“Glory team to Resonance team,” Erin Bartlett speaks into her handheld radio. No response comes, so Bartlett wriggles a bit further down the cave’s narrow passageway. Her 1100-lumen headlamp — the same brightness as the high beams on a car — explodes off golden-white calcite formations.
She’s protected against sharp edges and teeth-chattering cold by a bright blue Cordura speleo suit. It’s a trade-off. Caving is sweaty work. In the sealed-up suit, she feels as if everything below her neck is in a greenhouse. To get here, she and her team had to repel into black voids, contort around tight corners, and undertake a five-hour vertical rope ascent.
Photo © Peter Curtis
At least there’s a breeze to cool her face. It smells fresh, like the taste of pure water. On a prior trip, Bartlett had noted that this particular tunnel was “breathing heavily,” a caver term for strong air movement. It’s a good sign and means this unexplored passage could connect the greater ARGO cave system. This connection, if it can be proven with a survey, would mark a new distinction: Canada’s longest cave.
The ARGO system on northern Vancouver Island was a subject of the 2023 documentary film Subterranean, which follows a team of hobbyist cavers, including Bartlett, as they attempt to connect three cave systems – Arch, Resonance, and Glory ‘Ole. They successfully connected Arch and Resonance but failed to connect Resonance and Glory ‘Ole, something several groups of cavers have attempted over the last forty years.
Now, in the summer of 2024, Bartlett is close to achieving that goal. To confirm they are in the correct area, she attempts to make radio contact again. “Glory team to Resonance team.”
“Hello?” A clear, surprised voice answers. “This is Resonance.”
At the reply, Bartlett breaks into tears. Not only because it proves connection. Not only because she describes herself as an emotional person. And not only because this moment has been decades in the making. The reason tears are streaming down Bartlett’s face is all these things put together, plus this: the distinction could mean protection. The superlative of “longest” brings public attention and a bargaining chip in a battle to save the sensitive karst landscape around ARGO from further deforestation.
That’s the hope, at least. Superlatives are sticky. One look at the province of British Columbia’s tourism website will show how this is exploited: the tallest mountain, rarest bear, most wintering bald eagles, highest waterfall, oldest tree.
Arch Cave | Photo © Frank Tuot
The presence of Canada’s tallest tree, a Sitka Spruce dubbed the Carmanah Giant, was instrumental in the formation of Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park on Vancouver Island. This area preserves the Carmanah Giant and a grove of equally impressive trees that lack nothing in significance besides an “-est” designation.
Like any karst landscape not in a park, the ARGO cave system has no direct environmental protection in BC. Unique karst landscapes all over the world like this one filter and hold onto water, are home to uniquely fat trees, and contain animal species unknown to science.
A formal provincial or federal cave protection act would see all parts of karst landscapes safeguarded. We understand only a sliver of the inner workings of karst landscapes, and the actual caves represent only one portion of these environments. The most important protections would focus on above-ground disturbances like mining and especially logging.
As a guide and coordinator at Horne Lake Caves Provincial Park, Bartlett takes children, teens, and adults deep underground. Here in the blackness, she explains we know more about the bottom of the ocean than the inside of caves – and we don’t know much about the bottom of the ocean.
The Horne Lake Caves are where most Vancouver Island locals get their first taste of the underworld. After taking a guiding course here in the mid 2010s, Bartlett was hooked. Over the years, mentors showed her some of the Island’s thousand-plus caves, including the ARGO system. Eventually, she took on a leading role in making the Glory-Resonance connection.
And now, deep inside Glory ‘Ole, Bartlett is in uncharted territory. With radio communication confirmed, she and another team member push into a tight tube, hoping to meet the other three-member crew in Resonance.
Arch Cave | Photo © Peter Curtis
Humans have a need to see around the next corner, to reach places unknown. The desire to explore this particular passage has kept Bartlett up at night. Ever since her first visit here four years earlier, the idea has been eating away at her brain.
If they locate the other team, they can all return to the land of the living in only 20 minutes by exiting Resonance. To reverse and repel back through Glory ‘Ole it would take four hours, at least. Eventually, an ever-tightening tube forces them to turn around. Bartlett and the two other team members exit at 2:30 am, after 18 hours underground. Still in darkness, they drive back down the logging roads that are punched through the landscape.
Almost the entire area around ARGO has been clearcut and replanted over the years. Once the big trees are gone on a karst landscape, it changes the way water flows into the system. Underground, in a place where the rate of change is measured in centuries and millennia, sudden changes to water flow can affect these fragile ecosystems.
Haplocampa wagnelli, the arthropod found in a limestone cave near Port Alberni on Vancouver Island | Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Only six years ago, scientists discovered a new species of insect in an Island cave. When the trees are clearcut, the soil they once held slips through the cracks in the karst and can choke out life below. Above ground, a forest’s soil can take thousands of years to accumulate. Without deep soil, plant life cannot return with the same vibrancy, or sometimes at all.
Weeks after the failed connection attempt, Bartlett returns to ARGO. She manages to scan a tight passageway between Glory and Resonance with a laser that links to an app on her phone. This survey confirms connection. At 25.4 km. the ARGO system is now Canada’s longest cave.
During a phone conversation she tells me how she’s a part of a group who will take this information to a meeting with the forestry company and ‘Namgis First Nation to discuss saving the forest around ARGO from being clearcut once again.
A teammate of hers states it bluntly: “Now, the work really begins.”
Arch Cave floor | Photo © Peter Curtis
Dave Flawse tells stories at the intersection of history and science. Follow his work exploring Vancouver Island’s history at www.vancouverislandhistory.com.
