Reluctantly sharing Daily Mail but they were the only English language media covering this. #speleo
A tragic, gory and in many parts unbelievable story — a lone tourist descended down to -1100 m in the world's deepest cave unprepared, got stuck on rope rebelay, died of hypothermia and was only found after 8 months.
Normally he wouldn't be even able to descend there as vertical caves require massive amounts of rope, but Veryovkina is so huge it was rigged permanently — descent to the bottom takes three days and there are four camps on the way with basic supplies.
This is how he was able to descend to camp at -600 m, spent a week there (!) and then decided to o further. At -1100 m the cave however becomes much more technical, which was where he got stuck and died.
The body was ultimately recovered from over 1 km depth in a very complex operation that involved over 30 cavers. I will spare further details as they were rather gory.
Everything in this story screams "WTF" from caver's perspective.
Unlike climbing, you don't solo caves, and the Veryovkina cave is a Chomolungma among caves. The deepest I've done was ~400 m underground and it's hell of an exercise, requiring fitness and skills.
And this guy went alone down to -1100 m totally unprepared, with two ascenders weirdly connected with a carabiner, which guaranteed he won't be able to ascend anything. Most likely he didn't even test it on a rope.