The Xe Bang Fai River cave's gaping downstream entrance was used as a daily staging point for the February 2008 trip, funded by the National Geographic Society's Expeditions Council.
The cave has two known entrancesone upstream and one downstream.
The exploration team spent ten days surveying and photographing the cave, communicating in the darkness by walkie-talkie, and traveling by lightweight, inflatable kayaks.
The adventurers' longest day in the cave lasted 17 hours.
The Xe Bang Fai River cave is crowded with outsize features.
First traversed on a bamboo raft by a French explorer in 1905, the cave, known locally as Tham Khoun Xe and occasionally visited by tourists, went unstudied for 90 years as war and political turmoil in Laos kept researchers out of the Southeast Asian country.
A French team returned briefly in 1995, but little useful data was gleaned. Caver John Pollack staged his first expedition to the site in 2006
A spelunker is dwarfed by draperies made of calcite deposits about two miles (three kilometers) from the Xe Bang Fai River cave's downstream entrance.
Caver John Pollack's 2008 team consisted of four Canadian and four American researchers aided by several Laotian guides and assistants.
The expedition's photographer Dave Bunnell shuttled mounds of photographic equipment into the caves.
"He'd spend all day setting up flashes and strobes, sometimes shooting the same shot 18, 20 times over," Pollack said.
Calcium carbonate formations (above) called gour or rimstone pools, form in the rainy season as water seeps in and collects in ponds, over time leaving complex deposits.
Explorer John Pollack's team found cube-shaped "cave pearls" in some of the cave's gour formations that were up to 12.6 inches (32 centimeters) in circumference–potentially a world record, he said.
Pollack's team chose February, the middle of Laos's dry season, for its 2008 expedition to the Xe Bang Fai River cave.
Still river levels reached 12.8 cubic yards (9.8 cubic meters) per second.
During the August-September monsoon, the Xe Bang Fai River roars through the cave at up to 1,300 cubic yards (1,000 cubic meters) per second
Cave explorers nicknamed this large room "the Cathedral" for its high, vaulted ceiling.
Explorer John Pollack calls the Xe Bang Fai River cave "an underground K2," which, based on the volume of water that passes through the cave and the size of its passages, is likely one of the largest river caves on Earth.
Expedition co-leader Bob Osburn is producing a highly detailed map of the cavern, and Pollack expects an article on the team's discoveries to appear in the journal of the National Speleological Society in 2009
October 20, 2008–A cave explorer stands before an imposing stalagmite–made of mineral deposits–near an entrance to the Xe Bang Fai River cave in central Laos.
An expedition in February 2008, co-led by veteran caver John Pollack, comprehensively mapped and photographed the 5.9-mile (9.5-kilometer) length of the little-known cavern for the first time.
The spelunking team encountered some of the largest rooms and most impressive structures of any river cave on Earth, Pollack said.
A river cave is any cave with an active water source flowing through it.
Everything about the cave is big–from its towering entrances to its phobia-inducing spiders, which can be 10 inches (25 centimeters) across, Pollack added.
"It's also extremely well decorated with spectacular formations," Pollack said.
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