The Boys in the Cave

by Matt Gutman

  “Night!”

  “Biw!”

  “Dom!”

  “Titan!”

  The only answer came from the cave itself, the echoes bouncing the names back at them. The park ranger and the coach tried to console them, as did volunteers who began arriving from nearby villages—who told them, “Don’t worry, no one can get lost in that cave.” And it seemed true—no one could remember a single incident in which a local had been trapped there. The rangers added that the only person they had ever known to get lost was a Chinese tourist who had parked his bike outside another cave in the park and left it there for two months. After multiple searches they found no evidence of the man and assumed he had gone into the cave and died in one of its distant corners. Two months later a local Muslim charity called about the man. He had apparently spent weeks meditating at the top of the mountain, but would come down every once in a while to buy provisions at a local 7-Eleven. When his money ran out, he sought free meals at the Muslim charity.

  So, explained the rangers reassuringly, even this “crazy Chinese tourist” hadn’t really been lost in the cave. They were sure they’d find the boys soon. The ranger and his little team left the parents and hustled to town to retrieve boots, flashlights, and a water pump from their headquarters. When they returned, more parents had arrived. None had left. Many of the parents would not leave that spot for days, refusing to sleep or eat. The ranger soothed them as they mumbled, “How can I sleep when my son is inside?” They couldn’t, so they stood out in the rain at the mouth of the cave.

  Coach Nok, despite his fear of the place, went back into the cave alone. The rains had slicked everything, and in his sandals he wiped out, flopping on his back and wrenching his neck. He couldn’t move, yelled for help, and had to be carried out of the cave with a neck injury that would plague him for months. It was an ominous start to the search.

  Chapter Four

  Retreat

  It was midnight. Governor Narongsak Osatanakorn reluctantly picked up the phone. He was already jumpy after reportedly getting on the wrong end of the wrath of Thailand’s ruling junta. He’d only been on the job for a year, but had ordered investigations into allegations of budgetary irregularities and possible graft in local public works projects. He had apparently alleged that the lion’s share of money earmarked for his own province of Chiang Rai was instead going to central government coffers in Bangkok. The bespectacled governor was a stickler for the rules, with multiple degrees in engineering. That kind of crusade against corruption comes with major risks in a country run by a military junta.

  In 2014, with the blessing of Thailand’s powerful King, General Prayut Chan-o-cha—then commanding The Royal Thai Army—had toppled a caretaker government to put an end to political violence that had paralyzed the country for months. Prayut installed himself as Prime Minister and established a junta called the National Council for Peace and Security to run the nation. It was the country’s first coup in more than eighty years. The next six months brought crackdowns against dissidents and political opponents. Order, if not democracy, had been restored.

  The fuss Narongsak had made and the embarrassment he reportedly caused the junta had resulted in an impending transfer to a backwater province—scheduled for just five days hence—from his cushy job as governor of Chiang Rai.

  Now he bolted from bed. “They’re what?”

  His secretary explained that twelve boys from the town of Mae Sai and their soccer coach had disappeared earlier on Saturday into a cave and never come out. Their parents were freaking out; they were waiting at the mouth of the cave. No one had ventured deep inside. They were waiting for a proper rescue team.

  Narongsak, as he’s known, hustled out of bed and sped the forty-five minutes to the cave. The blacked-out little hamlets lining Route 1 were a flash of graphite gray and spectral green. He arrived at the cave around one in the morning. About fifty people were there, a minicamp that over the coming days would swell into a small city. Narongsak was briefed by the head park ranger, Damrong, and quickly organized a rescue team of twenty-two men—local district officials, police, park rangers, and volunteers. They scrambled in shortly after 1 A.M. and reemerged almost three hours later with grim news: the rescue team had made it to the T-junction, and not only was there no sign of the boys, there was a tremendous amount of water—as powerful as an ocean rip current. And it was rising.

  They analyzed the situation: The tunnels beyond the T-junction seemed completely submerged. The terrain that was not submerged was merciless, with not a single patch of flat ground. The darkness was disorienting, there were trip hazards everywhere, and there was zero communication to the outside world. Many of the passages required crawling—so forget about ambulance gurneys or even regular stretchers. Cell phones had no signal, and because rock is conductive, the cave swallowed up the radio waves of their walkie-talkies. It was the worst possible place for a search-and-rescue operation, and Narongsak, ever careful, wanted to avoid a situation in which rescuers would need to be rescued.

  So Narongsak ordered everyone to pull back. They needed to reassess, and he needed someone who actually knew the cave.

  Early the next morning he convened another meeting. At 9 A.M. on Sunday, June 24, rescuers—including a sixty-three-year-old foreigner—started trickling into the cave site.

  No one knew it yet, but his presence was the first bit of luck the rescue would encounter. The foreigner was a sinewy Brit named Vernon Unsworth, known to everyone as Vern. Vern, a ranger told Narongsak, was the crazy Brit who went into the cave all the time.

  Vern had fallen in love with caving at sixteen, joining the Red Rose Pothole Club near his native Lancaster. He just happened to be born on the doorstep of the United Kingdom’s caving country. Lancaster is at the stem of what on a map looks like a giant cloverleaf of three national parks, featuring some of the country’s longest and deepest caves. On weekends young Vern would explore the fifty-three-mile-long Three Counties cave system nearby. Still in his teens, he’d climbed the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc—in the same week. He took a decade-long hiatus to race motorcycles semiprofessionally, then returned to his first love, caving.

  Divorced after two decades of marriage, he had recently fallen in love with a local woman who lived in Mae Sai. Her name was Tik. His Thai was rudimentary, so he spoke to her in the singsong-accented English that betrays his roots in northern England. From the window of their little bungalow, he could see the entirety of the Sleeping Princess—Doi Nang Non mountain.

  Vern loves Tik, but as he tells it, the object of his deepest desire was that Princess—more precisely, her guts. He’d been exploring the Tham Luang cave for a few years now. In 2013 he and his caving buddy, sixty-five-year-old Rob Harper, started redrawing the original 1980s survey map. That map had charted the cave as being about four miles long. In Tham Luang, Vern and Harper had taken a right at the T-junction and pushed forward up through the Monk’s Series, the tunnel and its cramped offshoots that point due north. The shafts were so tight and the belly crawls so gnarly that Vern’s back looked like it had been shredded by a feral cat. He took a selfie of his injuries, which he likes to show friends—or reporters—when they ask about caving. But that expedition added over half a mile to the cave’s overall documented length and Vern decided to explore it again the next year.

  The locals, he says, “thought I was crazy. For the last four or five years, they called me Crazy Caveman. They couldn’t understand why I spent so much time in caves. Caves to them are supposed to have a spiritual side. They could not understand why I spent so much time there. What’s the point?”

  If you had asked that question to Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay about Mount Everest, or to explorers like George Mallory and Robert Falcon Scott—who died pursuing similar obsessions—they might have answered, “It was there.” But “there” also encompasses the uniquely human impulse to be first—to explore the blank parts of the map. And cavers submit that the greatest trove of unexplored places
on earth is the treasure chest of tunnels and passageways that honeycomb our hills. Plus, unlike seventy-thousand-dollar-per-person Everest expeditions, it’s a stunningly egalitarian activity—all you have to do is get there.

  For as long as humans have been around, caves have served as places to live or in which to store what was most valuable or most dangerous. Neanderthals crammed their clans into caves also inhabited by various animals. Cro-Magnons famously painted on cave walls. Today deep caves, sometimes man-made, serve as cold storage for the planet’s seeds (the Svalbard Global Seed Vault) and as the future depository of America’s nuclear waste (Yucca Mountain).

  But going into caves for recreation, rather than for shelter or storage, began in the late nineteenth century. Caving was pioneered in the late 1880s by Édouard-Alfred Martel, who started poking around deep holes in the ground in France. In 1895 he successfully descended into the nearly vertical 350-foot main shaft at Gaping Gill in Yorkshire, England. The quest to go deeper led him to develop his own techniques and the rudiments of modern climbing equipment, including thinner climbing ropes and metallic ladders. A group of Frenchmen, including a metal machinist named Fernand Petzl—with apparently little else to do during World War II—descended into the Dent de Crolles cave system near Grenoble, France. It was during that record-setting expedition—they traveled over two thousand feet into the earth—that primitive prototypes of the modern nylon climbing rope, rope ladders, and rope ascenders used in lieu of ladders were developed. Petzl continued to tinker with climbing safety gear—ultimately founding the eponymous climbing manufacturer Petzl. The descendants of those prototypes are still used by climbers and cavers today.

  In the British Isles, recreational caving started during the latter years of the nineteenth century, but until the period between the World Wars it remained largely the preserve of a very small group of adventurers and scientists interested in the unique geology and biology found deep inside the earth. During the 1920s and ’30s interest in caving grew, leading to the formation of the first caving clubs, initially in the Yorkshire Dales near Lancaster and in Somerset.

  England is notoriously wet, and the north is typically cold and wet. By the mid-1930s in England, cavers who kept running into water devised ways of crossing it. In 1936 Jack Sheppard made cave-diving history by crossing a short little “sump”—an important cave-diving term for a submerged section of a cave between two dry passages—in a cave in southern England using a suit filled with air from a modified bicycle pump.

  The growth of the sport’s popularity worldwide correlated with a commensurate rise in disasters, many of them involving water. In 1993, south of St. Louis, a group from the St. Joseph’s Home for Boys set out to Cliff Cave County Park. When heavy rains drenched the area, most of the boys and counselors left the cave, but five boys and two adults stayed to explore further. Rainwater gathered in streamlets, which poured into the cave’s sinkholes. Six members of the group drowned, four of them children. One of the boys, thirteen-year-old Gary Mahr, managed to survive by clinging to a rock shelf above the water for eighteen hours.

  A similar incident occurred in England in 1967, when a group of some of England’s hotshot cavers, led by a swashbuckling twenty-six-year-old named David Adamson, became trapped as waters flooded the Mossdale Caverns in Yorkshire. It was already soggy before they went in. The forecast had called for thunderstorms. Anticipating the flooding everyone suspected possible, and defying the group leader’s exhortations to stay put, four of the original group of ten fled the cave, including Adamson’s fiancée. Those four survived, but a massive effort failed to rescue the six who stayed. All six young men died in what was then the world’s worst caving accident.

  Mossdale Caverns happens to be just a few miles from Lancaster, where the twelve-year-old Vernon Unsworth was on the cusp of a lifetime obsession with climbing and caving. Of course he knew about the failed rescue effort, the whole world did. Hundreds of locals, some digging with bare hands, had built a makeshift dam to divert the stream that stuffed the cave’s belly full of water. Retching from exhaustion and choked by churned-up foam, the rescuers discovered five of the six bodies jammed up into small passages. It would take two more days to find the sixth member of the doomed expedition, half-buried in mud. The search, the recovery of the bodies, the funerals, and the finger-pointing made headlines for days.

  “They were playing Russian roulette, really,” Vern said, fifty-one years after the tragedy. “We all thought about it. But you just have to get on with it, don’t you?” Mossdale was hardly a glamorous cave; it was basically a miles-long mole burrow, with ominously named sections like Rough Chamber, offering none of the geological delights of caves like Tham Luang. Mossdale’s distinct appeal was its length and the possibilities it offered for a connection with another long cave system. Vern and others would explore it countless times over the years, cautionary tales be damned.

  “It is the excitement,” continues Vern. “Finding passages, finding new areas of the cave where no one has ever been before. Those footprints you make? Those are yours, you’re the first. It’s a bit like Neil Armstrong on the moon. You are the first person in that part of the cave. No one has ever seen it before.”

  There’s a unique kind of satisfaction in finding new passages or connecting existing cave systems—something primal that certainly did not exist in Vern’s day job as a mortgage broker and financial adviser.

  Tham Luang was Vern’s hobby, and he freely admits that it was quickly turning into his obsession. It’s a caver’s dream. Located in the Sleeping Princess’s head—where her earring might be—it’s easily accessible for him off a decently maintained dirt road outside Mae Sai, which he calls home for part of the year. Its internal curtains and kissing pairs of stalactites and stalagmites are protected by a dedicated group of park rangers. Beyond that entrance it is rarely traveled, and its deeper recesses harbor endless unexplored mysteries. There’s another convenience for Vern; it’s only a few miles from Tik’s house. In March 2014, Vern and Harper were back, this time turning left at the T-junction. They reached the end of the cave, past the shrivelingly cold Goolie Cooler to the perennially wet Voute Basse, and hit a dead end.

  Caves are cryptic places, where rock is folded all over itself, leaving an often hidden geological wrinkle of a passageway. And every cave has a tell. Like humans and fire, caves need to breathe. A whisper of wind means there’s an opening somewhere. The bigger the draft, the bigger the possible opening beyond. And Vern felt, and heard, something. For sixteen hours during the expedition he’d schlepped a five-pound hammer and a chisel in his pack. He felt his way toward the source of the draft, a small “window” beside the water-clogged passage of Voute Basse, and could see a large cavern beyond. He started to hammer away, enlarging the window enough to squeeze through and reach uncharted territory. If you’re a caver, this is winning the lottery. It was terra incognita. Cavers have a term for this: “scooping booty,” as in grabbing treasure. To them uncharted territory was worth more than gold.

  He’d found what cavers call the master cave—the source of water in a particular cave system. In a single expedition the two men had turned Tham Luang from the sixth-longest cave in Thailand to the fourth-longest. It was now over six miles long. And they kept at it, going back in 2015 and 2016 to map new uncharted extensions to this mysterious cave.

  Early on that rainy morning of June 24, 2018, Vern committed himself to the growing rescue effort; he called a local caving buddy named Lak, who was a volunteer park ranger. When Lak arrived, they went in.

  How could anyone get lost in Tham Luang? Vernon thought to himself. It’s a straight shot, and any reasonably fit person could handle the terrain—certainly a youth soccer team could. The only thing you need to remember is whether you took a right or a left at the T-Junction. Like most, he figured he’d fish them out and be done with it. He and Lak cruised through the main chamber on that Sunday morning and scuttled through the pinches leading to Chamber Two. Just past Cha
mber Three, Vern noticed water piling up in the gutterlike sides of the tunnel, but he was on autopilot until they reached the T-junction.

  It stopped him in his tracks. The bowl that he’d seen so many times was now overflowing. He’d been told there was water, but didn’t expect this much. They reckoned that the boys had gone to the left. To the right was the Monk’s Series, that uphill wash, and the boys would have been flushed out. So they turned left and began to shout, yelling the boys’ names. By then, though, the water had fully flooded the passage ahead, blocking their voices.

  Neither man had been in the cave during the wet season, and both found this watery world almost unrecognizable. Vern thought the flooded T-junction was diveable at the time, but no one in that search party had either the know-how or the equipment to do it. They turned back—soaked with sweat and cave water and battered with a layer of the reddish mud. It would be the first time the cave had defeated Vern and the first of a ceaseless series of retreats in the coming days. Still, Vern trudged out of the cave with an idea. If they could block the water flowing down from the Monk’s Series, they could arrest the rising flood. After a meeting with Governor Narongsak, they decided to return—this time with a small contingent of local soldiers who had arrived and a team of technical rope rescuers and divers from the nearby city of Chiang Mai.* The leader of that team, Noppadon Uppakham, called Taw, is an experienced caver who works for a rock-climbing outfit run by his brother-in-law, an American living in Chiang Mai named Josh Morris.

  Vern went in again, this time with the climbing team dragging in a pump and digging tools. They drew markings on the wall, to more easily quantify the rising water level. It was easy going until that tight space before Chamber Four. To traverse tight passages like that you have a couple of choices: scooting on your butt with your hands behind you (for short distances), which burns your thighs—crab-walking—or crawling on all fours. Either way, after hauling in the gear they were all out of breath by the time they reached the T-junction. Vern informed the team that there was little chance the boys had headed to the right, uphill toward the pulsing waters coming from the Monk’s Series. The team’s plan was to simultaneously dam the water flowing down with sandbags and pump enough water out to allow the flooded section to be forded. The sandbags didn’t need to arrest the flow, just slow it enough to allow the pump to work. The soldiers immediately got out their shovels and started filling sandbags. As soon as they placed one in the water, the current zipped it downstream. Abandoning the sandbags, they would have to rely on the pump alone. They cranked it to life and sent one of Taw’s divers to inspect the section on the left side toward Pattaya Beach and the Underwater City.