Blind Descent
The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth
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Beschreibung des Verlags
The deepest cave on earth was a prize that had remained unclaimed for centuries, long after every other ultimate discovery had been made. This is the story of the men and women who risked everything to find it, earning their place in history beside the likes of Peary, Amundsen, Hillary, and Armstrong.
In 2004, two great scientist-explorers attempted to find the bottom of the world. Bold, American Bill Stone was committed to the vast Cheve Cave, located in southern Mexico and deadly even by supercave standards. On the other side of the globe, legendary Ukrainian explorer Alexander Klimchouk - Stone's opposite in temperament and style - had targeted Krubera, a freezing nightmare of a supercave in the Republic of Georgia.
Blind Descent explores both the brightest and darkest aspects of the timeless human urge to discover - to be first. It is also a thrilling epic about a pursuit that makes even extreme mountaineering and ocean exploration pale by comparison. These supercavers spent months in multiple camps almost two vertical miles deep and many more miles from their caves' exits. They had to contend with thousand-foot drops, deadly flooded tunnels, raging whitewater rivers, monstrous waterfalls, mile-long belly crawls, and much more. Perhaps even worse were the psychological horrors produced by weeks plunged into absolute, perpetual darkness, beyond all hope of rescue, including a particularly insidious derangement called 'The Rapture'.
Blind Descent is a testament to human survival and endurance - and to two extraordinary men whose relentless pursuit of greatness led them to heights of triumph and depths of tragedy neither could have imagined.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tabor, a former contributing editor at Outside magazine and author of Forever on the Mountain, contrasts two sterling teams, one American and the other Russian, in their perilous search to locate the deepest supercave on earth. While the book dwells largely on the obsessive, authoritative American star caver, Bill Stone, the writer gives just enough ink to the bold Soviet team counterpart ,Alexander Klimchouk, and his fair-but-firm leadership in his expeditions into the subterranean world. However, the personalities of the adventurers aside, it s the fascinating information of the big supercave treks that holds the reader to his seat, containing dangers aplenty with deadly falls, killer microbes, sudden burial, asphyxiation, claustrophobia, anxiety, and hallucinations far underneath the ground in a lightless world. Using a pulse-pounding narrative, this is tense real-life adventure pitting two master cavers mirroring the cold war with very uncommonly high stakes.
