FIFTY
THE NEXT DAY, VASH, KASJAN, MEDVEDEVA, and Ischenko entered Krubera. They rappelled pit after pit, struggled through the Crimea and Mozambique meanders, dropped their freight bags at about 1,200 feet deep, and then headed back up. The walls of the meanders had a bizarre, pockmarked look that reminded Vash of Abkhazian buildings, blasted and pitted by machine-gun fire and RPG rounds. Kabanikhin rescuers had drilled into these Krubera Cave walls to place explosives in order to blast open passages too tight for the cumbersome litter.
They were finding significant problems with the rigging—jammed knots, old rope, too much distance between belay points. These were remnants of the summer 2004 expedition, and not the usual leavings of a Klimchouk team. But that group had included almost sixty members of widely varying ages, experience levels, and national origins. That made the sloppy work more understandable, but no less frustrating. For Kasjan and his smaller team, it was like trying to untangle a giant fishing-reel backlash one maddening snarl at a time, except that they were doing this in the dark, hanging from sheer walls with hundreds of feet of empty space yawning beneath them, awash in nearly freezing water that numbed their fingers in minutes.
It all put the normally sunny Vash in a rare bad mood. “I was hanging for a long time in doubt, re-doing and securing again,” he wrote in his diary later. “Finally we have finished at the old campsite at the depth of –500m.” It was from here, the 500-Meter Camp, that Kabanikhin’s rescuers had stabilized him and begun his long carry to salvation.
YURY KASJAN REMAINED IN THE CAVE late that day, after the others had retreated to the surface. He often worked alone, relishing the feeling of being one with the cave and grateful for the opportunity to work free of distractions. He was about 1,150 feet deep, free-climbing a 10-foot vertical pitch up to a ledge, when his foot slipped off a wet, slick nubbin and he fell, wrenching a knee. It was not an incapacitating injury, but it easily could have been. If nothing else, the mishap illustrated how every move in a cave, even the seemingly routine, could do you in. Emil Vash was cooking dinner up top when he and other team members heard about their leader’s slip and fall. It was somewhat unnerving for these novitiates to learn that an icon like Kasjan could come to grief so early in this effort.
Though Vash was thus far uninjured, he was suffering as well. He had been told that ascending cavers could go up from the 500-Meter Camp with two sixty-pound bags, twice a day, and feel fine. Based on what he was experiencing—and Vash was a fit, veteran caver—he found that hard to imagine. Moreover, on his way up, Vash discovered how, in supercaves, fatigue and chance can combine to produce unnerving consequences. A few hundred feet above the 500-Meter Camp, he came to a rebelay station where he had to hang from a short fixed rope while detaching his ascenders from the lower climbing rope and reaffixing them to the one that ran on up beyond the rebelay. As he was hanging on the short rope, one of the carabiners fastened to the rebelay bolt in the wall twisted and opened, and out popped one of his safety ropes. Vash had taken the technically correct precaution of reattaching his ascender to the rope above the rebelay station, and that saved him. Had he been hanging only from the “rope rail,” with its defective carabiner, he would have fallen to his death.
Vash made it to the surface without further incident. It was full dark, with bright stars shining overhead, when he emerged. He had a quiet dinner and mugs of sweet tea with Kasjan and Medvedeva. The telephone system picked up random signals from various radio stations, and Vash found the intermittent snatches of music and talk reassuring evidence that human civilization was still out there.
In company with various team members, Vash spent the next days carrying supplies and rigging ropes deeper into the cave. This was not simply a matter of repeated rappels. They had to haul heavy bags through horizontal meanders as well, those maddening tubes that required crawling on hands and knees, and sometimes on bellies. The aptly named Sinusoida Meander was representative. About 650 feet long, it descended 330 vertical feet in a series of cramped, narrow, winding passages that, on a map, look like the nasal passages of a giant with a badly deviated septum. After one such hard haul, Vash reached the 700-Meter Camp at 1:00 A.M. somewhat the worse for wear, with a bad cough, an aching back, and a wrenched knee.
Clearly, this was like no other cave Vash had ever entered. After what sounded suspiciously like a minor attack of The Rapture, he confided to his diary, “In general, I can’t feel any special spiritual closeness with [Krubera] yet. That reminds me of some kind of absence of imagination; I look inside myself and then ideas appear about my own callousness and roughness.”
Determined to persevere, Vash tried to relieve his anxieties by recalling the surface. He fell asleep at the 700-Meter Camp thinking of Arabika’s lush greenswards and meadows so strewn with wildflowers they looked like one of Monet’s impressionistic canvases.
On October 9, Team B ferried loads down to the 500-Meter Camp while Vash’s lead team, starting at 11:00 A.M., began to work down to the 1,200-Meter Camp. It was a tricky route, involving vertical pitches washed by frigid cascades interspersed with more tight, twisting meanders. At eight o’clock that evening, Vash, Kasjan, and Medvedeva occupied the 1,200-Meter Camp, which Vash found surprisingly commodious—dry and roomy and equipped with a tent big enough to hold six comfortably. Vash made minor repairs to his vertical gear, snacked, and listened to the question that would not stop echoing through his brain: Will I get to the bottom? And listened, as well, to its inescapable evil twin: Will I get back to the top?
The camp, a Hilton by expeditionary caving standards, had a stocked pantry with one hundred person-days of food, or enough for the five-person Team A to remain underground twenty more days. That evening, dry and warm in his blue sleeping bag, Vash dreamed not of wildflowers and meadows but, oddly, of beautiful pictures in a grand museum. If there was some symbolism connected to his current adventure, he could not, upon waking, discern what it might be. But at least he was not having nightmares.
Day by day, like mountaineers climbing up to successively higher camps, Vash and his teammates descended to successively lower ones. On October 11 they occupied the 1,400-Meter Camp. From here, Klimchouk’s summer teams had explored virgin cave all the way down to 6,037 feet (1,840 meters), establishing Krubera as the world’s deepest cave. That lowest spot would become this expedition’s jumping-off point. Everything previous was just preparation.
To reach that camp, however, they had to get themselves, their gear, and their supplies through a short but treacherous sump. The sump was just short enough that scuba equipment was not absolutely essential. But it was long and tight enough to stretch a breath-hold dive to its extreme limits. Because bringing scuba gear involved another whole dimension of logistics, Kasjan had elected to traverse this sump by breath-hold diving. Vash knew he would have to go through if he was to have any chance of reaching Krubera’s bottom. It would be his first encounter with such a sump, and he would be attempting it deeper than he had ever been before, as well as in the most dangerous cave he had ever encountered—and quite possibly the most treacherous in all the world.