Caving How Low Can You Go? A tough-as-nails cadre of Russian and Ukranian speleologists wriggles and blasts its way to caving's grand prize: the mythic 2,000-meter mark By David Craig and Jason Daley
Ukrainian Speleological Association member Yevgeni Kislistim straddles a passage inside Ozernaja Cave, in Western Ukraine
No well-wishers were on hand last year to greet the 11 Russian and Ukrainian cavers who pulled themselves out of Krubera Cave, high in the Republic of Georgia, and into the history books. Twelve days earlier, when the team had last stood topside here on the Arabika Massif, they'd faced a cold and dry mountain. Now a blizzard hammered the slopes, and the only thing welcoming the party was the bitter wind and the crushing realization that, with no helicopter pickup in sight, they would have to walk out. Pausing briefly to reconnoiter, the group—which had spent almost two weeks rappelling down tight, damp corridors and blasting rubble-clogged passages to descend deeper into the earth than anyone had gone before—began the trek through waist-deep snow, bound for the tree line. Halfway there, an avalanche released and overwhelmed the man in front, Anatolij Povjakalo, who had turned 18 while in the cave. The team pulled him out unharmed.
How Low Will They Go?
In January, a team of Cavex explorers will plunge into Slovenia's Skaljarevo Brezno Cave in hopes of surpassing their 1,710 record. For reports on their progress, click here
Today, the episode stands as a bitter metaphor for life with the Cavex Cave Exploration Society and Ukrainian Speleological Association (UKSA), an elite joint team in which predilections for extreme cold, cramped quarters, and the dark are requirements for joining, and where expeditions, like everyday life in the former Soviet Republics, amount to one misery piled on top of another. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—such misfortunes, the 30-odd members of Cavex, led by 45-year-old Alexander Klimchouk, are bar none the most skilled deep-cave explorers on earth, and the undisputed leaders of a worldwide drive to reach the speleological equivalent of the four-minute mile—a point 2,000 meters, or a mile and a quarter, below ground. Though the team's record-breaking 1,710-meter push into Krubera Cave last January brought them tantalizingly close to that coveted mark, it was but one expedition in what will eventually be an eight-year project, christened "The Call of the Abyss," designed to bring them closer to their goal. This January, the drive for depth will take them into the little-explored Skaljarevo Brezno Cave in Slovenia's Julian Alps, where the winter freeze will once again reduce the danger of an underground flash flood, and where blasting through a blocked passage will lead them, they hope, to the mother of all deep-cave pits.
When the men and women of Cavex and the UKSA pass the 2,000-meter mark—and few doubt that they will—Klimchouk, the founder of both groups and president of Cavex, will likely be the first man below the line. "My expectations are quite high; we have really strong people," he says. "My life experience is, if you have a very strong desire, your goals usually happen." Born in Odessa, Klimchouk, a senior scientist with the Ukraine's National Academy of Sciences, has spent most of his life plumbing the depths. Like athletes in the famous Eastern Bloc training camps of the Cold War era, many of his society's members, including his son Oleg, now 26, a construction worker, and Kiev-based Nikolaj Solovjov, 44, were first sent underground as children, some as early as age five. After decades of mentoring, the young explorers (most began deep caving in their twenties) have since mastered the most complex vertical-caving techniques, including cave rescue, rope work, cave diving, rock cutting, surveying, scientific sampling, and blasting. (Widening passages with gunpowder, while frowned upon by conservationists, remains a common practice around the world.) Now, as all-star players in the caving world's major leagues, they are eminently qualified to tackle the ultimate underground endurance event.
