CHAPTER 18

This was a forgotten place—but it ain’t forgotten anymore!

As usual, it poured all night, sometimes with deafening ferocity, and it was still raining when we awoke to the howler-monkey alarm clock.

As I crawled out of my tent and drew on my sodden clothes, Steve next door was looking up at the spider monkeys, who seemed as miserable as we were. He wondered how they could stand the rain, day in and day out. This was supposed to be the dry season in Honduras, but in this remote area a crazy sort of microclimate seemed to prevail.

At breakfast, the discussion turned to T3. The bad weather would prevent the air reconnaissance of T3 planned for that day. The other city lay about twenty miles to the north, and Chris was passionately eager to see a glimpse of it, at least from the air, if only the weather would break.

We waited for a pause in the rain. When it came, the AStar showed up with two more expedition members: Mark Plotkin, the noted ethnobotanist, president of the Amazon Conservation Team, and author of the bestselling book Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice; and his colleague Prof. Luis Poveda, an ethnobotanist from the National University of Costa Rica. Their hope was to record and study the botany of the T1 valley, especially in relation to its ancient inhabitants; they planned to inventory any legacy plants that might remain from pre-Columbian times, as well as identify biologically useful trees and medicinal plants. Almost immediately after the helicopter left, the rains came again. We packed up for another hike into the ruins. This time Juan Carlos carried a huge plastic suitcase strapped to his back. Inside was a $120,000 terrestrial lidar unit, a machine on a tripod, with which he intended to scan the sculpture cache.

While ascending the fixed ropes up the slippery trail, Prof. Poveda, who was in his early seventies, fell and rolled down the hill, pulling a muscle in his leg. He had to be carried back to camp and later evacuated by helicopter. At the cache it was pouring so hard that Juan Carlos had to wait an hour before he dared remove the lidar machine from its box. He set it up on the bottom slope of the pyramid just above the cluster of sculptures. Kneeling in the mud, with a tarp draped over his head, he fiddled with his MacBook Pro, jacked into the lidar unit as a controller. It seemed doubtful his equipment would survive the ordeal. Finally, hours later, the rain let up enough for him to uncover the machine and do an eleven-minute scan of the site. His intention was to do six scans, at different angles, to complete a three-dimensional picture, but a fresh downpour caused a delay and finally shut him down for the day. He left the equipment up there, well tarped, to complete the scans the next day. It poured again all night, and I awoke to the now familiar hammering of rain on the tent fly. My entire tent was now sunken in mud, and water was coming in and starting to pool.

At breakfast, Oscar passed around his cell phone with a picture he had taken that morning from his hammock. Just as he was putting his foot out to step onto the ground, he said, “I had a funny feeling.” He withdrew his bare foot and poked his head out of the hammock, peering at the ground below. Directly underneath him, crawling along at a leisurely pace, was a fer-de-lance as long as his hammock. When it passed by, he climbed down and got dressed.

Sully glanced at the picture. “Lovely way to start the day, mate,” he said, passing it along.

I spent the morning under the kitchen tarp, writing in my notebook, thinking how fast the days had gone by. We only had a few more before we would have to break down the camp, pack up, and fly everything out. I felt a sense almost of panic that we had hardly scratched the surface. Exploring the city was clearly an undertaking that would take years.

Meanwhile, the camp had turned into a quagmire, the mud six inches deep or more, except where there were ponds of water. The bamboo poles laid down as corrugation over the worst spots sank out of sight as soon as they were trod upon, and disappeared into the muck. Spud would cut more to lay on top, and they, too, would be swallowed.

That afternoon, the weather broke long enough for a quick reconnaissance of T3. Steve joined the flight, along with Dave and Chris. I wanted to go but there wasn’t room. The AStar took off in the early afternoon and returned a few hours later.

“Did you see anything?” I asked Steve, as he came back into camp.

“It’s beautiful. Unbelievably beautiful. It’s like a paradise.” The pilot had descended almost to the ground, hovering about a foot off a sandbar, while Dave took pictures. Steve described the valley of T3 as much gentler and more open than T1, a vast, parklike expanse bisected by clear rivers with sandy beaches along the banks. The rivers were surrounded by fields of deep grass, over six feet high, broken here and there by stands of giant trees. Most of the actual ruins stood on benchlands above the river and were hidden in the forest. The valley was bounded on the east by a lofty ridge, where an unnamed river flowed through a gap, heading toward the distant Patuca; T3 was surrounded by peaks on the other three sides as well. He said there were no obvious signs of human habitation, “just forest and grasslands as far as the eye can see.” The chopper was able to hover in place for only a few minutes at T3 before heading back to T1.

The following year, Chris and Juan Carlos would attempt a more serious reconnaissance of T3. In mid-January 2016, the Honduran military flew them in a helicopter to T3 and were able to put down the chopper on a sandbar.

“We landed,” Chris recalled, “and the pilot said we had a couple of hours.” But the grass was so high and thick that it took them an hour and a half to go a mere thousand feet, slashing unceasingly with machetes at the tough, thick-stemmed grass. It was impossible to see anything, and they were in great fear of snakes. But when they finally got out of the floodplain and climbed up to the benchland, they came upon an amazing sight: “It was nonstop plazas,” Chris said, “with little mounds around them, and more plazas and little mounds, as far as we could go. It’s much bigger than T1. It was huge. There were a lot of people living there.” The valley of T3, like T1, gave every indication of being another untouched wilderness with no evidence of recent human entry or indigenous use. As of this writing, beyond these two reconnaissance missions T3 remains unexplored.

Around noon, Mark Plotkin arrived back in camp carrying a turtle. I was curious to hear what he, as a rainforest ethnobotanist, was seeing in the valley. “We went upriver,” he said. “We were looking for evidence of recent habitation, but we didn’t see any. But we saw lots of useful plants.” He began rattling them off. A ginger used to treat cancer; a fig-related plant used by shamans; balsa trees; the biggest ramón trees he had ever seen, which produce a fruit and a highly nutritious nut; massive Virola trees used to treat fungal infections and to make a hallucinogenic snuff for sacred ceremonies. “I don’t see any trees or plants that would indicate any recent human presence,” he said. “I’ve been looking for chiles—seen none of that. And no Castilla.” Castilla elastica, he explained, was an important tree for the ancient Maya, who used it as the source of latex to make rubber for the balls used in the sacred game. He had also seen no mahogany trees. “What’s driving the deforestation near here,” he said, confirming what others had told me, “isn’t mahogany but clearing the land for cattle.”

He had run into a huge troop of spider monkeys upriver, much bigger than the family above my camp. “These are the first animals hunted out,” he said. “When you see spider monkeys who don’t run away but come and look at you, that is exceptional.” Later, Chris Fisher went downriver and ran into another large troop of monkeys, who were sitting in a tree above the river eating flowers. They screeched and shook branches at him. When the inner primate in Chris emerged and he began hooting and shaking bushes back at them, they bombarded him with flowers.

Plotkin was profoundly impressed by the valley. He said that, in all his years wandering the jungle, he had never seen a place like it. “This is clearly one of the most undisturbed rainforests in Central America,” he said. “The importance of this place cannot be overestimated. Spectacular ruins, pristine wilderness—this place has it all. I’ve been walking tropical American rainforests for thirty years and I’ve never walked up to a collection of artifacts like that. And I probably won’t ever again.”

I asked him, as an authority on rainforest conservation, what could be done to preserve the valley and site. He said it was a very difficult problem. “Conservation is a spiritual practice,” he said. “This place is right up there with the most important unspoiled places on earth. This was a forgotten place—but it ain’t forgotten anymore! We live in a world gone crazy for resources. Everybody on Google Earth can look at this place now. If you don’t move to protect it, it will disappear. Everything in the world is vulnerable. It’s amazing to me it hasn’t been looted already.”

“So what should be done?” I asked. “Create a national park?”

“This is already supposed to be a biosphere reserve. Where are the guards? The problem is people establish a national park and think they’ve won the war. No way. That’s only the first step—a battle in a longer war. The good thing about this expedition is that at least you’re bringing attention to this place and it might now be saved. Otherwise, it won’t last long. You saw the clear-cutting outside the valley. Absolutely gone in a few years.”

That night, the rain continued to fall. I was astounded to see Dave Yoder packing up his camera gear with a set of portable lights, and loading it all on his back. He said he was dissatisfied with his pictures of the cache so far. The daylight filtering down was too flat. He was going to hike up there in the dark with Sully so that he could “light-paint” the artifacts. This is a difficult photographic technique in which the camera, on a tripod, is left with the shutter open while the photographer sweeps light beams over the objects from different angles, to highlight particular details and add a sense of drama and mystery.

“You’re crazy,” I said. “You’re going up there in the pitch dark, with all those snakes, in the rain, wading in mud up to your balls, climbing that hill with a ton of gear on your back in a suitcase? You’re going to get yourself killed.”

He grunted and hiked off into the dark, his headlamp bobbing around before winking out entirely. As I hunkered down in my tent, listening to the rain, I was damned glad I was just a writer.

The rain stopped in the night and—finally—the morning of February 24 dawned beautifully, with fresh sunlight skimming the treetops. Some of the Honduran soldiers said they had seen petroglyphs downstream, where the river entered the notch on its way out of the valley. An expedition was organized to investigate. Chris Fisher and his crew decided to use the good weather to continue mapping the site, while Juan Carlos hoped to finish up his lidar scan of the cache. Steve and Bill Benenson joined our group heading downriver, along with Alicia and Oscar.

The weather was glorious. I washed my muddy, mildewed clothes in the river and put them back on, then stood on the riverbank in the warm sunlight, holding my arms out and turning about in a hopeless effort to dry my clothes. After so many nights and days of rain, even after laundering they smelled like they were rotting.

The AStar flew our group from our LZ to the Honduran LZ downstream at the river junction. A second group of Honduran soldiers had set up a camp at the junction, with tarps and palm fronds erected for tents, floored with cut bamboo. This was the only landing zone for the Honduran Bell helicopter, and these soldiers helped ferry supplies in and out and served as a backup to the group upstream. A side of deer ribs and two haunches were smoking over a fire, the rule against hunting having not yet been instituted.

We set off hiking downriver, Steve hobbling along, wading in the water with his walking pole, wearing a Tilley hat. The trip down this magical river was one of the most beautiful and memorable journeys of my life. We traveled mostly by wading in the stream, avoiding as much as possible the dense embankments, which we knew were a favorite snake habitat. (Venomous snakes are easier to see and less common in the water.) Snowy cumulus drifted across a clean blue sky. The area where the two rivers came together opened into a broad grassy field, and for the first time we could look around and actually see the shape of the land. The encircling ridge formed an arc in front of us, covered with trees; the conjoined river made a sharp right turn, running along the foot of the ridge, and then an abrupt left, cutting into the mountains and rushing through a ravine. For the first time, too, we could see the rainforest trees from top to bottom. Inside the rainforest, you can’t see the treetops or get a sense of what the trees look like and how tall they are.

After crossing the field, we waded into the river and hiked downstream. A tree had fallen across the river, with a tangle of limbs in and out of the water. The trunk was streaming with excitable, noxious red ants, which were using the tree as a bridge. We carefully wormed our way through its network of branches with the utmost care so as not to disturb them. We were lucky no one had been showered by these ants so far, which would require an evacuation and perhaps even a trip to the hospital. The river made a broad turn against the encircling ridge, running along a steep rocky slope thick with jungle trees that leaned over the river, dropping curtains of vines and aerial roots that trailed in the water, swaying in the current. The water was crystal clear until we stirred up the bottom, when it blossomed opaque with clouds of auburn silt. In some areas the river narrowed and became too strong and deep for wading; we were forced up on the embankment, where we followed the Honduran soldiers as they macheted a path for us, expertly flicking their machetes left and right, the blades going ping, snick, tang, snap—each species of plant making a different sound as it was cut.

As usual, we couldn’t see where we were putting our feet, and the fear of snakes was never far from our minds. And we did see one: a beautiful coral snake, banded in bright colors of red, yellow, and black, slithering through the grass. This snake has a bite that injects a potent neurotoxin, but unlike the fer-de-lance it is timid and reluctant to strike.

A few times we had to cross the river through rapids; there the soldiers formed a human bridge by linking arms in the water, while we waded through the current hanging on to them for dear life. As we reached the gap, we saw the first evidence of historic human occupation in the valley—a tattered cluster of wild banana trees. Banana trees were not native; originally from Asia, they had been brought to Central America by the Spanish. This was the only sign we ever saw of post-Conquest habitation in the valley.

We neared the gap: two forested slopes meeting in a V notch. The river took a ninety-degree turn at a place of heartbreaking loveliness, with thick stands of flowers giving way to a lush meadow and a beach. The river flowed in a singing curve over round stones and spilled in a waterfall over a ridge of basalt. In the shallows along the stream edge grew fat, blood-red aquatic flowers.

From the turn the river ran in a line as straight as a highway through the gap, faster and deeper, tumbling over rocks and fallen trees, sweeping around sandbars, dappled in sunlight. Rainforest giants leaned over the river from either side, forming a great cave echoing with the calls of macaws, frogs, and insects. The cloying smell of the jungle yielded to a clean scent of water.

Most of the people in our group halted at the opening to the ravine. Steve stretched out on a flat rock at the edge of the river, drying himself in the rare sunlight, not wanting to risk his bad leg by going on. Oscar cut some big leaves and laid them on the ground, making a bed, on which he took a nap. I decided to continue downstream looking for the petroglyphs, along with Bill Benenson, three soldiers, and the video crew.

Beyond the gap, the footing downstream got more treacherous, with waist-deep currents, hidden rocks, sunken limbs, and potholes. In places gigantic moss-covered tree trunks had fallen across the river, spanning the gap. Where the river got too swift, we scrambled up on the steep embankment. A faint animal path ran along the river, and the soldiers identified tapir dung and jaguar scat. The character of the river, now swiftly flowing between cliffs and overhung with trees, had become darker, mysterious, and unsettling. There were many boulders and ledges sticking out of the water, but we found no petroglyphs; the soldiers suspected the water had risen and submerged the rock carvings. We turned back when the river finally became too deep and the ravine walls too steep to continue. At several points I feared one of us might be swept away.

Indeed, once we’d returned to the gap, Bill was nearly carried off by the current while crossing a stretch of deep water. Steve rescued him by sticking out his foot, which Bill seized as a handhold. When I arrived, Steve ruefully handed me his iPhone, which was very hot. He had dropped it in the water and hadn’t completely clicked shut the waterproof flap over the charger port. As a result it had fried, and he’d lost all the photographs he had taken of the expedition he had spent twenty years bringing to fruition. (He would spend over a year working with Apple to recover the photos, to no avail; they were gone forever.)

We hiked back to the Honduran LZ, where the AStar picked us up and flew us back to camp. When we arrived, Woody told us that more bad weather was expected. Not wanting to risk anyone getting stranded, he had decided to begin extracting the team from the jungle a day early. He said he had scheduled me for a flight in one hour sharp; I should break down my camp, pack up, and be waiting with my gear at the LZ at that time. I was surprised and disappointed, but he said he’d worked out the evacuation on paper and this was the way it had to be. Even Steve had to come out that day. He clapped me on the shoulder: “Sorry, mate.”

The treetops were filling with golden light as the helicopter came in. It upset me that I had to leave when the weather had finally cleared, but I took a certain schadenfreude in the fact that torrential rains might soon be returning to torment those lucky enough to stay. I threw my pack in the basket, boarded, buckled in, and put on my headset; we were airborne in sixty seconds. As the chopper banked out of the LZ, sunlight caught the riffling stream, turning it for an instant into a shining scimitar as we accelerated upward, clearing the treetops, heading for the notch.

As we thundered through the gap, a feeling of melancholy settled over me at leaving the valley. It was no longer a terra incognita. T1 had finally joined the rest of the world in having been discovered, explored, mapped, measured, trod upon, and photographed—a forgotten place no more. Thrilled as I was to have been a member of this first lucky few, I had the sense that our exploration had diminished it, stripping it of its secrets. Soon, the clear-cut mountainsides came into view, along with ubiquitous plumes of smoke, farmsteads with glittering tin roofs, trails, roads, and pastures dotted with cattle. We had returned to “civilization.”