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  2. SBX Paralympic Outerwear Set
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SUBTERRA CAVING PACK

Designing Sistema Chevé Expedition Equipment
As part of my Equipment Studio final, Michael Orlow, Chris Stone, and I - a group of climbers - decided to dig a little deeper and dive into the depths of the Sistema Chevé Expedition and the gear needed for deep cave exploration. My portion of the project focused on redesigning the haul bag needed to carry the cavers equipment deeper into the cave.

The Chevé Cave is a cave in Oaxaca, Mexico. Exploration of this cave began in the 1980s. Rob Stone is leading a team of highly skilled climbing and caving experts to uncover, what they believe, to be the deepest cave in the world. The conditions inside this cave are ruthless, cold, wet, and unlike anything experienced on land. The team needs highly specific gear that will allow them to push further and deeper into the unknown conditions of the cave as they spend days on end under the surface of the earth exploring

Our research question: How can System Cheve exploration equipment be better designed to optimize equipment transportation logistics?

Below are some photos of the cave to provide a picture of the conditions of this cave. Included is also a map that displays the current areas of discovery within this cave and where the camps are set up. 




The haul bag was designed specifically for pushing from Camp 5 to Camp 6. With their current equipment, the pushers had to remove items from their bag and put it into a separate bag to fit through the small spaces in the Squeezelands. This was inconvenient  and a time suck for the cavers. My design solution features strengths taken from cayoneering packs to allow for the bag to fit through small spaces. Everything in the bag is fit into those plastic Curtec or Nalgene containers as pictured of. This waterproofs the contents inside. The bag just needed to be able to be carried and hauled through the cave, withstanding the conditions.

My concept for the bag was a double bag system that was connected by the shoulder straps. When the cavers reached an area where the bag needed to become smaller, the caver would remove the carabiners to allow the bag to reduce to the single bag size to be able to shove through spaces without taking out the contents of the bag. 


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