Bill Stone in the Abyss

Outside Magazine, November 1994 Bill Stone in the Abyss Bill Stone in the Abyss His life's obsession has been to get to the bottom of the world's deepest cave. Two team members have already died. How much farther is he prepared to go? By Craig Vetter Early last may, members of the U.S. Deep Caving Team who had quit the Huautla expedition began to arrive back in the United States from the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, with reports of bitter dissension among team members and news of a death. There were rumors that the team's leader, Bill Stone, was planning to salvage something of the troubled expedition by diving alone into the unknown depths of Sistema Huautla, through flooded passages nearly a mile below the entrance, into territory so remote and so dangerous that if anything went wrong there would be little chance of recovering his body, much less of rescuing him. The word suicidal was used. The name Kurtz came up, evoking the Conrad character who was finally overtaken and destroyed by madness on the ragged upper reaches of an African river. Those who knew Stone could hardly have doubted that his 18-year obsession to prove Huautla the deepest cave in the world might well have pushed him into the mindset that would choose death over outright failure. He had been born to map this cave, he told friends: to explore its shafts and great rooms; to ford its underground rivers, whitewater canyons, and waterfalls; to dive through the still, dark pools, called sumps, that had stopped all the other cavers who had tried to follow this monstrous labyrinth from the light at the entrance through the long dark to the light at the other end, where the system emptied into a gorgeous jungle canyon. Above ground, the distance from entrance to exit was eight miles. Below ground, nobody knew. For Stone--a technical wizard, a physical warhorse, proud and driven--the mystery of Huautla's unseen depths fit his ambitions perfectly: a cave as hard as Everest. Maybe harder. It was the middle of may when I made the six-hour drive from the city of Oaxaca up into the cloud forests of the Sierra Mazateca, where the town of Huautla floats on stilts atop ridges overlooking the sinkhole valleys of these beautiful blue mountains. Huautla (pronounced "wowt-la"), a town of 30,000 or so, is the Kathmandu of caving. It lies within striking distance of several large cave systems, and during the months between January and the onset of the rainy season in June, caving teams from all over the world gather here to provision their expeditions, to use the telephone and mail service, to spend one last night in a hotel. Huautla is also the market center for the large population of Mazatec Indians who have lived and farmed in these steep hills for more than a thousand years. They speak an ancient language, Mazateca, which they supplement with a vocabulary of whistles as musical and complex as the birdsong that fills the forest. Their spirituality is a weave of Catholicism and old beliefs that they saw no need to abandon when the Roman faith stormed in with Cortés. They are among the few Mexican tribespeople who still practice the sacred psychedelic mushroom ceremony to cleanse their souls and keep them in harmony with the world of spirits and myth that surrounds them in the clouds, trees, rivers, and especially the caves that make lacework under their limestone highlands. According to legend, Huautla is the underworld from which the first Mazatecs walked into the light and were born. For centuries they buried their dead in the caves, where the gods they still revere make their immortal home. They do not go into the caves these days, nor do they take it lightly when others do. In 1969, a Mazatec used his machete to chop the rope from which American caver Meri Fish was suspended. (She fell, uninjured, onto a ledge.) Stone himself had a brief scuffle with locals at the cave entrance on one of his early expeditions. The Indians retreated, hurling curses that Stone was a brujo, a warlock. 1 Outside Magazine, November 1994 Bill Stone in the Abyss I spent the night in one of Huautla's small hotels and the next morning drove half an hour up a steep rock- and-dirt road to the pueblito called San Agustin, perched on the rim of the sinkhole that holds the primary entrance to the Huautla cave. The fog that is generated each morning when the mountain air meets the atmosphere of the cave hung in the crater like milk in a blue bowl. It had been more than two weeks since any news of the expedition, so I had no idea as I rolled slowly into the village whether the team was in the cave or out. Then I spotted team doctor Noel Sloan washing at a standpipe along the road. His face and upper body were the pale color of a salamander's belly. His greeting was affable but tired. The team had come up that morning, he said, a ten-hour trip with heavy loads after a final underground push that had lasted 14 days. "Everybody's in the kitchen shack," he said, pointing 50 yards down the hillside to a small wooden hut with a tin roof. "We haven't slept yet. It's been an extremely intense expedition." Inside the hut I found the tatters of the team seated around a large makeshift table taking their first aboveground meal. There were seven of them, and they were a picture of dirt-eating exhaustion. Stone's face was gaunt and filthy. His fingers were wrapped in duct tape. He stopped a forkful of salad halfway to his mouth as I came in and greeted me with words that reflected the sullen, almost surly mood that seemed to be on him in the wake of his great adventure. "My God," he said. "There's only one person I'd be more surprised to see down here, and I'd have to kill that person." It was a reference to one of the people who Stone thought had let him down, one ancillary player in the many disputes, disappointments, and disasters that had befallen him on the long way to this bittersweet--and perhaps last--Huautla expedition. Huautla put its spell on Stone in 1976, the first time he climbed into it. He was a 23-year-old engineering student at the University of Texas, a member of an expedition that pushed the cave to a Western Hemisphere depth record of 2,624 feet. Another team that same year got only 200 feet deeper before it was stopped by a flooded room, a dead-end that the cavers called the San Agustin sump. The only way past it was to dive, and in 1981 Stone took measure of the barrier by swimming a thousand underwater feet before the limits of his open-circuit scuba gear turned him back. Three years later he led an expedition that attempted to connect the cave from the opposite direction: from the jungle plateau up to the high entrance. The probe took three months and turned out to be a logistical nightmare: 600 dives through six sumps using 72 scuba tanks. The team mapped six cave miles, which covered only a quarter of the aboveground distance to the San Agustin sump. Stone returned from that trip to the drawing board with another idea: to design and build a "rebreather," a sophisticated piece of machinery that would give him greater range than ordinary scuba gear and allow him, perhaps, to dive through the unknown distance of the San Agustin sump into the air bells that he expected to find farther down the cave. He began work on his high-tech backpack in 1984 in the basement of his Maryland home. He and several friends built the machine by hand on weekends, in the early hours before Stone went to his job as a structural engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and in the late hours after he got home. By 1987 they had a prototype: a 195-pound, computerized gas-processing plant that would scrub and remix exhaled air, making it possible for a diver to stay underwater for up to 48 hours. Stone called his backpack the MK1R, and it was a testament to his great problem-solving aptitude, his tenacity, and his two- headed passion for science and adventure. It was a rare and powerful combination: a kind of tough brilliance that took the mapping of a circuit board to be the same as the mapping of a cave. In the summer of 1987 Stone began testing the rebreather and looking for teammates to train for an all-out assault on Huautla's last secrets. 2 Outside Magazine, November 1994 Bill Stone in the Abyss I met Stone and four members of his prospective team five years later, during a training mission at northern Florida's Jackson Blue Spring. For three weeks they had spent their days tinkering with the rebreathers and diving with them into a long, deep, clear-water cave at the head of the spring. Tagging along on one of their practice dives, I tried to imagine the double whammy of climbing nearly 3,000 feet into the earth and then diving through a flooded snakehole. I decided I'd sooner light my hair and try to roast hot dogs over the flame. As it turned out, the combined job of caving and diving was going to be one of the most serious challenges Stone would face in building his team.

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