Blind Descent, by James Tabor

In 1914, famous explorer Ernest Shackleton placed an ad in London newspapers. It read:

“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in event of success.”

In Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth, James Tabor compares this vintage ad to the one more suited for today’s extreme cavers:

“Participants wanted for journey to the center of the earth. No wages, constant wet, cold, and darkness. Weeks underground. Safe return doubtful. (Honor and recognition equally so.)”

And these casually enumerated conditions are only the beginning of the challenges facing those willing to crawl, climb, rappel, dig, and dive their way up to two miles beneath the earth’s surface. These veteran divers and climbers spend weeks in complete darkness, using light only when absolutely necessary. They’re often wet, soaked by underground rivers and magnificent waterfalls, with little hope of drying out. They transport heavy equipment, fuelled only by freeze-dried food and chocolate bars,  shedding up to 25 pounds on one expedition. All of this in the name of exploring earth’s final frontier.

Tabor’s book serves as a good introduction to supercaving (likened to climbing a mountain in reverse . . . in the dark . . . with the hardest part — the ascent — left for last) and offers contrasting profiles of two successful cavers — the aggressive American Alpha explorer Bill Stone, and the soft-spoken Ukrainian scientist Alexander Klimchouk. Granting each man a section of the book, detailing their backgrounds and various expeditions, Tabor explores each man’s personality, leadership style, and accomplishments as both men race to map the deepest cave on earth.

Tabor starts with Stone, opening his section with a quote from the larger-than-life personality: “Rule No. 1: Nothing is impossible (unless it violates the laws of physics). Rule No. 2: Bend the laws of physics if you can.” After 150 pages with Stone, the reader may begin to imagine this type-A approach to caving is the only way, making Tabor’s focus on Klimchouk for the next 100 pages that much more fascinating. While both men focus on the scientific motivations for caving, we see that for Stone, science is just a means to make adventuring possible, whereas for Klimchouk, science is the reason for the adventure itself.

Blind Descent is also a cautionary tale as it plumbs the depths of its two lead explorers, shedding light on the not only the risks to life and limb but upon the toll that cave-obsession can take on personal relationships, team dynamics, and sometimes international politics, tainting even record-breaking achievements. And in a pitch-black underworld where every second is risk-laden, where people can risk their lives for a few meager feet of advancement, the achievements themselves are sometimes even secondary to the relief that comes from surviving weeks of high-stakes, high pressure, high-impact toil in the darkness. It explains the ambivalence that can strike even the great Bill Stone. Tabor writes, “Their six day Huaulta effort was a monumentally stunning accomplishment, and yet Stone’s happiest moment came not during their exploration of the great cave but upon their return from its darkest heart.”

Tabor does a good job balancing information and exposition, and though sometimes the logistics of caving can be hard to imagine and I’d get a little snagged, the author offers up the information in small chunks, using effective similes to help the reader gain some footing in unfamiliar territory. The cast of Blind Descent is rather large, and though Tabor endeavours to describe most of them, I found I’d lose track of who’s who. Not that it matters much: in the darkness faces are indistinguishable, and it’s the pinpoint of light shed on their skill and brazen courage that is most illuminating.

The closest I've been to supercaving: Exploring the Jenolan Caves in Australia's Blue Moutains.

Though I did miss the adrenalin-laced immediacy of a first-person narrative (the best ones make you forget that the person has lived to tell the tale), Tabor brings the reader into many all-too-common life-and-death moments: people stricken by The Rapture (an mental sickness with similar affects to the oxygen deprivation that imperils mountaineers), divers snagged in rocky tunnels, climbers hanging by improperly secured equipment over gaping canyons . . . even a simple trip to the toilet is potentially fatal as a caver slips near the makeshift latrine. These precarious moments inject essential life into the narrative, and provide perfect fodder for short chapters with cliffhanger endings (which have never been this literal).

One part balanced, informative biography and supercaving primer, and one part high adventure, Blind Descent certainly has “shades of Indiana Jones,” though for the courageous (indeed perhaps crazy) people haunted by the echoes of the earth’s caves, something like dropping into a pit of snakes would be child’s play.

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Megathanks to KIRBCer Calvin for recommending Blind Descent (and to KIRBCer Ron for hooking up an adventure-lit junkie). For more extreme caving info, read Calvin’s interview with James Tabor over at Toro.