texascavers Digest 7 Nov 2012 04:26:36 -0000 Issue 1661
Topics (messages 20996 through 20998):
Re: Be careful out there
20996 by: Tim Stich
20997 by: Bill Steele
20998 by: Louise Power
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--- Begin Message ---
Ugh. Such horrible outcomes, both of them. :-(
But thanks for sharing the stories.
On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 12:35 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
> **
> But Nancy, your story isn't complete. Didn't the Arc narks try to have you
> arrested for going to the cave in the first place? That has happened to me
> three times in Belize.
>
> The first time a humorless jerk named Tom Miller tried to have me thrown
> out of the country for visiting the Chiquibul cave without his permission.
> (Logan can tell you all about it.) That didn't work because I was already
> there. He wrote letters to the forestry department and the University of
> Florida accusing me of being a temple looter and drug user who consorts
> with known outlaws (specifically Arturo and Brother Moses of gales Point).
> The first accusation is untrue but the second two are true. Upon exiting
> the Vaca plateau but before writing the letters he burned down my friend
> Santiago's house along with all of his meager belongings, then left a ten
> dollar bill and a note saying "sorry".
>
> Then there was the time the director of the Belize Audubon society tried
> to get the Belize Defense Force (BDF) to search for me in the jungle for
> the crime of entering the Bladen nature preserve without his personal
> permission. The BDF just laughed because they never go into the jungle,
> there could be snakes out there! On my way out I ran into a so called
> "Rapid Environmental Assessment" team funded by the Nature Conservancy and
> supported by the British army (those damned helicopters again!) They had
> catered meals with fresh salads and dessert yet denied me a pinch of salt.
> Even though they could see I had nothing but a small pack and the clothes
> on my back they accused me of being a looter. While saying this they were
> standing next to large sack loads of looted artifacts.
>
> Then an archeologist named Dunham? took great exception to the fact that I
> had explored the valley of Sleazeweazel branch, an upstream tributary of
> the Bladen branch even further up the Monkey river. There is a small ruin
> there and he wanted credit for being the first person to discover it (by
> helicopter of course!) He apparently brought in a large number of Mayans
> and utterly destroyed the place. His reported pilferage of a large amount
> of jade may or may not be true. I can't bear the thought of it so I haven't
> been back. I tried to cooperate by sending him photographs of what I had
> discovered. Unfortunately the aforementioned criminals had in fact dug open
> a grave, I caught them and reinterred the remains. Perhaps it was unwise of
> me to take a photo of the king's skull with a snake crawling through the
> eye socket. Dunham was eventually thrown out of the country. Some years
> later a friend of mine who is a real (i.e. non insane) archeologist
> attended a conference in Belmopan. He heard my name mentioned and turned to
> say, "he's a friend of mine". For that they tried to throw him out of the
> country too.
>
> Not all archeologists are insane. What about Logan? (although I have my
> doubts) Why doesn't he pipe up?
>
> SW
>
> In a message dated 11/6/2012 1:23:25 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
> [email protected] writes:
>
> ah always such a gust of fresh air. thought you might enjoy my experience
> with 'legitimate' grave robbers.
>
>
>
>
> BLADE CAVE
>
> I was suffering a surfeit of testosterone. We were midway through a 3
> month expedition to explore the massive Sistema Huautla, the multi
> entranced deepest cave in the western hemisphere, at one time 13th deepest
> in the world. We had rented 2 rock houses in the miniscule pueblo of San
> Augustin, a collection of perhaps a dozen 2 story homes, a one room school,
> a basketball court and a jail cell in the basement of the municipal
> building. Between the cobblestone dead end road and the buildings all the
> flat land was taken. Subsistence farming took place on the 45 degree angle
> hillsides that formed enormous sinkholes or dolinas funneling the wet
> season floods into the cave system, both carving it out and scouring it
> slick. Where the hillsides steepened into cliffs, small boys herded goats
> looking for vegetation or gathered twigs for cooking fires. The village
> had no electricity, running water was a much repaired plastic pipe that
> snaked from miles away and dripped steadily over by the basketball court.
> Our 4wd schoolbus and assorted Toyota trucks filled to the brim with cavers
> and caving gear were the only vehicles to bump down this road. Once a
> week, a bus careened past the intersection of the cobbled turnoff, heading
> even deeper into the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico; occasionally a pipe bed
> cargo truck could be flagged down for a scary ride on the one laned s
> curved dirt road. Burros carried everything else that came in or out.
>
>
>
> The village had no sanitation facilities, using the flat ground that
> doubled as main street. We hacked steps into the clay cliff behind the
> house and constructed a marginal out house.
>
>
> The inhabitants of San Agustin vied to surrender their homes to us for the
> wealth of rent money, so we had a fieldhouse kitchen on the main floor,
> with propane stoves, pallets of canned and freeze dried food, cartons of
> local beer, whatever wilted produce and flats of eggs that were available
> in the market town of Huautla, about an hour away on foot or by grinding
> jouncing low gear in the trucks. The downstairs also housed duffel bags of
> rope, the cave required thousands of feet, surveying and mapping gear,
> barrels of carbide to power our acetylene gas caving lamps, kerosene
> lanterns, well hidden explosives for enlarging recalcitrant rock passages,
> digging tools, helmets, rock climbing equipment, a rescue stretcher, first
> aid supplies and anything else we could imagine might be required.
>
> Upstairs 11 men, my partner and myself staked out sleeping bag sized
> living areas in what was the family's corn loft. Upstairs and down was
> shared with rats, fleas, village dogs and cats. At night the room was a
> cacophony of belches, farts, and snores. The villagers went to bed at dark
> and got up an hour or so before dawn. All night every night was punctuated
> by crowing, braying, barking and wailing of the assorted populace. I was
> in the constant company of men who were eating drinking and expending
> massive calories, who had last bathed 6 weeks ago, and for whom delicacy of
> feeling or conversation was not a priority.
>
> So that morning when a firsttimer asked if he could join me and Mark on a
> day hike to an entrance Mark had found previously - I snapped No, go find
> your own cave. And much to all of our amazement Frank did.
>
>
> Mexico has some of the richest karst regions of the world. The massive
> bedded limestone has solutioned over the millennia into vast underground
> networks of huge passages and black rivers. These cave systems compete
> with the known depths and complexities of Europe's best, the caves of the
> Pyrenees and those of the Ural mountains, with a bonus. The tropical
> temperatures of Mexico made exploration far easier and far less life
> threatening. And the North American cavers had them all to theirselves.
> In the '60's a motley crew of college students from around Texas began to
> take their vacation breaks in Mexico, venturing as far as trains and 3rd
> class buses could take them, to stand on the edges of breathtaking pits far
> out in the jungle, to come home with stories that could hardly be
> credited. The caving fever took hold of these few and those who listened
> to their stories. Communal housing was established, old buses and power
> wagons purchased, group forays were made deeper and further into the
> mountains, always coming back with more extravagant finds. Deeper pits,
> more entrances, big black beckoning wilderness all in the matrix of an
> intoxicatingly foreign landscape and culture where the dollar went a long
> ways for these underemployed students.
> In the land rush to explore this vast underground wilderness fiefdoms were
> gradually established, loose affiliations of cavestruck dreamers who
> cooperated somewhat and competed more for longest, deepest. Against this
> backdrop, one group had instituted a policy of hammering a small metal tag
> at the entrance of each cave they explored. Nominally the numbers on this
> tag were meant to let others know that the cave had been surveyed and
> mapped, the data to be shared, not to waste your time here, to go on to the
> next undiscovered cave. Effectively, the data was back in Austin, often
> released reluctantly and worst case, cave entrances were sometimes marked
> for future reference without ever being entered - a sort of finders claim.
> I had decried this policy for a number of reasons: the attempted ownership
> of areas, and the dismissive attitude of explorers toward a cave thus
> marked. Despite the sure knowledge that there were often overlooked
> passages and leads there was an obsession by cavers who wanted to be the
> first into a cave, some special status conferred on the one who 'scooped
> booty' as running headlong down virgin passage was called. Our group
> didn't use the tag system.
>
> So it was on this spring day in 1987, that Frank went out from San
> Agustin, wandered around the mountains until he found an entrance, and
> explored it on his own, never quessing that the cave was well known, had
> been mapped and was considered to be 'done'.
>
> When he reached the back of the two medium sized rooms, he poked into a
> crawlspace following the air, that breath that the cave breathes,
> exchanging its volume of space each day with the outside world: one long
> inhale, then an exhale. Here the ceiling dipped down near the floor,
> compressing the air and making its flow more powerful. After wriggling for
> a body length or so, Frank came out into a room where he could stand up and
> he must surely have gasped at what his light picked out. Everywhere he
> turned, there was a jumble of sophisticated pots. A far alcove looked like
> a dish drainer, dozens of pots stacked atop one another and glistening with
> calcite deposits indicating that they had been here for a very long time.
> The floor was littered with finely worked beads. The center of the room
> had a single oblong rock oddly alone on the sandy floor. And on the rock
> was a 6 inch obsidian blade. Alongside it was another longer blade. A
> human skull lay there as well and all about the skull were the tiny squares
> of turquoise tile that had once decorated it.
>
> He came back to the fieldhouse, bubbling with excitement, which was
> contagious. All plans were set aside the next day and all of us in camp,
> followed him to the cave. We explored in amazement, poking into corners
> and exclaiming over new treasures. Very few of the caves in this region
> were so amenable to human access. Most had entrance drops over 60 feet in
> depth and took such vast quantities of water in the rainy season that there
> was rarely any gravel, much less a stash of antiquities. Despite the
> suspicions of the locals that we must be after gold or uranium or treasure,
> this was in fact the first place we had found anything other than rock and
> water.
>
> For several days there was no activity other than admiring Blade Cave as
> it was promptly named. Photography, speculation, and solemn agreements all
> around not to divulge the secret outside of the group. There was no
> consideration of taking anything. One of the strongest taboos in caving is
> taking anything from a cave. And the taboo is enforced with the tacit
> understanding that anyone who broke it would be kicked out of the group.
> It was a powerful threat.
>
> What happened next was worse.
>
> Some months after the expedition had returned to the States, we received a
> formal note from the wife of one of the explorers. She was an archaeology
> student and had found the perfect thesis. Without consulting any of the
> rest of the group, she and her husband had returned to Mexico, had gotten
> in touch with the authorities in Oaxaca City, had taken them to the cave
> and all the material that could be, had been removed from the site.
> According to the authorities, it was stored in the basement of the
> government museum. I'll bet the items hit the black market before the end
> of the day and are now displayed in the home of a smug collector. A gate
> was constructed in the tiny crawlspace to prevent looting - unofficial
> looting - of the pots that had been cemented in place.
>
> A thesis sits in a library somewhere unread, surrounded by hundreds of
> similar ones; a collector gratifies his ego; an official pockets a payoff;
> a sacred site undisturbed for centuries, is ransacked; and a little more
> mystery and wonder vanishes from the world.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
Nine
Sent by iPhone
On Nov 6, 2012, at 2:08 PM, Tim Stich <[email protected]> wrote:
Ugh. Such horrible outcomes, both of them. :-(
But thanks for sharing the stories.
On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 12:35 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
> But Nancy, your story isn't complete. Didn't the Arc narks try to have you
> arrested for going to the cave in the first place? That has happened to me
> three times in Belize.
>
> The first time a humorless jerk named Tom Miller tried to have me thrown out
> of the country for visiting the Chiquibul cave without his permission. (Logan
> can tell you all about it.) That didn't work because I was already there. He
> wrote letters to the forestry department and the University of Florida
> accusing me of being a temple looter and drug user who consorts with known
> outlaws (specifically Arturo and Brother Moses of gales Point). The first
> accusation is untrue but the second two are true. Upon exiting the Vaca
> plateau but before writing the letters he burned down my friend Santiago's
> house along with all of his meager belongings, then left a ten dollar bill
> and a note saying "sorry".
>
> Then there was the time the director of the Belize Audubon society tried to
> get the Belize Defense Force (BDF) to search for me in the jungle for the
> crime of entering the Bladen nature preserve without his personal permission.
> The BDF just laughed because they never go into the jungle, there could be
> snakes out there! On my way out I ran into a so called "Rapid Environmental
> Assessment" team funded by the Nature Conservancy and supported by the
> British army (those damned helicopters again!) They had catered meals with
> fresh salads and dessert yet denied me a pinch of salt. Even though they
> could see I had nothing but a small pack and the clothes on my back they
> accused me of being a looter. While saying this they were standing next to
> large sack loads of looted artifacts.
>
> Then an archeologist named Dunham? took great exception to the fact that I
> had explored the valley of Sleazeweazel branch, an upstream tributary of the
> Bladen branch even further up the Monkey river. There is a small ruin there
> and he wanted credit for being the first person to discover it (by helicopter
> of course!) He apparently brought in a large number of Mayans and utterly
> destroyed the place. His reported pilferage of a large amount of jade may or
> may not be true. I can't bear the thought of it so I haven't been back. I
> tried to cooperate by sending him photographs of what I had discovered.
> Unfortunately the aforementioned criminals had in fact dug open a grave, I
> caught them and reinterred the remains. Perhaps it was unwise of me to take a
> photo of the king's skull with a snake crawling through the eye socket.
> Dunham was eventually thrown out of the country. Some years later a friend of
> mine who is a real (i.e. non insane) archeologist attended a conference in
> Belmopan. He heard my name mentioned and turned to say, "he's a friend of
> mine". For that they tried to throw him out of the country too.
>
> Not all archeologists are insane. What about Logan? (although I have my
> doubts) Why doesn't he pipe up?
>
> SW
>
> In a message dated 11/6/2012 1:23:25 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
> [email protected] writes:
> ah always such a gust of fresh air. thought you might enjoy my experience
> with 'legitimate' grave robbers.
>
>
>
>
> BLADE CAVE
>
> I was suffering a surfeit of testosterone. We were midway through a 3 month
> expedition to explore the massive Sistema Huautla, the multi entranced
> deepest cave in the western hemisphere, at one time 13th deepest in the
> world. We had rented 2 rock houses in the miniscule pueblo of San Augustin,
> a collection of perhaps a dozen 2 story homes, a one room school, a
> basketball court and a jail cell in the basement of the municipal building.
> Between the cobblestone dead end road and the buildings all the flat land was
> taken. Subsistence farming took place on the 45 degree angle hillsides that
> formed enormous sinkholes or dolinas funneling the wet season floods into the
> cave system, both carving it out and scouring it slick. Where the hillsides
> steepened into cliffs, small boys herded goats looking for vegetation or
> gathered twigs for cooking fires. The village had no electricity, running
> water was a much repaired plastic pipe that snaked from miles away and
> dripped steadily over by the basketball court. Our 4wd schoolbus and
> assorted Toyota trucks filled to the brim with cavers and caving gear were
> the only vehicles to bump down this road. Once a week, a bus careened past
> the intersection of the cobbled turnoff, heading even deeper into the
> mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico; occasionally a pipe bed cargo truck could be
> flagged down for a scary ride on the one laned s curved dirt road. Burros
> carried everything else that came in or out.
>
>
>
> The village had no sanitation facilities, using the flat ground that doubled
> as main street. We hacked steps into the clay cliff behind the house and
> constructed a marginal out house.
>
>
> The inhabitants of San Agustin vied to surrender their homes to us for the
> wealth of rent money, so we had a fieldhouse kitchen on the main floor, with
> propane stoves, pallets of canned and freeze dried food, cartons of local
> beer, whatever wilted produce and flats of eggs that were available in the
> market town of Huautla, about an hour away on foot or by grinding jouncing
> low gear in the trucks. The downstairs also housed duffel bags of rope, the
> cave required thousands of feet, surveying and mapping gear, barrels of
> carbide to power our acetylene gas caving lamps, kerosene lanterns, well
> hidden explosives for enlarging recalcitrant rock passages, digging tools,
> helmets, rock climbing equipment, a rescue stretcher, first aid supplies and
> anything else we could imagine might be required.
>
> Upstairs 11 men, my partner and myself staked out sleeping bag sized living
> areas in what was the family's corn loft. Upstairs and down was shared with
> rats, fleas, village dogs and cats. At night the room was a cacophony of
> belches, farts, and snores. The villagers went to bed at dark and got up an
> hour or so before dawn. All night every night was punctuated by crowing,
> braying, barking and wailing of the assorted populace. I was in the constant
> company of men who were eating drinking and expending massive calories, who
> had last bathed 6 weeks ago, and for whom delicacy of feeling or conversation
> was not a priority.
>
> So that morning when a firsttimer asked if he could join me and Mark on a day
> hike to an entrance Mark had found previously - I snapped No, go find your
> own cave. And much to all of our amazement Frank did.
>
>
> Mexico has some of the richest karst regions of the world. The massive
> bedded limestone has solutioned over the millennia into vast underground
> networks of huge passages and black rivers. These cave systems compete with
> the known depths and complexities of Europe's best, the caves of the Pyrenees
> and those of the Ural mountains, with a bonus. The tropical temperatures of
> Mexico made exploration far easier and far less life threatening. And the
> North American cavers had them all to theirselves. In the '60's a motley
> crew of college students from around Texas began to take their vacation
> breaks in Mexico, venturing as far as trains and 3rd class buses could take
> them, to stand on the edges of breathtaking pits far out in the jungle, to
> come home with stories that could hardly be credited. The caving fever took
> hold of these few and those who listened to their stories. Communal housing
> was established, old buses and power wagons purchased, group forays were made
> deeper and further into the mountains, always coming back with more
> extravagant finds. Deeper pits, more entrances, big black beckoning
> wilderness all in the matrix of an intoxicatingly foreign landscape and
> culture where the dollar went a long ways for these underemployed students.
> In the land rush to explore this vast underground wilderness fiefdoms were
> gradually established, loose affiliations of cavestruck dreamers who
> cooperated somewhat and competed more for longest, deepest. Against this
> backdrop, one group had instituted a policy of hammering a small metal tag at
> the entrance of each cave they explored. Nominally the numbers on this tag
> were meant to let others know that the cave had been surveyed and mapped, the
> data to be shared, not to waste your time here, to go on to the next
> undiscovered cave. Effectively, the data was back in Austin, often released
> reluctantly and worst case, cave entrances were sometimes marked for future
> reference without ever being entered - a sort of finders claim. I had
> decried this policy for a number of reasons: the attempted ownership of
> areas, and the dismissive attitude of explorers toward a cave thus marked.
> Despite the sure knowledge that there were often overlooked passages and
> leads there was an obsession by cavers who wanted to be the first into a
> cave, some special status conferred on the one who 'scooped booty' as running
> headlong down virgin passage was called. Our group didn't use the tag system.
>
> So it was on this spring day in 1987, that Frank went out from San Agustin,
> wandered around the mountains until he found an entrance, and explored it on
> his own, never quessing that the cave was well known, had been mapped and was
> considered to be 'done'.
>
> When he reached the back of the two medium sized rooms, he poked into a
> crawlspace following the air, that breath that the cave breathes, exchanging
> its volume of space each day with the outside world: one long inhale, then an
> exhale. Here the ceiling dipped down near the floor, compressing the air and
> making its flow more powerful. After wriggling for a body length or so,
> Frank came out into a room where he could stand up and he must surely have
> gasped at what his light picked out. Everywhere he turned, there was a
> jumble of sophisticated pots. A far alcove looked like a dish drainer,
> dozens of pots stacked atop one another and glistening with calcite deposits
> indicating that they had been here for a very long time. The floor was
> littered with finely worked beads. The center of the room had a single
> oblong rock oddly alone on the sandy floor. And on the rock was a 6 inch
> obsidian blade. Alongside it was another longer blade. A human skull lay
> there as well and all about the skull were the tiny squares of turquoise tile
> that had once decorated it.
>
> He came back to the fieldhouse, bubbling with excitement, which was
> contagious. All plans were set aside the next day and all of us in camp,
> followed him to the cave. We explored in amazement, poking into corners and
> exclaiming over new treasures. Very few of the caves in this region were so
> amenable to human access. Most had entrance drops over 60 feet in depth and
> took such vast quantities of water in the rainy season that there was rarely
> any gravel, much less a stash of antiquities. Despite the suspicions of the
> locals that we must be after gold or uranium or treasure, this was in fact
> the first place we had found anything other than rock and water.
>
> For several days there was no activity other than admiring Blade Cave as it
> was promptly named. Photography, speculation, and solemn agreements all
> around not to divulge the secret outside of the group. There was no
> consideration of taking anything. One of the strongest taboos in caving is
> taking anything from a cave. And the taboo is enforced with the tacit
> understanding that anyone who broke it would be kicked out of the group. It
> was a powerful threat.
>
> What happened next was worse.
>
> Some months after the expedition had returned to the States, we received a
> formal note from the wife of one of the explorers. She was an archaeology
> student and had found the perfect thesis. Without consulting any of the rest
> of the group, she and her husband had returned to Mexico, had gotten in touch
> with the authorities in Oaxaca City, had taken them to the cave and all the
> material that could be, had been removed from the site. According to the
> authorities, it was stored in the basement of the government museum. I'll
> bet the items hit the black market before the end of the day and are now
> displayed in the home of a smug collector. A gate was constructed in the
> tiny crawlspace to prevent looting - unofficial looting - of the pots that
> had been cemented in place.
>
> A thesis sits in a library somewhere unread, surrounded by hundreds of
> similar ones; a collector gratifies his ego; an official pockets a payoff; a
> sacred site undisturbed for centuries, is ransacked; and a little more
> mystery and wonder vanishes from the world.
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
Why hasn't Logan piped up? Well he's retired now. Probably watching TV and
having a beer...or two.
From: [email protected]
List-Post: [email protected]
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2012 14:35:42 -0500
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Texascavers] Be careful out there
But Nancy, your story isn't complete. Didn't the Arc narks try to have you
arrested for going to the cave in the first place? That has happened to me
three
times in Belize.
The first time a humorless jerk named Tom Miller tried to have me thrown
out of the country for visiting the Chiquibul cave without his permission.
(Logan can tell you all about it.) That didn't work because I was already
there. He wrote letters to the forestry department and the University of
Florida
accusing me of being a temple looter and drug user who consorts with known
outlaws (specifically Arturo and Brother Moses of gales Point). The first
accusation is untrue but the second two are true. Upon exiting the Vaca plateau
but before writing the letters he burned down my friend Santiago's house along
with all of his meager belongings, then left a ten dollar bill and a note
saying
"sorry".
Then there was the time the director of the Belize Audubon society tried to
get the Belize Defense Force (BDF) to search for me in the jungle for the crime
of entering the Bladen nature preserve without his personal permission. The BDF
just laughed because they never go into the jungle, there could be snakes out
there! On my way out I ran into a so called "Rapid Environmental Assessment"
team funded by the Nature Conservancy and supported by the British army (those
damned helicopters again!) They had catered meals with fresh salads and dessert
yet denied me a pinch of salt. Even though they could see I had nothing but a
small pack and the clothes on my back they accused me of being a looter. While
saying this they were standing next to large sack loads of looted
artifacts.
Then an archeologist named Dunham? took great exception to the fact that I
had explored the valley of Sleazeweazel branch, an upstream tributary of the
Bladen branch even further up the Monkey river. There is a small ruin
there and he wanted credit for being the first person to discover it (by
helicopter of course!) He apparently brought in a large number of Mayans and
utterly destroyed the place. His reported pilferage of a large amount of jade
may or may not be true. I can't bear the thought of it so I haven't been back.
I
tried to cooperate by sending him photographs of what I had discovered.
Unfortunately the aforementioned criminals had in fact dug open a grave, I
caught them and reinterred the remains. Perhaps it was unwise of me to take a
photo of the king's skull with a snake crawling through the eye socket. Dunham
was eventually thrown out of the country. Some years later a friend of mine who
is a real (i.e. non insane) archeologist attended a conference in Belmopan. He
heard my name mentioned and turned to say, "he's a friend of mine". For that
they tried to throw him out of the country too.
Not all archeologists are insane. What about Logan? (although I have my
doubts) Why doesn't he pipe up?
SW
In a message dated 11/6/2012 1:23:25 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
[email protected] writes:
ah always such a gust of fresh air.
thought you might enjoy my experience with 'legitimate' grave
robbers.
BLADE
CAVE
I was suffering a surfeit of testosterone. We were midway
through a 3 month expedition to explore the massive Sistema Huautla, the
multi
entranced deepest cave in the western hemisphere, at one time 13th deepest in
the world. We had rented 2 rock houses in the miniscule pueblo of San
Augustin, a collection of perhaps a dozen 2 story homes, a one room school, a
basketball court and a jail cell in the basement of the municipal
building. Between the cobblestone dead end road and the buildings all
the flat land was taken. Subsistence farming took place on the 45 degree
angle hillsides that formed enormous sinkholes or dolinas funneling the wet
season floods into the cave system, both carving it out and scouring it
slick. Where the hillsides steepened into cliffs, small boys herded
goats looking for vegetation or gathered twigs for cooking fires. The
village had no electricity, running water was a much repaired plastic pipe
that snaked from miles away and dripped steadily over by the basketball
court. Our 4wd schoolbus and assorted Toyota trucks filled to the brim
with cavers and caving gear were the only vehicles to bump down this
road. Once a week, a bus careened past the intersection of the cobbled
turnoff, heading even deeper into the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico;
occasionally a pipe bed cargo truck could be flagged down for a scary ride on
the one laned s curved dirt road. Burros carried everything else that
came in or out.
The village had no sanitation facilities,
using the flat ground that doubled as main street. We hacked steps into
the clay cliff behind the house and constructed a marginal out
house.
The inhabitants of San Agustin vied to surrender their homes
to us for the wealth of rent money, so we had a fieldhouse kitchen on the
main
floor, with propane stoves, pallets of canned and freeze dried food, cartons
of local beer, whatever wilted produce and flats of eggs that were available
in the market town of Huautla, about an hour away on foot or by grinding
jouncing low gear in the trucks. The downstairs also housed duffel bags
of rope, the cave required thousands of feet, surveying and mapping gear,
barrels of carbide to power our acetylene gas caving lamps, kerosene
lanterns,
well hidden explosives for enlarging recalcitrant rock passages, digging
tools, helmets, rock climbing equipment, a rescue stretcher, first aid
supplies and anything else we could imagine might be required.
Upstairs
11 men, my partner and myself staked out sleeping bag sized living areas in
what was the family's corn loft. Upstairs and down was shared with rats,
fleas, village dogs and cats. At night the room was a cacophony of belches,
farts, and snores. The villagers went to bed at dark and got up an hour
or so before dawn. All night every night was punctuated by crowing,
braying, barking and wailing of the assorted populace. I was in the
constant company of men who were eating drinking and expending massive
calories, who had last bathed 6 weeks ago, and for whom delicacy of feeling
or
conversation was not a priority.
So that morning when a firsttimer
asked if he could join me and Mark on a day hike to an entrance Mark had
found
previously - I snapped No, go find your own cave. And much to all of our
amazement Frank did.
Mexico has some of the richest karst regions
of the world. The massive bedded limestone has solutioned over the
millennia into vast underground networks of huge passages and black
rivers. These cave systems compete with the known depths and
complexities of Europe's best, the caves of the Pyrenees and those of the
Ural mountains, with a bonus. The tropical temperatures of Mexico
made exploration far easier and far less life threatening. And the North
American cavers had them all to theirselves. In the '60's a motley crew
of college students from around Texas began to take their vacation breaks in
Mexico, venturing as far as trains and 3rd class buses could take them, to
stand on the edges of breathtaking pits far out in the jungle, to come home
with stories that could hardly be credited. The caving fever took hold
of these few and those who listened to their stories. Communal housing
was established, old buses and power wagons purchased, group forays were made
deeper and further into the mountains, always coming back with more
extravagant finds. Deeper pits, more entrances, big black
beckoning wilderness all in the matrix of an intoxicatingly foreign landscape
and culture where the dollar went a long ways for these underemployed
students.
In the land rush to explore this vast underground
wilderness fiefdoms were gradually established, loose affiliations of
cavestruck dreamers who cooperated somewhat and competed more for longest,
deepest. Against this backdrop, one group had instituted a policy of
hammering a small metal tag at the entrance of each cave they explored.
Nominally the numbers on this tag were meant to let others know that the cave
had been surveyed and mapped, the data to be shared, not to waste your time
here, to go on to the next undiscovered cave. Effectively, the data was
back in Austin, often released reluctantly and worst case, cave entrances
were
sometimes marked for future reference without ever being entered - a sort of
finders claim. I had decried this policy for a number of reasons: the
attempted ownership of areas, and the dismissive attitude of explorers toward
a cave thus marked. Despite the sure knowledge that there were often
overlooked passages and leads there was an obsession by cavers who
wanted to be the first into a cave, some special status conferred on the one
who 'scooped booty' as running headlong down virgin passage was called.
Our group didn't use the tag system.
So it was on this spring day in
1987, that Frank went out from San Agustin, wandered around the mountains
until he found an entrance, and explored it on his own, never quessing that
the cave was well known, had been mapped and was considered to be
'done'.
When he reached the back of the two medium sized rooms, he
poked into a crawlspace following the air, that breath that the cave
breathes,
exchanging its volume of space each day with the outside world: one long
inhale, then an exhale. Here the ceiling dipped down near the floor,
compressing the air and making its flow more powerful. After wriggling
for a body length or so, Frank came out into a room where he could stand up
and he must surely have gasped at what his light picked out. Everywhere
he turned, there was a jumble of sophisticated pots. A far alcove looked
like a dish drainer, dozens of pots stacked atop one another and glistening
with calcite deposits indicating that they had been here for a very long
time. The floor was littered with finely worked beads. The center
of the room had a single oblong rock oddly alone on the sandy floor. And
on the rock was a 6 inch obsidian blade. Alongside it was another longer
blade. A human skull lay there as well and all about the skull were the
tiny squares of turquoise tile that had once decorated it.
He came back
to the fieldhouse, bubbling with excitement, which was contagious. All
plans were set aside the next day and all of us in camp, followed him to the
cave. We explored in amazement, poking into corners and exclaiming over
new treasures. Very few of the caves in this region were so amenable to
human access. Most had entrance drops over 60 feet in depth and took
such vast quantities of water in the rainy season that there was rarely any
gravel, much less a stash of antiquities. Despite the suspicions of the
locals that we must be after gold or uranium or treasure, this was in fact
the
first place we had found anything other than rock and water.
For
several days there was no activity other than admiring Blade Cave as it
was promptly named. Photography, speculation, and solemn agreements all
around not to divulge the secret outside of the group. There was no
consideration of taking anything. One of the strongest taboos in caving
is taking anything from a cave. And the taboo is enforced with the tacit
understanding that anyone who broke it would be kicked out of the group.
It was a powerful threat.
What happened next was
worse.
Some months after the expedition had returned to the States, we
received a formal note from the wife of one of the explorers. She was an
archaeology student and had found the perfect thesis. Without consulting
any of the rest of the group, she and her husband had returned to Mexico, had
gotten in touch with the authorities in Oaxaca City, had taken them to the
cave and all the material that could be, had been removed from the site.
According to the authorities, it was stored in the basement of the government
museum. I'll bet the items hit the black market before the end of the
day and are now displayed in the home of a smug collector. A gate was
constructed in the tiny crawlspace to prevent looting - unofficial looting -
of the pots that had been cemented in place.
A thesis sits in a library somewhere unread,
surrounded by hundreds of similar ones; a collector gratifies his ego; an
official pockets a payoff; a sacred site undisturbed for centuries, is
ransacked; and a little more mystery and wonder vanishes from the
world.
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