The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  Casteret and Chevalier helped turn caving into a heroic undertaking, and the search for the world’s deepest cave into an international competition—a precursor to the space race. “Praise Heaven, no one can give France lessons in this matter of epic achievement,” Casteret wrote, in his preface to Chevalier’s book. “The race of explorers and adventure-seekers has not died out from our land.” By combining lighter, stronger climbing gear with scuba tanks, cavers went deeper and deeper into the earth, more than tripling Chevalier’s depth in the next 60 years. The record would bounce between France, Spain, and Austria (where one of Gala’s teams went below 5,300 feet at Lamprechtsofen in 1998), before settling in the Republic of Georgia, in 2004.

  A cave’s depth is measured from the entrance down, no matter how high it is above sea level. When prospecting for deep systems, cavers start in mountains with thick layers of limestone deposited by ancient seas. Then they look for evidence of underground streams and for sinkholes—sometimes many miles square—where rain and runoff get funneled into the rock. As the water seeps in, carbon dioxide that it has picked up from the soil and the atmosphere dissolves the calcium carbonate in the stone, bubbling through it like water through a sponge. In Georgia’s Krubera Cave, in the Western Caucasus, great chimneylike shafts plunge as much as 500 feet at a time, with crawl spaces and flooded tunnels between them. The current depth record was set there in 2012, when a Ukrainian caver named Gennadiy Samokhin descended more than 7,200 feet from the entrance—close to a mile and a half underground.

  The Chevé system is even deeper. Drop some fluorescent dye into the stream at the entrance, as a teammate of Stone’s did in 1990, and it will tumble into the Santo Domingo eight days later, 11 miles away and 8,500 feet below. No other cave in the world has such proven depth (though geologists suspect that some caves in China, New Guinea, and Turkey go even deeper). But that isn’t enough to set a record: cave depths, unlike mountain heights, are inherently subjective. Everest was the world’s tallest peak long before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay scaled it. But a cave is only officially a cave when people have passed through it. Until then, it’s just another hole in the ground.

  Deep caves rarely call attention to themselves. Like speakeasies and opium dens, they tend to hide behind shabby entrances. A muddy rift will widen into a shaft, a crawl space into a vaulting nave. Krubera begins as a grave-size hole full of moss and crows’ nests. When local cavers first explored it, in 1960, they got less than 300 feet down before the shaft leveled off into an impassable squeeze. It was more than 20 years before the passage was dug out, and another 17 before a side passage revealed the vast cave system beneath it. Yet the signs were there all along. The bigger the cave, the more air goes through it, and Krubera was like a wind tunnel in places. “If it blows, it goes,” cavers say.

  Chevé has what cavers call a Hollywood entrance: a gaping maw in the face of a cliff, like King Kong’s lair on Skull Island. A long golden meadow leads up to it, bordered by rows of pines and a stream that murmurs in from the right. It feels ceremonial somehow, like the approach to an altar. As you walk beneath the overhang, the temperature drops, and a musty, fungal scent drifts up from the cave’s throat, where the children’s bones were found. The stream passes between piles of rubble and boulders, their shadows thrown into looming relief by your headlamp. Then the walls close in and the wind begins to rise. It’s easy to see why the Cuicatec felt that some dark presence abided here—that something in this place needed to be appeased.

  Like Krubera, Chevé starts with a precipitous drop: 3,000 feet in less than half a mile. But then it levels off to a more gradual slope: to go another vertical mile, you have to go 10 miles horizontally, at least half a mile of it underwater. Although the water eventually gathers into a single stream, the cave’s upper reaches are full of oxbows and tributaries, meandering and intertwining through the rock, paralleling one another for a stretch, then veering apart or abruptly ending. It’s tempting to imagine the system as a giant Habitrail, with cavers scurrying through it. But these tunnels weren’t meant for inhabitants. They’re geological formations, differentially eroded, their soft deposits ground down to serrated edges or carved into knobs and spikes that the body has to contort itself around. A long squirm down a tight shaft will lead to an even longer crawl, a slippery descent, and so on, in a natural obstacle course, relentless in its challenges. Near the main entrance, there’s a 30-foot section known as the Cat Walk, where a caver can hoist his pack and stroll forward without thinking. It’s the only place like it in the system. “Every other piece of this cave might kill you,” Gala told me.

  Bill Stone has led seven expeditions to Chevé in the past 10 years, all but one of them with Gala. In 2003, his team dove through a sump that had thwarted cavers for more than a decade, then climbed down to nearly 5,000 feet, making Chevé the deepest cave in the Western Hemisphere. But there was no clear way forward: the main passage ended in a wall of boulders. The only option was to try to bypass the blockage by entering the system farther downslope. The following spring, Stone sent teams of Polish, Spanish, Australian, and American cavers bushwhacking across the cloud forest in search of new entrances. They found more than 100, including a spectacular cliff-face opening called Atanasio. The most promising, though, was a more modest but gusty opening labeled J2 (the “J” was for jaskinia—Polish for “cave”). It was wide open at the top, but pinched tight as soon as you went down. The Australians called it Barbie.

  The J2 system runs roughly parallel to the main Chevé passage and about 1,000 feet above it. The water’s exact course through the mountain is hard to predict, but cave surveys and Stone’s 3-D models suggest that the two systems eventually merge. If Gala and Short could get past the sump beyond Camp Four, their route should join up with Chevé, drop another 2,500 feet, and barrel down to the Santo Domingo. “Imagine a storm-tunnel system in a city,” Stone told me. “All these feeders connect to a trunk and then go out to an estuary. We’re in the back door trying to get into that primary conduit.” This is it, he said. This is the big one. “If everything goes well, we’ll be as far as anyone has ever been inside the earth.”

  Deep caving demands what Stone calls siege logistics. It’s not so much a matter of conquering a cave as outlasting it. Just to set up base camp in Mexico, his team had to move six truckloads of material more than 1,200 miles and up a mountain. Then the real work began. Exploring Chevé is like drilling a very deep hole. It can’t be done in one pass. You have to go down a certain distance, return to the surface, then drill down a little farther, over and over, until you can go no deeper. While one group is recovering on the surface, the other is shuttling provisions farther into the cave. Stone’s team had to establish four camps underground, each about a day’s hike apart. Latrines had to be dug, ropes rigged, supplies consumed, and refuse carried back to the surface. Divers like Gala and Short were just advance scouts for the mud-spattered army behind them, lugging 30-pound rubber duffel bags through the cave—sherpas of a sort, though they’d never set foot on a mountaintop. Stone called them mules.

  Two months earlier, in Texas, I’d watched the final preparations for the trip. Stone’s headquarters are about 15 minutes southeast of Austin, on 30 acres of drought-stricken scrub. There is a corrugated building out front that’s home to Stone Aerospace, a robotics firm he started in 1998, and a two-story log house in back, where he lives with his wife, Vickie, a fellow-caver. (They met at a party where Stone overheard her talking about tactical rigging.) The trucks were scheduled to leave in two days, and every corner of the house had been requisitioned for supplies. One room was piled with cook pots, cable ladders, nylon line, and long underwear. Another had dry suits, diving masks, rebreathers, and oxygen bottles. In the basement, eight long picnic tables were stacked with more than 1,000 pounds of provisions. Shrink-wrapped flats of peanuts, cashews, and energy bars sat next to rows of four-liter bottles filled with staples and dry mixes: quinoa, oatmeal, whey protein, mangos, powdered potatoes, a
nd broccoli-cheese soup. Stone had tamped in some of the ingredients using an ax handle.

  “In the past, I’d lose 25 pounds on one of these trips,” Stone told me. “We can burn as many calories as a Tour de France rider every day underground.” Ascending Chevé, he once said, was like climbing Yosemite’s El Capitan at night through a freezing waterfall. To fine-tune the team’s diet, he’d modeled it on Lance Armstrong’s program, aiming for a ratio of 17 percent protein, 16 percent fat, and 67 percent carbohydrates. In Mexico, the supplies would be replenished with local beans, vegetables, and dried machaca beef. “What you aren’t going to find is candy,” Stone said. “Stuff like Snickers—that’s bullshit.” When I looked closer, though, I found a bottle of miniature chocolates that Vickie had hidden among the supplies.

  Cavers, even more than climbers, have to travel light and tight. Bulky packs are a torture to get through narrow fissures, and every ounce is extracted tenfold in sweat. Over the years, caving gear has undergone a brutal Darwinian selection, lopping off redundant parts and vestigial limbs. Toothbrushes have lost their handles, forks a tine or two, packs their adjustable straps. Underwear is worn for weeks on end, the bacteria kept back by antibiotic silver and copper threads. Simple items are often best: Nalgene bottles, waterproof and unbreakable, have replaced all manner of fancier containers; cavers even stuff their sleeping bags into them. Yet the biggest weight savings have come from more sophisticated gear. Stone has a PhD in structural engineering from the University of Texas and spent 24 years at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Maryland. His company has worked on numerous robotics projects for NASA, including autonomous submarines destined for Europa, Jupiter’s sixth moon. The rebreathers for the Chevé trip were of his own design. Their carbon-fiber tanks weighed a fourth of what conventional tanks weigh and lasted more than four times longer underwater; their software could precisely regulate the mix and flow of gases.

  Stone’s newest obsession was a set of methanol fuel cells from a company called SFC Energy. Headlamps, phones, scuba computers, and hammer drills (used to drive rope anchors into the rock) all use lithium batteries that have to be recharged. On this trip the cavers would also be carrying GoPro video cameras for a documentary that would be shown on the Discovery Channel. In the past, Stone had tried installing a paddle wheel underground to generate electricity from the stream flow, with fairly feeble results. But a single bottle of methanol and four fuel cells—each about the size of a large toaster—could power the whole expedition. The question was whether they’d survive. High-tech gear tends to be fragile and finicky. While I was in Texas, one of the rebreathers kept shutting down for no apparent reason (it was later found to have a faulty fail-safe program), and this was the sixth generation of that design. The fuel cells weren’t nearly as robust. Stone would keep them in shockproof, watertight cases, but he doubted that would suffice. “We’re going to take them down there and turn them into broken pieces of plastic,” he said.

  Stone knew what it meant to be a battered piece of hardware: he’d turned 60 that December and had spent more than a year of his life underground. His gangly frame—six feet four, with a wingspan nearly as wide—was kept knotty by free weights, and he could still outclimb and outcarry most 25-year-olds. But he was getting old for an extreme sport like this, and he knew it. He had the whiskered, weather-beaten look of an old lobsterman. “I think it’s a little surprising to him how hard the caving is on his body these days,” one of the team members told me. “I won’t say that he’s feeling his age, but he’s realizing that he isn’t at the pointy end of the stick anymore.”

  As a leader, Stone models himself on the great expeditionary Brits of the past century. He has an engineer’s methodical mind and an explorer’s heroic self-image. He’s pragmatic about details and romantic about goals. His teammates often compare him to Ernest Shackleton, another explorer who felt most alive in the world’s most unpleasant places. But Shackleton, despite shipwreck and starvation, never lost a man under his direct command. (“I thought you’d rather have a live donkey than a dead lion,” he told his wife, after failing to reach the South Pole.) Cave diving is less forgiving. Stone has lost four teammates on his expeditions, including Henry Kendall, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist. Kendall failed to turn on the oxygen in his rebreather while cave diving in Florida. Others have succumbed to narcosis or hypoxia, fallen from cliffs or had grand-mal seizures, lost their way or lost track of time. They’ve buried themselves so deep that they couldn’t come back up.

  Stone’s single-minded, almost mechanistic style can sometimes raise hackles. He can be inspiring one moment and dismissive the next. “Bill has problems identifying people’s emotions,” Gala told me. “So he doesn’t always react to them well.” Then again it’s hard to avoid tension in a sport that takes such a mortal toll. Stone’s mentor, the legendary cave diver Sheck Exley, retrieved 40 corpses from diving sites in Florida alone, then drowned in a Mexican cenote in 1994. “When cavers become cave divers, they usually die because of it,” Stone’s friend James Brown told me. In 1988, Brown and Stone were called in to help remove the body of a female diver from a cave near Altoona, Pennsylvania. When they found her, she was tangled in rope at the bottom of a sump, arms so stiff that, Brown recalled, Stone suggested they cut them off for easier transport. “Nobody liked that idea much,” Brown said. “But after a while her arms softened up, and we were able to fold them down.”

  It took them two days to get her out, with Stone pushing from behind. “He kept saying, ‘Don’t leave me back here if she gets stuck!’” Brown said. If there’s one rule of caving, Stone told me, it’s that you never leave a person behind. Especially if they’re alive, he added. “If they’re dead, it’s another matter.”

  By the time I arrived at base camp, in mid-March, the team had settled into a soggy routine. A week underground followed by 10 days on the surface. Five days of drizzle followed by one day of sun. They’d spent most of the first month hauling gear up the mountain—a muddy three-hour hike from a farmhouse in the valley—loading the heaviest items on burros and the rest on their backs. They’d set up tents and dug latrines, strung lights and cut trails to the cave. The camp was spread out beneath pines and low-hanging clouds, on a rare stretch of relatively flat ground. To one side, the Discovery crew had erected a geodesic dome with two full editing stations inside. To the other, the cavers had hung a giant blue tarp, sheltering a long plywood table, stacks of provisions, and a pair of two-burner camp stoves. On most expeditions, base camp is a place to dry out and recover from infections acquired underground—cracked skin and inflamed cuts and staph bacteria that burrow under your fingernails till they ooze pus. But this forest was nearly as wet as the cave.

  “Welcome to Hell,” one of the cavers told me, when I joined him by the campfire that first night. “Where happiness goes to die,” another added. There was a pause, then someone launched into the colonel’s monologue from Avatar: “Out there, beyond that fence, every living thing that crawls, flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes. . . . If you wish to survive, you need to cultivate a strong mental attitude.” It was a favorite conceit around camp: the cloud forest as hostile planet. But, looking at all the gleaming eyes around the fire, I was mostly reminded of the Island of Lost Boys. Beneath all the mud and gloom and dire admonitions, there burned an ember of self-satisfaction—of pride in their wretched circumstance and willingness to endure it. As Gala put it, “It’s just one continuous miserable.”

  Fifty-four cavers from 13 countries, 43 of them men and 11 women, would pass through the camp that spring. The team had a core of 20 or so veteran members, reinforced by recruits from caving groups worldwide. On any given day, the cave might be home to a particle physicist from Berkeley, a molecular biologist from Russia, a spacecraft engineer from Washington, D.C., a rancher from Mexico, a geologist from Sweden, a tree surgeon from Colorado, a mathematician from Slovenia, a theater director from Poland
, and a cave guide from Canada who lived in a Jeep and spent 200 days a year underground. They were a paradoxical breed: restlessly active yet fond of tight places, highly analytical yet indifferent to risk. They seemed built for solitude—pale, phlegmatic creatures drawn to deep holes and dark passages—yet they worked together as a selfless unit: the naked mole rats of extreme sport. As far as I could tell, only two things truly connected them: a love of the unknown and a tolerance for pain.

  Matt Covington, a 33-year-old caver from Fayetteville, was a typical specimen. A professor of geology at the University of Arkansas, he had earned his PhD in astrophysics but switched fields so that he could spend more time underground. He had a build best described as Flat Stanley. Six feet four but only 150 pounds, he could squeeze through a crevice six and a half inches wide. “My head isn’t the limiting factor,” he told me. “It’s my hips.” Covington was a veteran of seven Stone expeditions as well as caving trips to Sumatra, Peru, and other remote formations. Five years earlier, he was climbing up a cliff face in Lechuguilla Cave, near Carlsbad Caverns, when an anchor came loose from the rock. Covington’s feet caught on the cliff as he fell, tumbling him onto his left arm, causing compound fractures. Rather than wait for rescue, he spent the next 13 hours dragging himself to the surface. “The crawling was fairly uncomfortable,” he allowed. “There was a lot of rope to climb.”