James M. Tabor - 008 Blind Descent - Chapter 03.1 - Stone | Текст песни

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• James M. Tabor
• 008 Blind Descent - Chapter 03.1 - Stone

THREE
ACTUALLY, FOR AN EXPLORER LIKE STONE, Cheve may be more heavenly than hellish, but by any measure it is an extraordinary cave, and the world has an extraordinary couple from California to thank for its 1986 discovery. In December of that year, the Chernobyl fallout was just ending, Reagan’s Iran-contra fallout was just beginning, and while their friends were wrapping Christmas gifts in California, Carol Vesely and Bill Farr were thrashing around remote forest, high in the Sierra Juárez, desperately seeking a supercave. They were going on a tip given them by another caver, Peter Sprouse, who had made an exhaustive study of topographical maps of the area.
Supercaves, vast geologic monsters miles long and many thousands of feet deep, are to the subterranean world as 8,000-meter peaks are to mountaineering; their exploration requires huge, costly expeditions, multiple subterranean camps, and weeks underground. Actually, supercaves are even rarer than 8,000-meter peaks, of which there are fourteen. In 1986, Vesely and Farr could count on the fingers of one hand caves that were contenders for the title of world’s deepest.
Like serious mountain climbers, Vesely and Farr were fit, technically expert, adventurous, and iconoclastic. Their lives revolved around caving. Vesely had become a “professional” substitute teacher because it afforded freedom for her true passions, subterranean exploration and discovery. Farr, a software engineer, negotiated work arrangements that allowed him months of free time. Caving was their true career. That other stuff paid the bills.
Vesely, a petite blonde then twenty-nine, and the wiry, energetic Farr, twenty-six, knew that the ultimate supercave—the deepest one on earth—had yet to be discovered. They also knew that these Mexican mountains were prime supercave territory. This whole region was what geologists call karst—a limestone landscape. That and copious local rainfall created ideal conditions for the formation of giant caves.
Thus this Christmas visit, which had them panting in the thin air at 9,000 feet, twelve miles northeast of the nearest town, a day’s car travel to the Gulf of Mexico. At sea level in Oaxaca, the climate was tropical. Up where they were, it was pleasantly cool and clear.
After several hours of hiking through mountain forest, Vesely and Farr came upon a gigantic sinkhole half a mile long and three times as wide. A very welcome sign. Sinkholes are created when water flowing underground erodes soluble subterranean limestone, causing the surface to collapse; big sinkholes foreshadow big caves. They continued on down an old logging road, then began following a stream that dove into the woods and kept flowing downhill. They hoped that the stream would eventually lead them to a cave. They could both sense that something big might be in the offing, and soon they were running, weaving between pines that rose like giant slalom poles as they followed the stream’s path.
“Wouldn’t it be great to find a really grand Mexican-style cave entrance?” Vesely panted. By this she meant something big enough to drive a 747 through. At that very moment they skidded to a stop at the edge of a cliff. The stream plunged over it, falling to a lovely green meadow 25 feet below. And sure enough, a quarter mile away, above the meadow’s far end, stood a really grand, Mexican-style cave entrance.
It looked like a giant black mouth with ragged teeth, several stories high and wide enough to hold two Greyhound buses parked end to end. Both Vesely and Farr were tempted to sprint across that meadow and plunge right in, but they knew better. This was not like making a new route up a mountain, which climbers could preview with maps, telescopes, and photographs. Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) gave similar advance looks undersea. Even Armstrong and Aldrin saw pictures of their Sea of Tranquillity landing site before they arrived.
But cave explorers like Vesely and Farr could not see the route and so could not anticipate the dangers, a partial list of which includes drowning,

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