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Cheve Cave - Back to the Dark
Post by nssmembersforum on Apr 17, 2006, 8:06am
Colorado caver Mike Frazier is profiled in this article on Cheve 2006. Bill Stone, always associated with Cheve expeditions, is also featured.
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A mile under Mexico, the search grinds on for the world’s deepest cave
By Dave Philipps
April 14, 2006
People die in Cueva Cheve.
The cave falls in giant steps for 4,867 feet into the dark heart of a mountain in southern Mexico. Piles of shifting boulders choke some passages. Underground rivers roar through others. It takes three days to reach the farthest point. One man collapsed while scuba diving through a neighboring passage. It took his teammates five days to carry his body to the surface. Another fell 90 feet into a pit in Cheve. He is buried in the cave. Other cavers in the area have had their ropes cut by machetewielding locals convinced the gringos are devil worshippers who come to steal ancient Mayan gold.
But every spring, during a brief dry season when the underground waterfalls aren’t quite as fierce, cavers from all over the world rappel into Cheve, believing if they can find the bottom, they will have found the deepest cave in the world.
Mike Frazier is one of about a dozen regulars who have been pushing deeper into Cheve for years. “It’s like climbing Everest, but in reverse. It’s like Star Trek, but with a headlamp. You’re going where no one has gone before,” he said on a recent morning at his Colorado Springs home as he threw jars of peanut butter and spools of climbing rope into the back of a sagging 1978 Toyota camper for the drive down to the Oaxaca.
Frazier’s thick forearms and bushy beard make him look like a mix between Popeye and Bluto. Among local cavers he’s known for being crazy enough to try anything and skillful enough to get away with it. He walks with a pronounced limp from a climbing injury, but still manages to leave more graceful cavers in the dust. The underground is his life. He has read Jules Vern’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” more than once. His son is named Kijahexuntau, after a Mexican cave he discovered. He can’t help but smile when he mentions that his daughter scooped booty (discovered virgin cave passage) at the age of 5. The only decoration on his ramshackle house is an 18-inch light-up bat.
He shuffled boxes of climbing bolts, piles of dry bags, guitars and machetes, trying to get the weight even on the Toyota’s tired shocks. After an hour, he shut the camper door and said, “You reach a point eventually when you’re close enough.” He fed his cat, started the truck, and rolled off toward what could finally be the big year for Cheve.
DIFFICULT DISCOVERIES
Right now, the title of deepest cave belongs to a 7,021-foot-deep cavern called Krubera in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Cheve’s mapped portions reach down only 5,000 feet. But the cave sits in a 9,000-foot thick limestone mountain and cavers know it goes deeper. In 1990, they dropped red fluorescein dye into the stream flowing into Cheve. It emerged eight days and 13 miles later from a spring flowing out of a cave at the base of the mountain 8,284 feet below. “So the cave has to be 1,000 feet deeper than the known deepest cave,” Frazier said. “We just don’t know how to get there. It’s like having a puzzle that is almost done and you can’t find a few pieces. But we keep looking.”
They’ve been looking for 20 years, since the cave was discovered in 1986. For the first four seasons the going was easy. Each expedition found miles of new cave. The system grew so big that it took days to get back to the surface. Like climbers on Everest, the team established camps (Camp I, Camp II, Camp III) where they could cook and sleep as they dropped deeper into the dark. Today, it takes three days and more than 50 rope drops to get to Cheve’s farthest reaches. The largest sheer drop, a 415-foot-deep abyss called Saknussemm’s Well, could swallow the tallest building in Colorado Springs with the Air Force Academy chapel stacked on top, and still have 20 feet left.
Besides pits, cavers have to cross underground rapids described aptly by their names: The Salmon Ladder, the Turbines, The Major Abyss, Black Borehole, Nightmare Falls. “You have to be careful. Some of those falls can eat you,” Frazier said. The easy discoveries ended 15 years ago. By the time Frazier was invited on his first Cheve expedition in 1990, all the unexplored passages were either flooded by pools called sumps, which block a passage like the trap in a sink drain, or choked by collapsed ceilings, called breakdown.
Year after year, cavers crawled into the breakdown like ants in a jar of marbles, or dove into the sumps with special scuba gear. Many got discouraged and stopped coming. Only Frazier and a few other diehards kept at it. “You have to understand, Mike is a true expedicionario,” said one of those diehards, and the leader of this year’s expedition, Bill Stone. “For guys like Mike, this is not a one-shot adventure, but a yearly reunion with the ultra-specialized international fraternity in which he is respected and thrives. It goes beyond sport. It’s family.”
While Stone pushed the flooded tunnels with a re- breather apparatus he invented that recycles expended air, allowing divers to stay under for hours at a time, Frazier and others probed the breakdown maze every spring for five years. At one point a boulder collapsed, pinning him. But finally, after countless tries, he spotted a crack with darkness on the other side. He squeezed through into a stadium-sized cavern. He named it Harbinger Hall.
LIKE A SPIDER IN THE DARK
As a foster kid in Iowa, Frazier was always a bit of a loner. Sometimes he would crawl alone through the drainage pipes in his neighborhood, daring himself to go deeper and deeper. The first time he wandered into a real cave with two friends, they took only one flashlight. Frazier dropped the flashlight, the bulb broke, and they spent the next 12 hours fumbling their way out by the spark of a lighter. “Both of my friends said, ‘That was enough.’ I said, ‘Huh, I want more.”
He hooked up with the local grotto, as caving groups are called, and was soon one of the top-tier cavers. “Mike is insane. He’ll climb anything, go down any hole,” said fellow Springs grotto member Floyd Fernandez. “But in a dangerous situation, there is no one you would rather have around.” When he is not caving, Frazier is a tree surgeon. The constant climbing and rigging of ropes is perfect practice for traversing the caverns of Oaxaca. “You absolutely have to know your ropes,” he said. “There is no room for mistakes. If you get hurt bad down there, chances are you’re not coming out.”
In 2004, while exploring a cave near Cheve, Frazier lowered his rope into a shaft so deep his light couldn’t reach the bottom. As he leaned over the edge to rappel down, the ascender he would use to get back up fell out of his pack. Six seconds later he heard it hit the ground and figured he would grab it when he got to the bottom. He slid down the rope. And down, and down, until he had gone 325 feet. He still couldn’t see the bottom. Spinning like a spider in the dark, with no ascender to climb back up and no way to get down, he grabbed the tail of rope below him and tied a fancy knot he sometimes uses in tree climbing that acts like an ascender. Slowly, he inched back to the surface.
THE HAPPY FOOT SOLDIER
Mexico brings the all-stars of the underground together. “These are the major leagues,” Frazier said. They are mountain guides, doctors, programmers and other types of people from 10 countries who are relentlessly driven and cool under pressure. Stone, the team leader, is a NASA engineer in the midst of building a robot to explore the seas beneath the ice of the Jupiter moon Europa. He’s testing it in a flooded cave in Mexico. He is so focused on finding the deepest cave that Outside magazine has likened him to Kurtz, the mad steamboat captain in the novel “Heart of Darkness.”
Frazier is known as a foot soldier. He happily does the unglamorous work of rigging ropes in already-explored sections of the cave, and the maddening drudgery of finding a way through breakdown. But he’s best known for his indestructible playfulness. Last year he traveled three days through the jungle to take a birthday cake to a fellow caver. The impromptu cave ballads he composes in camp to the tune of classic rock songs are legendary. “He has such biting wit that he can have the entire camp crying and laughing at the same time,” said Stone.
ONE OF EARTH’S LAST UNEXPLORED PLACES
This could be the breakthrough year for Cheve, if there isn’t trouble with the locals. In 2005, the team found a new entrance they called J2. It dropped 3,600 feet in just over three miles, headed straight for the unreachable sections of Cheve. “The passage just kept going and going,” Frazier said. “We didn’t run out of cave. We ran out of time. Eventually, we all had to come home and go back to work.” Now they are going back, hoping that this time sumps and breakdown won’t stop them. But there are problems.
To the local Mazatec Indians, the caves are sacred. Many of their ancestors are buried inside. Last year, a group of gringos not affiliated with Frazier’s team did some illegal archaeological digs in the caves. “Now the locals are pissed,” Frazier said. “We’re not going into the best situation. We may not be able to go into the caves at all.” If the team can drop into J2, and the cave goes all the way, eventually only cave divers will be able to reach the end at a spring more than 8,000 feet below. Stone estimates the full trip will take 20 to 30 days. “We’ll be beyond all hope of rescue, exploring deeper with every step in one of the last unexplored places in the world,” Stone said.
Frazier won’t go under water. He sees cave diving as so dangerous that he calls it “cave dieing.” “I’ve got kids. I don’t cave dive,” he said with a shrug. “But I still get to go into places no one has ever seen. It’s really cool. And if you’re lucky, you find a way around the flooded sections.”
Contact the writer: 636-0223 or dave.philipps@gazette.com
Re: Cheve - Back to the Dark
Post by madratdan on Apr 17, 2006, 9:01am
Mikie is still down in Mexico out scooping Mr Stone, Madrat style.
Thanks for posting this Sharon. This appeared in our local paper this weekend, so I bought several copies. Great article by the way. Always fun to read about a friend. I did hear back that all went well when they met with the locals. Pat and Mike were the only Americans, as they were joined by 8 Polish cavers, to explore Tres Amegos cave in the Cerro Rabon area. After which they joined up with Bill for the J2 expedition.
Re: Cheve - Back to the Dark
Post by nssmembersforum on Apr 17, 2006, 4:15pm
Thanks, I thought it was a great article too. I'd really love for these cavers to have a major breakthrough and significantly extend the depth of this cave. The potential is there if someone can just find the right passage. 
Re: Cheve - Back to the Dark
Post by guanonoggin on Apr 19, 2006, 8:13pm
Woa Dudes,
That's one awesome article! Mike is one frickin motivated caver man! Hope he gets down and scoops some major deepness. Sounds like he totally deserves it.
Yo Sharon. It would be cool if you did a post later giving us the story on what they find if ya can.
Re: Cheve Cave - Back to the Dark
Post by madratdan on Apr 21, 2006, 9:04am
Mike is back with some great stories of discoveries and fellowship. Tres Amegos was still going big with multiple leads. They ran out of both time and rope once again. Next years expedition will be a good one with talk of setting up a camp for further exploration.
He only stayed a few days at the J2 expedition, so not much info on whats going on there. I hope they too get to scoop (and survey) lots of bore hole passage, Madrat style.
Re: Cheve Cave - Back to the Dark
Post by nssmembersforum on Apr 30, 2006, 7:29pm
April 30 update on the 2006 J2 Expedition from the Texas listserve.
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From Yvonne Droms:
Mark Minton and I just returned from the J2 expedition tonight. The expedition is still underway for another 2 weeks. Here is a bit of history and a synopsis of this year's J2 expedition and its results so far: The aim of the J2 project is to find an entrance into the vast, unknown middle section of the Cheve System (Oaxaca, Mexico), which has a proven potential of over 2500 meters of depth. In 2004, a new high potential entrance was found (J2) and explored to a depth of -450 m. The 2005 expedition extended its depth to -1100 m. The 2006 effort, still underway, is being conducted by an international team consisting of nearly 40 cavers from 9 countries (USA, Mexico, Poland, Australia, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Ireland, and Switzerland). As one of its first priorities, the 2006 team installed a phone wire from surface base camp to the limit of exploration (more than 6 km of wire), which allowed for instantaneous updates of progress from the cave. Continuing exploration beyond the 2005 limit revealed a massive breakdown choke which was ultimately passed. Beyond, large passage continued until a deep sump was reached at -1193 m. Efforts are continuing to explore alternate routes in search of a bypass to this sump. The expedition, which started April 3, will end on May 12, 2006.
Yvonne Droms and Mark Minton
for the US Deep Caving Team
Re: Cheve Cave - Back to the Dark
Post by nssmembersforum on May 4, 2006, 6:19pm
From Yvonne Droms via the Texas listserve:
Here is the translation for the latest update on the Portuguese website (from one of the Portuguese members of the J2 expedition, Fernando Pinto)
Wednesday May 3, 2006 (11:30 pm, or 5:30 pm Mexico time)
Pinto contacted us by MSN (satellite-sent text message). He said that the work in J2 is over. The dive in the sump did not pan out because another sump follows the first one, which makes everything more complicated. Therefore, the exploration ended at around -1200 m.
Bummer... How frustrating.
Yvonne