AFTERWORD
On August 17, 2004, The New York Times reported that a team of Croatian cavers had “set a new benchmark that went largely unnoticed. They found the world’s deepest hole.” Interestingly, that article referred not to Krubera but to an unnamed pit that really was just a hole which plummeted 1,693 feet into a mountainside near the former Yugoslavian city of Zagreb. Later, the article acknowledged that the find was “not the deepest cave on Earth [emphasis added]. That title still belongs to the Krubera Cave in Abkhazia, which descends 5,130 feet (almost a mile).”
It was soon to descend a lot farther than that. Less than a week after the Croatians’ find, Dmitry Fedotov and Denis Kurta worked through the Way to the Dream Meander, pushing Krubera’s depth to 5,888 feet. Then, in October, Yury Kasjan descended to 7,072 feet, firmly establishing Krubera as the deepest cave and the last great terrestrial discovery. Krubera had one more surprise to spring. In August 2006, the Ukrainian cave diver Gennadiy Samokhin pushed its ultimate depth to 7,188 feet (2,191 meters) and its final length to more than 8 miles.
With his decades-long work on the Arabika Massif brought to fruition, Alexander Klimchouk has shifted his attention to another supercave, Aladaglar, in Turkey. While it won’t surpass Krubera’s depth, Aladaglar is still a true supercave, offering new subterranean challenges that draw Klimchouk and his teams.
Klimchouk divides his time between his work in the field, his academic responsibilities in Ukraine, and traveling the world. He is a sought-after speaker and presenter at international scientific conferences and is working on a book about his explorations.
Klimchouk remains estranged from his son Oleg; the two have not spoken for years.
BILL STONE CONTINUES TO PROBE the Cheve Cave system in Oaxaca, having led several expeditions there in the years after 2004. Cheve Cave’s official depth is now 4,869 feet, appreciably less than Krubera’s. In 2009, Stone led an ambitious but unsuccessful attempt to connect the lower cave called J2 with Cheve. He and his teammates spent the last nineteen days underground, diving one sump after another, ultimately mapping almost 2,000 feet of new passages. At the expedition’s end, however, more than 3,000 feet still separated them from Cheve’s deepest known point, far above. For the record, Stone still believes that Cheve has the potential to surpass Krubera.
On a separate track, Stone has moved a bit closer to fulfilling his astronaut dreams, building a NASA-funded interplanetary robot named Endurance. If all goes according to plan, sometime in the next decade Endurance will be flown to Jupiter’s moon Europa, where it will search for water. Before that, though, Stone himself may go to our own moon. He has vowed, publicly, to establish the first commercial mining operation there by 2017.
SUGGESTED READING
Cave exploration has generated nothing like the volume of literature produced by mountaineers and marine explorers, but there are still classics in the field. Those interested in the history of caving and speleology will enjoy édouard A. Martel’s books, in particular Les Cévennes and Les Ab?mes. La C?te d’Azur Russe chronicles his visit to the Black Sea region and the Arabika Massif.
Martel’s astonishing disciple Norbert Casteret was one of the most prolific writers in the history of exploration, publishing hundreds of articles and more than forty books. His classic Ten Years under the Earth (1933) remains an exhilarating and informative read to this day.
“Vertical Bill” Cuddington pioneered the single-rope technique (SRT) for vertical caving, now used as well by search-and-rescue (SAR) teams, rock climbers, and for industrial vertical work. The definitive biography is Vertical Bill, by David W. Hughes.
Sheck Exley was to cave diving as Bill Cuddington was to vertical caving. Before his tragic death in Mexico’s El Zacatón cenote on April 6, 1994, he pioneered virtually every essential cave-diving technique and mentored hundreds, including Bill Stone. His Basic Cave Diving: A Blueprint for Survival and Caverns Measureless to Man are classics.
The best single source of information about Mexican supercave exploration is the Association of Mexican Cave Studies (www.amcs.org), operated by the legendary Texas caver Bill Mixon. Since 1975, the annual AMCS Activities Newsletter has contained articles about each year’s significant Mexican caving expeditions. The quality of writing and photography is superb. AMCS Bulletins, which appear periodically, are in-depth studies of single subjects, such as the one titled Hydrogeology of the Sistema Huautla Karst Groundwater Basin (2002).
The Russian geographer Alexander Kruber fostered speleology in his region of the world and exploration of the Arabika Massif. For those who read Russian (or are willing to pay for translations), his early articles, especially “The Voyage to Arabika” (1912), are rewarding.
Alexander Klimchouk has published scores of articles in scholarly and scientific journals, most of them in Russian. His fascinating account, in English, of breaking the 2,000-meter barrier in Krubera Cave, “In a Search for the Route to 2000 Meters Depth: The Deepest Cave in the World in the Arabika Massif, Western Caucasus,” coauthored with Yury Kasjan, can be found in Cavedigger, issue 8, December 2003–February 2004.
Last but far from least are the countless articles published by Bill Stone, in both popular and scientific journals. His Beyond the Deep, written with Barbara am Ende and Monte Paulsen, is a detailed retelling of the ill-starred 1994 Huautla expedition.