A wolverine is eating my leg

by Tim Cahill

  hang protected them from falling rocks displaced by cavers above, and it was entirely wise for them to be sitting there. But the rock gave way, and the two cavers were crushed beneath its unthinkable weight.

  Smokey and Kent were on the team that recovered the bodies. They had to dig under the rock, and what they found there has haunted Kent Ballew ever since. "Valhalla used to be my favorite pit," Kent told me. "I used to do it twenty times a year or more. Now it's like the pit's turned hostile. Those guys did everything right and the pit killed them."

  We did Valhalla on a weekend. Perhaps fifty spectators were watching when Kent Ballew began his descent. He backed over the lip and, it seemed, just let go. It looked like he had come out of the rope, like he was falling, and several people screamed. This is the way Kent rappels, and he relishes screams of terror from concerned onlookers.

  I followed him down. The brake bar rack used for these long rappels is an elongated horseshoe-shaped device. The rope is threaded through six crossing bars and the bars may be slid close together to create friction and thus slow the descent. Spread the bars out for a Kent Ballew-like full-tilt rappel.

  Valhalla was surrounded by foliage at the top. Inside, it was a symphony of sculpted, soaring rock, and I wanted to take my time. Bright summer sun filtered through the trees surrounding the pit, and a dozen shafts of slanting light fell inside the pit in pure operatic overstatement.

  The PMI rope we were using was specially designed for long rappels. It consisted of a braided outer sheath that protects the load-bearing inner core from abrasion. The core was composed of twenty-two parallel strands of splice-less nylon. This static kernmatle type of construction meant the rope did not spin, and had very little stretch. A mountaineering rope, by contrast, is designed to stop a falling climber and must stretch to cushion the shock that occurs when some plummeting unfortunate reaches the end of his tether.

  This is not to say that PMI rope has no stretch at all. At

  the bottom of a pit like Valhalla, for instance, when you stand and take your weight off the rope it pulls up a few feet. This upward pressure makes it difficult to get the rap-pel rack off the rope. For this reason it is a good idea to lift the legs and rappel until you are almost sitting on solid ground. Which is what I was doing—cruising to a sit-down landing in this open to the sky pit—when I saw the copperhead snake coiled directly below. At such times, one doesn't reflect that the only way a snake could get to the bottom of the pit would be a fast and fatal 260-foot fall. The copperhead was curled in striking position. I grabbed the rope, pulled myself up, and said "wok!" in the manner of a man who has stepped barefoot onto something squishy and foul and possibly alive. Ballew, who had put the dead snake under the rope, thought this was among the more humorous things he had ever seen. I discussed his sense of humor with him, and the discussion was in the nature of a stern warning.

  Still, we left the snake there for photographer Nick Nichols, who was next on the rope. Nick has been photographing caves for a dozen years and is well known in the speleological community. Because caves, as opposed to sinkholes like Valhalla, are perfectly dark, it is impossible to get an idea of their dimensions with one light. Nick's genius is to illuminate the caves with light—with a combination of old-fashioned flash guns, flares, radio-controlled strobe lights, and great white hot magnesium explosions. Cavers accompany Nick—he gets them to carry his gear—into the deepest and most inaccessible caves because he will provide them with photographs of a place they have been to but have never really seen.

  Because I was with Nick, Smokey and Kent saw to it that we hit the deepest cave pits in the Southeast. This process of rappeling down and climbing back up without attempting to make a connection, is called "yo-yoing the pit." One day we yo-yoed the 282-foot-deep Mystery Hole just outside Chattanooga, once thought to be the deepest cave pit in America. There had been a death in this cave as well. Back in 1959, 18-year-old Jimmy Shadden had attempted to de-

  scend into the Mystery Hole on a frayed ski rope and fell to his death. The rope, it was found later, had a breaking strength of 270 pounds. (PMI's 7 /i6-inch rope has a maximum tensile strength of 6,800 pounds.)

  There is a waterfall in the Mystery Hole, and a caver named Buddy Lane has devised a clever dam so people no longer have to descend and ascend through the freezing spray. We dammed the falls and rappeled down into the darkness of the Mystery Hole. Buddy Lane, who accompanied us on this one, stayed up top to let the water drain out of the dam once the rest of us were on the floor of the pit. It came crashing down, 280 feet, and the bottom of the pit was a roaring chaos of howling mist for over five minutes. Ballew said a word of prayer for "ski-rope Jimmy" (whom he regarded as a friendly spirit), Buddy Lane redammed the waterfall for us, and we began climbing up the rope in the dark.

  Ascending is a complicated process. The first essential item needed for a long rope climb is a seat harness. This, in its simplest form, is a long strip of heavy nylon webbing that is wound about the waist and legs and tied off. A cara-biner—an oblong metal ring that snaps open on one side— is clipped into the seat and hangs just below the belly button. If the seat harness is properly tied and fastened, you could clip the carabiner onto a stout hook in a wall and simply sit there.

  Single rope technique, as practiced by the best vertical cavers, involves the use of mechanical devices called Gibbs ascenders: these are little metal gadgets that slide easily up the main rope. Put your weight on a Gibbs and it will bite down and hold with dull metal teeth, which do not damage the rope.

  The bottom Gibbs is attached to a loop of webbing worn on the right foot. You could wear a second Gibbs on your left foot, and hook it into the rope just above your right foot. The problem with this is that you will never be able to lift your right foot above your left. Consequently, you will end up lifting your body weight only on your left foot.

  What you really want to do is walk up the rope, lifting

  one foot above the other so that each leg alternately carries your weight. To do this, you need to rig a "floating cam," which is a Gibbs worn just off the left knee. A foot loop drops from that Gibbs to your left foot. A length of elastic cord fastened to a harness around your chest pulls the knee Gibbs up the rope when you lift your left foot.

  In this way, you can walk up the rope. There are two more devices that make the process easier. The first holds your upper body in toward the rope. Because you are really only attached to the rope at the left knee and right ankle, it is necessary to hold yourself in to the rope with your hands so you don't fall over backward. Rather than use arms at all, you can wear a chest harness with a small wheel in it. The wheel, which is set in a small metal frame, is positioned over the breastbone. You run the rope through the wheel and it will hold your chest into the rope so you can climb no-handed.

  A device that allows you to rest and also provides an extra measure of safety is a "top Jumar." Like a Gibbs, the Jumar is a metal ascender that will bite and hold when it feels downward pressure. The Jumar is attached to the rope at about eye level. A length of webbing connects the Jumar to a carabiner on the seat harness. As you climb, you slide the Jumar up the rope. When you are tired, you simply sit in the seat harness and the Jumar holds you.

  It took a week for me to begin to feel comfortable working this rig and for Smokey to decide I was ready to try Ellison's Cave. "You've been to the chapels," Nick told me, "now we're going to the cathedral."

  Most of the caves in the southeastern section of the United States are limestone formations. In the distant past, the area was a vast sea, and in this sea various creatures lived, absorbed calcium compounds from the water, and when they died their calcareous skeletons formed beds of limestone. In time, the sea retreated to the east as the land rose and the

  Appalachian Mountains formed at a tectonic wrinkle point. Much of the new land consisted of vast outcroppings of limestone that broke and twisted, that folded in on themselves, that were, in fact, a place where caves bred and multiplied.
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br />   Limestone is the mother of caves, and surface water the father. Rainwater seeping through topsoil absorbs carbon dioxide and so forms carbonic acid. Limestone is soluble in this weak acid, which will find cracks and fissures in the broken humped-up rock of the old sea bed. In time—given the capacity of acidic surface water to melt rock—the fissures became canyons, the cracks became pits. Rainwater can, over the centuries, carve out great halls. Underground waterfalls form immense pits with smooth vertical walls.

  The land itself is so honeycombed with meandering underground passages that many drainages in Kentucky and Tennessee and Georgia and Alabama do not contain rivers. The water simply moves underground. When the water table falls, the stony courses of these underground river systems are left dry.

  Rainwater still seeps into the dry passages: into the double oval passageways shaped like keyholes, into the grand ballrooms. It falls over the lips of pits. Because there is no green plant life in the depths of a cave, there is no carbon dioxide in it either, which accounts for the alien "clean" odor of most caves. In a cave environment, the weakly acidic surface water wants to reach chemical equilibrium, and carbon dioxide, so recently absorbed in the green world above, is suddenly released in the lifeless stone passages below. Limestone that had once been in solution becomes solid, and fantastic formations are created.

  In a large room, over time measured in centuries, a single persistent drip can form a stalactite, those odd stone icicles that hang tight to the ceiling. The corresponding formation, a stalagmite (you might walk into one), grows up from the floor. Small sheets of water flowing down the side of a wall can form flamboyant multicolored stone draperies, and water running along the floor of the cave leaves flowstone deposits that look like a river frozen in stone.

  These formations are like nothing seen on the surface of the earth. They have an alien sculpted beauty that suggests some strained, ancient, and unhuman intelligence at work. Sometimes, in the near silence, you can hear that intelligence speak in the sound of distant running water. It sounds vaguely like the mumbling of human voices and it generally comes from below, from deeper. . . .

  Because there isn't much life in caves, they lack the familiar odors of life and death. Near the entrances you might find some nesting birds, a few spiders, some salamanders. These common creatures don't penetrate much past the twilight world of the entrances. But deep in the caves, in the absolute darkness, is where you find white eyeless crickets carrying antennae—longer than their own bodies—which they use the way blind people use canes. There are bats hanging in some of the passageways, bats hanging in great gray furry masses. Drops of water collect on their bodies so that a light shone upon them backscatters bright and silver with a slight otherworldly prismatic rainbow effect. Sometimes, in the permanent ponds and lakes, you may find white albino fish, and where the eyes would be on these fish, there is only smooth white flesh.

  To see these things, these odd creatures, these revelations in stone, is reason enough to venture into caves. The impulse is called tourism, and there are plenty of commercial caves open across the United States where people may safely scratch that itch in some comfort and safety. But the urge to explore, to go where no man has gone before, takes hard-core cavers into a world of wonder where the words comfort and safety are no more than cruel jokes.

  True, wild caves sometimes contain passages in which a tall man can walk upright. More often, passages are a tad low, and people must walk the equivalent of several city blocks bent over at the waist. Since rocks and stalactites projecting from the ceiling can deal a nasty blow, it is wise to walk looking forward and above, with the head rolled back slightly on the shoulders. Cavers call this comical means of locomotion a Groucho walk. Some passages require a squatting duck walk and others a belly crawl. This

  last can be painful: often the floor of the passage will contain a small cold stream flowing over a bed of excruciatingly sharp rocks.

  And then there are passages that seem impossible, little holes in the rock not much bigger around than a long-playing record. Here it is necessary to put the arms through first, like a diver; it is necessary to expel all the air from the lungs, to wiggle through, snakelike. Getting caught in such a hole is a panicky, claustrophobic situation. Even the best cavers sometimes have to be "talked through" bad holes. "Hey, Frank"—and here you speak calmly, reasonably, in a kind of a whisper—"maybe if you got your right foot up a bit, you could push against a rock I see. Be through in a second. No problem. No hurry. You got it, buddy. . . ."

  There are dangers in wild caves that are not matters of common sense and simple intuition. In passages where bats congregate, for instance, they leave nasty little lakes of droppings. Lightning has a habit of streaking into the mouths of caves, striking guano accumulations and causing them to explode.

  Aside from exploding bat shit, cavers can be injured by falls, cave-ins, falling rocks, or by the wet cold that drains the body of heat. Get lost in a cave and you don't have to worry about starving to death. The damp cold will kill you first. You can watch it happen, actually see the onset of hypothermia in a cave where the year-round temperature may stand at fifty-five degrees. Just hold your hand up and shine a light on it: five streams of steam rise from your fingers. One caver who was trapped for over forty hours in a Kentucky cave told me she couldn't stop doing this as she waited, hoping to be rescued. "I was watching myself die," she told me.

  Drowning is quicker and not uncommon. Since the caver doesn't know what the weather is outside, he must constantly look for and mark rooms with high and accessible ledges. A big thunderstorm can fill the passages with rushing water. Even in the highest rooms, doomed cavers have watched helplessly as the water level rose to their legs, their chests, their necks. In the end they died with their lips

  against the cold stone of the ceiling, died knowing that this was the last breath they would ever take.

  Cavers consider such dangers problems to be overcome: they see them in the way mountain climbers see ice-covered rock and unstable avalanche chutes. And while the mountaineer strives to reach the summit, the apotheosis of the sport is to make a first ascent.

  Most people have some sense of what that means—a first ascent—but few understand the caver's drive to make the first connection in a newly discovered cave. New caves are often found today by cavers who "walk the ridges," looking for holes in the ground or places where small rivers disappear. Generally, the river will reappear somewhere below, perhaps on the other side of the mountain. Clearly then— unless there are two streams—the river flows through the mountain. Which means there are passages leading from the high entrance to the lower one. The purpose of exploration is to map the cave, to avoid both getting lost and having time and the damp cold of the cave suck the life out of your body, to climb over great piles of fallen rock, to wade through pools, to belly crawl and Groucho walk your way from one entrance and then exit through another.

  It may take dozens of trips to make the connection. Sometimes a passageway may "go," may lead to more passages. Sometimes two hours' worth of belly-crawling misery ends when the passage squeezes down to nothing. Because passages sometimes fold in on themselves like strands of spaghetti, it is often possible to apparently dead end, only to find a tiny hole leading from one series of snaking passages to another. Very thin cavers are often sent ahead to see if such a hole "goes." Small slender women who don't suffer from claustrophobia are valuable in this regard. They are among the "stoutest" of cavers.

  In the past thirty years, cavers, especially in the Southeast, have been presented with new and seemingly insoluble "problems" in some of the most spectacular of the newly found caves. In Fern Cave, in Ellison's Cave, there are huge pits the caver has to negotiate in order to make the connection. In the absolute blackness there is no way to accurately

  judge the depth of these pits—a beam of light shone down them is simply swallowed up by the eternal darkness—but a rock dropped into the abyss of Ellison's Fantastic Pit takes just under
seven seconds to hit bottom. The physics of the situation suggest a drop of 550 feet, about half of what you'd get from the top of the Empire State Building.

  Rope ladders were too heavy, too difficult, to Groucho walk and belly crawl through holes. And they tended to spin under a caver's weight. Ski rope was the suicide's solution to the pits, and mountaineering rope spun so badly that early cavers became nauseated in only a few feet. What cavers needed, in order to make the connection, were new methods, new techniques. Single rope technique—the use of specialized rope, rappel racks, and mechanical ascenders—was the answer.

  During the time these techniques *ere being developed—from 1967 through 1981—there were eight fatalities among accomplished vertical cavers. Four were the result of problems with the seat harness, two happened when the caver slipped at the lip while off the rope, one occurred when the rope pulled out of its anchor, and one person death rigged himself.

  Since the caving community is a small one, accounts of these deaths spread quickly, and the hard-core vertical caver, in consequence, tends to be more safety conscious than one might first suppose. A small magazine, Nylon Highway, published by the "vertical section" of the National Speleological Society, caters to this hard core and contains reports on accidents as well as offering safety hints and accounts of new pits. It also lists records for the "classic" one-hundred-foot rope climb, which now stands at under thirty seconds.

  In the last half dozen years, the technique that was developed for the purposes of exploration—and modified to save lives—has become a sport in and of itself. A number of cavers now simply yo-yo the pits with no thought of further exploration, and some of these fanatics have taken their dirty underground sport out into the light of day. Last October, I accompanied my caving friends to Yosemite Na-