weather cleared, another helicopter evacuated the battered party, and that winter’s effort was scrubbed.
In summer, the cavers ride old army trucks along roads that, for the last few miles, are little more than goat paths, to an elevation of about 6,500 feet on the Arabika, which is one of the largest limestone massifs in the western Caucasus, if not in the world. These are serious mountains, with frequent, powerful storms during the long winters and continual avalanche hazard. In summertime, though, the land surrounding Krubera is stunningly beautiful, like something out of a J.R.R. Tolkien novel.
The massif’s elevations range from 5,800 feet to almost 8,000, and flying over it at 50,000 feet, you can see that it roughly resembles a four-leaf clover. The Arabika Massif is not huge—about 8 miles in a straight line from the outer edge of one clover leaf to the outer edge of its opposite. The clover here is white rather than green, because the massif and its mountains are composed of whitish and unusually hard limestone. The rock is high in silicon content, which gives it a sandpapery feel and a sparkly look under certain angles of light.
The massif might have been created by someone using a giant ice cream scoop to carve steep-walled, bowl-shaped valleys out of the mountainsides. That someone was Mother Nature, and her scoops were ancient glaciers, which left behind a fantasyland of emerald-green valleys and bone-white peaks and ridges, landforms so varied and chaotic they look like a storming ocean frozen in mid-tumult. The cave’s immediate environs bear a name as beautiful and rolling as the land: the Ortobalagan Valley.
Krubera Cave’s entrance, on a hill in the Upper Ortobalagan Valley, is a remarkably small hole in the ground, about the size and shape of a big-wave surfboard. Both Cheve and Krubera are true supercaves, thousands of feet deep and with many miles of surveyed passages, but there the similarities end. Cheve resembles a gigantic L, with an initial shaft dropping about 3,000 feet and an elongated foot descending for almost 2 more miles at a moderate slope of roughly 10 degrees. Krubera, on the other hand, is 90 percent vertical, pitch after pitch connected by short passages called meanders. While noncavers would be terrorized by the yawning pits, one of which is 500 feet deep, experienced explorers look forward to their thrilling rappels, if not to their grinding ascents. They uniformly despise, however, “the f*cking meanders,” as they are most frequently called.
Speleogenesis—the way caves like Krubera are created—is to blame for such conformation. Water plunging vertically has much greater erosive power than water flowing horizontally. Falling water can carve enormous vertical chambers, while water flowing laterally in the same cave will remove much less material. Thus meanders are excruciatingly tight, especially in their first few hundred feet, where outflow from the vertical chambers is slowest and carves out much less rock, year after year. Traversing Krubera’s many meanders is like crawling under your car (while half submerged in flowing water) for thousands of yards.
The caves’ body temperatures are also different. Cheve is cool but relatively mild, with air temperatures that range from 47 degrees at its entrance to the low 50s down deep. Water temperatures match the air temperatures. To eastern Europeans, that’s balmy. Alexander Klimchouk said bluntly, “Mexican caves are warm.” Krubera, on the other hand, is freezing, the kind of cold that, when you’re working with water and wind, can quickly put you into third-stage, potentially fatal hypothermia. The average air temperature at the bottom of Krubera’s first pit is 32 degrees in summer and zero or below in winter; it’s 40 degrees at the cave’s bottom. The inflowing water is never much more than 32 degrees; unprotected survival time in water that cold is fifteen minutes or less. Given the airflow though Krubera, the windchill factor remains below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Krubera cavers protect themselves with multiple layers of high-tech undergarments and waterproof dry suits, but dry suits are never completely that, so the cavers are always damp and always cold.
Both caves’ explorers like to say that their cave is the more challenging. In reality, Cheve and Krubera both present unique difficulties. Cheve is longer, with more rivers and waterfalls. Krubera is steeper, tighter, and much colder. Very few cavers have been in both, but those who have describe them, in respectful tones, like this: very different, very difficult, and very dangerous.
Locals have known about Krubera’s mouth for almost a century. Its entrance chamber was first descended and documented by Georgian speleologists in 1963. Over the next two decades, other scientists looked into Krubera, but none could get through an impassable constriction at 290 feet. Several expeditions visited the cave after that, but were unable to add anything new. The consensus formed that Krubera was undistinguished and had no potential for real depth.
Then along came a man named Klimchouk.
TODAY, ALEXANDER KLIMCHOUK, PH.D., is fifty-three years old and sports a large, perfectly trimmed, salt-and-pepper mustache. He looks like a blend of Charles Bronson and Walter Matthau: craggy and handsome like the former, avuncular and a bit mournful like the latter. If God had set out to design Bill Stone’s diametric opposite, he could not have done a better job than Alexander Klimchouk. Stone grew up with a Brady Bunch family in a tree-lined suburb. Klimchouk was raised, more or less, in a Soviet industrial city by a twice-divorced mom struggling with infant triplets. Stone stands six feet, four inches tall and weighs 200 pounds. Klimchouk is five feet, eight inches tall and weighs 150 pounds. Stone is a classic type A—brusque, impatient, rushing. Klimchouk, or “Father Klim,” as younger cavers sometimes call him, is mild-mannered, soft-spoken, polite to the point of courtliness, deliberate in thought and motion. Since his divorce, Stone has had relationships with one beautiful woman after another. Klimchouk has been married to the same woman, the hydrogeologist Natalia Yablokova, since 1975.
The two men are just as different in their exploration philosophies. Bill Stone unquestionably appreciates teamwork but values leadership more, preferring to be at the top of any team he accompanies. He has gone on relatively few expeditions that he did not lead. Klimchouk appreciates leadership but values teamwork more, firm in his conviction that only “a big society of united people” is capable of performing the multigenerational work supercaving requires. He routinely delegates leadership responsibilities to trusted younger cavers.
Klimchouk was born in Odessa, a Black Sea port 260 miles south of Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, in August 1956—coincidentally, the same year and month in which French explorers discovered the world’s first kilometer-deep cave in their country’s Alps. Klimchouk’s father died when he was four. His mother remarried, moved with her new husband to Kiev, and, when Klimchouk was six, gave birth to triplets, two daughters and a son.
Klimchouk’s mother was understandably preoccupied with her three new babies. She did not ignore Klimchouk, but neither was she able to keep a close eye on him. When she subsequently divorced her second husband, the triplets’ father, things became even more difficult. Kiev was no idyllic suburb. There were gray factories aplenty, cranking out fishing trawlers, machine tools, medical equipment, and motorcycles, among other industrial products. Kiev also had its share of gray concrete apartment buildings, gray weather, and gray apparatchiks.
But Kiev did have a bright and beautiful side. Tidy beds of red and blue flowers (Ukraine’s national colors during the Soviet era) bordered sidewalks and streets, many of which were shaded by grand old chestnut trees. There was a Lenin Street, of course, but also the more splendid Shevchenko Avenue, which honored the national hero Taras Shevchenko, a nineteenth-century poet and painter who fought Russian tyranny. Good restaurants served chicken Kiev and other fancy edibles. Art shows and theaters enlivened life throughout the city, bathers played in the Dnieper River, and Olympic-caliber athletic events took place at the 100,000-seat Central Stadium.
The Soviet system, for all its faults, tried to do right by children. Two mainstays provided support for young people throughout the Soviet Union in general and Kiev in particular. One was school. The other, arguably more important, was a Soviet-wide organization called Young Pioneers, a blend of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the YMCA, and the Young Republicans (or Democrats). The state-sponsored Young Pioneers offered more than American youth groups ever had. In the 1970s, for example, a Young Pioneer camp called Orlyonok hosted seventeen thousand youngsters each year. The camp had sixty buildings, a movie theater, outdoor and heated indoor swimming pools, a secondary school, a medical building, an air and space museum, a passenger ship, forty-five sailboats, motorboats, and two hundred different activity offerings.
Every city, Kiev included, had Young Pioneer Palaces, centers for recreation, athletics, education, and, of course, some good old-fashioned Communist indoctrination. The first such centers were created in Moscow in the 1920s. These actually were former palaces, from which wealthy and politically incorrect owners had been evicted, not infrequently with holes in the backs of their heads. The government also built new Young Pioneer Palaces. By 1970 more than three thousand of them functioned throughout the Soviet Union. Kiev’s, completed in 1965, was one of the largest, on a par with Moscow’s. The Kiev facility was a sprawling, modern four-story building with vast expanses of glass and bright, spacious interiors. Grassy pavilions with chestnut trees surrounded the campus. There was even a silver-domed observatory on the roof.
The palaces complemented the Soviet schools, which stressed academics and indoctrination almost exclusively. Palace membership was voluntary, and children could choose from age-classified “hobby groups” in sports, creative and artistic pursuits, technical instruction, politics, and various outdoor activities. No tuition was charged, and the quality of instruction was excellent. One common, and classically Communistic, responsibility linked everything: teach what you have been taught. That theme would prove especially beneficial for cave exploration in eastern Europe, where leaders inculcated their teams with the idea that unlocking the secrets of supercaves was a lifetime commitment whose success depended on passing skills and knowledge from one generation to the next.
In the end, though, Young Pioneering was more play than politburo. Part of the goal was to produce well-rounded youths. Another was to identify unusual potential in children and develop it for nationalistic purposes like the Olympics and scientific discoveries. Alexander Klimchouk displayed such potential.
For as long as he could remember, Bill Stone had been fascinated by science and, in his youth, by chemistry in particular. Klimchouk, almost from the time he learned to read, loved geology. With extraordinary initiative, at age eleven he embarked on a self-directed search for knowledge in the Kiev Young Pioneer Palace.
Klimchouk passed through the imposing front doors and walked hall after echoing hall, exploring each floor in turn, finally coming to an open door on the other side of which sat an old professorial type.
“I’m looking for the geologists,” Klimchouk said.
“Come on in,” the man replied with a smile and a wave. “Here we do speleology, but it contains also geology.”
Seeing one image in a high school slide show changed the course of Bill Stone’s life. Passing through that office door changed Klimchouk’s.