THIRTY-SEVEN
THINGS THEN WENT SO QUICKLY THAT, later, Klimchouk confessed to feeling a bit mystified, because things rarely went quickly in supercave exploration.
He sent another Yury Kasjan–led expedition, composed solely of Ukrainian cavers, in August 2000. That group descended to 3,888 feet and left the cave rigged for another group, one that, for the first time, included non-Ukrainians. The Spanish caver Sergio García-Dils (who had helped rescue Alexander Kabanikhin) had been imploring Klimchouk for a Krubera expedition spot. So had the prominent French caver Bernard Tourte. Yury Kasjan obligingly agreed to lead this group as well, despite having already spent the better part of August underground.
On August 31, García-Dils, with other Spanish and French cavers, met Kasjan in the Georgian city of Sochi, a Black Sea resort town with an international airport (and coincidentally, the scheduled site of the 2014 Olympic Winter Games). Most of the fighting between Abkhazia and Georgia had ended, but not the centuries-old animosity that divided the two populations. Both sides were guarding their borders, as the Russians were their own.
Unwilling to pay the exorbitant bribes ($300 per caver) demanded by corrupt Georgian border guards, they eventually retained the services of a “fixer” named Vatek. He arranged smaller bribes to Russian guards at a different crossing. There, the Euros waded the Psou River, which separates Russia from Abkhazia, on a pitch-dark night. On the other side, they walked a long way through open fields, which Vatek had neglected to tell them were thickly sown with land mines. They were lucky. All were intact the next morning when Vatek showed up in a van loaded with their caving gear.
The next day, the Arabika Massif proved to have more objective dangers than storms and avalanches. Yury Kasjan and his team were putting the finishing touches on their base camp when a group of AK-47-toting Abkhazians showed up. Cavers had been working in the Ortobalagan for twenty years by then, so most of the locals were accustomed to seeing people dressed in brightly colored suits disappear into the ground for weeks at a time. The cavers hoped that these soldiers would be similarly nonchalant about their expedition. Fortune was with them; the squad had dropped by to say hello and see how things were going. At one point they handed over their rifles so that the visitors could do a little full-auto plinking.
Kasjan’s teams explored down to 4,600 feet. At that point, progress ended at a tight squeeze in a meander with no airflow. Ascending a shaft after the expedition’s last drop to the bottom, Yury Kasjan found another window, this one at about the 4,000-foot level. Here air was moving, and there was a special feel to the place. Klimchouk was not the only one with great cave intuition. Something about that window spoke to Kasjan; he could smell depth there.
Tantalized, Klimchouk and his cavers decided not to wait for the next summer and organized a winter expedition. In one important way, winter was better: with everything frozen on top, the danger of flooding down low was virtually eliminated. Set against that were the difficulties of getting up onto the Arabika Massif in winter, when many feet of snow and ice required the establishment of a mountaineering base camp at the cave’s mouth. Those winter conditions also made it harder to bring supplies in and any injured people out.
Alexander Klimchouk once again oversaw organization of the expedition, and the redoubtable Yury Kasjan led it. This time, though, the eleven-person team included members of a Moscow-based group called the CAVEX (Cave Exploration) Society, which Klimchouk had helped create in 1998 as a kind of daughter group under the Ukr.S.A. umbrella—his fondness for affiliation at work again. Klimchouk had seen a need to improve working relations between Moscow cavers and the Ukr.S.A. His good intentions, alas, would produce a classic demonstration of that old saying about no good deeds going unpunished and CAVEX would have, like Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, a catastrophic effect on his life.
Klimchouk’s son Oleg, then twenty-four, was a CAVEX member and had lobbied his father heavily to include the Muscovites in the winter expedition. Klimchouk had no qualms about Oleg. Given his early start in caving and his love for the activity, Oleg was competent in all the required disciplines. Even so, at first Klimchouk hesitated, for reasons that had nothing to do with concerns about Oleg’s capabilities.
This expedition could produce a once-in-a-century discovery. The Russians had not contributed to previous Krubera explorations, so their unearned opportunity to “skim the cream” (the Ukrainian equivalent of “scooping booty”) would be resented by many in the Ukr.S.A. But Klimchouk was the kind of man who listened hard for the better angels of his nature, and he decided to let them come. The Moscow guys were young, strong, and ambitious cavers and, after all, they were also technically Ukr.S.A. members. Why not give them the privilege of taking part in what might be a historic event? Why not encourage, in this way, international cooperation in cave explorations? Klimchouk’s intentions were good, but they ended up paving the way to a hellish confrontation not only between his association and CAVEX but also between him and Oleg.
Initially, team leader Kasjan was also reluctant to accept the Russians, but Klimchouk persuaded him. They both made it clear to the Moscow contingent, however, that they were coming along as part of the Ukr.S.A. expedition, not as a CAVEX group. The eager young cavers stated that they perfectly understood the situation and happily agreed to abide by Klimchouk’s terms.
The expedition departed from Kiev on Christmas Day 2000. Two days later, a helicopter dropped them and their supplies into deep snow at the base camp area. Whether in Oaxaca or Arabika, rigging is always the first order of business. In just two more days, they’d established Camp 1 at 1,600 feet deep, at the bottom of a 450-foot shaft with a disconcerting tendency to spit rockfall. Staying there was rather like being an infantry platoon under mortar fire.
Unfazed, the cavers soldiered on, working with the efficiency and cooperation typical of Ukr.S.A. teams. Four duos toiled around the clock. Their ultimate mission was to explore the window that Yury Kasjan had found in August. The honor of going first went to the expedition’s youngest member, Anatoli Povyakalo, who had recently celebrated his eighteenth birthday. Povyakalo succeeded in pushing through the window and down to 4,756 feet. Increased air and water flows suggested that they were within striking distance of the then-deepest cave in the world, 5,354-foot deep Lamprechtsofen, in Austria. Late at night on January 4, Moscow caver Ilya Zharkov and a companion broke that record, descending to a huge chamber at 5,510 feet, where a major boulder choke stopped them.
Four more explorers took over the point, hoping to go even deeper, but there was no way around the choke. Expedition members named the vast new room the Chamber of Soviet Speleologists. Unlike extreme mountaineering expeditions, which typically place only a few climbers from a large group on the summit, every member of the 2000–01 Krubera probe got below 5,000 feet, and nine went through a new passage all the way to the expedition’s deepest penetration, nearly 1,710 meters, or 5,609 feet. Krubera was now officially the deepest cave on earth, which certainly was cause for celebration, but everyone expected that it would go much deeper, perhaps another 1,000 feet or more.
The hazardous work of descending more than a mile into Krubera went off without a hitch, but not so the team’s descent from Arabika. They waited anxiously for a scheduled helicopter to pick them up on January 11. Bad weather grounded it at sea level that day, and then worsened. Forecasters predicted high winds, heavy snow, and near-zero visibility for at least three days. The team decided to walk down off the Arabika Massif. They were about three miles from the timberline, and their route took them through terrain where the avalanche hazard was high. They’d made it a bit more than halfway when a large avalanche let go from a mountain face right in front of them. It caught and buried the young caver who had so recently celebrated his eighteenth birthday, Anatoli Povyakalo. Proving that he was the luckiest as well as the youngest, Povyakalo survived, thanks to the fast action of his mates, who dug him out before he suffocated. The remainder of their hike out passed uneventfully, and on January 16 an old gray helicopter, taking advantage of a brief weather break, evacuated their remaining gear from base camp.
BACK IN KIEV, ALEXANDER KLIMCHOUK HAD spent the first week of January 2001 anxiously awaiting news from Kasjan. Klimchouk knew full well that this expedition might bring to fruition decades of grueling, dangerous work. One day after another passed, until he was literally pacing the floor. Then, on January 7, the phone rang. It was Denis Provalov, calling from Arabika on his satellite phone.
“Well, Alexander, I just came to the surface alone. The weather has been a bit wintry, but everything has proceeded pretty well,” Provalov said matter-of-factly. Imagining Klimchouk in a lather of impatience, Provalov could barely suppress his laughter.
“But …?” Klimchouk broke in. “What happened at the bottom?”
“Well, Alexander, perhaps you had better sit down,” Provalov said. “Because we broke the world record here. Krubera is now the deepest cave on earth.”
Then Klimchouk did sit down. The announcement literally left him breathless. This moment was the culmination of nearly thirty years of work, beginning with the discovery of Kilsi Cave in central Asia and continuing through decades of organizing enormous expeditions and taking immense risks year after year. The long dream had become, at last, a reality. It took a while for the fact to sink in. And although Klimchouk had not made it to the bottom on this particular trip, he felt as if he was there, at the bottom of Krubera, the new deepest cave in the world. He rightly considered it the result of his work of decades. The glow lasted for weeks.
According to Klimchouk, he was not the only person Provalov notified with the sat phone. Provalov also called Moscow media with word that “Russian cavers have established the new world record.” It was in Klimchouk’s view “already the beginning of [a] misinformation campaign.”
On January 18, a huge crowd jammed the Kiev railway station, awaiting the arrival of the Sochi train. People came bearing flowers, vodka, champagne, and banners. When the train pulled in, an orchestra launched into a victory march. Television crews and newspaper reporters jostled for position, shouting questions. The expedition members, coming one by one from the train onto the platform, were immediately hoisted onto the shoulders of celebrants and paraded around like heroes.
The new world depth record generated significant coverage in Europe and the United Kingdom, where the general public follows activities like mountaineering, caving, climbing, and diving more closely than do Americans. Even so, the publicity was nothing like that lavished on polar discoverers and summiters of 8,000-meter peaks.
Earth scientists and speleologists certainly understood how significant the Krubera descent really was, and what it portended. Krubera’s penetration had exceeded the previous record by 250 feet in one fell swoop, while advances for the depth record during the previous three decades had averaged less than 50 feet per year. In addition, it was the first time in the history of geology that the deepest cave in the world had been established outside of western Europe. (For a correlative, imagine that the new highest mountain on earth was suddenly discovered in Chile.) During the subsequent month, congratulations by the hundreds poured in from universities, caving societies, academic societies, and scientific organizations all over the globe. It was infinitely gratifying for Klimchouk that people all around the world shared his joy and excitement.
Klimchouk and his team enjoyed the thrill of victory for weeks. But after a while, with the champagne drunk and the exultation quieted, he began to experience the angst that almost invariably sets in after the accomplishment of a great goal. He understood, as transformers do, that discovery is a two-edged sword, cause at once for celebration over great accomplishment and sadness at a long journey’s end. What could he possibly do as an encore, now that his team had discovered the new deepest cave in the world?
It didn’t take Klimchouk long to decide. In February 2001, he established a new project for the Ukr.S.A. and CAVEX: to discover the first 2,000-meter (6,562-foot) deep cave on earth. Despite Klimchouk’s accomplishments, many knowledgeable cavers and geologists scoffed. Before the Krubera exploration, explorers had taken twenty-five years to add about 1,000 feet to the depth record. Now Klimchouk thought he could almost repeat that feat in only a few years? Not likely. But Klimchouk had surprised the scoffers before.
Thus was born the Call of the Abyss Project.