Blind Descent

I've been reading about extreme mountaineering since the late 1990s.  With James M. Tabor's Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth (2010), I go to the opposite extreme: extreme caving.  As adventure-exploration goes, it is actually quite similar to extreme mountaineering: weeks spent isolated in cold, wet environments with complicated technical equipment and a dozen obvious ways to die.  Even the most minor of injuries can trap a caver; rescue is near-impossible at the depths to which these "supercave" explorers routinely descend.  There are plenty of high cliffs, even in the greatest depths, so the climbing equipment and danger of falling are quite similar.  Cavers, like climbers, establish a series of camps with supplies as they move deeper into the cave.  Even the term "Sherpa" has been adopted for the lower-ranking cavers who spend all their time ferrying supplies for the more experienced explorers.  The personalities can be equally extreme.  And, as in mountaineering, getting to the destination is only half the battle.  Getting back is even worse.

What's different, of course, is that along with offering safe doses of terror with tales of great height, Tabor also hits all my claustrophobia buttons with stories of cavers squeezing through impossibly small cracks, wriggling through narrow tubes like the MRI from hell, or swimming through tunnels with only an inch of airspace at the top while trying to keep one's nose above water.  And there's always the potential for rising water flooding a cave and drowning helpless explorers or a random boulder falling and crushing you.  You can fall off a cliff, be buried alive, and drown, all more-or-less at once.  Top this off with complete darkness and constant jet-level noise from rushing water.  It makes the cold and lack of oxygen on Everest look positively restful.  And Tabor starts his story off with a bang: a note to fellow cavers reading "STOP. We have a fatality."  This is followed by a description of the fatal mistake of an inexperienced caver, an episode Tabor will revisit later.  The theme of just how easily inexperience can kill you and the problems of people without much experience attempting supercaves are very similar to the issue of having many inexperienced climbers on Everest and other peaks, though as in mountaineering, plenty of veteran cavers die as well from various mishaps. 

The other similarity with extreme mountaineering is the quest element.  But the highest mountain was climbed 60 years ago; the only records to be set now are personal ones.  The world's deepest cave is a title that was up for grabs until less than a decade ago, and even now is not necessarily a closed issue.  Supercaves are much harder to find than tall mountains; while some have "cathedral-style" entrances, one has an entrance that looks more like the narrow lava tubes on Rangitoto.  There might still be a deeper cave to be discovered, or a connection between nearby caves that might result in a new record depth measurement.

Tabor is an experienced caver himself, so plenty of basic information (including everything you need to know about cave latrines, cave cuisine, and cave sex) and how-to makes its way into the book as well, quite enough to convince me that the tourist-friendly Carlsbad Caverns was just fine as my first, last, and only cave experience back in 1992.

Blind Descent focuses on two cavers who are racing to be the first to discover by exploration (unlike mountains, cave size cannot be measured other than by surveying it from the inside) Earth's deepest cave: the obsessive American engineer-inventor Bill Stone and the meticulously organized Ukrainian geologist Alexander Klimchouk.  Given the language barriers and Stone's colorful personality, it's understandable that Tabor devotes more attention to Stone's exploration of the Mexican caves, the deepest in the Americas, than to Klimchouk's methodical expeditions in the Republic of Georgia.  Stone is an inventor as well; Tabor compares him to Doc Savage, a reference he apparently assumes is entirely self-explanatory.  Between expeditions, Stone occupies himself with developing better and lighter-weight equipment for deeper descents and lengthier cave-diving, when cavers have to actually travel through caverns entirely underwater.

Tabor is a fairly cool writer, despite the compelling topic, and even with all the listed hazards, I didn't spend my reading time twitching nervously and trying to repress my imagination.  But I was certainly engaged by the cavers and their quest, and I was really rooting for Stone as he poked around the amazing Cueva Chevé (which Tabor, irritatingly, spells simply as "Cheve" without the accent mark) and surrounding caves, knowing from simple experiments with dye how far water traveled through the system and hoping to find a way for humans to match it even as he hits dead end after dead end.  It's also a pleasure to see thorough descriptions of the exploits of some accomplished female cavers, though I was rolling my eyes at Tabor's apparent compulsion to describe their physical attractiveness.  And Tabor does hit his stride in pure description.  I could have been entirely content knowing a little less about the consistency of vampire bats' guano or the gushing fluids of a body retrieved from a cave in a state of extreme decomposition.  He also includes a fair amount of interpersonal soap opera, though he admits to drawing the line at poking into the details of Stone's divorce and carefully avoids naming names during one incident of a lapse of caving ethics and protocol.

I was particularly fascinated by the really enormous caverns found deep underground: one was the length of three football fields and 175 feet high at it's peak.  The distance the cavers travel is quite comparable in both vertical distance and overall miles-traveled to extreme mountaineering.  And the names they give the various areas of each cave are wonderful: Through the Looking Glass, Mad Man's Falls, the Swim Gym, Wet Dreams, the Exclusion Tubes, Nightmare Falls.  I would have loved to have more pictures, but given the challenges of underground photography, I understand why there just aren't many to include.

I won't spoil the ending of the race or the book, which I highly recommend for anyone interested in exploration, adventure, and survival in extremis.  It's a real pity that extreme caving doesn't get nearly the attention extreme mountaineering gets.  By any measure, these are extraordinary feats.  Hopefully this book will help put that right.

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