Calgary Herald

Exploring Sarlacc’s Pit

HOW THE ONLY MAN TO EXPLORE ENORMOUS CANADIAN CAVE MADE HIS ‘ONCE IN A LIFETIME’ DESCENT

- Nick Faris nfaris@postmedia.com

He spends his time on the clock below the surface of the earth, but Lee Hollis’ subterrane­an exploits have also helped him see the world, from his native land, England, to his present-day home in British Columbia and beyond.

A caver whose years in the profession recently surpassed the three-decade mark, Hollis has delved far below ground in Thailand, Ireland, Wales and Spain. He ventured into the belly of France’s Gouffre Berger, once thought to be the world’s deepest cave, for three days in 1993. A few years back, he helped discover a previously unseen lava tube on a Hawaiian island.

As he put it in an email, “I’ve had some incredible caving trips over the years” — exactly none of which prepared him to process the size of the pit that awaited him a few months ago, when the clouds cleared on a late-summer day as he helicopter­ed into a B.C. provincial park.

Hollis, 49, is the caver who made the first and only known descent into the cave that a team of Canadian researcher­s has affectiona­tely dubbed Sarlacc’s Pit, a Star Wars reference that aims to summarize the utter enormity of the hole in the ground located somewhere inside Wells Gray Provincial Park, a short distance west of Jasper National Park in Alberta.

Hollis descended into the formerly unexplored pit — whose estimated dimensions of 100 metres long by 60 metres wide might make it the single biggest cave in the country — in September, six months after a helicopter crew from B.C.’s Ministry of Environmen­t and Climate Change discovered it in the midst of an otherwise routine caribou census. The discovery was revealed last week.

“If you think of a soccer field and you put that soccer field on its end, you have this pit going down,” geologist Catherine Hickson, who organized the reconnaiss­ance effort in which Hollis explored the cave, told The Canadian Press.

“Think about this giant circular or oval hole that just goes down and down and down. It is truly amazing.”

Archeologi­cal surveyor John Pollack, who said the cave was of “national significan­ce” in a paper he co-wrote about the finding, recruited Hollis to the research team to lower himself into the yawning depths of the pit and make initial observatio­ns about its features. Hollis woke early on Sept. 9, the day he, Pollack, Hickson and two other researcher­s flew over mountains and lakes to reach the site of the colossal system.

The cave was the largest Hollis had ever seen, and as Pollack set about creating a three-dimensiona­l rendering, he hooked his rope to one side of the beast to prepare to rappel down as far as possible.

As Hollis made his gradual descent, a fierce waterfall coursed through the cave on his right; in the end he measured its height at 61 metres. The descent was steep: the slope of the cave ranged from 45 to 75 degrees, and loose rocks that threatened to fall from above posed a hazard. He cleared loose pieces of stone from his path as he walked down.

At the bottom of the waterfall, Hollis ducked under a large snow plug three to five metres thick to investigat­e how much farther the cave continued into the earth. He landed on a small ledge 75 metres below ground level — at which point he encountere­d an undergroun­d river that overtook his capacity to hear.

That was as far as Hollis got that day.

“The first thing that struck me was the volume and noise of the raging water,” Hollis said via email. “I had a radio to maintain surface contact but soon realized the max volume would not be enough to overcome the sound of the raging river.”

There is plenty left for Hollis to scrutinize in the profundity of Sarlacc’s Pit. He said he and the rest of the research team plan to return to the cave sometime in 2019 to perform further reconnaiss­ance, and they’re hoping to conduct a full expedition in 2020.

For now, he can appreciate the rarity of his first descent, an hour down to the river and an hour back up on a route no one had ever travelled before.

“It was a real privilege,” Hollis said. “These opportunit­ies are quite literally once in a lifetime.”

 ?? COURTESY OF LEE HOLLIS ?? Caver Lee Hollis, left, and surveyor John Pollack were part of the first research team to explore an enormous cave discovered last March in B.C.’s Wells Gray Provincial Park. The entrance to the cave is nicknamed “Sarlacc’s Pit,” a Star Wars reference.
COURTESY OF LEE HOLLIS Caver Lee Hollis, left, and surveyor John Pollack were part of the first research team to explore an enormous cave discovered last March in B.C.’s Wells Gray Provincial Park. The entrance to the cave is nicknamed “Sarlacc’s Pit,” a Star Wars reference.
 ?? THE CANADIAN PRESS / TUYA TERRA GEO CORP., CATHERINE HICKSON ??
THE CANADIAN PRESS / TUYA TERRA GEO CORP., CATHERINE HICKSON

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