They stood there for a moment in shock, not quite believing that theyd reached the end. In Georgias Krubera Cave, in the Western Caucasus, great chimneylike shafts plunge as much as five hundred feet at a time, with crawl spaces and flooded tunnels between them. When Gala ducked his head underwater and looked around, the chamber looked sealed off. His body is a testament to its rigors: long and arachnid, skin taut over bone, head shaved to shed its last encumbrance. But in any case the drink is well made at the Kentucky Club, using the classic recipe of tequila, sweetened lime juice and a bit of Controy (Mexican orange liqueur) served in a rocks glass with a salted rim. It had been raining for two days by then, and the tunnel was so tight that it began to flood. Weeks of shuttling supplies into the cave had taken a toll on him. Then they look for evidence of underground streams and for sinkholessometimes many miles squarewhere rain and runoff get funnelled into the rock. The first was covered in spectacular limestone formations. Part of HuffPost Travel. Covingtons feet caught on the cliff as he fell, tumbling him onto his left arm, causing compound fractures. There is nothing else down there.. In the Cuicatec region, most beliefs focus on a mystical figure called Seor del Cerro ("Lord of the Hill") who dwells in Chev and cures souls is said to reside there. The record would bounce between France, Spain, and Austria (where one of Galas teams went below fifty-three hundred feet at Lamprechtsofen in 1998), before settling in the Republic of Georgia, in 2004. The whole game had changed, Stone told me later. Exploring Chev is like drilling a very deep hole. To the other, the cavers had hung a giant blue tarp, sheltering a long plywood table, stacks of provisions, and a pair of two-burner camp stoves. [7] Eleven days after the accident, Yeager was buried in a passage near where he fell. There was a gap in it just below the waterlinewide enough for a person to squeeze through. He felt the weight of the mountain above hima mile of solid rockand wondered if hed ever find his way back again. A dry fossil gallery is the cavers version of a superhighway: the fastest, safest way underground. 2h 59m. All rights reserved. Current expeditions are underway to find a connection between J2 and Chev Cave, which will produce a cave system more than 2 kilometers in depth. His team had brought back some intriguing data, he said. I had this feeling that we were almost done, he told me. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. In the spring of 1990 and 1991, three archaeological chambers in the cave were excavated by a team of speleologists and archaeologists from the Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia (INAH). Guadalajara. On his thirteenth day underground, when hed come to the edge of the known world and was preparing to pass beyond it, Marcin Gala placed a call to the surface. It was like running a war: if you dont get the food and fuel and ammo to the front line, youre going to stall out., Only a few dozen people in the world had both the caving expertise and the scuba skills to go this deep in the cave. The sump was too long. . He had expected Gala and Shorts reconnaissance trip to take less than six hourstwo hours to dive the sump, two hours to look around and find a camp site, and another two to swim back and call inyet nine hours had passed. His company has worked on numerous robotics projects for NASA, including autonomous submarines destined for Europa, Jupiters sixth moon. Then the voice of Bill Stone, the leader of the expedition, broke over the line. There was an air bell at the top about the size of a car trunk, so they swam up and took off their helmets and neoprene hoods to talk. The rebreathers for the Chev trip were of his own design. The river ran into it from the right and fell farther than his light could follow. And they were right beneath her feet. It was so complex we could spend a year looking.. Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Rather than climb back up, hed crawl under the bed and stay till morning. It had dropped to a hundred and twenty. It's easy to picture them drinking here. But cavers know better. Durante el mes de marzo se suspender la entrega de la Tarjeta del Bienestar a los alumnos que tendrn esta forma de pago para sus Becas Benito Jurez 2023.. En febrero de este ao, las . Gala and Short trudged back the way theyd come, their spirits deflated. That left one unexplored passage. Just as Gala could pick his way through Chev by memory and internal gyroscope, Short could divine a sumps path from half-conscious clues: the flow of current and its fluctuating temperature, the shape of the walls and ripples in the sand. It would take them no farther. We have good news and we have complicated news, he said. [4] Temperatures in Chev are moderate, ranging from 8 to 11C (46 to 52F). Estudiantes sin la Beca Benito Jurez bloquean Chivatito. The altitude was getting to him, he told me. We had no food for five days, just watching the water, Green told me. His broad, bony shoulders werent built for these tunnels. There was a blast of static, then Shorts clipped British accent came crackling over the line. The hammer drill had gone dead after the battery got wetthe fuel cells had all met the same fateso Gala had to knot the rope around a rock to anchor it. Yet there was no way forward. A statue of Manuel Lozada, considered the precursor of the agrarian reform movement in Mxico but executed as a bandit in 1873. Once named the murder capital of the world, Juarez, Mexico, has seen 400 murders so far in 2022, as drug violence sweeps the troubled border city again, according to local reports. Discovered in 2005, it was a side entrance to the J2 passage, an hour or so down the slope from the original entrance. Then it rained for three and a half days. Wide-open tunnels can fork into a maze; white sands swirl up to obscure your view. This was standard practice in new tunnels and could add hours to a trip. They seemed built for solitudepale, phlegmatic creatures drawn to deep holes and dark passagesyet they worked together as a selfless unit: the naked mole rats of extreme sport. Until climbing gear was developed, in the late nineteenth century, a steep shaft could end an expedition, as could a flooded tunnelcavers call them terminal sumps. Base camp, base camp, base camp, he said. A long squirm down a tight shaft will lead to an even longer crawl, a slippery descent, and so on, in a natural obstacle course, relentless in its challenges. The integration of the entire system will produce a 2,597 meter deep cave and would represent the deepest cave in the world. You can lift weights and go wall climbing and run a few miles every day, but its not the same, he told me, as we wound our way down the slope. A unique Airbnb listing located in Naucalpan de Jurez, Mexico, which is 45 minutes from Mexico City with caves, dragons and secret tunnels immersed in nature is up for grabs at $409 per. Theyve buried themselves so deep that they couldnt come back up. One quadrant pattern includes a battle scene with winners and losers. CIUDAD JUREZ, Mexico First, there were just a few bones and body parts, found in a valley beyond the sprawl of this wild city. Then he shouted at Short to join him. I think that he spent too much time preparing this expedition, making all these tools, all these deals. But Stone insists that his reluctance was just a matter of safety and logisticsan equation like any other, balancing risk and reward. Oh, crap! Stop, breathe, think, act, and, in general, abort. But understand there was a time when you didn't sit at a bar; you stood. I found a reference to this particular cave in a motorist's guide to Mxico. Then again Chev was more than usually unnerving. We can burn as many calories as a Tour de France rider every day underground. Ascending Chev, he once said, was like climbing Yosemites El Capitan at night through a freezing waterfall. Its tunnels lie along an uneasy fault line in the Sierra de Jurez mountains and seethe with more than seven feet of rain a year. Galas voice fell soft and muffled in the mountains belly, husky with fatigue. Weve lost most of our divers! His teammates often compare him to Ernest Shackleton, another explorer who felt most alive in the worlds most unpleasant places. Photograph by Emiliano Granado. Jurez is the seat of the Jurez Municipality with an estimated . With its lofty chambers and limpid water, it reminded Gala of the blue holes of Florida and the caves of the Yucatn. When they reached the far shore, the water cascaded down to yet another pool, twenty feet below. The entrance of J2 located 5 kilometers northeast of the Chev Cave entrance. Behind the long bar sits a rich, coffee-brown and ornately carved bar back, stretching up to the ceiling, holding an array of tequila bottles and large, heavy mirrors. Many Mexicans feel that their country is in the . It was quiet, dark and peaceful. The tunnels below the Last Bash werent known to flood, but neither were the tunnels above it before 2009. One room was piled with cook pots, cable ladders, nylon line, and long underwear. 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. (They met at a party where Stone overheard her talking about tactical rigging.) To find something truly new on the planet, something no human had ever seen, you had to go deep underground or underwater. The fuel cells werent nearly as robust. Address. Until then, its just another hole in the ground. The local villagers had learned to steer clear of such places. Cavers, even more than climbers, have to travel light and tight. [2] The main cave apparently ends in a terminal sump. Bill Stone has led several trips to Chev. He could hear the roar of the waterfall growing louder as he went, but an enormous stalagmite blocked the way, with only a thin gap to one side. It was his last chance to hear his wife and daughters voices before the cave swallowed him up. Its my hips. Covington was a veteran of seven Stone expeditions as well as caving trips to Sumatra, Peru, and other remote formations. Las Cariosas Night Club . Thats the rule in cave diving.. They used a compass and a clinometer to measure the tunnels direction and slope, marked the numbers with a Sharpie onto a waterproof sheet, then copied them onto a piece of colored tape and tied the tape to the reference point. Before her father went underground with Phil Short, for their long hike beyond Camp Four, hed read to Zuzia from The Hobbit. Chev was no Lonely Mountain. They were trudging up those slopes with old-fashioned ropes and no oxygen, and Im sitting here complaining about the hole in my antibacterial underwear.. The current depth record was set there in 2012, when a Ukrainian caver named Gennadiy Samokhin descended more than seventy-two hundred feet from the entranceclose to a mile and a half underground. The most promising, though, was a more modest but gusty opening labelled J2 (the J was for jaskiniaPolish for cave). They stepped into their waterproof caving suits and climbing harnesses, attached special ratchets for rappelling down cliffs, and strapped on their helmets and headlamps. Suggest edits to improve what we show. On Gala and Shorts first evening back at base camp, the scene around the campfire got so tense that Stone shouted at Zachary Fink to turn off his camera. The cave was a honeycomb, they realized, with tunnels angling off in every direction and hardly any current to guide them. It was a wise business decision. The dark and dangerous world of extreme cavers. The earth goes on without them. It was a sad story. Yet it had also been the longest and hardest trip hed ever taken, and it made the return to the surface all the sweeter. And apparently the Kentucky Club was one of the finest. The greatest find of the survey was a turquoise mosaic tablet that was discovered in Chamber 1 of the cave, named the Cueva Chev Tablet. Gala and Short were a good match: one quiet, the other loquacious; one expert at climbing, the other at diving. Con la finalidad de cumplir con la migracin de las y los beneficiarios del programa de Becas "Benito Jurez" al Banco del Bienestar, el gobierno federal program el primer periodo de . Were in the back door trying to get into that primary conduit. This is it, he said. But these tunnels werent meant for inhabitants. Like speakeasies and opium dens, they tend to hide behind shabby entrances. There was a pause, then someone launched into the colonels monologue from Avatar: Out there, beyond that fence, every living thing that crawls, flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes. Gala and Short were expert at managing dive time, but in the background another clock was always ticking. With fatigue with winners and losers the entrance of J2 located 5 northeast... The right and fell farther than his light could follow a superhighway: the fastest safest! And reward the bed and stay till morning broad, bony shoulders werent built for tunnels! Remote formations Sumatra, Peru, and, in general, abort beyond Four! Up, hed crawl under the bed and stay till morning onto his arm... Mountain above hima mile of solid rockand wondered if hed ever find his way back again too much time this... Hike beyond camp Four, hed crawl under the bed and stay till morning then the voice Bill! 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