by Tim Cahill
According to De Quille, Newhouse was found the next day, about twenty miles into the desert,
a human figure seated against a rock. . . . His beard was covered with frost, and— though the noonday sun poured down its fiercest rays—an icicle over a foot in length hung from his nose. There he had perished miserably, because his armor had worked but too well, and because it was laced up behind where he could not reach the fastenings.
The story was reported as news worldwide, and the boys in the newsroom at the Terminal Enterprise must have had a good laugh over that one. De Quille, like his contemporary Mark Twain, could tell a story so patently false that truth smirked out from around the edges.
In my mind's eye, I could see the foot-long icicle, blue white under a molten sun. Slowly, the thing began to grow, and it floated dumbly out into the shimmering salt pan of the valley floor, where it stood like a massive religious icon, a monolithic icicle plunged into the heart of Death Valley.
By nine that night it had cooled off enough to walk. Neither of us had slept for over forty hours. Worse, we had lain our boots on the ground to dry. The boots had been wet and caked with muddy salt. The ground on fire had baked them into weird, unfootlike shapes. Mine seemed to weigh fifteen or twenty pounds apiece. The canvas and leather felt like cement.
We hammered on the boots with rocks, cracking away the caked adobe.
"Leaving the boots on the ground," Nick pointed out, "was dumb."
There was poor planning involved, all right. The next water stash was only five miles away, at a place where a scrubby bush grew beside a rocky four-wheel-drive road. Unfortunately, in that area there had been a number of springtime flash floods. Water had thundered down the mountainsides in several temporary rivers, and each wash, in the light of our headlamps, appeared to be a four-wheel-drive road. We couldn't find the water. Poor planning.
The evaporative wind had cranked up to about forty miles an hour. This was serious. We retraced our steps, searching for the stash, walking like a pair of Frankenstein monsters in our adobe boots. We both were developing severe blisters, but there was no stopping now. Finding the water was more important than some little excruciatingly crippling pain.
About 2:30 that morning we stumbled over the water and
food. We had been out on the Valley floor for twenty-six hours, in temperatures sometimes exceeding 120 degrees. My feet looked and felt like I'd been walking across hot coals. We both carried extra boots, but walking over ground on fire makes feet expand. Mine looked sort of like big red blistered floppy clown feet. My second pair of boots simply didn't fit, not even a little bit. Another bit of poor planning that meant I'd have to walk forever in cruel shoes, limping pathetically.
We'd made too many mistakes, Nick and I, and the errors had compounded themselves exponentially, so that we had completely lost the will to push on. In the distance, seventeen miles away, we could see the lights of Furnace Creek. We doctored our feet—break the blister, apply the antiseptic, coat with Spenco Second Skin tape—and discussed complete capitulation. In our condition, with blisters and thirty-pound packs, we could probably make two miles in an hour. It would take six and a half hours to walk to Furnace Creek just to surrender.
On the other hand, the next stash was three miles away, in the Panamint Mountains, at an elevation of 2,300 feet. Say, four hours to cover eight miles, and give it another hour for each 1,000 feet of elevation. The stash was about six and a half hours away. It would hurt just as bad to give up as to push on, and it would be ten or fifteen degrees cooler at 2,300 feet.
Still, if blisters and exhaustion kept us from reaching the rocks before noon, that could be fatal. We decided to gamble and headed for the high country, hoping the idea of death could save us.
INTO THE FIRE
We were perhaps 1,500 feet up into the Panamints, walking up a long, bare slope littered with sage. Thcie was no shade anywhere on the slope. We had miles to walk before the rock would rise above us and provide some protection from the sun. Quite clearly, neither of us could survive another day crouched under a space blanket.
Nick was wearing shorts, and I could see the muscles in
his thighs twitching spasmodically. It was only two hours until sunup. There was a full moon that night, and in its light I suddenly saw, sloping off to my right, a long, narrow valley. In that valley, almost glittering in the moonlight, was a town full of large frame houses, all of them inexplicably painted white. The houses seemed well maintained but were clearly abandoned. There was nothing on the map that indicated a ghost town here in Trail Canyon.
"Jesus, Nick, look." I pointed to the ghost town, perhaps 250 feet below us.
"What?"
"We can hole up down there."
"Where?"
"Down there."
Nick stared down into the valley for a full thirty seconds. "You're pointing to a ditch," he said finally. "You want to hole up in a ditch?"
I squinted down at the ghost town. Slowly, it began to rise toward me. The neatly painted white houses became strands of moon-dappled sage in a ditch perhaps five feet deep.
"I been having 'em, too," Nick said.
Nick wouldn't say what his hallucinations were like. I had to coax it out of him.
"Graveyards," Nick said finally. "I been seeing graveyards."
An hour and a half later we sat to rest. To the east, over the Funeral Mountains, on the other side of Death Valley, the pale light of false dawn had given way to a faint pastel pink. The sky suddenly burst into flame, filling the high canyons with a crimson that flowed down the ridges and flooded the valley floor with blood. Then the sun rose over the Funeral Mountains, fierce and blindingly hot, like molten silver, and its white heat scattered the crimson, so that for a moment the full weight of the sun lay glittering and triumphant on the great lifeless salt pan below. It was still cool—perhaps 85 degrees—but, within a matter of hours, the temperature could rise to 120 or more.
It was the first time in my life I'd ever found a beautiful
sunrise terrifying. It was like seeing a huge mushroom cloud rise in the distance, that sunrise.
THE POSTCARD OF THE RESCUE
In the rocks above the bare sage slope, we found a narrow S-shaped canyon, where we lay down to sleep. Throughout the day, the sun chased us around the bends of the S, but there was always shade somewhere. We shared the canyon with a small, drab, gray sparrowlike bird that seemed to be feeding on some thorny red flowers that grew in the shade. I loved Death Valley. It was, as the ranger said, psychological, this place. It slammed you from one extreme to another. My heart seemed to expand inside my chest, and I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. I turned away from Nick, and we sat like that for a time, back to back.
"Nice here," I said finally. "Comfortable."
"Birds and shit," Nick agreed. His voice was shaky.
We slept for twelve hours, ate at nine that night, then slept until six the next morning. The swelling in our feet had gone down after twenty-one hours of sleep, and we could wear our extra boots. I felt like skipping. By noon that day we had reached an abandoned miner's cabin where we had stashed six gallons of water.
"How do you feel?" I asked Nick.
"Real good."
"Me too."
"We're going to make it," he said.
"I know."
It was cool enough to cook inside the cabin, and Nick was whipping up one of his modified freeze-dried Creole shrimp dinners when we heard the plane.
It was moving up the slope, circling over the route we had given Dick Rayner, and we couldn't believe they were looking for us now that we felt like gods of the desert. It was still twenty-four hours to the first checkpoint. Why were they searching for us? I laid out a yellow poncho so the rangers could spot us. Beside the poncho I arranged several dozen rocks to read "OK" in letters ten feet high. The plane
came in close and dipped a wing. The pilot looked like Rayner. He circled twice more, then flew back down Furnace Creek.
It was an odd se
nsation, having them out spending taxpayers' money searching for us. I felt like some boy scout had just offered to help me across the street.
APOTHEOSIS
We had, it seemed, acclimated to the desert. It was easier, now, to walk during the day and sleep in the cool of the evening. We took the Panamint Valley at midday in temperatures that rose to 115 degrees. The next day, climbing another range of mountains, we came upon a series of enclosing rock walls that reminded us of our good friend the S-shaped canyon. It rose up into the mountains, and there was a small, clear creek running down the middle of the canyon where green grass and bulrushes and coyote melons and trees—actual willow trees—grew. Ahead, water cascaded over some boulders that had formed a natural dam. The pool beyond the boulders was clear green with a golden sandy bottom. It was deep enough to dive into, and the water was so cold it drove the air from my lungs like a punch to the chest. Above, several waterfalls fell down a series of ledges that rose like steps toward the summit of the mountains.
The same sun that had tried to kill us in Death Valley offered its apologies, and we lay out on the rocks, watching golden-blue dragonflies flit over the pool. It was 111 degrees, and we were sunbathing.
The next day we made twenty miles overland. The day after that, almost thirty. We crossed the salt flats of the Owens Valley in the middle of the day, roared into the town of Lone Pine, registered with the rangers to climb Mount Whitney, and reached the summit in a day and a half. It is, perhaps, the easiest pretty high mountain in the world to climb: a walk up.
About forty people made the summit that day, but only half a dozen of us camped there. I was using the stove to
melt snow for drinking water and shivering slightly because my summer sleeping bag wasn't keep me entirely warm. Nick was shooting the sunset over the headwaters of the Kern River far below.
"My fingers are numb," he said. "It's hard to focus." The thermometer read sixteen degrees.
"Yeah, well, you know what they say."
"What do they say?"
"If it's not one thing, it's another."
"Nice view, though," the Indiana Jones of photography said.
THE KINDNESS OF RANGERS REVISITED
When we walked into Dick Rayner's office, I had a copy of the The Death Valley Gazette under my arm. The chief ranger agreed that, yes, according to the plan we'd filed, we hadn't been late. What had happened, he said, was that Frank Frost, in the support vehicle, had climbed to the top of a mountain with a commanding view of our route and had spent a day scanning the trails with high-powered binoculars. It was the day we had spent sleeping in the S-shaped canyon. Frank couldn't find us anywhere.
He reported to the rangers, who had immediately set out to save our lives. The foul-up hadn't been anyone's fault really, and I suppose I was glad that the Park Service employs men like Dick Rayner who are willing to leave an air-conditioned office to save a couple of nincompoops like us.
Still, I couldn't help zapping him a little. "The article says we were more than twenty-four hours overdue. I mean, look at our trip plan. We still had twenty-four hours to the first checkpoint."
Rayner said, "I didn't write the article."
"They quote you directly, though. You say we were in 'good but fatigued condition.' "
"Well, we saw your footprints across the valley," Rayner said. "That's a tiring walk. And we could see you were in
good condition when we flew over. So: 'good but fatigued condition.' "
The chief ranger seemed a little embarrassed. He recounted some of the rescues he'd participated in, and one of the deaths he knew about. Rayner seemed to be saying that he'd just as soon nobody walked across Death Valley in the summertime. It was his job to discourage such treks— to put guardrails along the cliffs—and he apparently felt that newspaper articles about half-dead dumbshits in the desert were something of a public service. He was a good man who just purely hated the idea of people getting hurt in his park.
"Would you do it again?" Rayner asked.
I glanced over at the Indiana Jones of photography, who was smiling in a manner that made him look somewhat psychological. "We could change the rules," he said. "No stashes. We walk from spring to spring and carry portable water purifiers. Badwater to Tule Spring to Trail Canyon . . ."
Dick Rayner seemed intrigued. Certainly against his better judgment, he pointed to the map on his desk and said, "There's a spring here that would get you into the canyon in better shape."
small falls somewhere in the darkness.) Ah, but it feels like a place for bubbling sulphur pits, for lakes of fire complete with damned souls screaming in eternal torment. Oh, Dante would love it here on the lip of Incredible Pit, deep inside Ellison's Cave under Pigeon Mountain just outside Lafayette, Georgia.
All black fancy, generated out of primal fear, this train of thought. Better to contemplate the expedition as a whole: Ellison's Cave is simply the most spectacular vertical caving experience in America. It is rated as one of the most physically taxing and technically difficult wild caves anywhere.
A lot of people who don't go into caves have theories about why other people do. There's talk that gets all fuzzy and Freudian around the edges, a lot of thumb-sucking nonsense about figurative returns to the womb that makes cavers seem just a tad, oh, psychotic. The truth is simple enough: certain people go into caves because most folks don't. The urge is called exploration and everyone understands it to one degree or another. We were, all of us, explorers from our first breath, in a time our world expanded in wonder.
The physical act of exploration is still possible. The forests may be gone, and land is replete with shopping malls and fast-food outlets, but drop half a mile into the earth and there is a pristine wilderness of danger and challenge and alien, almost obscene, beauty. There is wonder left in the world.
The order cavers impose on this wonder is called making the connection. A connection has been made when a person manages to crawl, climb, slide, or swim from one cave entrance and exit through another.
The connection is the stated goal, just as making the summit is the mountaineer's goal. And just as each mountain presents a series of unique challenges, so does each cave. Ellison's is a kind of Everest of American caving. The primary obstacles to be overcome are two large pits: holes in the ground, deep below the surface of the earth, each of them large enough to contain a forty- or fifty-story building.
Dropping these natural shafts on a single rope may be an act of exploration, but there's more than a tad of terror vibrating in the core of the wonder. Consequently, standing in the darkness, on the Brink of Forever, I check my rig for the fifth or sixth time. Yes, yes, everything just so. Seat harness—A-OK. Carabiner—locked. How's the rope? Is it threaded properly through the rappel rack? There is a right way to do this and a wrong way. The wrong way is called a "death rig."
I've got a bag hanging from the seat harness and it contains all the things I'll need for the projected twelve to twenty hours it should take us to make the connection. Check out the contents: a spare light, some candles, lighters, warm clothes in a plastic bag to keep them dry, some spare bits of hardware, a couple of roast beef sandwiches. Yes, sir, dropping down to the ninth level of hell and bringing along a lunch.
The folks who have brought me here are pros, experts, and it seems wise to seek their counsel at the Brink. "Am I death rigged here or what?"
Kent Ballew gives my rappel rack a cursory glance. "Looks good to me," he says. Looks good? What does he mean, looks good? Lots of things look good to Kent Ballew. Women with pouty mouths look good to Kent Ballew. Fast cars look good to Kent Ballew. Do I really want to spend the last six seconds of my life thinking about what looks good to Kent Ballew?
"You mean I'm in solid," I persist, "not death rigged?"
"That would be my considered opinion," Kent says, since he has determined that I require a degree of formality and certitude in this matter.
And so I walk backward to the edge of the pit, lean back on the rope I've ri
gged into, and begin falling out into nothing. It is as if my intention is to do a back flip into the pit.
Larry "Smokey" Caldwell, arguably one of the most astute and inventive vertical cavers in the world, felt my life was worth a week's training anyway. Vertical caving, as practiced by Caldwell and his cohorts, is not a skill someone picks up in a day. Single rope technique (SRT) is an elegantly esoteric art, and my guess is that the people who are any good at it can be counted in the hundreds. Smokey runs a business—Pigeon Mountain Industries in Lafayette, Georgia—that caters to these folks. PMI manufactures the specialized rope used in vertical caving, and it sells the various bits of hardware needed to literally walk up a rope. The techniques Smokey and men like "Vertical Bill" Cuddington pioneered translate well to endeavors beyond the realm of sport. PMI sells rope and gear (and sometimes expertise) to fire fighters, mountain rescue teams, and the military. Indeed, my partner in training with Smokey was John VandenBurg, a fire fighter from Ontario, Canada. He would use his training to save lives—to rescue people on the top floors of a burning high-rise, for instance—and I would use mine to explore America's deepest caves.
Smokey started us off on a simple outdoor cliff—a sixty-foot drop called the Eagles Nest—and soon enough we progressed to sinkholes, large pits open to the air. My favorite was called Valhalla, though Kent Ballew, an employee of PMI, found it spooky in the extreme. Kent is the kind of guy who can do a bootlegger's 180 degree turn on a Chattanooga street, dead sober, and then discuss the matter with an officer of the law in such a way that he gets off with a stern warning. Kent, you sense, is a man who lives a life full of stern warnings. Like most hard-core cavers, he finds calculated risk a life-affirming activity.
And that is why what happened a few years ago in the pit called Valhalla upset him so badly. Some cavers had rap-peled into the 260-foot pit and were waiting there, under an overhanging rock the size of a 18-wheel truck. The over-