Exploring Canada’s deepest cave with Christian Stenner

“In the cave, when everyone turns off their headlamps, there is no light” says Stenner. “You’re in a world that is devoid of colour, it’s browns and greys, rock and mud, and endless black. When you get back to the surface after many days underground, you’re assaulted by the green of the trees and the blue of the sky”. 

Join David McGuffin, broadcast journalist, former Supervising Editor with NPR and host of Canadian Geographic’s podcast, Explore, as he interviews Christian Stenner, 2021 Trebek Grantee. 

As one of Canada’s top cavers, Christian and his team proved in 2018 that the Bisaro Anima cave in British Columbia was the deepest cave anywhere in Canada or the U.S., logging a staggering 674m into the Earth. He discusses the challenges of exploring caves, saying “almost everything you bring into the cave will get wrecked. Imagine climbing a mountain with your pack on your back, but instead, you have to crawl over sharp boulders while throwing your pack ahead of you, two or three feet at a time. Then you crawl to it, throw it again, crawl to it… and oh, now you have to crawl through a slimy river, so you tie it around yourself and drag it behind you”.

In a few short months Christian will start his Trebek project where he will explore Mount Meager, Canada’s only active volcano, just north of Squamish. During this time he will survey the cave, characterize the source of fumarolic gasses and deploy a NASA rover intended to study Earth’s diverse range of ice caves in hopes of better understanding the properties and behaviours of caves and ice elsewhere in the solar system. 

Despite the physically and mentally gruelling conditions, it’s the sense of exploration that keeps him going. “It’s amazing to know you’re in a place that no one’s ever been before. Your light is shining on a place that’s never seen light. It’s existed for millennia in complete darkness and your footsteps are the first”.