willemite

Humanity is very concerned with great height. Flying, scaling Everest and walking on the moon are obvious examples. But can you name the deepest cave on earth? I didn’t think so. Neither can most people. But there are explorers who live for the challenge of finding the deepest part of our planet.

There are many wonderful books about explorers and adventurers. Among them are Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, which looks at those who climb (or try) Everest and Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees, which looks at a group of climbers who seek to scale the world’s tallest trees. Blind Descent joins their ranks as an info-rich report on the world of deep-earth explorers who risk all to descend deeper into the earth’s crust than anyone has gone before, to find that deepest place.

Tabor takes us into the world of two top-tier cave explorers, the Shackleton, Peary, Edmund Hilary and Amundsen of contemporary cave exploration, American Bill Stone and Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk. Like their renowned predecessors, Stone and Klimchouk were involved in a competition to find the “est.” Not the top or bottom of the planet, but the deepest place on it. It was billed as The Great Cave Race of 2004, an extreme effort to be the first to the deepest cave on earth, seen as the last great terrestrial discovery to be made.

Stone is a classic Type A personality, intensely focused, brilliant and unrelenting. He personally succeeded in designing a new underwater breathing apparatus, a re-breather, which the US military had spent tens of millions of dollars failing to develop. This SCUBA-on-steroids was a critical tool without which underground exploration, which entails having to traverse considerable distances underwater, was seriously limited. But the drive that defined Stone’s accomplishments did little for his relationships with people. His missions were subject to team mutinies more than once. It cost him his marriage and personal relationships beyond. Tabor, armed with full access to expedition materials, gives us a very detailed look at Stone’s efforts, in particular his attempts at the depths of the Cheve super-cave in Mexico.

Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk is a polar opposite to Stone in many ways. Whereas Stone is a large man, six feet four inches, two hundred pounds of rock-like muscle. Klimchouk was a much more modestly proportioned caver, about one hundred fifty pounds, well under six feet tall, and just as solidly muscled. Whereas Stone was a hyper determined individual who expected all around him to mimic his fundamentalist dedication, Klimchouk was a team-player extraordinaire, as focused on organization building and planning as he was on caving. Unlike Stone, who, while admired and respected, is also reviled by many, Klimchouk is admired and respected to the exclusion of most negativity. Whereas Stone was a control-freak who needed to be point man in most aspects of actual caving, Klimchouk was willing to put others in control in the field, particularly as he got older. Klimchouk’s candidate for deepest was the Krubera cave in Abkhazia, a part of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains

If the notion of cave diving makes you think of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar or of Verne’s Professor Hardwigg burrowing from Iceland to Italy beneath the surface, or even Abraham Merritt’s fictional adventures in The Moon Pool, forget about it. Real caves do not harbor ancient lost human civilizations, or sport a wealth of relatively easy tunnels hither and yon. Blind Descent will give you a taste of what real cavers experience.

Here is a sample from page 205

He wormed his way in and was digging out the floor to enlarge the passage when he spotted a mass of daddy longlegs hanging from the ceiling inches above his face. Seen from a distance, a daddy longlegs colony looked like a giant black beard growing on the rock. Seen from inches, the insects looked like big, hairy spiders. For the life of him, Clemmer could not remember whether they had a venomous bite. As long as he did not breathe or move, the colony was quiet. When he did either, the black beard burst into frantic motion. It could have been a scene straight from a Stephen King novel.

It was interesting to learn that in terms of safety deep cave exploration has a lot more in common with extra-terrestrial exploration than it does with, say, mountain climbing. In case of injury, rescuers would have to not only complete the descent the explorer had already done, which could include having to scuba through extended underwater passages with only a few feet of visibility, but then bring the injured party back the way they came, possibly through passages that are so small that one must squeeze through inchworm-style. It is comparable to being stranded with an injury on Mars. A severe injury at great depths constitutes a death sentence.

As with all such tales of specialized areas, there are new words to learn and new concepts to absorb. “Rapture” to a caver, for instance, bears little resemblance to what it might mean to a fundamentalist. Here it means a super-freakout panic attack, one with life-threatening implications. To cavers “sump” is a bit more dramatic than the hole in your basement floor. It is a water-filled hole that one must traverse to get to the next section of a cave system.

This is not a book you rip through. It takes some concentration, but that is not to say that it is a tough read. It is not. It is just not a fast one. No big deal, really, in a book of this modest length.

I was left with a question at the end of reading Blind Descent. While it is possible for us to identify the tallest mountain, the longest river, even the biggest pumpkin, how can we really know for certain that this or that cave is the absolute, final-word, no question deepest. Surely a little tectonic tango might dislodge a bit of this or a hunk of that to open up currently-blocked passages in candidate holes. But for now, we do have a world champion. No, I am not telling.

This is such an interesting read that once you dive into it, you will have a hard time coming back out until you’re done.