Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  On my way to southern France, I had stopped in at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. There I perused the timeline that summarized the experts’ consensus about the invention and development of art in Europe. It all began with crude lumps of clay or stone, obese female fertility symbols, crafted around 30,000 BP. Only thousands of years later did the first painted images appear. They grew slowly in complexity and sophistication, climaxing around 17,000 years ago in the masterpieces of Lascaux.

  Everyone assumed at first that the Chauvet paintings must be contemporary with Lascaux. Then the radiocarbon dates came back. The Chauvet art clustered around the unthinkably early date of 32,000 BP, and ranged as far as 4,000 years before that. Obsolete in an instant was the Musée de l’Homme’s confident timeline, along with the collective wisdom of scores of textbooks about man in the Paleolithic Era.

  I came away from the Ardèche bursting with admiration for the unfathomably old paintings hidden from human sight for some three hundred centuries, even though all I had seen (or would ever see) were photographs of that art, and with a new-found awe for pioneers who, long before humans learned how to plant seeds or fire clay pots, had risked their lives to imprint upon the underworld a record of their spiritual cosmos. If any men and women who ever lived deserved to be called explorers, it was those barefoot mystics carrying their pine torches into an undiscovered world too dark and sterile ever to inhabit, but the only place on earth sublime enough to bear the homage of the visions by which they lived.

  During my lifetime, the highest and hardest mountains in the world have been tamed. Hillary and Tenzing reached the summit of Everest on my tenth birthday, May 29, 1953—a triumph that reverberated for me throughout my adolescence. Ten years later, in 1963, I participated in my first expedition, to the previously unclimbed Wickersham Wall on the north side of Mount McKinley (not yet known as Denali). By that year, in southern Patagonia, the highest peak, Fitz Roy, had been climbed, but a far more difficult mountain called Cerro Torre awaited its first ascent. In the Karakoram, although K2 had received a single ascent, such soaring thrusts of rock and ice as Trango Tower, the Ogre, and Mitre Peak were still untouched. In Alaska, where I would focus my ambitions for the next fifteen years, a pair of ranges that would eventually test some of the best climbers in the world—the Kichatna Spires and the Revelation Mountains—had not even been discovered, let alone explored, by mountaineers.

  In Boulder, Colorado, in the late 1950s, I was regarded by my high school classmates as a geek because of my passion for the mountains. (The cool kids went skiing at Arapahoe Basin and Winter Park.) Nowadays, of course, Boulder is as sportif a town as can be found anywhere in the country, and rock climbers, who constitute a hefty percentage of the populace, wear their racks and chalk bags as insignia of the in-crowd.

  Yet by now, virtually all of the most challenging mountains in the world have been climbed. In 1963, the sheer 2,700-foot face of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley had been climbed by only two routes (the Nose and the Salathé Wall). Today, there are more than seventy lines up that stern monolith, routes that weave in and out of one another or guard their autonomy only yards away from their neighbors.

  Old-timers looking back on the playing fields of youth occasionally lament that a given range is “climbed out.” The temptation to enshrine the years of one’s prime as a golden age lies close at hand. If several hundred people—most of them clients on guided expeditions—can stand on the summit of Everest on a given day and snap selfies, it’s hard not to regard big-range mountaineering as a travesty of what it meant to Hillary—or to Eric Shipton. Yet the climbing game remains in 2017 as vital in crucial respects as it was half a century ago. Consider the north ridge of 23,440-foot Latok I in the Karakoram—as pure and daunting a route as any peak in the world can boast. It was first attempted in 1978 by four of the finest American alpinists of the day—Michael Kennedy, Jim Donini, George Lowe, and Jeff Lowe. After twenty-six days, they got within 500 feet of the summit, only to be turned back by weather and a nearly fatal illness that struck Jeff Lowe in the team’s highest camp. Almost forty years later, the north ridge has been assaulted by some twenty-five expeditions, still without success. None of the subsequent teams, in fact, has matched the 1978 high point.

  There has always been, one would think, a close affinity between mountaineering and caving. The passion to reach the summit of an unclimbed peak has its mirror image in the challenge of exploring a subterranean grotto. A primary goal is to “push” a cave to the deepest point possible below the surface. Yet in my experience, few climbers show any interest in caving; many of them shudder in claustrophobic horror at the very prospect of crawling through tunnels and rappelling down vertical shafts in the pitch-black labyrinths that abound on every continent (except, as far as we know, Antarctica).

  Caving today is far from chic. The public image of “spelunkers” (as serious cavers balk at being called) remains at least as geeky as my small coterie of climbing buddies was in Boulder in the late 1950s. Yet if ever an era of geographical exploration deserved to be called a golden age, for cavers that time is now.

  Consider a simple question: What is the deepest cave in the United States? The startling answer is, no one knows. It is entirely possible that the deepest cave in our country has yet to be discovered. In the 1980s, most ardent American devotees of the subterranean world focused their efforts on pushing Lechuguilla, a grotto full of amazingly beautiful speleothems (ranging from stalactites and stalagmites to soda straws to calcite dams to cave pearls) not far from Carlsbad Caverns in southern New Mexico. In 1988, for a magazine assignment, I was guided on an eighteen-hour trip into Lechuguilla by Rick Bridges, one of the pioneers in its exploration. The cave’s entrance, a nondescript hole in the ground on a hillside in the Guadalupe Mountains, had been known since 1914—for decades, it was mined for bat guano, a high-end fertilizer. But the verdict that the pit was “very small and somewhat disappointing” held sway until 1986, when Bridges and fellow zealots pried loose the dirt and stones clogging the entrance in pursuit of the elusive promise of a strong wind blowing out from the depths.

  In August 1987, Lechuguilla was pushed to the depth of 1,058 feet, exceeding its famous neighbor by a scant 20 feet. Carlsbad Caverns, first explored by a local teenager around 1898, had been made a national monument in 1923 (it is now a national park). No terrain on earth can be more thoroughly trivialized by commercial development than a cave. The day before my initiation into Lechuguilla, I made the standard tourist visit to Carlsbad. It had taken five all-out pushes over three months to stretch Lechuguilla to a depth of 750 feet. In Carlsbad, I reached that depth in fifty-seven seconds, thanks to an elevator that whisks passengers to a once-pristine lower sanctum. Just outside the elevator doors, a gift shop-cum-snack bar offered relief from the rigors of the abyss.

  During the week I visited the Guadalupes in 1988, the dedicated efforts of Bridges and his cronies extended the depth of Lechuguilla from 1,207 to 1,415 feet, earning it the laurel of the second-deepest known cavern in the U.S. The record-holder was Columbine Crawl, a cave in Wyoming’s Teton Range that was discovered only in 1980. Compared to the relatively warm air and dazzling beauty of Lechuguilla, Bridges told me, Columbine was “a death hole, a horrible cave.” Not long after my visit, cavers found new shafts and tunnels that extended Lechuguilla to 1,604 feet deep, beating Columbine Crawl by 53 feet. For almost two decades, Lechuguilla held the record.

  Then in 2014, a determined caver named Jason Ballensky led a team on a two-day, 22-mile backpack into Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness Area. Nine years earlier, Ballensky had discovered a small hole on the slopes of Turtlehead Mountain that hinted at huge spaces underground. He had been probing his discovery ever since, convinced that the new cave had major potential. Like Columbine Crawl, Tears of the Turtle, as Ballensky named his find, was scary and challenging even for experts, combining chilly temperatures with a plethora of vertical drops on which ropes had to be fixed. (The air inside a cave assumes a
n annual mean temperature of the terrain surrounding it. The Bob, as aficionados call it, is a high-altitude northern wilderness.)

  On the 2014 thrust, Ballensky’s team pushed the cave to a depth of 1,629 feet. Tears of the Turtle thus exceeded the vertical relief of Lechuguilla by a mere 25 feet. As of 2017, the cavern deep in the Montana outback retains the American record. Ballensky is certain that potential for further development lies among the remote seams and tunnels at the bottom of Tears of the Turtle. The 2014 push was stopped by a deposit of “quicksand-like mud” left by recurrent floods. “It’s the sort of thing where we were worried about getting stuck in it and not getting out,” Ballensky told a Missoula newspaper. The small band of cavers exploring the Bob is also convinced there are other entrances to unknown caverns with vast potential waiting to be discovered on Turtlehead and other peaks in the back country.

  Just how extraordinary the uncertain designation “deepest cave in the United States” is can be gleaned by a comparison with mountaineering. Before Alaska was admitted to the Union in 1959, the highest peak in the United States was Mount Whitney in California, at 14,505 feet above sea level. Whitney’s supremacy had not been seriously doubted since the beginning of the twentieth century. The first known ascent (whether Native Americans had preceded Anglos to the summit remains an open question) came in 1873, the deed of three fishermen from the nearby town of Lone Pine. By its easiest route, Whitney is, in climbers’ dismissive parlance, a walk-up.

  Mount McKinley, named by a Republican prospector in 1896, was thought even then to be the highest peak in the Alaska Territory. That Denali (the great mountain’s official name since 2015) was also the highest point on the continent, at 20,310 feet, was established before the second decade of the twentieth century. First attempted in 1903, Denali was successfully climbed by a party led by Archdeacon Hudson Stuck in 1913. Nowadays, more than a thousand climbers attempt Denali each year, nearly all of them opting for the easiest route, the West Buttress, with a success rate slightly above 50 percent.

  That Everest was the highest mountain in the world has not been seriously doubted since the 1930s. But the likes of Jason Ballensky are vigorously searching for caving’s Mount Everest—or even for caving’s Denali. Yet as lively and passionate as the quest for deeper passages in the U.S. waxes today, caves in this country are distinctly minor-league by international standards. Tears of the Turtle ranks nowhere near the roster of deepest underground systems in the world. A cave system in Mexico has been pushed to a depth more than three times as great as the pride of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area. As of 2017, the most profound abyss in the world is a cave system in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, stretching an unimaginable distance of 7,206 feet from entrance to lowest sanctum. Yet even now, none of the experts will claim that a deeper cave may not exist somewhere on earth, waiting to be found.

  Of these dizzying explorations among the chasms of the underworld, more below.

  The distances cavers travel underground tend to be short compared to treks of all kinds on the surface. In Actun Tunichil Muknal, the grotto in Belize in which Jaime Awe guided me to the chamber containing the remains of Maya sacrificial victims, it took us two hours to cover a mere 800 yards. By the time we got there, that eerie refuge felt quite remote from the entrance portal.

  There are three main reasons why caving magnifies distance. The first is that the going can be difficult and tiresome. In terms of pure climbing challenges, no pitches tackled inside caverns such as Lechuguilla or Columbine Crawl approach the technical extremes of cutting-edge rock climbs. In the larger underground passages, explorers can sometimes hike for minutes at a time. But more often, the limestone mazes carved by water over the eons reduce the visitor to crawling and even slithering. Indeed, the trick to pushing a cave to new depths or extents often depends on the efforts of veterans who inch and squeeze their bodies through orifices that at first look impossible to breach. Caving is not for the claustrophobic. Every caver’s nightmare, in fact, is getting stuck for good in some dead-end tube or slot that looked at first as though it might “go.” The horror story that still looms largest in the general public’s fearful image of subterranean exploration is the grim demise of Floyd Collins inside Kentucky’s Crystal Cave in 1925. Although Collins was imprisoned in a crawlway only 55 feet below the entrance, the frantic labors of an army of rescuers failed to extricate him from his death trap. It took him fourteen excruciating days to die of hypothermia and dehydration. (Robert Penn Warren wrote a novel, The Cave, based on Collins’s plight and the media circus it spawned.)

  The second reason that caves seem to stretch real distance stems from their complexity. For every “lead” that opens a route to new passages, there are dozens of tantalizing holes and crannies that go nowhere. Route-finding inside caves can be fiendishly complicated, and the penalties for screwing up can be dire. Experienced cavers carry marking tape to tag the many junctions where a pivotal choice of leads must be made.

  Deep inside Lechuguilla, Rick Bridges led me and two relatively inexperienced cavers along a narrow and (to my mind) unpromising tunnel. All of a sudden we popped out of the tube and hoisted ourselves into a massive “room.” As we played our headlamps across the distant walls of the chamber and stared up at the high ceiling, we could not suppress our cries of awe. Bridges let us revel in the moment, then said, “Okay, guys, which hole did we just come out of?” We stared down at our feet. The floor of the chamber was a massive talus pile of collapsed rocks. A hundred dark nooks among the stones within a few yards of where we stood adumbrated ninety-nine wild goose chases. Had the cavers who first discovered the great room not carefully taped their progress, the route leading back to the entrance pit in the Guadalupe Mountains might have taken hours or even days to rediscover.

  Getting lost inside a cave, in short, is a real danger, one that can have fatal results.

  A geologic quirk of underground topography intensifies the challenge of route-finding. Because there is little or no wind deep inside a cave, no variation of temperature with the seasons, no storms pummeling the landscape, erosion makes little impact on the terrain. Talus piles such as the one we emerged upon in Lechuguilla are far more unstable than their counterparts on mountain slopes. One must be very careful hiking across these chaoses, for huge stones can roll and shift under the lightest tread. Big slabs that a climber would guess are solidly lodged in place can pry loose under the careless grip of hand or foot.

  The third reason that caves seem more gigantic than they really are has to do with sensory deprivation. A standard trick that veterans inflict on novices is to get them comfortably seated in some corner of the underworld, then ask them all to turn off their lights. If you think you’ve experienced true pitch darkness before, at that moment your synapses will undergo a radical recalibration.

  The underground is devoid not only of light but for the most part of odor. After hours inside a cave, you may feel as though you’ve adjusted to the alienness of the place—until you pop at the end of the journey back into the “real” world. That act always delivers a strong emotional jolt. It’s common to liken the experience to being reborn. A few years after my visit to Lechuguilla, my friend Jon Krakauer spent five days inside the labyrinth, as he accompanied scientists looking for the closest earthly facsimile to the landscape of Mars. Of his re-emergence from Lechuguilla after more than a hundred hours, Jon wrote:

  Sunlight washes over my chest and face. I inhale a greedy lungful of desert air, savoring the scent of juniper and sage. The colors that flood my light-starved retinas—the blue of the sky, a pale green drift of cactus, the creamy palette of the clouds—seem electric, surreal, almost overwhelming. An involuntary whoop of joy erupts from my throat. I feel as if I’ve just been released from prison.

  Caves, then, are serious places. But consider for a moment how much more serious they become if they are filled with water.

  The Yucatán is the fist that the bent arm of Mexico thrusts toward the Caribbean Sea. Lo
ng before Columbus, it was home to the Maya, especially after the collapse of the Classic Era civilization around the year 900. Such imposing congeries of pyramids and temples as Chichén Itzá anchored the still-thriving Maya world during the Post-Classic period. By now the Yucatán Peninsula has become a favorite tourist destination, as college kids on spring break flock to the nightclubs of Cancún and trendy Euros congregate in Playa del Carmen. Yet away from the northeast coast, in the rain forests of the interior, the terrain approaches the status of wilderness.

  Most of the Yucatán is flat, and most of it is made up of a bedrock called karst, a kind of limestone that is easily dissolved by water. Normally hidden under a layer of soil and vegetation, the bedrock resembles an enormous lattice of stone riddled with holes. The annual rainfall in the Yucatán is a soggy 50-plus inches, and during the rainy season, from June through October, you can count on drizzles or downpours every day. Yet the paradox is that because of the karst, all that rainfall filters through soil and stone to pool underground. There are virtually no rivers flowing across the peninsula, and very few lakes. For the traveler in the rain forest, finding water to drink can be a daunting challenge.

  The restored ruins of Chichén Itzá and Tulum, as well as of Cobá and Uxmal, seem to be orderly and civilized places, with trim grasses carpeting plazas and lanes, out of which, with geometrical rigor, soar the spectacularly decorated buildings. But if you venture off the tourist track to a minimally excavated site such as Calakmul, near the Guatemalan border, you are smitten by the monumental struggle the Maya must have waged with a smothering jungle to erect and maintain their city-states.

  From the air, or from a cruise ship coasting the shore, the Yucatán looks like a tame landscape. Yet encountered on foot, beyond the roads and trails, it asserts its primeval fierceness. The Yucatán, in fact, has always struck me as one of the scariest landscapes on earth. On my own visit to Calakmul, I wandered through the trees tracing the vague lumps and ridges swarming with vines and roots that camouflaged the fallen glories of the past. In its heyday, in the seventh century AD, Calakmul was one of the greatest and most powerful of all the Maya centers, on a par with Tikal and Copán. I followed the faint impression of a causeway as it led away from the ruin—followed it for only a hundred yards or so before I lost it in the snarls of underbrush. When I turned back to get my bearings by sighting the main ruin, I saw only a blind frieze of leaves and branches. Suppressing a twinge of panic, I realized that I could easily get lost only a quarter mile away from the edge of civilization. Nothing but trees, no water, no glimpse of the sun, a bewildering flatness everywhere—here would have lurked a wilderness test of survival.