Underneath Alaska - caves

Sierra, March-April, 2003 by Bruce Brewer

With blue skies and temperatures in the 80s, southeast Alaska doesn't feel like a rainforest. Dappled sunlight dances through spruce and hemlock branches swaying 150 feet overhead in the mid-June breeze. In the muskegs--the sponge-like bogs that ring the old-growth forest--shooting stars are in bloom, their purple blossoms dotting a lime-green carpet of sphagnum moss.

Black bears forage along gravel logging roads and dart into the forest when humans approach. To the south, the shadowy peaks of Heceta Island rise through the humid sea air across Davidson Inlet.

It's a perfect shorts and T-shirt day for a leisurely hike, or a ride in a skiff to watch sea otters bob in the gleaming, cool waters of nearby Edna Bay.

But not for us.

Instead, my team and I are wrapped in expedition-weight polypropylene, fleece, wool socks, and armored bodysuits made of ballistic nylon and PVC. We enjoy no sun, no warm breeze, and no scenic vistas. We sweat, not from the warmth, but from exertion. The perspiration steams out of our suits into musty air that smells of earth.

We're in Tongass National Forest. Or more precisely, 60 feet beneath it, exploring a newly discovered cave on Kosciusko Island, one of a thousand or so islands that are part of the Tongass. With other volunteers working with the U.S. Forest Service, I'm helping locate and map a vast network of limestone caves. So far, more than 600 caves have been found and charted in the Tongass--but that number is thought to be a tiny fraction of what's here.

Because of the insulating qualities of the earth, the cave we've dropped into maintains the mean average temperature of the region, about 40 degrees, even as the land above us bakes. Beneath tons of solid rock our dim headlamps provide a pale yellow glow in a place that has never known sunlight. Our breath vaporizes as it passes through balaclavas and into the cold, humid subterranean atmosphere.

As the caving population has grown in recent decades, so too has research and activism. More people are experiencing caves as windows into a complex environment where water flows not just over land, but through it. Caves harbor unique life, act as archaeological repositories, and are important sources of water.

On a more visceral level, caves are just plain awesome landscapes, as inspiring as Yosemite's El Capitan or the sea of grass in Florida's Everglades. Of course, a cave is much harder to visit: Underneath the Tongass, you have to be ready to crawl, climb, squeeze, and swim.

THE CAVE WE'RE MAPPING, KNOWN ONLY AS K-109, begins as a hole little wider than a basketball hoop at the base of a grove of old growth. From that humble beginning we descend into a sinuous, narrow canyon whose walls are covered in "moon milk," a rare white bubbly coating made of calcite.

In places the ceiling is 15 feet high, but the walls are only a foot apart. As we slide through pinch points our clothing grinds against walls with the texture of rough cement. Here and there we have to drop to our knees and move sideways, ducking under pinches too narrow for our helmeted heads.

The slot ends abruptly at a 15-foot drop into a silo-shaped chamber. We rig a rope and carefully shimmy to the floor, where a few white "soda straws," or crystal tubes, hang over our heads. A trickle of water flows in from a small side passage up one wall, bringing sloppy black mud from the surface. Our voices ricochet and reverberate off the curving walls, making conversation difficult. Following the water, we slide down another crack and come to a standing space with smooth, white crystal walls coated with liquid-looking flowstone. From there, we climb down into a two-foot-wide fissure, only to find it's another drop, this one piercing the ceiling of a large chamber. The misty air and the curving walls of the fissure obscure the bottom. All we know is that the chamber is big, or so our echoes suggest. There's only one way to find out what's there.

Gino Albert, a caver from Chicago, ties an 11-millimeter nylon rope around a rock outcrop and lowers it down the fissure. He then threads the rope through his rack, a steel device resembling a foot-long ladder. The rope weaves around the bars, producing friction that allows a caver to slide in a controlled manner.

Gino wiggles downward, keeping one hand on his rack for control. Then he disappears from view. The seconds crawl by. The trickle of water gurgles behind me as the rope bobs and shakes from his motion. He finally sends back a report.

"Oh my God! I don't believe this! This is the best cave on the island! It looks like Arizona!" he yells, referring to the heavily decorated caves found there.

"Are you off-rope?"

"No!"

"Well get off the damned rope!" is all I can muster. I can't begin my descent until he does.

When I finally drop into the chamber and turn to face the room, Gino is still ecstatic. We've broken into a three-way intersection of 20-foot-wide tunnels with 20-foot-high ceilings. The whole passage plunges at a 45-degree angle into the bedrock. The walls, floor, and ceiling bristle with accretions of crystallized minerals that have been leached out of the rock by percolating water and deposited over thousands of years, making the chamber look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.