Heroic Rescue: How American Caver Mark Dickey Was Saved From a 3,400 Feet Deep Underground Trap

Mark Dickey, the American explorer who fell ill 3,400 feet below the entrance to a cave in Turkey, has been rescued, officials said on Monday.

The Turkish Caving Federation announced that Dickey was successfully escorted out of the cave just after midnight local time and was being transported to a local hospital for further treatment.

His parents, Debbie and Andy Dickey, said Monday that they were “indescribably relieved” after his rescue.

“Mark is strong and we believe in his strength, but we fully understood that he needed tremendous and immediate support,” they said in a statement released by the New Jersey Initial Response Team. They expressed their gratitude to the international caving community for the prayers and support.

Dickey, 40, is an experienced caver who was exploring Turkey’s Morca cave, one of the country’s deepest cave systems. He is also a cave rescuer, instructor, and chief of the New Jersey Initial Response Team, a wilderness search and rescue program.

However, he developed life-threatening bleeding and vomiting thousands of feet below ground, leading to a multinational rescue effort.

Runners were needed to transport messages between rescue crews and the outside world, sometimes taking five to seven hours to share updates on his well-being.

“The prompt response of the Turkish government in providing the medical supplies that I needed, in my opinion, saved my life,” Dickey said last week after partially recovering. “I was very close to the edge.”

The caving community is close-knit, and previous rescues have seen similar displays of support and aid. In 2014, an explorer was trapped in Germany’s deepest cave after a head injury from a rock fall, and it took 12 days to rescue him safely to the surface.