Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth
Product Description In 2004, two great scientist-explorers attempted to find the bottom of the world. American Bill Stone took on the vast, deadly Cheve Cave in southern Mexico. Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk targeted Krubera, a freezing nightmare of a supercave in the war-torn former Soviet republic of Georgia. Both men spent months almost two vertical miles deep, contending with thousand-foot drops, raging whitewater rivers, monstrous waterfalls, mile-long belly crawls, and the psychological horrors produced by weeks in absolute darkness, beyond all hope of rescue. Based on his unprecedented access to logs and journals as well as hours of personal interviews, James Tabor has crafted a thrilling exploration of man’s timeless urge to discover—and of two extraordinary men whose pursuit of greatness led them to the heights of triumph and the depths of tragedy. Blind Descent is an unforgettable addition to the classic literature of true-life adventure, and a testament to human survival and endurance. Includes a 16-pg black and white insert Amazon.com Review : Set in impenetrable darkness, James M. Tabor's Blind Descent is as awe-inspiring as any adventure story above ground. Tabor's claustrophobic and pulse-pounding narrative follows two of the world's premier cavers--American Bill Stone and Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk--as they race to explore Earth's deepest caves, swimming through steering wheel-sized tunnels and scaling rock walls slick with spring runoff. Caving is dirty and dangerous work, and Tabor pulls no punches in describing the many terrifying hazards that cavers face underground, including falling rocks, hypothermia, starvation, nitrogen narcosis, hallucinations, hypoxia, and deadly anxiety attacks. He captures the eerie mixture of excitement and horror that accompanies life in extreme environments, while shedding light on the ineffable and complex moral code that governs men and women in places where survival is hoped for, but never guaranteed. Blind Descent is a captivating summer read for adventure seekers and armchair adrenaline junkies alike. --Lynette Mong About the Author James M. Tabor’s last book was the international award-winning Forever on the Mountain: The Truth Behind One of Mountaineering’s Most Controversial and Mysterious Disasters. The writer and on-camera host of the acclaimed national PBS series The Great Outdoors, Tabor was also co-creator and executive producer for the 2007 History Channel special Journey to the Center of the World. Tabor is a former contributing editor to Outside magazine and Ski Magazine; his writing has also appeared in Time, Smithsonian, Barron’s, U.S. News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and many other national publications. From the Hardcover edition. From Booklist In Tabor's narrative of recent deep-caving expeditions renowned in the speleological community, the saga of exploration occurs in grottos of Hadean darkness, where the margin between life and death is narrow and occasionally crossed. Centering on two leaders who competed to discover the most profound natural cave on earth, Tabor works their engineering and scientific backgrounds into descriptive chronicles of their daring, dangerous descents. He depicts William Stone, who wrote his story in Beyond the Deep (2002), as a controversial leader whose several expeditions to cavern systems in Mexico incurred dissension and fatalities en route to successes in reaching extreme depths. But the superlative laurel of the deepest eluded Stone's strivings; that went to Tabor's second star, Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk. As driven as Stone but more emollient a chief in Tabor's description, Klimchouk took his teams down a sinuous chasm in the Republic of Georgia, vertically dropping by rappelling, crawling, and swimming to more than two kilometers. Fully evoking the peril, lure, and Everest-scale logistics of extreme caving, Tabor is an able dramatist for the adventure-read