Back in Tears: The 2019 Expedition to America’s Deepest Cave

0:00 Awesome. You guys can hear, everyone can hear me? I guess, Ellen, you'll probably let me know if you can't. Sweet. Yeah, so as Ellen mentioned, I'm going to talk about this year's 2019 Tears of the Turtle expedition, or I suppose last year's. But before I start, I'm actually going to do the sort of thank you to everybody right off the top. Obviously, in terms of support, Northern Rocky Mountain Grotto was kind enough, that's you guys and us, to give us a grant. The NSS also gave us a grant and PMI donated a whole bunch of rope. I'm also going to call out, like, these are photos you guys are going to see from people. Braden, James, Jean, Nick, Jason, Ben, Kevin, Matt, Tommy, and Gilly. I think I got everybody. Obviously, hauling expensive photo gear down to the bottom of a cave, especially Tears, is a lot of work and some risk. And lazy bastards like me just use their photos. So I just want to make sure that we're giving them credit. And same deal goes for Hans, who I'm sure many of you know. All the maps in this are his maps. The other thing I'm going to point out right off the top is this is kind of just the 2019 expedition I'm focused on. We talk a little bit about 2016 too, but this has been going on since 2005. I tried to, like, count up the number of people that I know that have been involved, and it has to be like over 40 or 45 people that have probably been out to Tears in some capacity. This year's expedition alone was 25. So it's a lot of people. This is, for the most part, this is the 2019 group.

1:31 We're missing a handful of people that helped haul some gear for us that weren't there. So Ian, Bryce Maxell, Will Urbanski, Graham Schindel, and who am I missing? I'm missing one person who hauled gear too, I think. But other than that, this is the 2019 group. Two weeks, it was 25 people total. Not everybody was there for two weeks, but they came and went. This is the 2016 year, so this is the first year we camped. And then this is 2014, which was the year that we first broke the depth record. But again, you know, there's been expeditions out there going back until 2005, which is when Hans and Jason sort of found the entrance to Tears. They pushed it. It actually didn't even go that far in the beginning, just a couple hundred feet, I think. I'll show you on the map in a second. And they kind of hit a spot where it looked like it didn't keep going. And so they spent their time focusing on Virgil. This is 2016 Virgil trip, but you can see James Hunter and Ian there coming out of Virgil. But it was only after they kind of went back and looked at the data, which didn't quite look like this at the time. This is quite a bit more cave. But they sort of saw this chunk of Tears right here, you know, that ended somewhere up here, and they saw Virgil over here, and they kind of said, you know, maybe it looks like it's sort of trending out towards Virgil, let's go back and have a second look. And when they did, James was able to sort of climb up and pass this point in the cave where they thought it ended, and kind of have this breakout in 2012. Went past the Birthday Pit.

3:11 The next time out, they went through the Bunga Bunga, which is like a pretty bad tight part of the cave. I think above the borehole, on camp, it's probably the worst. And then 2014, this is all still day trips through the borehole all the way down to the Slough of Despond, which is kind of that muddy, water-filled hallway that you guys have probably heard about. That stopped exploration in 2014. And that was the limit. That was the year that the depth record got set. So we went back in 2016 to kind of set up camp. You know, and again, you kind of have this chunk of Virgil. There's this interesting infeeder that I'll talk about later. that's kind of trending towards Tears. This is... okay. I think this is Tickle Me 3, Tickle Me 3 or Tickle... I think these are 1 and 2, but maybe Jason can comment at the end. Also a significantly deep cave as well. And Virgil is third or fourth deepest cave in the country. And you'll notice like the entrance to Tears is higher up the hill. So if you did potentially connect these, Virgil would add depth to Tears. Just a quick look at the profile. I think what's amazing about this cave is just how consistent the downward trend is. I mean, it's almost like a perfectly straight line, even through the parts that we sort of perceive as being a lot more flat, which is this section down by the borehole. So 2016, we head back out with the sort of objective to set up camp down on the bottom of the cave. Day trips have become sort of prohibitively difficult.

4:43 Traveling through this nice karst landscape, you can see these cliffs. It's kind of... look, that's this cliff band right here. It's like great, sort of traditional glacier-carved valleys that expose the entrances, right? I mean, I don't know that we would even be able to get into the cave if it hadn't exposed the entrances and the cliff faces. Big support teams just to set up camp, you know, pushing all that gear down. We set up camp in this muddy, nasty, awful section of borehole. Painter's tarps. I think this picture is me and, on the camp team, with Ben Tobin and Ben Schwartz. It's not the most pleasant place to be, and it's obviously pretty absurdly muddy. This is more what it looks like, obviously, when you're in the cave. Shot at camp. You know, everybody, you'll notice, looks really, really excited in all these photos, but you're sort of just like on this island of plastic in a sea of mud, and you sort of just spend the entire time in the sleeping bags when you're not out in the cave. But Ben Tobin, Ben Schwartz, and I pushed down to the Slough of Despond. We'd spent between 2014, 2016, you know, debating, like, how do we get across this weird hallway that's full of mud and water? And we'd come up with these, like, boots things that strap onto your boots that were designed to cross Alaskan tidal flats, like mud flats in Alaska. They were completely worthless. They didn't work at all. We got out there, the mud was just basically water. I took a trekking pole that we had brought down to sort of probe the depth.

6:16 It went the full length of the trekking pole and kind of up to my wrist, didn't hit the bottom, and I said, we're not walking across this. So Ben Schwartz sort of just direct aided the full length of the hallway, and we pushed a little bit past that, surveyed a little bit past that to a flowstone choke, and that was kind of the end of the first camp team in 2016. We left this kind of obnoxious note for the next team. For those of you who don't speak Spanish, that's House of the Turtle's [inaudible], is what we named it. And it's basically was like a fake Airbnb check-in note. Jason and James Hunter and Ian Chechet went back, pushed past that flowstone choke and kind of down into this awful muddy fissure passage that's just kind of covered in mud. You can, again, see them. Everybody always looks super, super excited, right? And that was the end of 2016. So along comes, again, three years of recruitment, trying to get everybody we can to get out there. And then starts the whole logistical circus for trying to get all this gear out there and plan. So I kind of took time- lapse video of my dining room as I packed everything for the whole expedition. Half of it's like gear that Jason, I think he actually dropped it off in person when he was out in Denver one day, but you know, just like all this stuff that you didn't have to get out to Montana. You got to get it onto the mules. I'm sure, you know, you guys are all Montana cavers. A lot of you have probably dealt with mules before.

7:46 Pack it all up, and off you go down the trail with, you know, this huge big group of people. This is... so the way it works is you actually hike out, like, you head out one evening, and we camp along the river the first evening. Then we hike up to surface camp on the second day. And then we actually hike back to meet the mules on day three. So surface camp, I think, is 21 miles from the trailhead, and then the cave is like another 2 miles past surface camp. But it turns into this big procession. For most of the way in, you're hiking kind of up here on the hill above the Flathead. It's really scenic and really nice. And camp the first night on the river. This is kind of what it looks like down in the flats and then you start heading up this drainage called Helen Creek, which is a little bit of a side path trail. You can see Jean Krejca here eating huckleberries on the way up. Just the group kind of stopped. That's Hope Brooks, Eric Pelkey, I think that's Paul Winter and Kevin Manley and I. But this is like a big stopping point, just kind of your last spot for water for a while. Just a few shots of the landscape. And then you kind of hit Pagoda Pass, and this is like maybe 2 miles, a little bit less, from surface camp. You can see the trail here. This is on the day, the way in. Like I said, you kind of hike out to surface camp and then the next day you hike back out. You can see the trail here. So off here is the Flathead in the distance.

9:18 You kind of come up Helen Creek and up over this pass, and then it's this kind of walk, and that's the mule train down there. But you're coming up this, like, kind of crappy scree slope. Unload all the gear. You get into this, like, sort of yard sale where everybody dumps all the stuff off the mules and starts loading it up before the mules take off and it's back up this terrible scree slope and you kind of traverse around for half a mile or so and then you drop down into the drainage. But the day that you're hauling all the gear back from the mules, you know, it's mostly people doing two-packs. It's just kind of running laps back and forth and it's pretty miserable. Brian, you're the one I forgot. Brian was also there. But here's Nick Socky kind of hauling two-packs up and over. You kind of drop down in the drainage. It's again sort of classic karst landscape. And then the surface camp, which is pretty nice. It's actually pretty comfortable. There's a nice little stream here that we get water from. That's why we camp there. Here's sort of our kitchen area. You can kind of see the flagpole in the background. We just continue to get bigger and bigger flagpoles every year. And then, you know, a whole bunch of gear hung up, PMI stuff, nice fire. There's Matt Covington. Good shot of the flagpole. There's actually a couple caves up in the cliffs up here. Smaller caves. Jason digging through gear. I didn't mention at the top. Obviously, you guys probably know this, but Jason has basically organized all the trips up until this year. He had a kid in the last 18 months or so. And so he asked me to organize the 2019 trip.

10:53 Nice little kitchen. There's Ian McMillan, Beth Cortright. Beth's been out for years and years. Ian's been out quite a bit too. Carl Froslie, and I think that's Tommy Cleckner. You can kind of see where we hang our food, and we've kind of built like a series of seats as well at this point. A bunch of PMI rope. You spend a lot of time at camp cleaning your gear when you come back out of the cave, so we kind of have this nice little pool in the stream that makes for a little good gear washing spot. Everybody hanging out by the fire. It's, again, pretty pleasant. The caves are not pleasant, but the surface is. And Keely Owens actually painted this pretty nice watercolor photo of everybody hanging out by the fire, which is pretty cool. So back down into the cave, we had eight people that were sort of tasked with supplying the camp team. And we were getting four campers down on the first camp team. The plan over two weeks was to have three camp teams. Originally, it was going to be Jason leading one, Ben Tobin, who had camped in 2016, leading another, and then I was going to lead the third. Ben Tobin ended up hurting his shoulder right before the trip, so I ended up having to do camp team two and three, and Jason did one. So me and eight people supplied them, on the... just helped them haul all the stuff down to make a camp and get it all set up. Here's Jason climbing up in the entrance. There's like a tiny little climb up here. Everybody's kind of suiting up. We also... this is kind of great. So Ian Chechet had dropped a register in the entrance in 2016, and amazingly, somebody had hiked out to the cave.

12:29 It seems to have started to get quite a little bit of a notoriety up there. When we were hiking in from the trailhead, we ran into people who asked us if we were going to explore the cave, which is for sure the first time that's ever happened. But they put, only went down a couple hundred yards, were not professional cavers, which I thought was funny, because we are also not professional cavers. Maybe someday we'll get the professional cavers in there, and they'll actually get to the bottom of this thing. But we were surprised to see that. Handful of pictures here just to kind of give you guys a feel for what the cave looks like. It's pretty tight passage with all these sort of short nuisance drops. I mean, most of them are... some of them are like 15 feet. They're really short. A few longer ones, but no big pits, really. And I think, like, people that have been there will feel like this type of stuff is the most indicative of what the passage looks like. And then, you know, a lot of the drops will bell out, but you can see right down here, they pretty quickly start getting tight again. Kind of this you know, weird, goofy rope drops. There's Brian Gindling. And then finally, like five hours into the cave, you go through the Bunga Bunga, which is particularly tight. You do this, like, one little short drop, and you're down into the borehole, which is, for 300 feet of passage, this kind of anomaly in the rest of the cave. This pool is sort of what we wash all our gear in every night. Camp is in this borehole. It's a couple hundred feet down the passage. You can't really see it too well, but there's actually a pretty significant infeeder coming out of the ceiling here.

14:01 And while camping, like, we'll literally almost take a shower in it to try to get the mud off the gear. You're sitting there scrubbing, you know, with a kitchen brush, just anything you can do to try to get that weight off your suit. Because it's just so much mud. So I think this is George Breeley, Mark Wingard, Paul Winter and me, we're setting up camp. The three of us here on the left were the supply team. Paul was going to doing his three-day stint. But again, you know, you can kind of see the mud. you can see that kind of kitchen brush there. This is like what we look like. We haven't gone through the worst of the mud. The worst of the mud is actually below camp. So this is relatively clean for Tears, what we look like right here. We got camp set up. Those eight people exited. I don't think we got out of the cave until 3 a.m. I'm 35 now. You can definitely start to feel your recovery time drop by the age of 35 when you're doing Tears. I basically spent the whole next day sleeping after getting out. Here's George doing the same thing. But Nick Socky, Eric Pelkey, and Paul Winter and Jason were all down in the cave. So they pushed back out to that spot that you saw. You saw Jason and Ian from the previous trip. They did some survey, some stuff that hadn't been surveyed the previous time. And the previous time, they sort of squeezed through this low spot in the fissure that was pretty miserable to get in, so they actually rigged up and over it this time. And that took up most of their camp trip.

15:33 They ran out of rigging and actually ended up exiting the cave a day early. And so we were, you know, kind of all sitting around the fire, and we were pretty surprised to see Jason show up a day before he was supposed to. And I think I mentioned, you know, in 2016, there were some pretty good conversations that I wish I got on video. So I did a pretty good job this year of making sure we got some of this on video. So I'm going to play this. This is Jason. Literally, we're all sitting in camp. He just shows up. Paul, Eric, and... Paul, Eric, and Nick are like nowhere to be seen. And so we start asking them all these questions. Can you guys hear this? [Video: people talking and laughing]

16:27 Where are they? [inaudible] [Video: people talking and laughing]

16:44 I don't know if you can hear it or not. [inaudible]

16:50 But you don't think it'll ever be bottomed in your lifetime? You don't think the game will ever end?

16:59 It's got a long ways to go. Like 400 feet down, you have to do something different. Like, you have to bust into a borehole and then be able to just really quickly go down, like the type of passage we're in. Like how you didn't drop at all, because you didn't even get... You got to where you got to last time. Here's the other thing You may do this whole trip but you may not get any more depth out of the bottom.

17:20 So that was Jason after his first camp. He came out and basically got back to where they got in 2016 and came out. And his proclamation was that he's basically never going back and the cave's never going to be bottomed. So I don't think we were super... morale maybe wasn't super high that particular night or the next day going in. But the thing, if you guys have caved with Jason, I think Jason, and I think this comes from maybe years and years of just ridge walking endlessly, he tends to have a little bit of a pessimistic side to him. And the story I'll tell is, I think the first expedition I ever went on with Jason was one of his trips in the Grand Canyon. And we were going out to Double Bopper, and he was like, look, we just have to go do mop-up in this cave. It's going to be two or three hours from Double Bopper. You know, it's just mop-up. We're going to wrap everything up in one day. And we get out there, and it was literally the largest borehole I'd ever surveyed in my life. And every single day for three days, he kept saying, we're going to finish it. We're going to finish it. And we never did. So, you know, when he says he thinks the cave's never going to be bottomed and also that he's never going to go back, we literally had a conversation today about going back. So you kind of have to take Jason's pessimism with a grain of salt. He emailed me today, and he's like, yeah, we got a plan going back. Nick, Paul, and Eric did end up showing up a couple minutes later in fairly good spirits, all things considered. And they even brought back data. Here's the survey book that Nick came back with. It was a mess, but we did get the data from it.

18:53 Just had to dry those sheets out in the sun for a little bit. And just to, like, re-emphasize the mud, I mean, it's this weird glacial silt. I showed this picture at convention a few years ago. You know, this is kind of the changing tarp in camp, and there's actually three sets of gear here. You can just barely see them, but the mud is for real. So camp team two, we again, you know, head back out to the cave. It's the three of us. It's me, Gilly, and Tommy, Gilly Elor and Tommy Cleckner. We head down. Here's kind of us in camp. This is a picture of the sort of weird changing process you have to go through every day. You get one person to get completely clean and get in the tent. You get one intermediate person who's kind of on the changing tarp. The dirty person opens the pack and kind of holds it forward while the intermediate person takes the stuff out, opens the dry bag, and the clean person reaches into the dry bag. So it's this entire... it's getting in and out of your gear and getting all the gear into the packs is a pretty time-consuming process, all just to try to keep the camp at least marginally clean. And your gear is just like falling apart. I think over seven days while I was camping in the cave, pretty much the only piece of soft gear I had that was functional at the end was my foot loop. I got holes in my XtraTufs. You know, my harness, the double-back buckle on the back was so worn that I basically was worried I wasn't going to make it out of the cave. The whole time I was, like, manufacturing PVC patches and stuff like that to try to keep it functional.

20:27 And every day, like, kind of crouched... let me see if I got these a little bit out of order. Every day, crouched on this tarp, you know, I'd spend 20 minutes with a Speedy Stitcher trying to put my Jazam suit back together. I think day two, Gilly had smuggled in chocolate and a little bit of bourbon. It was my 35th birthday. My notes for that just... that day just say, happy birthday, dumbass. And again, you know, all the repairs, just like endless repairs. This is on the surface, but I think 2016, we got a big group order of these Shazam suits. And I don't, I think maybe James Hunter still has his. I think the rest of them are gone, or at least they're not functional anymore. They're just so worn out. Mine's shot. But there's George repairing his gear on the surface. So we went back not too much farther than this spot in the cave. We brought the survey over like a day and a half of work down in the cave we brought the survey all the way up to another climb up and a traverse and started working on that. But like, everything is harder. It's freezing. You don't want to touch the walls. You're just like covered in mud. You're pretty miserable. I think I dropped the drill. So like the progress was pretty slow. You know, we ended up bringing the survey up to the edge of the cave and then got a few bolts up and a few bolts into this traverse. And that was about it and got back to camp. And, you know, now we're down to two out of our three camp trips are done. I kind of curl up in the fetal position in my sleeping bag while Tommy and Gilly head for the surface. But I sent them up with a note, and the note just said, 134 feet of survey, no retreat, no surrender, which is, you know, perhaps a little bit hubristic.

22:05 But so it's a little demoralizing. You're like, you know, this is 25 people, two weeks of time, and we're just making so little progress. But at least, like, on the surface at the same time, a number of other objectives in other caves were kind of getting taken care of. Again, sort of that famous Jason pessimism. You know, he's like, everything over there has been ridge-walked. But I said, okay, well, what about this whole section of karst? You can see it on satellite imagery. And he's like, yeah, no, no, we didn't walk that. And it's just this, like, huge chunk of karst that's basically never been walked. So Corey Hackley and Keely Owens kind of went over there. They did this kind of two-day away trip thing we gave them some radios you know we could communicate with them and they found like a number of features that, you know, we need to go back and check in the future. And at the same time, Double Date, which is just kind of around the corner, James and Jason and Beth Cortright have, like, done a lot of work in there. It's a fairly substantial... might even be the longest cave in the area, but fairly substantial cave. Mark Wingard, Carl Froslie, and Kevin Manley went down there and worked a couple lead climbs. I think Matt and Jean Krejca, maybe somebody else, helped haul some gear for them, maybe Hope. But they worked on two climbs. There's Mark. There's a little bit of a squeeze in one spot. I've never even been here, so I'm kind of, you know, just showing you the pictures. But there's Carl kind of trying to get through this one little tight pinch. But they ended up checking one lead, which I think they said had already been done, but they got up there, and there's still a sort of marginal stream crawl that's still going.

23:37 And then they did another climb that ended up going to a second climb that's still outstanding and still a lead. So, like, pretty productive, especially considering the fact that we were, like, stripping rigging back from them because we were running out of everything in Tears. And I had this bright idea that instead of hauling out three or four Petzl Tam Tam hammers, we were going to haul out these MSR tent stake hammers, that one of them ended up breaking on them. So we kind of threw every obstacle... we gave them every disadvantage we could, and they still were getting quite a bit done. There's either Kevin or Mark on the climb. But the other one, the entrance to Tears, Beth Cortright and Ben Schwartz started a climb in the entrance in 2016 that actually added depth to the cave. And it was still going up, and it was a lead that was left. So Beth and James went back, and I think Jean as well. But of course, the rope in 2019 was frozen solid in this ice in the entrance of the cave. So the first thing they had to do was kind of hammer the rope out and free the rope. But once they got up there, I think there were leads in two directions. One kind of led to a dig, you know, with air, but most likely it was heading up towards the surface. And then I think they did another 80-foot aid climb. I haven't been up there, so I don't know how much of that 80 feet is actual straight vertical. But, you know, they ended up adding 79 feet of depth to the cave just by climbing in the entrance and setting a new high point. They also did a couple of objectives in Virgil. You know, so again, Virgil is like the third or fourth deepest cave in the country. About halfway down, you know, you go over...

25:14 I have this picture because there's this great drop named Death Is All Around Us, and it's hard to see here, but these are just kind of like fractured blocks laid in. So the name of the drop is Death Is All Around Us, which is kind of a fun name for a drop, and sort of true. But you get down about halfway and there's this infeeder that comes in. You go through this kind of awful, awful, tight, short squeeze, which, if you've ever had to go through a squeeze in cold rock, is not pleasant. But I think that's Hope, Beth, Jean... I don't... I guess Kevin and James probably took the photo here. You know, there they are, muddy at the entrance on the way out. Same thing. It's the infeeder in the other direction, but they sort of finished this climb, and it's, you know, in an infeeder that's trending right towards Tears. James got up there. I think they all went up, and it ended up just leading to another climb. So again, another head up the climb and you're heading upstream and you hit a second one. But it's really pretty interesting, because it's super close to Tears. There's nothing. And this is the 2016 data. So they're probably somewhere in here now. It's like just a couple hundred feet at most, but there's no obvious spot where it might join up with Tears. So it's a little bit of a question mark. But again, you know, Tears is all this tight fissure passage, so it's pretty possible you could miss something. Meanwhile, I didn't spend too much time curled up in the fetal position. Matt Covington, Ian McMillan, and George Breeley showed up.

26:45 So, you know, the four of us were kind of this final camp team. Here we are again in camp. The mud still exists. Don't worry, didn't go anywhere. But we end up pushing back, you know, down to where we'd left off. George did quite a bit of rigging through that traverse, maybe 100 feet, maybe a little bit more even. And finally, basically after two years of expeditions and camp trips, breaks into a drop, which he named No More Tears, might be the nicest drop in the cave. I mean, it's probably 50 feet or something. And we get back into downward-trending, clean-washed canyon. It started to get a little bit tight again, but in probably all the time that I've been out there, it's the best... it's the best we've left the cave. But, you know, we're now about three hours of travel time from camp. I mean it's getting to the point where I think to go back you would almost have to you know do like a camp situation where you went to camp on one day your second day was like a really hard 24-hour day and then the whole team would take a full rest day on the third day and then you would exit. So we're sort of having this debate about how, you know, how you manage to go back, given that we're now three hours of travel time from camp. And the big question, of course, you know, we're at 1,863 feet now, is how deep does it go? So we're somewhere right in here. I think we still have about 200 feet to the river level. So there's sort of two theories. One is that we're going to hit the river level and it's going to sump out.

28:18 One is we would hit the river level and the cave would take a hard right and follow the river downstream. There's actually a huge resurgence down here. I tend to think we're going to hit the river level and get mudded out, but that's sort of a complete guess, and you don't really know until you go. So I love these pictures. I think James Hunter took these. This is everybody coming out of the cave, and you can just sort of see, like, everyone's pretty happy to be out, but for having been underground for a couple days, they're not that happy, because they're so exhausted. So that's Ian McMillan and George Breeley coming out. You know, here's me forcing a smile along with Jason and Matt. Matt looks a little bit happier a couple minutes later. I mean, same thing with me. I look a little bit happier, but you can kind of just see the wear on everybody's face. I think Tommy Cleckner is the only one coming out of here that sort of seems like he's maybe in halfway decent spirits. After that, you kind of reverse the whole process. Everybody comes back up. We had about eight people pack everything up, haul it all the way back over the pass to meet the mules again, throw in the mules. The mules drag all the equipment down to the river. They'd also stashed our boats. Unfortunately, there was like a big group that left after week one that was also supposed to raft out and there was some sort of miscommunication with the mules and the boats weren't there when they got there, which was a huge bummer, because this is kind of the fun part of the trip and what everybody looks forward to. But they ended up having to hike out. And I had to track their boats down and get them shipped back to everybody afterwards. But the week two crew, the, like, eight of us that were left at the very end, this is us blowing our boats up at the river.

29:56 You know, the next day you kind of put in. You can see this kind of great shot with the mule train in the background here. And off we go. You know, the river, I think I've heard maybe there's sections that are Class 3. So it's not like too terrible, but you know, half of us are in these, like, Amazon.com boats that are pretty less than worthy of paddling. What's going on? Oh, there it goes. You know, this is like the kind of one really bad... This maybe even overstates how hard it is, but we do tend to flip just because you have an 80-pound pack on the boat, and you're in these kind of crappy boats. This is a pretty nice boat, but this year we did pretty well. Everybody made it. Everybody got back to civilization. And now it's just a question of planning next year, since obviously we're going to have to go back, since the cave still goes. I guess that's about all I got, so I'll turn it over to questions, I guess.