THREE
ACTUALLY, FOR AN EXPLORER LIKE STONE, Cheve may be more heavenly than hellish, but by any measure it is an extraordinary cave, and the world has an extraordinary couple from California to thank for its 1986 discovery. In December of that year, the Chernobyl fallout was just ending, Reagan’s Iran-contra fallout was just beginning, and while their friends were wrapping Christmas gifts in California, Carol Vesely and Bill Farr were thrashing around remote forest, high in the Sierra Juárez, desperately seeking a supercave. They were going on a tip given them by another caver, Peter Sprouse, who had made an exhaustive study of topographical maps of the area.
Supercaves, vast geologic monsters miles long and many thousands of feet deep, are to the subterranean world as 8,000-meter peaks are to mountaineering; their exploration requires huge, costly expeditions, multiple subterranean camps, and weeks underground. Actually, supercaves are even rarer than 8,000-meter peaks, of which there are fourteen. In 1986, Vesely and Farr could count on the fingers of one hand caves that were contenders for the title of world’s deepest.
Like serious mountain climbers, Vesely and Farr were fit, technically expert, adventurous, and iconoclastic. Their lives revolved around caving. Vesely had become a “professional” substitute teacher because it afforded freedom for her true passions, subterranean exploration and discovery. Farr, a software engineer, negotiated work arrangements that allowed him months of free time. Caving was their true career. That other stuff paid the bills.
Vesely, a petite blonde then twenty-nine, and the wiry, energetic Farr, twenty-six, knew that the ultimate supercave—the deepest one on earth—had yet to be discovered. They also knew that these Mexican mountains were prime supercave territory. This whole region was what geologists call karst—a limestone landscape. That and copious local rainfall created ideal conditions for the formation of giant caves.
Thus this Christmas visit, which had them panting in the thin air at 9,000 feet, twelve miles northeast of the nearest town, a day’s car travel to the Gulf of Mexico. At sea level in Oaxaca, the climate was tropical. Up where they were, it was pleasantly cool and clear.
After several hours of hiking through mountain forest, Vesely and Farr came upon a gigantic sinkhole half a mile long and three times as wide. A very welcome sign. Sinkholes are created when water flowing underground erodes soluble subterranean limestone, causing the surface to collapse; big sinkholes foreshadow big caves. They continued on down an old logging road, then began following a stream that dove into the woods and kept flowing downhill. They hoped that the stream would eventually lead them to a cave. They could both sense that something big might be in the offing, and soon they were running, weaving between pines that rose like giant slalom poles as they followed the stream’s path.
“Wouldn’t it be great to find a really grand Mexican-style cave entrance?” Vesely panted. By this she meant something big enough to drive a 747 through. At that very moment they skidded to a stop at the edge of a cliff. The stream plunged over it, falling to a lovely green meadow 25 feet below. And sure enough, a quarter mile away, above the meadow’s far end, stood a really grand, Mexican-style cave entrance.
It looked like a giant black mouth with ragged teeth, several stories high and wide enough to hold two Greyhound buses parked end to end. Both Vesely and Farr were tempted to sprint across that meadow and plunge right in, but they knew better. This was not like making a new route up a mountain, which climbers could preview with maps, telescopes, and photographs. Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) gave similar advance looks undersea. Even Armstrong and Aldrin saw pictures of their Sea of Tranquillity landing site before they arrived.
But cave explorers like Vesely and Farr could not see the route and so could not anticipate the dangers, a partial list of which includes drowning, fatal falls, premature burial, asphyxiation, hypothermia, hurricane-force winds, electrocution, earthquake-induced collapses, poison gases, and walls dripping sulfuric or hydrochloric acid. There are also rabid bats, snakes, troglodytic scorpions and spiders, radon, and microbes that cause horrific diseases like histoplasmosis and leishmaniasis. Kitum Cave in Uganda is believed to be the birthplace of that ultragerm the Ebola virus.
Caving hazards related to equipment and techniques include strangulation by one’s own vertical gear (primary and secondary ropes, rappel rack and ascender connections, et cetera), rope failure, running out of light, rappelling off the end of a rope, ascenders failing on muddy rope, foot-hang (fully as unpleasant as it sounds), and scores more that, if less common, are no less unpleasant.
One final hazard, so obvious that it’s easy to forget, deserves mention: getting lost.
Supercaves create inner dangers as well, warping the mind with claustrophobia, anxiety, insomnia, hallucinations, personality disorders. There is also a particularly insidious derangement unique to caves called The Rapture, which is like a panic attack on meth. It can strike anywhere in a cave, at any time, but usually assaults a caver deep underground.
And, of course, there is one more that, like getting lost, tends to be overlooked because it’s omnipresent: absolute, eternal darkness. Darkness so dark, without a single photon of light, that it is the luminal equivalent of absolute zero.
Vesely and Farr knew about all these hazards, and the awareness deterred them not an instant. They trotted across the meadow and, up close, found that the cave mouth was huge, even bigger than it had looked from afar. They would measure it, later, at 100 feet wide by 25 feet high, but even that was dwarfed by what they found inside. The Entrance Chamber, as they named it, was 225 feet wide by 100 feet high by 650 feet long, big enough, in other words, to have parked three Boeing 757 jetliners nose to tail, with room left over.
The Entrance Chamber sloped steadily downward for 200 yards at about 30 degrees, the pitch of an expert ski run. Its floor was littered with “breakdown”—jagged boulders that had broken from the ceiling over eons and continued to do so unpredictably. Descending through that maze was like clambering down a mountain of wet, junked cars in the dark.
Some 50 yards inside the cave, a giant gray monolith 30 feet high and about 8 feet in diameter rose at an angle from the cave bottom, resembling a smaller, tilting Washington Monument. They passed it, the light growing dimmer with every step, their single flashlight barely adequate. In their skimpy outfits, T-shirts and jeans, they quickly learned that this cave was cold. A cave maintains a steady “body temperature,” the average surface temperature of its locale. At a lower elevation in Mexico, this could be in the 70s. Way up here, it was about 47 degrees Fahrenheit.
The cave smelled like mud and wet rock and rotting vegetation. It did not have, just yet, the uniquely alive smell found deeper in wild caves. “Alive” here is used advisedly. Many native peoples believe that caves are sentient, living things. This is not entirely unreasonable, given that caves breathe; have active circulatory, digestive, and excretory systems; can contract diseases and suffer injuries and heal many of both; and are constantly growing—just like any other living body.
VESELY AND FARR COULD NOT KNOW for sure yet, but they might have been the first humans ever to set foot in this place, and the power of that possibility charged each moment with electric anticipation. Working their way farther in, they saw two passages leading on from the chamber’s wall to their right. A third passage extended from the chamber’s deepest point. There the stream that had led them to this cave disappeared into darkness.
They followed the stream down deeper into the cave, leaving the “Washington Monument” 100 yards behind them, stopping finally at an immense, diamond-shaped portal 20 feet wide by 60 feet high. This was really the “door” to Cheve, down at the bottom of the Entrance Chamber and near the end of the “twilight zone,” that part of the cave where external light still penetrated. They had never found a passage that large in a cave with much air movement, but wind was whipping down through this one.
All caves breathe. The diurnal pressure changes from solar heating, as well as larger system-related barometric pressure shifts, account for air movement through caves. Little caves sigh. Big caves blow. Supercaves roar, some with hurricane-force winds. The bigger the cave, the bigger the blow. With its gusty breath, this one had just given Vesely and Farr the best Christmas gift either could have imagined: the kiss of depth.