Impasse At Double Trouble

SIX ADVENTURE-SEEKINGBUDDIES SET OFF FORA DAY OF CAVING.BY NIGHTFALL, ONLYFOUR OF THEM HADEMERGED FROM THE DEEP.

- Lisa Fitterman

The rain comes down steady and hard. Jason Storie hears it but isn’t worried as he prepares for a day of caving with five friends. They’re headed to a remote spot 130 kilometres northwest of Storie’s home in Duncan, B.C., on Vancouver Island.

The 43-year-old is dressed for the wet weather—and for unpredictable temperatures: a T-shirt, two sweatshirts, a pair of overalls, neoprene socks, a water-resistant jacket and rubber boots. Under his arm, he carries his new helmet and headlamp.

“Sleep in,” he whispers, bending down to kiss his wife, Caroline.

“Be careful,” she says.

“Always.”

IT’S 6 A.M. ON DECEMBER 5, 2015.

A newcomer to the sport, Storie has gone caving only four times. This will be his toughest outing yet: a spot called Cascade. It’s dangerous enough that a locked metal door blocks the entry to keep out casual spelunkers. The key can be obtained only after everyone in the caving party signs a waiver. At almost two kilometres long and about 103 metres deep, Cascade is full of incredibly tight turns and squeezes—a claustrophobe’s nightmare.

Storie is the outlier among the group, possessing the least experience and older by a decade or more. A stocky father of two young children, he’s an entrepreneur, the owner of a window-washing company. It was his friend Andrew Munoz, 33, who introduced him to the sport. Unlike Storie, Munoz is an expert caver—a former guide, actually—and a wiry paramedic who would know what to do if something were to go wrong.

Munoz, Storie and two more friends—Adam Shepherd, also a paramedic, and Zac Zorisky, a chef and volunteer fire fighter—drive through the heavy rain to the parking lot of a log-cabin candy store in Port Alberni, where they get the key to that metal door. There, they meet up with Matt Watson and Arthur Taylor, both computer programmers.