FIFTY-ONE
ON OCTOBER 12, THE DAY OF the planned sump crossing, Vash found himself too nervous to eat breakfast, an unusual experience for the hardworking and normally ravenous caver. At midmorning, hauling two bags, he started down, rappelling two long vertical drops, both flowing with strong and freezing waterfalls. During the descent, Vash’s thoughts alternated between excitement, apprehension, and the stoic need to endure. Arriving finally at his personal Rubicon, Vash discovered that Kasjan had already made the dive and was on the other side. It was time for the other cavers to follow.
Gutsy Katya Medvedeva went first. She put on a diving mask, sucked in a huge lungful of air, and disappeared into the flooded tunnel. They waited several long minutes, but she did not return. Vash and the others assumed—hoped—that she was safely on the other side. Then, after what seemed to them a very long time, she reappeared, sent by Kasjan to assist the less experienced Vash and the others. She broke the surface with water streaming from her helmet, lights shining, and a reassuring smile brightening her lovely countenance. Not so bad after all, she reassured the others. Just stay calm.
Vash’s turn came. He had been told that the underwater tunnel was about 30 inches high and 10 feet long. That didn’t sound like much, but its third dimension was what made the tunnel so dangerous: it was just 18 inches wide, roughly the diameter of a large pizza. In addition, its walls were rough and spiked with protrusions that could easily snag a caver. It would not take long to drown in those conditions. He would do well to be able to hold his breath for sixty seconds in water that cold. Throw in the added factors of oxygen-devouring panic and wild attempts to extricate oneself, and the probable time before drowning dropped considerably.
Vash had a premonition that he would not make it through, but he pushed on regardless. He hyperventilated briefly to blow carbon dioxide out of his system, held a last breath, and dove. His premonition quickly came true. He didn’t submerge deeply enough and, halfway through, his helmet caught on a ceiling obstruction. Panicking, he flailed back out of the sump and surfaced, unnerved and gasping. It had been one of the worst moments of his caving career. Though it had taken only twenty seconds or so for Vash to extricate himself, it had seemed much longer. Vash’s exertions had consumed the oxygen in his system voraciously, causing him to feel suffocated much too quickly. Reflecting later, he could remember no specific thoughts during the incident, just a black space filled with terror.
Cavers are nothing if not persistent. Calming himself, Vash went in once again, taking care to go all the way down to the tunnel’s floor this time. He cleared the ceiling but found, terrifyingly, that the sump was so narrow that it pressed against the surface of his body and helmet. This was a very tight scrabble while completely submerged in zero-visibility, 32-degree water. He had been told to expect such conditions, but as veterans of childbirth and combat can confirm, no matter how great the effort, thinking about such things is never adequate preparation for their reality.
When he finally popped out the other side, there was a weird similarity to birth about the whole thing: the painful passage through a constricted canal, followed by shocking emergence from water to air in a cold room where waited an oddly dressed man with lights on his head.
“Calmly, easy, it’s all good now,” Kasjan told the rattled Krubera rookie in a soothing voice. Vash was, of course, hugely relieved that he had survived; but he was almost equally dismayed that, in his role as resupply Sherpa, he would have to pass back and forth through this little chamber of horrors many times before all was said and done.
On the other side, Vash and Igor Ischenko helped Kasjan resupply the 1,400-Meter Camp, leaving additional food, batteries, fuel canisters for stoves, and other items. Before they were finished, Ischenko began to feel nauseated and weak and retreated to the next camp above. Vash and Kasjan finished their restocking, and then it was time to go back through the sump.
Kasjan went through first, leaving Vash alone on the other side, the deepest, and probably the loneliest, man on earth. Only one person had ever been deeper, and that was Gennadiy Samokhin, whose August 2004 dive had taken him to the bottom of the other sump, down at 5,664 feet.
With his heart racing and his fear under control—barely—Vash sucked in as big a breath as his chest would hold and dove in. It took longer than his first crossing had, and he surfaced on the other side trembling and panting. Once again, Kasjan, like a Ukrainian Marion Smith, was there to help.
“Quietly, quietly,” he said with a reassuring smile and a pat on the shoulder. “All is okay.”
Vash had been underground for days. He was soaked, freezing, and in absolute darkness held at bay only by his frail lights. He was not an experienced diver, and the chamber he’d had to pass through, while not long, was squeeze-tight and spiky and filled with opaque water. It had been the longest short period of Vash’s young life, and would be so every time he made that passage.
Over the next few days, both teams brought more supplies to the deep camp, creating caving’s version of the high camp in mountaineering, the final resting place before the launch of the summit assault. Working so hard that deep, Vash was discovering something as true in supercaves as it is for extreme mountaineers in the “death zone” of 8,000-meter peaks: the body does not really recover under such conditions but deteriorates more or less rapidly, depending on the individual. Most supercave expedition members lose a pound a day or more, and since few are fat to begin with, their bodies soon begin eating their own muscles. For Vash, the work was so exhausting that he found himself floating away at times, as had Andi Hunter in Cheve, his mind involuntarily detaching from the pains of cold, sharp rocks, burning muscles, and exhausted body. In such a fatigue-induced stupor, he often heard music and saw the faces of friends floating before him.
By October 14, they’d finished the preparatory work and had moved into the 1,400-Meter Camp, separated from the world by several miles of mostly vertical passages and the frightening sump. This was a far worse place to get hurt than the 500-Meter Camp, where Kabanikhin had been “lucky,” if you could call it that, to suffer his own injury. Serious injury or illness this deep, beneath so many vertical sections, and on the far side of that infernal sump, meant almost certain death. Contemplating such reassuring facts, the team rested, ate, and drank. They were ready to begin the final, crucial stage of the expedition, a two-pronged attempt to find a way past the lower sump that had stopped Gennadiy Samokhin on his final summer dive. Two separate probes would explore passages that diverged at what they called the Large Fork, just above the Samokhin sump. One passage had already been surveyed, but not fully investigated, by the August group. The other was terra incognita.
Leader Kasjan further divided his A team. He and Medvedeva would press on into the new passage; Vash and two others would explore more carefully the passage surveyed by Klimchouk’s August team. As had happened before, there might be windows or cracks that, if pushed, could lead onward.
Vash, despite his exhaustion, finally encountered beauty in Krubera dramatic enough to penetrate even his thick haze of fatigue. In this section of their exploration, he passed through gracefully winding meanders filled with limestone formations of fairy-tale beauty, delicately layered walls of white, brown, black, and red, alternating with sparkling waterfalls. The beauty had a beastly twist, though, because he and his already fatigued mates worked their way down to the terminal sump without discovering new leads. By the time they reached the sump, terminal exhaustion was setting in. Vash was finding it difficult to move. He was becoming hypothermic, his muscles stiffening like cold taffy, his mind sluggish. More than anything else, his body begged for sleep. It was a struggle to get back to the deep camp, where the team dined on hot tea, snacks, and macaroni and cheese, and collapsed gratefully into their sleeping bags.