Courtesy of Pete Smith
“Caves are the only places on the Tongass where we are going to get a good window into our history.”
Steve Lewis Steve Lewis and his friends love naming caves: Slug’s Plunge, Toad’s Plunge, Die Hardyman Hole, Blowing in the Wind, and Two Deer Pit. Macho Peak-A-Boo, a challenging vertical-descent cave complete with skylight. Enigma Cave, and its diminutive neighbor, Slightly Enigmatic. Many spelunkers would do just about anything to have the honor of naming even one cave, but for seasoned Alaskan cavers like Steve, it’s a fairly regular event. Many of the islands in Southeast Alaska are richly endowed with karst, a landform created when rain and snowmelt dissolve limestone to form a labyrinth of caves and underground streams. As a founding member of the Tongass Cave Project, Steve has spent much of the last decade dropping into 500-foot pits, climbing 30-foot walls, swimming underground pools, and squeezing through wormholes, all in pitch darkness and often in uncharted territory. There is much uncharted territory on Dall Island, a rugged, wavepounded island in the southernmost reaches of the Tongass. Steve loves the island’s weathered rocks and grassy hills because they 24
have an “out-there feeling” unique to remote islands that, like Dall, face the open ocean. “There aren’t any giant mountains or huge cliffs or the biggest trees on the Tongass,” he says, “but it feels wild.” It is also peppered with caves. “The density of sinkholes on parts of Dall is some of the best in the country,” Steve says. Even on a place like Dall, which, geologically speaking, might as well be a giant slab of Swiss cheese, finding caves can be a tricky business. Years of experience have taught Steve some of the nuanced differences in terrain and undergrowth that can signal the presence of caves, but, he says, “You have to develop an eye for each island.” On Dall, Steve and his companions study aerial photos and geological maps, then walk the ground in search of pits, sinkholes, and grikes (fissures in limestone). In the course of exploring and charting caves in Southeast Alaska, Steve and other Tongass Cave Project members have discovered human and animal remains as much as 40,000 years old. Many of the caves they have explored contain the sleeping holes-turned-