How Low Can You Go? (cont.)

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Outside Magazine January 2002

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How Low Can You Go? (cont.)

"The amount of training, skill, technical experience, and difficulty of logistics make descending a 2,000-meter cave akin to a summit attempt of Everest," says Hazel Barton, a University of Colorado microbiologist and a board member of the Huntsville, Alabama-based National Speleological Society. "It takes a lot of mental strength to accomplish these long underground expeditions," she adds.

Like 8,000-meter peaks, deep caves—generally defined as those bottoming out beyond 1,000 meters—are confined to small, not easily accessible geographic regions. Beyond Central Asia, many lie in the Italian and Austrian Alps, southern Mexico, and parts of Spain. Further, as is the case with the Himalayas, the harsh physical challenges of winter trips to these depths make them inaccessible to all but the most fit and organized. As caves plunge below the realm of weekend exploration, the mercury drops close to freezing, boulder chokes demand more potent—and more carefully placed—explosives, and passageways can narrow into squeezes known as "chest compressors" that require a total exhalation to pass through. So far, no one on the Call of the Abyss team has died or suffered serious injury, but the stamina and competence needed to negotiate deep caves grow geometrically the farther a team descends. But since such trips involve spending days and sometimes weeks working and bivouacking underground in close quarters, team solidarity and trust are the most important requirements.

Little wonder that depth records are so rare. The first, 140 meters, was set in 1723 by an engineer simply known as Nagel in what is now the Czech Republic. The record stood, remarkably, for more than 200 years, until cavers in France dropped below 500 meters in 1944. Since then, the pace of exploration has quickened somewhat—1,000 meters fell in 1956 and 1,500 meters in 1983—but progress in the past two decades has been measured by smaller and smaller increments, usually less than 20 meters at a time.

Cavers are a famously superstitious lot. "It's very bad form to discuss depth too openly," says Kasjan.

That is, until the Call of the Abyss team—possibly riding a nicotine high from their strong Russian cigarettes—smashed the record by pushing an extra 80 meters down into Krubera in one go. Now, in the first weeks of January, a Cavex team will tackle the Kanin Massif in Slovenia's Julian Alps, an area of limestone sinkholes and shafts that they have been scouting since 1996. With funding from the Kiev-based construction firm Paritet, the team will descend Skaljarevo Brezno Cave to 900 meters and blast through a boulder choke. Beyond, they hope, they'll find another record-breaking pit.

Should Brezno run shallow, Klimchouk and the Call of the Abyss organizers have already scheduled more summer expeditions to Krubera and Turkey's Aladaglar Massif, where they plan to conduct dye tests in underground rivers. But cavers, a famously superstitious lot, are reluctant to lay odds on whether these attempts will pay off for The Call of the Abyss. "It's very bad form to discuss depth too openly," says Yury Kasjan. "If you assume you're going to break the record, and bring along too much equipment, the cave will be scared and stop." We can assume, however, that these cavers never will.

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