Why does Kieran Mckay, a New Zealand professional caver do what he does? Why does he wedge his fragile body between tons of rock, through passages so pinched that one of them is dubbed Castration Gap’? Why does he camp underground in the wet and filth for days on end, sucking dank air, aware that he could be drowned or crushed at any second?
He nearly didn’t, after a mate drowned in 1999 while caving, and Mckay had the horrific task of trying – and failing – to drag out his body.
Like the dozen or so top cavers pushing the boundaries of the sport, Mckay spends about a third of his year underground, squeezing between cracks and passing through enormous rock cathedrals where nobody has ever been before. The outdoor instructor slips easily into long stories. He has many to tell.
The connection brought excitement and disbelief from the international caving world. It’s something people have been looking for for 60 years, and it’s taken three years and five attempts to nail the link – in fact since the day when Mckay and his team first suspected these two systems could be one. In 2011, trapped in a storm on Mt. Arthur, they sheltered in what they thought was a small cave.
The passage eventually terminated in a rockfall, but when they laid the Stormy Pot map over the Nettlebed map, they realized the two systems were very close neighbours. In fact, they’d missed connecting them by just a few hundred feet, a step short of a record.
If air and water could get through, they reasoned, a person could surely follow. Over the next few years, they progressively closed the gap between the two systems. On the day he broke through piles of rubble to connect the caves, Mckay had been crushed into a crack for hours, working on his stomach to lever rocks away with a crowbar.
He looked around. Thirty feet away, there was a rock he’d tied a rope to on an earlier trip – and it was then that he recognized he’d been there before, and that there was a campsite just above him. He was standing in the shaft they’d been using as a toilet.
He’s not daunted. There’s likely to be a mega cave system just waiting to be discovered, and that’s why he’s going back to a place that nearly became his grave.