Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The Mail on Sunday (London, England)

IN TOO DEEP; The bright young adventurers of the Oxford University Caving Club plumb some of the deepest systems in the subterranean world. Occasionally they die doing so. At the age of 50, former member and Mail on Sunday writer David Rose went back below ground on a 132-hour odyssey to explore man's compulsion to map its furthest boundaries - whatever the cost.

Article Excerpt
Byline: David Rose

It's well after midnight, more than ten hours since we left the surface. Still we're heading down. My harness clipped to a nylon rope, I swing my legs and then my body over a blade of rock, out horizontally over the darkness to a pair of metal bolts drilled into the wall. It is the top of a vertical shaft whose depth I can only estimate.

From somewhere below comes the rumble of falling water and a chilly draught. For a moment I dangle from the bolts, hard steel rawlplugs drilled into the rock, and adjust the heavy equipment bags that hang from my waist. Then I thread the rope through my abseil device, squeeze its 'dead man's handle' and start to descend.

Above me, beyond the reach of my headlamp, the roof is also invisible, but I know it's holding up about 2,500ft of limestone. My aching muscles don't need to be told. To get here from the entrance, a gaping rent in a flank of the Picos de Europa mountains in northern Spain, we've already descended more than 30 vertical 'pitches', from shortish drops the height of a house to vast echoing chimneys up to 300ft deep.

There are four in our party: photographer Robbie Shone, cave diver Tony Seddon, computer expert Rosa Clements and me. We're heading for an underground camp in the pothole known as Asopladeru la Texa, and we don't expect to re-emerge for the best part of a week. Using surveyors' instruments, other members of our team have made an accurate map, finding that the furthest reaches discovered so far lie more than 3,700ft below the daylight. Its exploration, co-ordinated by cavers from Oxford University, continues.

Texa has already been connected to another cave nearby, Pozo la Tormenta. The hope now is to discover the further links we know must exist inside these hollow mountains - some by climbing and other 'ordinary' techniques, and others by the hazardous process of diving 'sumps' (flooded sections without airspace). Potentially, this could be the deepest 'through system', joining mountain tops to valley floor, in the world.

Between the shafts, we've had to pass a series of 'meanders' - winding rifts in the rock. If we hadn't each had to carry two reinforced PVC kitbags, with food, rope, dry clothes for the camp and Tony's diving gear, the occasional squeezes that punctuate these passages might not have seemed difficult. Thanks to the bags, which always seem to stick where the cave is too constricted to turn around, getting my 6ft 3in frame and 48in chest through has been something of a struggle.

In some of the squeezes, I've had to remove my harness in order to get through. In a couple, I got the angle of my body slightly wrong, so that instead of passing through the widest part I found myself pinned, heart thumping, and forced to squirm and wriggle until I managed to break free.

Fifty feet below the top of the shaft, I stop at a tiny ledge - no more than a pair of muddy footholds - where the rope is belayed to two more bolts. Tony is at the end of the following section and his yell echoes up the shaft: 'Rope free!' I clip my safety cord into the belay, remove my descender from the rope I've just come down, and re-attach it to the one beneath. Time to go down again, then again, and again, with the sound of the water all the time louder. Thirty feet above the bottom I'm suddenly abseiling next to a waterfall, which comes from a tunnel in the opposite side of the shaft. The stream soon starts to cut its way down a narrow fissure, and I clamber along a ledge to yet another rope. This one, however, leads up.

By now, I barely have the energy to lift the bags but somehow I hoist them up a series of little walls, each four or five feet high. At the top of the last I'm on the edge of another shaft that plunges down to the water. But the way...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!