FORTY-NINE
ONE HAPPY RESULT OF ALEXANDER KLIMCHOUK’S organizational skills was that his expeditions ran like Swiss watches. Another was his ability to mount multiple expeditions in a single year. There were at least four more weeks of acceptable caving weather in 2004, and four more iffy ones after that before winter really slammed down on Arabika. Klimchouk and his fellow explorers were determined to use them.
Klimchouk’s August expedition paved the way for 2004’s second Krubera effort. Between the August 2004 expedition and a previous one he had led in Turkey, Klimchouk had been in the field for two and a half months. He simply could not manage another month away from family, university, and laboratory. Someone else would have to lead the next effort, scheduled for October.
Yury Kasjan was the logical choice. He knew Krubera as well as anyone alive. Like Klimchouk, Kasjan was a fine leader, quiet but good-natured; had unbelievable stamina; and was technically adept at all aspects of extreme caving. Younger cavers liked him for his steadiness, his dry humor, his vast experience, and his concern for their safety.
Kasjan left home early on Thursday, September 30, 2004. On his way out of the house, he found a note from his son:
Dad,
I bet a pack of Snickers that you will find the way in the cave and make it deeper. So give it your best shot!
I will do my best, dear son, Kasjan thought to himself. But it would be no cakewalk. He had been to the Arabika ten times and in Krubera six. He had suffered its killing cold, shivered in its freezing water, inched along its endless crawlways, and rappelled its gigantic shafts. He had spent not just days or weeks but months down in its deepest, darkest reaches. He knew that this could well be the hardest expedition of all, not just in Krubera but also of his life.
Despite his years of experience, as Kasjan drove to the sparkling new steel-and-glass Kiev train station, he found himself worrying more than usual. Down here at sea level it was still late summer, but they would be spending October at 8,000 feet in the Caucasus Mountains. Winter conditions would definitely begin in November. October was a toss-up—mountain weather was notoriously fickle. Would the serious snow and windstorms hold off long enough for them to complete their expedition? Even if it didn’t snow in October, it would rain, exacerbating the risk of dangerous flooding. And what would they find beyond the sump that had stopped Gennadiy Samokhin in August? Based on dye-trace experiments, they knew Krubera could go to 8,000 feet or even deeper. But could they unlock the route that proved this cave, once and for all, to be the deepest on earth?
Kasjan was also concerned about his nine-person team. By supercave expeditionary standards, this was a radically small group, the caving equivalent of a light, fast, alpine-style mountaineering attempt. (Ironically, it was a mirror image of the small team Stone had taken to Cheve earlier that same year.) All of the team members were fit, well-equipped, experienced cave explorers, but only Kasjan had been in Krubera before. How would the others fare in the deepest, most dangerous cave in the world?
One of Kasjan’s young team members, Emil Vash, twenty-two, was wondering the same thing. The tall, slender Vash, who resembled the American actor Edward Norton, was pursuing a degree in physics at Uzhgorod National University in far western Ukraine. Like Klimchouk and so many others, Vash had started caving early, at fifteen, with a Young Pioneer Palace. He met Yury Kasjan in 2000 and soon joined his expeditions. By 2001 he was leading his own groups into serious caves.
It was raining in Uzhgorod on Thursday when Vash boarded the train to Kiev, where he would join Kasjan and some of the others. He shared his compartment with a quiet man named Vasil, a talkative man named Sergey, and a pretty girl named Svetlana, who regaled the others with tales of her psychotherapy sessions. Like all long journeys, this one began with small adventures, a “wonderful atmosphere of understanding between unknown but not strange people,” Vash wrote in his diary. As a newcomer to Krubera, Vash saw things with fresh eyes; this made his observations especially valuable. In addition, he was a gifted writer and his diary is the best record of the October 2004 expedition.
In Kiev, Vash disembarked and went shopping at Atlantida, a Ukrainian outdoor-gear emporium, to buy new caving coveralls, batteries, an ascender, and other equipage. He then met Kasjan and more cavers and they all took another train to the city of Sochi, the jumping-off point for Ukrainian Krubera expeditions. On October 3, under a cloudy sky spitting rain, Kasjan, Vash, and the other team members crossed the border from Russia into Georgia. Their passage was uneventful save for the scrutiny of one suspicious border guard, who thought that their dozens of small batteries looked like rifle cartridges.
Nine cavers would work underground in two separate groups. Team A included Kasjan, Vash, and three others. Blond Ekaterina “Katya” Medvedeva, twenty-three, was as strong and brave as she was pretty. Igor Ischenko, thirty-six, and Kyryl Gostev, twenty-one, rounded out the team. These five would be the expedition’s spearhead, employing Klimchouk’s “no dead ends” approach. Team B, which would support the other group’s effort, included Dmitry Furnik, thirty-six; Ilja Lapa, twenty-one; and Sergey Baguckiy, forty-two, all from Yalta; and Vladimir Dyachenko, twenty-five, from Kharkov.
Kasjan’s plan called for the use of at least four underground camps that had been created by the August expedition, at 700 meters (2,297 feet), 1,215 meters (3,986 feet), 1,400 meters (4,593 feet), and 1,640 meters (5,381 feet). The schedule called for a week to descend, a week exploring at depth, and another week ascending. This was less time than normally required for a major Krubera effort, but Kasjan expected that the rigging left by the summer expedition would speed their passage.
As usual, the team members took great pains in sorting and packaging their food “modules,” each of which contained rations for five people for two days. Bill Stone’s cavers, in line with their leader’s view that weight considerations were more important than comfort on expeditions, tended to rely on light but unpalatable freeze-dried foods in their deepest camps. Klimchouk preferred to work with caves rather than “attack” them; he believed, as well, that happy, comfortable cavers could explore more effectively than those strung out by Spartan conditions. In addition to staples like rice and pasta, therefore, Klimchouk’s teams stocked up on comfort foods: candy, cookies, cakes, sausages, cheese, canned vegetables, condensed milk, paté, nishtyak (a gorplike blend of raisins, apricots, prunes, figs, and candies), and, of course, spirits for appropriate celebrations.
On October 4, the expedition established its base camp. Emil Vash and Vladimir Dyachenko, lacking tents, holed up in a small, icy cave. Vash’s dinner that night included hot milk laced with butter and honey, to ease a hacking cough brought on by the altitude and the day’s exertions. Snow covered the ground around their foxhole-like abode. Both men were anxious to get down into the cave, where conditions would be appreciably more comfortable.