Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  Klimchouk’s great insight, which opened up Krubera, was to investigate what he called “windows”—small portals in the walls of shafts—rather than try to force his way through such putative dead ends as boulder chokes and sumps. Such an approach required great patience and endurance. In caves such as Krubera, according to Tabor, “Of hundreds of leads, 95 percent went nowhere; 4 percent yielded more depth and distance; only 1 percent produced substantial breakthroughs.”

  The teams that worked in Krubera were dominated by Ukrainians, many of them from an ambitious club based in Kiev. The organization they brought to the challenge of Krubera was both more massive and more cohesive than Stone’s often fragmented group efforts in Mexico. And once the vital windows were discovered and pushed, Krubera just seemed to go and go. In 2000, a team stretched it to a depth of 4,600 feet, at which it began to rival the deepest pits in Europe. And in January 2001, another Ukrainian team forced passages all the way down to 5,609 feet below the surface. Suddenly Krubera was the deepest cave in the world—the first grotto outside western Europe ever to claim that honor.

  The Georgian supremacy was short-lived, as in January 2003 a team in France extended the Gouffre Mirolda to 5,685 feet—a mere 74 feet deeper than Krubera. Klimchouk and his comrades, now fortified by some of the best cavers in post-Soviet Russia, redoubled their efforts, and in 2004 those efforts bore fruit. The team that now assaulted Krubera comprised fifty-six cavers from seven different countries. Their gear amounted to 10,000 pounds of supplies, which included two miles of rope. And they strung a telephone line into the abyss to facilitate communication between the surface and the depths.

  Diving through sumps and rappelling past waterfalls, an advance guard reached a depth of 6,307 feet. Krubera had regained first place. And since 2004, the cave has never looked back. Only two months after the record-setting push, another team lowered the cave to a vertical relief of 6,822 feet (2,080 meters). Krubera thus became the first known cave to break the magical barrier of 2,000 meters. Thirteen years later, it is still the only cave in the world exceeding that number. In 2017, the Krubera record stands at 7,206 feet—more than a thousand feet deeper than its nearest rival, another Georgian cave called Sarma. As of this writing, Huautla ranks eighth in the world, with a depth of 5,068 feet. Chevé lags slightly behind its Oaxacan neighbor, at 4,869.

  Yet even now, none of the best cavers in the world—not even Alexander Klimchouk—will declare unequivocally that the Krubera labyrinth they have discovered is the deepest in the world. Who knows what prodigies of karst lurk unsuspected in the highland jungles of New Guinea, on the remote plateaus of western China? The Everest of caving may still lie out there, undiscovered, in some limestone wilderness where few humans have ever ventured.

  In this book, I have dwelt on the ways in which exploration and adventure have been adulterated by the machinery of communication—cell and sat phones, radio, Internet—and by the rescue capability of airplanes and helicopters. Caving, almost uniquely, has been transformed virtually not at all by such modern inventions. Bill Stone and Barbara am Ende, feeling their way through the sumps beyond San Agustin, were almost as alone in 1994 as Douglas Mawson on his desperate solo jaunt back to base camp in 1913 in Antarctica. There is no fear at present that the grottos of the world, or even a single plateau like Arabika or Huautla, are in danger of being “caved out.” The driving geniuses of the underworld, the Bill Stones and Alexendar Klimchouks, have the visionary passion that stamped George Leigh Mallory on Everest, Roald Amundsen on his way to the South Pole. They also share a strong competitive streak. Even now, Stone is not willing to cede second-place status to his Ukrainian rival. The Chevé resurgence, promising more than 8,000 feet of depth, gnaws away at him. So in 2015 he announced yet another assault on Cheve, tentatively scheduled for 2017, when he would be sixty-four years old.

  If any exploratory endeavor nowadays truly confronts regions of the earth that are still undiscovered, it is caving. No one knows where a new passageway in Chevé or Krubera goes until men and women actually explore it. There are no aerial photos, no maps except the ones cavers draw as they survey onward.

  Record depth is only the most ardently sought benchmark of the underground. Every cave, in all its twisting passages, abounds in mysteries. Deep inside Lechuguilla on my guided tour, in the twelfth or thirteenth hour, as we sat on a limestone shelf taking a breather, Rick Bridges pointed to an orifice gaping 10 yards away. “This whole section of the cave was discovered only yesterday,” he said. “You want to have a look down that chute? Nobody’s been in it yet.”

  I jumped to my feet and started off. The bending tunnel lay swathed in deep drifts of gypsum powder. With every step, I left footprints. Bound by Bridges’s injunction to push only 50 or 60 yards, I nonetheless passed out of his sight. I was gripped by a frenzy I had first tasted on the north face of Denali in 1963. In the whole human history of the world, my brain sang, no one has ever been here before. I am the first.

  If I could start life over as an explorer, in 2017 rather than 1960, I think I might become a caver rather than a climber. But in my seventy-fourth year, with a cancer I cannot cure circumscribing every whim or ambition I might throw at the world, I can only dream of subterranean discovery. Still, it was dreamers who unlocked Huautla, who found the key to Krubera . . .

  SEVEN

  THE FUTURE of ADVENTURE

  According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, a resource compiled from several authoritative lexicons including the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “aventuren” first appears in English around the year 1300, as a verb meaning “to risk the loss of something.” That original meaning catches the essence of what adventure means to me. Not just “risk,” but “the loss of something.” The adventurers celebrated in this book all risked their very lives to achieve goals, however arcane, that the rest of the world deemed too hazardous to pursue. Without danger, adventure is reduced to a mere sport.

  The word “adventure” was used sparingly before the nineteenth century. Since 1800, the term (usually as a noun) has grown in popularity even as its meaning has been cheapened. Today, “the adventure of a lifetime” is a phrase shamelessly applied to everything from a tour of the Caribbean by cruise ship to taking a year to study abroad.

  The text of the King James Bible runs to 789,626 words. Among them, “adventure” appears only twice, in senses quite alien to our modern take on the word. Thus, in Deuteronomy 28:56, one of the cursed fates the Lord will mete out to nonbelievers is the corruption of a seemingly virtuous woman who “would not adventure to set the sole of her foot upon the ground for delicateness and tenderness, her eye shall be evil toward the husband of her bosom, and toward her son, and toward her daughter.”

  Throughout Richard Hakluyt’s Renaissance accounts of the great voyages of Britain’s boldest explorers, “adventurer” is deployed in a way that turns on its head our notion of what was at stake. For Hakluyt, the adventurers were the businessmen at home who financed the voyages, stalwarts of such enterprises as the British East India Company. It has been estimated that on any sixteenth-century voyage from Europe to the New World, the fatality rate was one in three. But in the Elizabethan mind, vagabonds who signed up for the expedition were mere crew, unskilled laborers. In Hakluyt’s world, what stood to be lost was money, not human lives. It was the financiers who took the risk.

  I doubt that the mariners who sailed with Odysseus on the voyage from Troy back to Ithaca conceived of their journey as an adventure. The trials they endured—threading the needle between Scylla and Charybdis, escaping the cave of Polyphemus, resisting the song of the beautiful Sirens—were obstacles to overcome, challenges thrown up by the gods in all their Olympian perversity. No one in Homeric Greece would have deliberately sought out such ordeals, since ordinary life was perilous enough. Yet the epic poem, among the earliest forms literature took on in the Western world, was conceived as a celebration of the deeds of an extraordinary man, told in heroic verse, i.e., dactylic he
xameter. Ironically, “having an epic” has become climbing slang for getting into serious trouble on an ascent that ought to have been straightforward.

  Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Canadian Arctic explorer and ethnologist, liked to claim that adventure was what happened when you screwed up. A sound explorer, in his view, pulled off his expeditions exactly as planned, with no tawdry melodramas spawned by avoidable mistakes. Yet the curmudgeonly Stefansson was belied by his own record, as during the disastrous voyage of the Karluk from 1913–16. When the ship was frozen into sea ice north of Point Barrow, Stefansson and five companions left the vessel, ostensibly to hunt for game to sustain the crew. Those remaining with the ship suspected that Stefansson had simply abandoned them, and indeed, the hunting party never returned to the Karluk, which sank in January 1914. Of the twenty-four men and one woman left with the ship, eleven died in various ways before Captain Robert Bartlett led a handful of teammates on a desperate march to Siberia to set a rescue in motion. Stefansson never took full responsibility for his crucial role in the fiasco, which unfolded as part of his own grand scheme of scientific research in the Arctic.

  To push the question in another direction, one might argue that adventure is the luxury of a modern world, or at least of that part of the world affluent enough to escape routine threats of starvation, disease, or ethnic oppression, in which ordinary life has become secure enough to take for granted. In that world, we seek out adventure, rather than having it thrust upon us as it was for Odysseus.

  When I took up mountain climbing as a teenager in Boulder in the late 1950s, I was following no mandate to serve my country or my kin, no vision of a way to improve the lives of others, not even a sense that here lay a path to a sustainable vocation. As much as anything, I started climbing because I was bored. Even hiking in the Colorado Rockies had grown humdrum. Yet within only two years, climbing became the most important thing in my life. I never doubted that it was worth the risk.

  Some years later, in graduate school at the University of Denver, I still shaped each year around the next summer’s expedition to Alaska. The beginning of the fall term each September loomed as shattering anticlimax. Studying poetry at DU, I started playing with the most demanding verse forms, such as the villanelle and the sestina. Free verse seemed too easy, too undisciplined. It was, as Frost had memorably said, playing tennis without a net. It was hiking up the dreary trail on Mount Audubon rather than attacking the east face of Longs Peak. At age twenty-three or twenty-four, I wrote a rondeau—a tight, twelve-line poem in iambic tetrameter in which the first phrase repeats at the end of both stanzas—that, I realize looking back, encapsulated my youthful angst about being an adventurer born too late.

  We drove all night to reach the shore.

  There was a time when men would sail

  All night to reach the land, and fail;

  And only hunger could restore

  The vision they had seen before.

  Along a paved, familiar trail

  We drove all night.

  What were all of us looking for?

  The truth of some persistent tale?

  A golden city, or the Grail?

  Because we could believe no more,

  We drove all night.

  Yet during those years, I gloried in the embarrassment of riches that the mountains of Alaska poured into my lap. Whole ranges that climbers had never approached! Soaring spires of granite that had never felt the touch of human hand! If I had stopped to reflect, I might have told myself, No, you weren’t born too late. Born at the perfect time. Pity the generations to come.

  Looking back at age seventy-three on my career as a mountaineer, I have to resist the temptation to deplore the current state of adventure as a tattered scrap of the abundance in which I reveled in my prime. In 2007, I wrote an essay for Alpinist titled “The Epigoni,” in which I did just that. My thesis was a brash put-down of the current scene. “It hit me,” I wrote, “that the young climbers of the day . . . were what the Greeks called epigoni: the born-too-late, the hangers-on, the feeble imitators of the heroic alpinists of a more healthy age. At their worst, they were spoiled kids fighting over the leftovers.”

  I wrote the piece tongue-in-cheek, or so I thought. Little did I realize that it might give some of the best climbers of the younger generation serious, self-doubting pause—until I came across a piece published in Appalachia in 2014 titled “Epigoni, Revisited.” That deft essay was the work of Michael Wejchert, the son of my longtime climbing buddy Chris Wejchert. The year before, Michael and two partners had attempted the south face of Alaska’s Mount Deborah, on the east ridge of which Don Jensen and I had been defeated during a forty-two-day two-man expedition in 1964. I had written my second book, Deborah: A Wilderness Narrative, about that protracted, nightmarish failure.

  Then twenty-six years old, Michael consulted with me in Cambridge before his own expedition. But I only glimpsed the fact that Deborah had been an inspirational text for him as a teenager, and that now he harbored the dark suspicion that the modern technology his team was throwing at the mountain might run the risk of cheapening their experience. I had no inkling, in fact, that he had read my Alpinist put-down, “The Epigoni.”

  Michael and his buddies flew by bush plane in to the West Fork Glacier, whereas Don and I had backpacked in from the Denali Highway. They carried a sat phone and planned to make a film of their exploit. Alas, a freakishly cold April—the coldest in Alaska since 1923—flattened their attempt before it even got started. In minus 40-degree temperatures, they never came to grips with the south face. Back at base camp, they called their pilot, who picked them up. They had spent only two weeks in the Hayes Range, compared to Don’s and my six.

  In Appalachia, Michael recounted the decision to give up.

  I realize the mountain doesn’t care who we are, why we’re here, or what we’ve brought. My frozen fingers unzip four layers and finally fumble with the camera lens. I manage 30 seconds of shaky footage almost automatically: Elliot below the mountain, swinging his feet like a football punter to stay warm. I don’t need the film to remember the moment though: We two grown men doing jumping jacks miles from anywhere, beneath a hunk of granite nobody really cares about, pistons of humanity bobbing down, fighting for enough warmth to stay alive. The climbing ceases to matter, and the movie, too. Sometimes, surviving is enough.

  When Michael got back to his home in New Hampshire, I consoled him over the phone. His attempt, I thought, had had the same kind of boldness about it that Don and I had been proud of in 1964. Only when I read the Appalachia essay did I realize that he had glumly consigned his attempt to the marginalia of the epigoni whom I had so cavalierly dismissed. The good thing is that the defeat on Deborah slowed Michael down not at all. He has returned to Alaska on two more ambitious expeditions, and is planning another in the future. At age thirty, Michael Wejchert is one of America’s strongest and most visionary mountaineers.

  Michael’s plucky example reset my curmudgeonly compass. I no longer worry that the skills and technology of the current band of alpinists relegate the deeds of my own generation to the limbo of “pretty good for its time.” I am surprised and pleased, in fact, that the hotshots of today express admiration for the climbs we made in the 1960s and 1970s. That some of our ascents have earned the label of “classic,” let alone “breakthrough,” fills me with pride. Climbers in general have a decent sense of history—as professional athletes do not. The great majority of major league baseball’s current stars have little or no idea who Willie Mays was, or Hank Aaron. But the typical twenty-five-year-old making his mark in Yosemite in 2017 reveres and honors Royal Robbins or Lynn Hill.

  The media, of course, focus inordinately on Everest, or on the Seven Summits. But all over the globe young adventurers set their sights on ranges that remain almost as unexplored as the Kichatnas and Revelations were for me and my teammates in the late 1960s. It matters little that the peaks they covet are officially unnamed—that neglect only redoubles th
eir value. If I were twenty-five myself, and setting out now in quest of new worlds to conquer, I’d head, like the most imaginative of today’s mountaineers, for the fjords on the east coast of Greenland, or the massifs of western China, or the enclaves of wilderness in Alaska that still, despite the campaigns of my own generation and the next, have escaped assault by piton and ice axe. I’ve seen the photos. I know what’s there.

  As I argued in the previous chapters, some forms of terrestrial exploration are only now luxuriating in the discovery of unknown worlds. Chief among them are caving and cave diving. And the descent of wild rivers that earlier kayakers and rafters judged unrunnable stirs the blood of a small legion of daring young paddlers. Nor must an explorer today be an expert in some arcane discipline that takes years of training and an arsenal of specialized gear to master. In 2001, two veteran American mountaineers, Mark Richey and Mark Wilford, climbed a little-known peak in the Karakoram called Yamandaka. After three bivouacs and several snowstorms, the men decided that descending the same side of the mountain as the face they had climbed would be too dangerous. As Richey told me years later:

  To the south, there appeared to be an easy descent to a broad meadow. Although we had no map or knowledge of the area, we decided to go that way. We spent the night in the meadow but noticed something strange—no sign of grazing and the wild animals we encountered seemed almost tame, like they had never seen humans. It turned out that this glacier meadow was isolated by a steep cirque and a torrent-filled canyon. We later learned that no humans, not even local herders, had ever visited this place. Our only choice was go back up and over the mountain and reverse our route or take our chances with the unknown canyon below. We chose the latter.