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2: Bill Steele | A Wall of Water Nearly Swallows a Group of Cavers in a Mexican River Cave

The Story

Entrance to Sumidero Yochib
Climbing one of the waterfalls in Sumidero Yochib
Climbing one of the Tyrollean traverses in Sumidero Yochib
Climbing one of the waterfalls in Sumidero Yochib
Looking at the aftermath of the big storm after the flood

In the early 1970s, a group of Canadian cavers came back from the highlands of Chiapas with something unusual: an admission of defeat.

They’d been told about a sinking river north of San Cristóbal de las Casas, near a village called Yochib. The local Tzeltal name, Sotol, means sinking river. So does the Spanish sumidero. The cave’s name is a redundancy in two languages — Sinking River Sinking River — which tells you roughly how much anyone knew about it.

Bill asked them what they’d found. Their answer: a cave that’s impossible to explore.

A river runs straight into the entrance. Not far in, the passage narrows to wall-to-wall water — no ledges, no dry route, you are in the river. The current is fast. There are waterfalls downstream, and you cannot see where they start until you are going over one. And it’s in the tropics, which means that even in the dry season a storm can arrive without warning and turn the whole thing into a drain.

We’ve been in a little ways, they told him. I don’t think we’re going back.

Bill was in his twenties. By his own description, “overly confident and probably a bit cocky,” and convinced he was one of the best in the world. So he went — and brought Mike Boon, the eccentric British caver widely considered the father of UK cave diving, a poet and playwright who was, in Bill’s words, “a little too strange for a lot of people. To me he amused me.”

Sumidero Yochib is only about 700 feet deep. That’s shallow by world standards, and Bill is the first to point out that depth isn’t what makes it dangerous. What makes it dangerous is that everything about it wants to move you downstream, and downstream is a waterfall you haven’t found yet.

How you explore a cave you can’t see into

The technique they invented for that is, in retrospect, absurdly simple and completely brilliant.

Take a one-gallon plastic milk jug. White ones — you can see white a long way down a dark passage. Tie a cord to it and float it downstream. Watch where it drops over the edge. That’s your waterfall. Now measure the cord and you know exactly how far away it is.

Then belay a caver down the same stretch, ready to stop him at any moment. When he’s ten or twelve feet from the lip, he places a bolt by hand, climbs up, bolts out over the waterfall, and drops down the far side.

They did that over and over and over, all the way through the cave. Which is why multi-day trips only got them one or two thousand feet in.

The rest of the kit was equally improvised. Carbide lamps, which are a poor choice in a cave where water sprays constantly and puts them out. Cheap plastic flashlights opened up and packed with Vaseline to waterproof them, then carried in their teeth on a cord while they swam the canals — so if you coughed and lost it, you didn’t lose it.

Bill’s take on modern gear is worth hearing in full, but the short version is that he thinks battery drills are a smaller improvement than young cavers believe. You can hand-drill a bolt in twenty minutes. A power drill does it in five — unless it’s wet, or the battery’s dead, in which case it does it never. “You also need to have a hand drill with you. But boy, young cavers ain’t gonna buy that.”

The flood

The exploration was essentially over. The cave had been derigged, the gear hauled out, and then somebody inventoried the pile and found a duffel bag missing.

So they rigged the cave again — three of them, with storms threatening — and went back in for one bag.

They found it. And then, at what Bill calls the violent lake, he saw brown water and floating leaves come through, which can only mean one thing: it is raining very hard on the surface.

Here’s the part he didn’t understand at the time and does now. A cave floods in two pulses. The first is the immediate catchment near the entrance — that’s the brown water and the leaves. It’s not the flood. It’s the announcement of the flood. The big catchment is still on its way.

He sent Jill Dorman up the rope and out. He and Gary hauled the duffel bag up the drop, derigged, came around the corner — and saw two people walking in. Mike Boon and Blake Harrison, coming to help. They weren’t needed. They were walking into a death trap.

The passage they were all standing in is about a thousand feet long, 120 feet high, 120 feet wide, and straight as an arrow. You can see daylight from inside it. Bill describes it as shaped like a cathedral.

When they met up, one of them looked back toward the entrance and said, “Look.”

The whole cathedral was filling with water.

They climbed onto a boulder they already knew would be underwater shortly. Behind them was a seventy-five-foot waterfall dropping onto flowstone. And Bill said it out loud: We’re gonna die now.

Two of the four went catatonic on the spot. Not panicked — vacant. “Just immobile,” he says. “They believed me.”

Boon did the opposite. He came alive, started scanning the walls, spotted a ledge system on the far side about eighteen inches wide, and said he thought he could get a rope over there. Then he dove into the sluice.

The current took him instantly. He climbed back out on the boulder and said, “Wrong angle.” Then he dove again, angled upstream, and swam — Bill’s comparison is Johnny Weissmüller — got washed downstream anyway but far enough out to reach the wall, caught an upstream eddy running along its base that carried him back level with the others, scrambled up, and tied off.

The two frozen men crossed hand-over-hand. No cow’s tail, no ascender — that gear didn’t exist yet. One of them got ducked under entirely, and what Bill remembers is his white knuckles on the rope.

Then Bill, alone, still standing in a loop of rope, holding the duffel bag they came for. He tied the rope to the bag so they wouldn’t lose it, and then — his phrase — “I let it have me.” The current pendulumed him into the wall. He hand-over-handed up and out.

It took them forty minutes to pick a horizontal route along the ledges to the entrance, a thousand feet away, on a line nobody had ever traversed. There was an audience: the rest of the team, outside, in view, able to see them and completely unable to help.

When they came out, the ground was covered in hail and the thatch roofs of the village were beaten to pieces. The locals were subdued. They’d always thought the cavers were nuts, and this had not changed their minds.

What’d you get out of there? they asked.

Knowledge. Experiences.

What This Episode Is Really About

Four things stuck with me, and none of them are only about caves.

Words are equipment. Bill has told the “we’re gonna die now” story for fifty years, not because of the flood but because of what those four words did to two competent adults. He later talked to combat veterans who confirmed it: you don’t say that, even when you believe it’s certain, because some people will simply stop. Leadership under pressure isn’t only about what you do. It’s about what you say while you do it.

If you’re discussing whether to rig it, rig it. He offers this as a hard rule after a British caver — a physician, extremely experienced — took an eight-meter fall 450 meters deep on the first week of an expedition and broke his leg. There had been a conversation about whether that drop needed a rope. There was plenty of rope. He gives a second example too: a man who argued a drop didn’t need a rope, watched the team rig it anyway, declined to use it, and broke his wrist. “I don’t even need to say anything in that case. He made the point.”

The first bad thing is not the bad thing. The two-pulse flood is a physical fact about karst hydrology, and it’s also the most useful metaphor in the episode. The early signal you’re reacting to is the small catchment. The big one hasn’t arrived yet, and if you calibrate your response to the first pulse you will be standing in the wrong place when the second one shows up.

One rope at a time. Six or seven hundred meters deep in Huautla, a green caver told Bill he didn’t think he could make it out — forty ropes still to climb. Bill’s answer: “I don’t know, I just see that one. That’s the one I’m thinking about.” Same principle a British caver named Peter Hartley once gave me deep in a cave: accept where you are, forget where you have to go, take one step. It’s not motivational-poster stuff. It’s a load-management technique for a brain that will otherwise try to climb all forty ropes simultaneously and fail.

Key Moments

00:00 — “We’re Gonna Die Now”: A Wall of Water in a Flooding Cave

02:18 — Meet Bill Steele: 50 Years and 28 Expeditions Underground

05:14 — The Photograph of Sótano de las Golondrinas That Started It All

08:42 — Magic Mushrooms, Hippies, and Why the Army Shut Down Huautla

10:50 — The Facebook Post That Nearly Ended a Huautla Expedition

16:08 — Fake Teeth and Juggling: How to Win Over a Village

17:36 — Sumidero Yochib: The Cave the Canadians Called Impossible

20:58 — Why a 700-Foot River Cave Is Deadlier Than a Deep One

22:35 — Milk Jugs and Belays: Rigging Blind Above Unseen Waterfalls

23:41 — Hand Drills, Carbide Lamps, and Flashlights Filled With Vaseline

28:22 — “If You Have a Discussion About Rigging a Drop, Rig It”

30:27 — Norm Pace, 15 Feet of Slack, and the Team That Thought He Drowned

32:01 — The Missing Duffel Bag That Sent Them Back Into a Flooding Cave

35:18 — “You Don’t Say That”: What Those Three Words Did to the Team

36:18 — Mike Boon Dives Into the Sluice: “Wrong Angle”

40:47 — Hail, Wrecked Rooftops, and Walking Out Alive

44:23 — One Rope at a Time: The Mental Game 700 Meters Deep

48:21 — “We Take Three Things Out of These Caves”

53:39 — Hypothermia, a Trapped Hand, and “Here’s How You Die in a Cave”

55:40 — Seventeen Close Calls, Written Down

Terms Used in This Episode

  • Sumidero — Spanish for sinking river, the point where a surface river disappears underground. The Tzeltal Maya name for the same feature, sotol, means the same thing.
  • Karst — the limestone landscape that makes caves possible. Where you find thick karst, you find undiscovered cave.
  • Canal line — a horizontal rope strung along a water-filled passage that you pull yourself along. Often deliberately not clipped into, so you can let go if you need to.
  • Belay — holding a rope for someone so you can stop them. In Yochib, used to stop a caver before he went over a waterfall nobody had found yet.
  • Rebelay / redirect — intermediate anchor points down a long drop that keep the rope off the rock. Standard now; didn’t exist when Bill started.
  • Derig — pulling all the ropes and hardware back out of a cave when you’re done. Notably, they had to re-rig Yochib to retrieve one lost duffel bag.
  • Traverse line — a rope along a wall that lets you move horizontally over something you don’t want to fall into.
  • Tyrolean traverse — a rope stretched across open space that you cross hanging from, rather than walking.
  • Cow’s tail — a short safety lanyard connecting your harness to a rope. Bill’s team didn’t have them in the seventies, which is why a man crossed a flooding passage on his knuckles.
  • Cable ladder — a flexible ladder of thin steel cable and rungs. Largely obsolete now, but genuinely useful in turbulent water where clipping ascenders is difficult.
  • Troglobitic — describing an organism that lives its entire life underground. As in Hemirrhagus billsteelei, the troglobitic tarantula named after this episode’s guest.
  • Grotto — a local chapter of the National Speleological Society. How most American cavers get made, including Bill, at Indiana University.

Resources

The book this episode is about

Go deeper on the people and the caves

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The Last Paragraph of the Book

I read this to Bill on the air. It’s the closing paragraph of Yochib: The River Cave, and it’s the reason I wanted to make this episode:

Sumidero Yochib had merely tolerated us. I felt respect for the dangers of this cave, as well as fear and apprehension. At times we had experienced emotional stresses, but we overcame them. What we conquered was not Sumidero Yochib but ourselves. We conjured from our beings the strength and the will to explore this grand cave to its end. And we all came back alive.

As far as Bill knows, only one person has been back to Yochib since. Scott Davis, a Grand Canyon river outfitter, took some kayaking clients in to play in the standing waves of the lake below the first waterfall.

Asked what they thought of the cave, they had one word.

Scary.