Reaching Deep

Despite the historical significance of the survey’s research, funding isn’t always forthcoming. “People pool air miles points [to travel to the area],” Pollack says, though he praises the Yukon Territory’s government for its “tremendous” support, providing much-needed riverboats to help with the surveying. For Pollack and his team, the project is both a “labour of love” everyone volunteers his or her time—and a struggle against indifference. In Western Canada, he laments, there are very few people working to document the area’s rich marine past. And those who are in the field—he admires the dedication of his Yukon colleagues Robyn Woodward, Doug Davidge and Norm Easton—face a dilemma: record the sites now, or risk losing them to erosion forever. “We long ago made the mental jump that it’s not someone else’s responsibility,” he says. “We can do it, it’s fun, and there are a lot worse things to do with your life than contribute to nautical history.”

Although dedicated to his work in the Yukon, shipwrecks aren’t Pollack’s only interest. A fellow of the National Speleological Society (NSS), he is also an accomplished caver. He first became involved in his home state of Colorado in the late 1960s—marriage to a Canadian led Pollack north in 1976—and learned the rocks, as it were, from caving legends Norm Pace and Donald Davis. In 1968, with “beginner’s luck,” he discovered Groaning Cave, the longest cave in Colorado; in 1973, he was part of an NSS expedition that was the first to rappel down the shaft of Greece’s Provatina cave, at a depth of more than 400 metres. Trips within Canada saw Pollack bottom Arctomys Cave, the country’s deepest, in a two-man unsupported team, and make several overnight excursions into Castleguard, its longest.

When Pollack first started out, the sport was a “smaller, more intimate, less commercial thing”; cavers would adapt antique gear from other disciplines, or make their own. “We had no such thing as a true waterproof <001E> ashlight,” he remembers. “We packed small Mallory flashlights with Vaseline.” Eventually, bottoming some of the world’s deepest caves with homemade gear wasn’t enough of a challenge for Pollack. In the mid 1980s, he turned to cave diving. “I got tired of carrying scuba tanks for my British cave-diving friends,” he explains. With diving partner David Sawatzky, a hyperbaric doctor with the Canadian military, he explored and mapped numerous caves in both the Canadian Rockies and northern Vancouver. In 1991, however, his cave-diving career was cut short when he was run over by an impaired driver. Thrown more than 24 metres, he broke his neck in two places, and his shoulder. Not only did his injuries leave him half an inch shorter, but damage to his spinal cord bends. He was forced to focus on dry caving and underwater archaeology, activities that didn’t involve decompression diving. Pollack is philosophical about such pivotal moments—or “blips,” as he calls them—as they are somewhat of a theme in his life. In the late 1960s when Pollack was a combat medic with the U.S. army, an interview with a sergeant decided whether he would work in a lab in Germany or fight in Vietnam. “It was a three-minute interview,” he recalls, “and it changed my life.” Perhaps this awareness—a blip can ruin just as easily as it can reward—is what motivates Pollack’s desire to map all that lays hidden both underwater and underground. His specialties, after all, are total station mapping and reconnaissance expeditions. “There’s something about that glimmer of discovery and understanding,” he says. “It’s figuring it out for yourself. And when you do, it’s a great thing.”

John Pollack is an underwater archaeologist, cartographer, cave enthusiast and a member of the Explorers Club.

For more information on the Explorers Club, visit its website, www.explorersclub.ca.

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