SEVEN
ON THE VERGE OF PANIC AND at the edge of death, Stone actually calmed himself by replaying one of Jim Smith’s blackest jokes about cave diving:
“You can’t get buried no deeper for no cheaper.”
That might not have soothed many people, but it says something about his sangfroid and sense of humor that it did calm Stone. He grabbed a wall and started clawing his way back. By that time, though, he was down to 700 psi and still consuming about 100 psi with each breath. He had his second pony tank hanging from one side, but its regulator mouthpiece was hard to reach and he was afraid that while searching for it he might run out of air in his first tank. In addition, he had stirred up clouds of silt, from the talc-fine powdered rock that forms the bottom of many caves’ water bodies. This silt is so fine that, once aroused, it remains suspended in the water for some time; in water without a strong current to wash it away, it can hang there for hours. Silt presents two dangers: reducing visibility and befouling delicate scuba regulators. Better but by no means fail-safe today, regulators were notoriously finicky and failure-prone back then. It could take precious little silt to bollix Stone’s backup.
Suddenly the choice was taken out of his hands. The rope jerked and he was being reeled in like a trophy bass hooked by a panicked angler, banging helmet and body and tanks against the jagged rock walls. Earlier, his handlers had not felt Stone’s tugs because an outcrop had snagged the rope. Suffering a minor panic of their own, they’d talked for a few minutes, then decided to haul him in pronto. The fast ride out may have saved his life, but could have taken it as easily, had one of those collisions with Huautla’s ragged walls stripped the regulator from his mouth. As it was, he surfaced with about 300 psi—three breaths—left in his tank.
Stymied by Huautla’s top end, Stone next decided to attack through its bottom, so to speak. Huautla’s mouth sat high on the side of a mountain over Santo Domingo Canyon, through which the Santo Domingo River flowed. Huautla’s resurgence—the place where all the water draining through it finally poured into the river—could be a cave that would lead upward to the main Huautla system. A fine theory, but first the resurgence had to be found.
Reconnoitering in on May 3, 1981, he did just that, and he had a special companion to share the celebration: Pat Wiedeman, who had come with him on that year’s expedition. The couple had become ever closer in the years since Stone’s move to Texas. Less than three months later, they would get married; it was seemingly a match made in heaven. They loved each other fiercely, and not only did Pat share Bill’s fondness for outdoor adventures, she could keep up with him, ascending as well as going down. In the spring of 1982, they would climb Alaska’s 20,320-foot Mount McKinley, North America’s highest peak and one of the world’s toughest mountaineering challenges. Few women made it to the summit back then, but Pat did, and by the tough Muldrow Glacier Route, to boot. She also became a proficient cave diver.
Their 1981 find, a cave called Pe?a Colorada, opened at the bottom of the mountain on which, higher up, Huautla’s mouth gaped. Visualize a gigantic spigot (Pe?a Colorada Cave) at the bottom of a vast holding tank (the mountain) with a giant funnel on top (Huautla Cave). In the rainy season, enough water gushed straight from Pe?a Colorada’s mouth to create a raging, 60-foot-wide river. In the dry season, though—the time of their visit—the terrain became passable. A 100-foot-deep, steep sand slope dropped to a walkable, descending cave passage, which itself shortly came to a flooded tunnel. This provided enough confirmation for Stone to pursue his plan of connecting the resurgence with Huautla’s deepest known point, six miles uphill and almost 2,000 feet higher in elevation.
Back in 1980, fully committed to deep cave exploration as a parallel profession, Stone had created the United States Deep Caving Team, a nonprofit organization that, according to its website, is “dedicated to the exploration, study, and public awareness of the earth’s last remaining frontiers and to the development of the technologies necessary to achieve those aims.” The USDCT, with its tax advantages for organizer and sponsors, would become the launch platform for most of Stone’s subsequent major expeditions, including his next, the 1984 Pe?a Colorada effort. It took them two years to pull everything together, but by 1984 he and expedition co-leader Bob Jefferys, another top caver of the day, had assembled a stellar team of divers and trained for two years with the latest high-tech diving gear. They expected that 30 percent—about 2 miles—of the cave’s 6-mile length would be flooded. This would require them to stock underground camps and live in them for days, perhaps even weeks, at a time, beyond flooded sumps.
In late February 1984, their Pe?a Colorada expedition invaded Santo Domingo Canyon. A core team of twelve divers had signed on for four months. This was a massive effort even by Himalayan and supercaving standards. There were over forty sponsors, including Rolex, General Electric, the Explorers Club, and other companies with deep pockets and dreams of better images. It would be a mistake to infer from this surfeit of support that extreme caving had suddenly gone mainstream. It had not, but, like extreme mountaineering, it held the attention of a small group that corporations coveted because its demographics mimicked those of the Explorers Club: educated, successful, affluent people.
Companies like Rolex and General Electric do not come knocking, money bags in hand, and shucking for dollars does not come naturally to the type-A alpha male; but, as expedition leaders from Columbus to Hillary have done, Bill Stone went begging for the better part of two years. A glimpse of the process reveals that for serious exploration, more time is spent in boardrooms than in the wild.
First came the proposal. Bill Stone had to produce not one, but, with over forty sponsors, many versions. What worked for Rolex, for instance, wouldn’t necessarily be persuasive to GM or GE. An application to the National Geographic Society for a major grant was typical: thirty pages of dense verbiage and documentation, including biographies of himself and the other expedition participants, lists of all other media contacts and funding applications, microscopic budgets for every dollar requested, and a project justification that ran almost two thousand words—the length of a full magazine article. And that was just one application.
Like most expedition leaders, he was a one-man show. Hard as it may have been, proposal writing was probably the least painful part of the process. The most painful was the making-nice part, which came next.
It may have been less frustrating and humbling than, say, pitching screenplays, but for a proud man like Stone, it was agony. Once in the executive suite, he had to sing for his supper, and do it well, because equally intelligent, intense, driven people had done their act before he got there and others would do so soon after he left. Stone claimed that he would do anything for a sponsorship except smoke, and that left a lot.
Asked a number of times what explorer in all of history he most admired, Stone’s answer never varied: Columbus. And what about the great navigator so impressed him? Courage? Leadership? Sailing skills? Well sure, but more than anything else, Stone affirmed, it was the wily Genoan’s skill at snaring sponsors.