A Deep Fascination
Corey Hackley of Boonsboro stands in an opening of the Sistema Cheve, a deep cave located in the Sierra Juárez mountain range in the southern Mexico state of Oaxaca. Credit Kasia Biernacka
Boonsboro native explores the world from a different perspective
By Laura Forrest Hopfauf
The last time I saw Corey Hackley was sometime around 2008 in the hallways of Boonsboro High School–until this past year when I turned on a National Geographic documentary titled “The Deepest Cave” and saw him again.
Hackley rappels into a crevasse of the Sistema Cheve. Credit Kasia Biernacka
I made my husband pause it when he came on the screen. I squinted.
“I’m pretty sure that’s Corey Hackley,” I said. “He was a great actor in our school drama productions.”
His name was on the screen under his picture while he was being interviewed so it seemed like it was probably him unless there was there another Corey Hackley that looked just like the Corey Hackley I had known. It crossed my mind. Sometimes life can seem surreal. That was one of those moments.
Hackley pokes through a small opening in the Sistema Cheve. Credit Kasia Biernacka
But I wasn’t wrong. That was Corey Hackley from Boonsboro High School on my screen in a National Geographic documentary about a team of world-class cavers exploring Mexico’s Cheve Cave to prove that it is the deepest in the world.
Turns out, Hackley started caving in Washington County as a kid. He grew up in a house with a father who had spent time caving and still had books, knowledge, and connections to the caving community that gave Hackley his introduction to the caving world.
“By the time I was 10, I had a deep fascination with caves and had become convinced that I could find new ones myself,” Hackley says, expounding upon a childhood where he and a friend would dig into dirt filled holes in rocks hoping to locate a lost cave.
When he was 11, Hackley’s father took him to a cave on private land near the Potomac, and he actually did get to stand in part of a cave that had never before been seen.
“I was able to squeeze through a crack no one else had been through and found myself in a standing-height passage that no one had ever been in before. It didn’t go very far, but the experience of that discovery was so intense for me that I was addicted. Since then, the caves have changed, but the drive to discover has remained exactly the same,” Hackley adds.
From there, Hackley joined Tristate Grotto, a caving club that meets in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and is part of the National Speleological Society where he was taught the etiquette of caving that keeps the delicate environments underground safe from the harms unaccustomed humans can accidentally cause.
With this community, Hackley began exploring caves that were more complex and remote like Germany Valley, West Virginia, an area noted for its extensive network of caves that have been formally documented and mapped. He started working with mentors like Terry McClanathan who taught him more technical caving skills Iike “vertical” caving. He also began “project caving.” No longer was Hackley visiting caves solely for fun but with the intent to prove that they could be expanded and mapped.
Hackley explores the Kimble Pit in Germany Valley, Pendleton County, West Virginia. Credit Kasia Biernacka
This community and these experiences became not just essential to his life in terms of caving, but introduced him to his future wife, good friends, and the person who first invited him on a caving expedition in Mexico in 2013. Since then, Hackley says, “I have spent about a year of my life in total caving in Mexico.”
Hackley squeezes through a tight spot in the Dew Drop Cave in Garrett County, Maryland. Credit Nathaniel Peck
The Cheve Cave exploration that Hackley is part of in Mexico is not a one-off trip but a decades-long project due not just to the massive undertaking of exploring a cave that so far has 51 miles of mapped passages and been measured to a depth just shy of a mile, but also because of dangerous flooding that comes during the rainy season and leaves the team a short yearly window to explore the deep. Their next major expedition for Cheve Cave is planned for the spring of 2026.
Surprisingly, caving isn’t Hackley’s full-time job, nor is it really anyone’s. Even Bill Stone, the expedition leader and a caving legend, runs his own company when he’s not underground. So, between then and now, Hackley will continue to work his day job, cave in the area, and sometimes join other expeditions in the United States. It sounds like a lot, but caving is Hackley’s passion.
“I think if you are really passionate about something and pursue it, your life will eventually start to bend around to accommodate the thing in question, and maybe even support the passion. It helps to start early, and luck is no doubt a factor, but someone with the hutzpah to have a passion in the first place has good odds of getting what they need from the world to pursue it. Passion is a valuable commodity. The world wants and needs it,” Hackley says.
Although his passion has taken him around the world to some of the deepest known spots on our planet, caving in itself remains the prize.
“I get as much out of finding a 500-foot-long cave in a place that no one expected as I do trying to find the deepest place on earth. What matters to me isn’t the superlative, it’s the experience of understanding something better and better,” Hackley says.
I may never stand in a formerly unexplored cavern of a cave. But I’m curious about them. I wonder what that’s like, how it happens, what comes from a new discovery that makes our world a bit bigger. Thanks to Hackley, I’ve been able to see what hasn’t been seen before, and I’ve been able to explore a part of earth I didn’t know existed, even if was only through my screen at home.