A team of five amateur cavers from the Calgary area have found a link between two caves in a remote part of the Rockies near the Continental Divide, making the system Canada's deepest by more than 100 metres. "It's 15 per cent deeper than anything that was known in Canada before," said Kathleen Graham, one of the cavers who found the link. "So this is a lot deeper."
The 653-metre deep cave, which is also the fourth-longest in Canada at 4.5 kilometres, is near the Alberta border in Mount Doupe, a 2,667-metre peak about a 90-minute drive on forestry roads southeast of Fernie, B.C.
Its discovery was the culmination of dozens of forays into two neighbouring caves by about 34 cavers from the Alberta Speleological Society working in small teams over eight years.
The society's explorers had strong suspicions the Pachidream and Heavy Breather caves, whose entrances are just 400 metres apart, must connect.
Their explorations showed the two caves came within 10 metres of each other at a few points deep underground. And they noticed Pachidream usually sucks air in, while Heavy Breather usually blows air out.
"That's a big indicator that one's feeding the other," Graham said.
But it wasn't until an 11-hour expedition Saturday that one of the teams -- which included Calgary-based cavers Graham, Colin Massey, Vince Massey, Gavin Elsley and Cochrane's Chris Omura -- found a link between the two caves.
The team descended into the depths by rappelling several hundred metres using ropes threaded through each member's caving harness.
Once inside, the temperature dropped to about 5 C, similar to the inside of a refrigerator.
"It never freezes down there, but it's never comfortable," said Graham. "The biggest danger was rockfall. There's always rockfall, because no one has ever gone down there and all the rocks have been loosened by water erosion."
The team's discovery came after they had shimmied through a long, horizontal branch of canyons and tight passages in the Heavy Breather Cave.
Graham remembered "a lot of crawling."
The connection between the two caves adds 150 metres to the depth of the system, because the entrance to Pachidream is that much higher than the entrance to Heavy Breather.
The cave system is a major find in Canada, but it's far from the deepest cave in the world. That title goes to the Krubera cave in the country of Georgia, at a depth of 2,019 metres.
Still, the Heavy Breather system is much deeper than the next deepest cave in Canada -- Arctomys, which descends 536 metres into Trio Mountain in Mount Robson Provincial Park, in British Columbia.