The Riesending Cave sits on Bavaria's southeastern edge, on the border with Austria in the Berchtesgaden Alps. It is Germany's deepest and longest pit cave -- a vertical labyrinth of shafts, narrow passages, and underground chambers that descends more than a kilometer into the mountain. Three speleologists had entered around noon on June 7, 2014, descending into a cave system known for its relentless technical difficulty. The rockfall that struck Westhauser came in the early hours of June 8, after the team had already descended about 1,000 meters. One teammate stayed with the injured man. The other began the grueling ten-hour climb back to the surface, carrying a message that would mobilize rescuers from across Europe.

By the evening of June 8, three groups of cave rescuers -- eleven people in total -- were making their way down toward Westhauser. A cave-link communication system was established to transmit text messages through the solid rock between the cave entrance and the accident site, the only way to coordinate an operation spanning the full vertical depth of the cave. Mountain rescue teams from Germany and Austria arrived, supported by state and federal police helicopters. It took until the evening of June 11 -- three days after the accident -- for physician Martin Goksu to reach the patient. He diagnosed a minor traumatic brain injury and, with a second doctor who arrived later that night, determined that Westhauser was stable enough to be moved. The question was how.

Everything had to be done by hand. No engines, no machinery -- just human muscle moving a man on a stretcher through passages barely wide enough to crawl through. The stretcher was adapted to be as shock-proof as possible, but in vertical passages, rescue workers used their own bodies as counterweights, lowering and raising Westhauser through shafts that had taken healthy cavers hours to negotiate unburdened. The operation lasted days. Westhauser's condition remained stable throughout, a fact that the medical team monitored anxiously with each meter of elevation gained. On June 19, at 11:44 AM -- eleven days after the rockfall -- the stretcher emerged from the Riesending Cave with the help of a manual winch. A helicopter carried Westhauser to the trauma hospital in Murnau.

The rescue was called a chapter of alpine rescue history. More than 700 people from Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Croatia, and other countries participated over the eleven days, at an estimated cost of nearly 960,000 euros. The Bavarian interior ministry later reported that Westhauser himself would be taking responsibility for a substantial portion of the bill. In late June 2014, police sealed the cave entrance to prevent curious visitors from attempting entry; a special permit is now required, issued only to those with professional qualifications and justified purpose. By 2016, Westhauser had recovered enough to begin exploring caves again. But the mountain had one more debt to collect: the rescue left over a ton of garbage underground -- food scraps, plastic packaging, drills, batteries, medical supplies. It took until 2020, six years after the rescue, to haul it all out, piece by piece, protecting the cave's ecosystem and the groundwater flowing through it.