James M. Tabor - 005 Blind Descent - Chapter 02.1 - Stone | Текст песни

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• James M. Tabor
• 005 Blind Descent - Chapter 02.1 - Stone

TWO
BUT DEATH TRUMPS ALL, and other considerations would have to wait. Yeager—or, rather, his corpse—was now the expedition’s responsibility, like it or not. The Mexican authorities, never entirely comfortable with these big cave expeditions, which caused unrest among some insular and superstitious locals, were going to be very unhappy about the death. Worse, they might even want the body, but had none of the skills necessary to retrieve it themselves. That job would fall to Bill Stone, his co-leaders, and the other cavers. The problem was that nobody had recovered a corpse from so deep in a cave like Cheve.
Supercaves present more hazards than any other extreme exploration environment. Just descending into and climbing out of them is exorbitantly dangerous. Recovering a body, dead or alive, from deep within any cave is even worse, increasing that danger by an order of magnitude. The same year Chris Yeager died, a caver named Emily Davis Mobley broke her leg only four hours and several hundred vertical feet from the entrance of a New Mexico cave called Lechuguilla—big but far less hazardous than Cheve. It took more than one hundred rescuers four days to bring her to the surface. One expert estimated that every hour of healthy-caver descent time equaled a day of ascent in rescue mode in Lechuguilla, which was noted for, as cave explorers put it, “extreme verticality.”
“Extreme verticality” describes perfectly the part of Cheve through which Yeager’s body would have to be hauled. From its entrance, the cave drops like a steep staircase almost 3,000 vertical feet, over a total travel distance of 2.2 miles, before it begins to level off somewhat. It is not one smooth, continuous drop. Those 3,000 feet include innumerable features and formations, with the odd level stretch, but Cheve’s main thrust here is down. One giant shaft alone is 500 feet deep. Like rock climbers, cavers call such vertical drops “pitches.” There are also shorter pitches—many of them, in fact—as well as waterfalls, crawl spaces, walking passages, lakes, huge boulder fields, and many more formations, unique and almost impossible to describe except with a camera.
In the entire cave, there are ninety pitches requiring rappels. Thirty-three of those lay between Yeager’s body and the surface, including that 500-foot monster. So going back up that way with a body on a litter, at virtually every one of those thirty-three pitches, recovery teams would have to install haul systems of ropes and pulleys and counterweights. The bigger the wall, the more complex the hauling system.
Rigging such haul systems there, particularly on the big walls, would be more dangerous than rappelling down and climbing back up such faces. The work would require that fatigued cavers hang for hours high in the air, in the dark, sometimes under streams of cold water, in painfully biting harnesses, setting bolts and hangers and pulleys. All that would be even before beginning the hauling, which would entail the use of living human bodies as counterweights, among other unpleasant and dangerous tasks. There is more to body recovery, but this gives a hint of its complexity.
Yeager’s father, Durbin, arrived several days after the accident with another relative and a caver friend from Indiana. The body, meanwhile, had been secured temporarily not far from the accident site. There followed a week of discussions between the expedition leaders and the Yeager contingent. Stone, not surprisingly, took the lead for his side. He and the others felt strongly that putting expedition members at great risk to retrieve a dead body was unwise. An accomplished climber himself, Stone pointed out that mountaineers often buried fallen comrades in situ. (At the time, something like 130 climbers had died on Everest, and most of those bodies were still up there.) Stone also pointed out, perhaps indelicately but correctly, that recovering the body would be much easier if it were left in the cave for several years, allowing it to desiccate. A smaller team could then more safely retrieve the bones.

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