Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  We caught up with another team of cavers, including Patty Kambesis, Chris Stein, and National Geographic photographer Nick Nichols. The combined teams were crawling through what is called a boneyard maze, a series of dry, dusty passages that

  wound around and over and through each other like tunnels in an anthill. At one point there was a walking passage that skirted a funnellike pit that dropped off into darkness. I slipped, fell, and began sliding rapidly.

  The funnel was a foot deep in powdery "rock flour," and I was sliding down on my belly, not entirely uncomfortable, although the events of the immediate future concerned me. Patty Kambesis was below me, and she reached out a hand. Patty weighs one hundred pounds. I weigh two hundred, and had gathered a bit of momentum. It occurred to me, in passing, that if I took Patty's hand, I'd pull her down with me, and she would share my uncertain future. I declined her offer, rather gallantly, I thought.

  A sharp rock ripped through my T-shirt and gashed my chest. I could now see that there was a low archway just below. I got a leg up and managed to stop myself—bam!—like that.

  Everyone was looking at me, and the combined force of the lights on their helmets felt hot, like fire. I wasn't badly hurt, only embarrassed.

  Cavers wear message T-shirts that emphasize the individual's responsibility to move through passages safely: if you die, we split

  UP YOUR GEAR.

  And yet, had I so much as broken an ankle, the two teams would have struggled for days to pull me up the ropes and through the Rift. It wouldn't have been any fun for anyone, but they would have done it.

  "I'm okay," I said quickly.

  Chris Stein, who was closest, took my hand and pulled me out of the rock flour. "Hey," he said by way of comment on the acrobatic nature of my fall, "the Romanian judge gave you a nine-point-six."

  After two hours in the dry, dusty boneyard maze, we ducked under a stone archway and stood on the shores of Lake Castro valva. It was sixty feet to the opposite shore. The water was twenty feet deep, and it glittered and shimmered in my light like a pool of liquid sapphire. We stripped off our filthy clothes so as not to foul the pool and swam to the far shore. The banks were smooth and reddish brown, so delicate and crystalline that we walked over them barefoot.

  The ceiling was hung with white stone icicles and with long, thin white columns that looked like giant soda straws. To my right, the far reddish-brown bank rose up in a sloping hillside that was guarded by huge formations that looked like otherworldly pagodas or huge melted Buddhas.

  The most fantastic formations, however, were under water. Circular stone lily pads, some of them ten feet in diameter, stood just under the surface of the turquoise water. They were balanced, like tables, on stone columns that extended from the floor of the pool. These shelf stone lily pads were reddish brown, but their outer edges were scalloped in a slightly thicker smooth white stone, like buttery frosting.

  I stood barefoot on the smooth bank and thought that Cas-trovalva was the most beautiful place I had ever been.

  That night, I sat on my inflatable mattress in my snow cave and waited to stop sweating. The conversation over dinner had been a familiar one: cave preservation, and what explorers can do to minimize their own impact on the cave.

  The cavers wear nonmarking boots—the kind of shoes you must wear on a gymnasium floor—rather than mar flowstone floors. In places like Castrovalva people go barefoot or wear clean sneakers they carry in their packs for the purpose. The pools, which are still and clear, are not for bathing. The project even puts clean pitchers nearby so the water isn't fouled by organic material in a canteen. (The only exception to the no-swimming policy is when a pool must be swum for the purposes of exploration.)

  Cavers moving through Lechuguilla routinely—I saw it over and over again—take difficult handholds on crumbly rock rather than grab a sturdy stalagmite and dirty it with muddy gloves.

  Because there is little organic life in the cave, human waste does not biodegrade. It must be carried out. We all developed our own methods for dealing with the problem. Some cavers didn't want to talk about waste disposal; others found it necessary to discuss the matter over dinner. Every night.

  I thought about conservation in the gently falling gypsum snow, then slipped into my bag, put my head on my pack, and slept for eight hours without moving.

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  We left about noon the next day, and long before I was in the entrance pit, I could smell the sweet odor of life in the desert canyon above. Rick Bridges and I climbed out of the pit on separate ropes, side by side. We wore mechanical ascenders on our feet that allowed us to literally walk up the rope.

  We pulled ourselves over the lip of the pit and sat in the moonlight, savoring the odor of life. Rick and I discussed our plans for the next few weeks. As the director of the Lechuguilla Cave Project, a group formed to study and explore the cave, Rick had organized an expedition of exploration for the week after next. The goal was to explore and map enough of Lechuguilla to bring the total mapped miles to fifty. Two dozen cavers from all over America were expected to help "push" Lechuguilla the necessary 1.9 miles. Rick was a bit nervous about the expedition: He had already invited the superintendent of Carlsbad Caverns National Park and the mayor of Carlsbad to the gala fifty-mile celebration.

  Most of the world's caves were formed in a gentle, timeless process.

  Water flowing on the surface of limestone hills passes through the topsoil, where it absorbs carbon dioxide from rotting organic material and forms carbonic acid. This is a very weak acid: It is present, for instance, in carbonated soft drinks.

  But limestone is slightly soluble in carbonic acid, and over the millenia, this rather anemic acid, seeping into the cracks and fissures of humped-up limestone beds, melts out caverns and chambers and passages and pits in the solid rock. Most of the dissolved limestone is carried away in mineral-rich "hard" water.

  Lechuguilla, however, is one of a very limited number of limestone caves formed by a very different and much more violent process. Lechuguilla was born of sulfuric acid.

  "Lechuguilla is dominated by a totally different chemistry than a typical cave where water comes in from the surface," Art Palmer told me. Palmer is a hydrologist and director of the Water Resources Program at the State University of New York in Oneida.

  Speleogenesis, the process by which caves are formed, is Art

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  Palmer's special area of interest. The fact that it was powerfully corrosive sulfuric acid rather than carbonic acid that melted the rock and carved out the caverns of Lechuguilla is what, in Art Palmer's words, "electrified the caving community. It's like talking about a new planet whose atmosphere is methane or something. It stretches the imagination. Lechuguilla is dominated by sulfur rather than carbon dioxide."

  I asked Art Palmer if he could explain the origin of the cave, its speleogenesis, to me.

  Palmer took me back to the Permian period, about 250 million years ago, when parts of Texas and New Mexico were covered over in a stagnant inland sea, something like the Dead Sea or the Persian Gulf. At the northern edge of this sea a limestone reef formed.

  Twenty to 40 million years ago, the earth shuddered, and the northern portion of the basin was uplifted and then lifted again 2-4 million years ago, forming the Guadalupe Mountains. As the reefs of the northwest rose, the southeast portion of the old sea sank slightly, forming what is called the Delaware Basin. Today the Delaware Basin contains vast deposits of gas and oil.

  The boiling oil-field brines in the basin are tapped in huge underground reservoirs, along with hydrogen sulfide, which doesn't exist on the face of the earth. When the gas encounters oxygen, it forms sulfuric acid. "In order for the hydrogen sulfide to come up to the surface," Art Palmer said, "you've got to have some kind of unrest in the earth's crust. A fracturing will release pressure sort of like a flat in a tire."

  So, millions of years ago, hydrogen sulfide, released from its underground
reservoirs by a fracturing of the earth's crust, rose through a series of cracks and fissures into the bedded limestone of the Guadalupe Mountains. When it reached the water table, it combined with the oxygen in the water to form sulfuric acid.

  Because sulfuric acid is so powerfully corrosive, it dissolved the limestone very rapidly, in geologic terms, forming huge caverns and rooms.

  Aside from big rooms, another characteristic of caves formed by sulfuric acid is the presence of great quantities of gypsum. The

  chemical process is a simple one, easily seen in the laboratory and sometimes demonstrated in high school chemistry classes. Drop enough limestone (calcium carbonate) into a beaker of sulfuric acid, and a white precipitate, gypsum (calcium sulfate) drops to the bottom, like snow in the enclosed glass winter scene on Grandma's table.

  "So," Art Palmer said, "the limestone is converted to gypsum. And you can see places where whole walls and ceilings and floors are white with the stuff. You can see bedded gypsum in Glacier Bay and the Prickly Ice Cube Room."

  The gypsum in Lechuguilla takes on many different forms. It can produce the fantastic eighteen-foot-long chandeliers of the Chandelier Ballroom, or glacierlike blocks, or delicate flowering tendrils, or strands of angel hair thirty feet long.

  "Think of ice," Art Palmer said. "Ice can form filigrees on a cold window in the winter. Ice forms differently on the surface of a frozen lake or in an iceberg. It's all ice, but it looks different. And in Lechuguilla, different outlines of how the crystals are put together, different origins, give you gypsum in cottonlike puffs or massive beds.

  Movements of air inside the cave have also influenced its formations and size.

  Larger caves tend to breathe: They inhale and exhale great quantities of air. When the barometric pressure on the surface changes, when a low-pressure system lumbers over the land, for instance, air rushes out the entrance as the cave attempts to reach barometric equilibrium. If a high-pressure cell is present aloft, the cave inhales.

  The winds that sometimes flow through the cave, according to Kim Cunningham, a geologist with the USGS and chairman of the Lechuguilla Cave Project Science Committee, carry tiny organisms that eat away at the rock. "Lechuguilla," Cunningham told me, "is a microbiological forest." There are bacteria in the cave that are chemosynthetic, which is to say, they are able to oxidize and feed off of mineral compounds like sulfur, manganese, and iron. A type of fungi can live on the bacteria.

  What this means is that microorganisms, swept through the

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  cave by currents of air, eat away at the solid rock wall. The indigestible residue created by this process often looks like a kind of brown, greasy, loose-packed mud and can sometimes be felt falling like a gentle rain. The rock flour I had slid down on my 9.6 acrobatic plunge was just such material.

  The idea of a cave being modified by microbiological means is, according to Cunningham, "confounding and a delight to study. It seems atypical on the planet."

  Lechuguilla had existed undiscovered until 1986, because it lacks a natural entrance. There was a ninety-foot-deep pit in the desert, but it offered no opening into the cave below. For a time the pit was known as Misery Hole.

  But occasionally, in the calm before a Pacific storm lashed the land, great clouds of dirt could be seen swirling out of the hole like dust devils. Winds of forty miles an hour and more whistled out from under the rocks in Misery Hole. A number of people concluded that there had to be a large cave breathing somewhere below the pit. Winds of fifty miles an hour do not blow out of solid rock.

  So, over the decades, cavers with shovels and pickaxes dug in the cave. On Memorial Day of 1986 a Colorado group calling itself the Lechuguilla Dig Project broke through. In two days the Lechuguilla Dig Project had mapped its find all the way past Glacier Bay to the Rift. It was obvious that a major new cave had been discovered.

  From the start the project had cooperated with the Park Service. Ronal Kerbo, at the time the Park Service's only cave specialist, was told of the breakthrough immediately.

  The Park Service quickly installed a culvert to shore up the breakthrough hole. There was a locked gate at the top of the culvert to protect the cave from the curious and the curious from the cave.

  The breakthrough group, now calling itself the Lechuguilla Cave Project, is a self-funded volunteer organization. A memorandum of understanding with the Park Service states that the LCP will be allowed to conduct exploration and scientific re-

  search under certain guidelines. Anyone who has the requisite caving skills, however, can obtain a permit to visit the cave provided he or she has a valid scientific reason.

  The caving community was buzzing with the news of the discovery, but there was little mention of Lechuguilla in the conventional media. And the good people of Carlsbad, New Mexico, began to feel as if the Park Service was keeping a secret from them. Tourism is New Mexico's number-one industry, and Carlsbad benefits greatly from the 750,000 people a year who visit the nearby caverns.

  Mayor Lyle Forrest was aggravated to hear that the cave would be managed as wilderness. "No one," he recalled, "said a thing to us about what the future of that cave should be or how it should be handled. So that's when I formed the Mayor's Task Force on Lechuguilla Cave."

  Mike Currier was appointed chairman of the task force, which met weekly from March to August of 1989. "We had some people who were very strong proponents of commercialization and some who were opponents," he told me. The purpose of the task force was research, pure and simple.

  Still, there was misunderstanding all around. Lyle Forrest received angry anonymous calls: "Are you the mayor who wants to put a McDonald's at the bottom of Lechuguilla?"

  Mike Currier believes that the turning point came when members of the Lechuguilla Cave Project made a presentation to the task force and the Carlsbad Department of Development.

  The Mayor's Task Force decided that "after listening to the various opinions about Lechuguilla Cave we believe ... it is in the best interests of all concerned not to seek development for general use at this time."

  A year later, Mayor Forrest told me that "the more we see of Lechuguilla, the more we're convinced that maybe this is one cave that can't be developed and shouldn't be developed. We want to do what's best."

  In the summer of 1990 the three groups most concerned with Lechuguilla Cave—the town of Carlsbad, the caving community, and the National Park Service—were in agreement about the fu-

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  ture of what has been called the finest underground wilderness in the world.

  The hurricane of controversy, Ron Kerbo thinks, has dissipated. The undeveloped wilderness of Lechuguilla, Kerbo says, "is significant in that it continues to foster the spirit and the heart and soul of exploration."

  I suggested that the exploration of the cave was really very similar to what happened during the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

  "You know," Ron Kerbo said, "I used to use that analogy myself. But then I realized that everywhere Lewis and Clark went, there were people. Exploring Lechuguilla is entirely different: No one's ever been in those virgin passages. It's Neil Armstrong stuff."

  I was on my third trip into the cave, sometime near my 280th hour in Lechuguilla, during the final fifty-mile push. Patty Kambesis and I were sitting on a sloping block of gypsum just above the lower end of the Rift, and we were scooping booty, which is to say, we were exploring a section of the cave where no one had ever been. The new lead was found by Rick Bridges at the lower end of the Rift. Beside the marked trail, there was a hole called the Death Pit. On another expedition, Rick Bridges and Buddy Lane had descended the pit, looking for leads. A huge rock had dislodged itself from the wall and thundered past them in such a way that observers above were certain they were dead, "flatrocked" at the bottom of, hey, let's call it Death Pit.

  About thirty feet down, a natural bridge, three feet wide, spanned the pit. The bridge led to a rabbit hole "lead" in what appeare
d to be a solid wall. In fact, the hole did "go"—it emptied out onto a sloping ledge below a nearly vertical flowstone cliff about sixty feet high. A climber named Dave Jones scaled the cliff face and rigged a rope for Patty and me to climb.

  Rick Bridges and Anne Strait were mapping the approach to the rabbit hole, just beyond the Death Pit. Patty and I went ahead to see how far this new lead might take us.

  Atop the cliff face there was an upward sloping room with a

  slanting roof, perhaps four feet high at its lowest. A forest of pearly-white stalactites and stalagmites made me feel as if I were trapped inside the jaws of some great beast. We could not see through the formations, in the same way you can't see through a thick forest. We knew we had to go on. (That's what we told ourselves.)

  Where the ceiling was highest, it might have been possible to walk upright, but Patty rejected the idea. There were too many delicate formations.

  I was not surprised that Patty would not take the easiest but the most damaging route onward. Cavers who accidentally damage a formation live for weeks in a state of self-flagellation. But Patty scouted the room and found a narrow side fissure that looked as if it might take us above the formations. We chimneyed up the crevice, backs against the rock, our feet braced on the opposite wall. It took half an hour of hard, dangerous work before we rose out of the cleft in the rock.

  Because Lechuguilla is sweaty-hot, heat exhaustion and heatstroke are very real dangers. Most cavers choose to wear short pants and short-sleeved shirts. Knee and elbow pads are worn for protection, but no one escapes unscathed. Patty was bleeding from her right thigh. My shorts had ripped against the jagged rock. I was scraped in a sensitive area but had not yet begun to bleed.

  The fissure gave way to a junction room perhaps ten feet high and forty feet across. There were at least five good leads that I could see. The best one, I thought, was a man-sized keyhole-shaped opening in the rock that was completely rimmed in gypsum.