Review of Devil's Book of Culture (AMCS Activities Newsletter)

AMCSACTIVITIES NEWSLETTER

Number 27 May 2004

ASSOCIATION FORMEXICAN CAVE STUDIES

BOX 7672AUSTIN, TEXAS 78713

www.amcs-pubs.org

© 2004 AMCSAll rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

The AMCS Activities Newsletter is published by the Associationfor Mexican Cave Studies, a Project of the National SpeleologicalSociety. The AMCS is an informal, nonprofit group dedicatedto the exploration, study, and conservation of the caves of Mexico.

The Activities Newsletter seeks articles and news items on allsignificant exploration and research activities in the caves ofMexico. The editor may be contacted at the address below orat [email protected]. Text and graphics may be submittedon paper, or consult the editor for acceptable formats forelectronic submission. Exceptional color photographs for thecovers are also sought. They need not pertain to articles in theissue, but the original slide or negative must be available forprofessional scanning.

This issue was edited by Bill Mixon, with help from Katie Arens,Oscar Berrones, Yvonne Droms, Rodolfo “Fofo” González,Elizabeth Hernandez, Orion Knox, Mark Minton, GuillaumePelletier, Denise Prendergast, Bev Shade, and John “Solo”White.

All previous issues of the Activities Newsletter are available,as are various other publications on the caves of Mexico. Con-tact [email protected], see www.amcs-pubs.org, or write theaddress below.

Front cover

Guillaume Pelletierrappelling down theentrance pit of La Ciudad,Hoya Grande, Puebla,during Mexpé 2002.Photo by Gustavo VelaTurcott.

Back cover

Terry Raines views sodastraw stalactites in a cavein northern Mexico. Photoby Dave Bunnell.

AMCS ACTIVITIES NEWSLETTER NUMBER 27

4 authors’ addresses5 new AMCS bulletins7 Mexico News

28 long and deep caves lists30 deep pits list

31 Proyecto Cerro Rabón 2004 Mike Frazier38 Mexpé 2002—Sistema Tepepa Matthieu Lévesque and Guillaume Pelletier44 Caving in Sistema Cheve, Oaxaca R. D. Milhollin51 Caves on the Jalpan Quadrangle, Querétaro Gerald Moni54 Ox Bel Ha, Spring 2003 Bil Phillips57 Maya Cave Shrines, Quintana Roo Dominique Rissolo60 Speciation in Aquatic Trogloxenes in Cenotes Adriana Barona and Luis Espinasa64 Caving in Cuetzalan Chris Lloyd68 History: First Speleological Survey of Mexico Trip T. R. Evans69 Chiropterphobia Chris Lloyd73 Gruta de San Sebastián Ricardo Arias Fernández79 Grutas de Balancanche Bruce Rogers84 Diving the Cheve Sumps Rick Stanton87 Caves of Atoyac, Veracruz Ricardo Arias Fernández93 Geography of Caves in Quintana Roo Jim Coke98 A Vampire Roost in a Cold Cave Gerardo Obispo Morgado, Luis Espinasa, and

Monika Baker Alpheis

67 book review: The Devil’s Book of Culture Ernie Garza

CONTENTS

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AUTHORS IN THIS ISSUE

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Ricardo Arias FernándezCoyotepec 17, Col. CumbriaCuautitlan Izcalli, Edo. México [email protected]

Jim CokePO Box 8663Woodlands, Texas [email protected]

Luis EspinasaBiology DepartmentShenandoah University1460 University DriveWinchester, Virginia [email protected]

Mike Frazier2207 Hagerman StreetColorado Springs, Colorado [email protected]

Chris LloydTeotehuacan 1661Pinar de la CalmaZapopan, Jalisco [email protected]

RD Milhollin3711 Gene LaneHaltom City, Texas [email protected]

Gerald Moni2330 Rader Ridge RoadAntioch, Tennessee [email protected]

Guillaume Pelletier5386 Jeanne D’ArcMontréal, Québec H1X 2E7Canada

Bil PhillipsPO Box 153Tulum, Quintana Roo [email protected]

Dominique RissoloDepartment of AnthropologySan Diego State University5500 Campanile DriveSan Diego, California [email protected]

Bruce RogersUS Geological Survey, MS-999345 Middlefield RoadMenlo Park, California [email protected]

Rick Stanton116 Allesley Old RoadCoventry, West Midlands CV5 8DFUnited Kingdom


AMCS Bulletin 11. Cave Hydrologyof the Caribbean Yucatan Coast. ParticiaA. Beddows. 2003. 8.5 by 11 inches,96 pages, softbound. $15.

The author’s masters thesis on anarea with over 350 kilometers ofunderwater caves. Studies of flow,saltwater mixing, tidal influence. 42figures, 17 tables.

AMCS Bulletin 12. Ancient MayaCave Use in the Yalahau Region,Northern Quintana Roo, Mexico. Do-minique Rissolo. 2003. 8.5 by 11inches, 151 pages, softbound. $20.

The author’s PhD dissertation,newly typeset from a 400-pageoriginal. The study area is unusualin the Yucatan for having surfacewater, but pools in caves still hadritual significance to the Maya. 167figures, 28 tables.

AMCS Bulletin 13. Geologic Studiesin the Purificación Karst. Louise Hoseand Gerald Atkinson. 2004. 8.5 by11 inches, 87 pages, softbound. $15.

Hose’s masters thesis, “The Ge-ology and Hydrology of the SistemaPurificación Area, Villa Hidlago,Tamaulipas, Mexico,” and Atkin-son’s senior thesis, “PlanktonicForaminiferal Biostratigraphy ofthe Tamabra and Mendez Forma-tions in the Conrado Castillo Area,Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, Mexi-co.” Foreword by Peter Sprouse.The area contains the longest drycave in Mexico, with more than 93kilometers of passage. 68 figuresand tables, including one in colorand three foldouts.

AMCS Bulletin 14. Karst Hydrologyof the Sierra de El Abra, Mexico. JohnFish. 2004. 8.5 by 11 inches, 186pages, softbound. $25.

The author’s PhD dissertation onan area in Mexico that containssome of its most famous caves andtwo karst springs with averageflows of more than 20 cubic metersper second. Many cave descriptionsand maps. Foreword by DerekFord, preface by Gerald Atkinson.Newly typeset from 469-page origi-nal. 126 figures, including 8 foldoutmaps, and 33 tables.

NEW AMCS BULLETINS

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Ordering information, includ-ing postage charges, is at www.amcs-pubs.org, or inquire [email protected] or the ad-dress given in the masthead.

Photo by Dave Bunnell.


Special thanks to Yvonne Droms forfinding or translating material onEuropean expeditions.

MEXICO NEWSCompiled by Bill Mixon

CHIAPASSince 2001, the Sociedad Espeleo-

lógica Jaguar in Tuxtla Gutiérrez([email protected]) hasconducted Proyecto EspeleológicoSan Fernando. They have exploredover seventy caves in the San Fer-nando area, nearly fifty of whichhave been mapped and recorded.Among them is Cueva del Sumidero(or Puercoespín), which is 323meters deep and 700 meters long.All members of the Jaguar groupare Mexican, but American, Cuban,and Italian cavers have workedwith them on the project. Severalmembers of the group have joinedthe Italians’ Río La Venta group,which has done much work in Chia-pas in the past. Source: Calvin Smith.

In February and March 2002, afour-member French team (GérardAyad, Eric David, Fabrice Faivre,and Cathy Frison) of the Explora-tions Karstiques Sud-Américainesgroup continued exploration in anarea of Chiapas first visited duringM’expé 1993, during which ElChorro Grande had been discov-ered and surveyed to a length of 10kilometers. (See article in AMCSActivities Newsletter 21.) EKSA’s ex-plorations centered near RobladaGrande, a village located on theMeseta Belén, a karst plateau 40 ki-lometers south of Tuxtla Guttiérrez.Various members of the Mexicanspeleo club Vaxakmen also partici-pated jointly with the French insome of the explorations.

The 2002 expedition’s main objec-tive was to find an upper entrance

to El Chorro Grande on the plateau350 meters above the cave, and ifthat failed, to explore upwards atthe end of the western branch of thecave, where high leads had beennoticed in 1993. A few days werespent checking an area just north ofEl Portillo, where a creek sinks dur-ing the dry season and turns into alake during the rainy season. Mostlikely the detergent bottles found inthe cave come from that sinkingcreek, making it the likely source ofthe river in the eastern (main)branch of El Chorro Grande. How-ever, all holes that were checkedwere clogged with sand after a fewmeters.

The area directly above the RivièreInattendue at the end of the west-ern branch of El Chorro Grande wasthen checked, and two pits of 45 and56 meters were found. The area di-rectly above the end of the easternbranch was also checked, resultingin finding a cluster of three insig-nificant sinks clogged with soil. Inaddition, prospecting in the areaturned up various other pits, themain one being Sima de la Tortuga,which was surveyed with membersof the Vaxakmen club to a depth of69 meters and a length of 119meters. An impenetrable fissureended the exploration.

El Chorro Grande, located at thebottom of the Río Suchiapa canyon,was revisited, but due to route-finding and equipment problems,no further exploration was possible.Across from the resurgence, twolarge openings on the cliff face re-main unexplored; aid climbing willbe necessary in order to reach them.

Twenty kilometers farther to theeast, on a plateau bordering thecliffs overlooking the Río SantoDomingo, two pits were found 50

meters apart and named SimasGemelas del Tío. Sima del Tío 1was surveyed to –80 meters, wherethey ran out of rope in mid-pit.Sima del Tío 2 was surveyed to –150meters and left hanging at a dome-pit estimated to be 25 meters deep,due to lack of gear, rope, and time.The fact that the Simas Gemelas delTío are located at the highest pointon the plateau at an elevation of1100 meters seemed very promis-ing, considering that the river is 650meters below, but after later exam-ining the surveys, they discoveredthat they are heading to the west,away from the river. Could there bea larger system there than firstthought? A reconnaissance trip intothe Río Santo Domingo canyon tolook for a resurgence only yieldedone little spring, which became im-penetrable after 50 meters.

In March 2003, the French EKSAteam, this time composed of EricDavid, Fabrice Faivre, and GérardAyad, returned to the area of MesetaBelén to continue the previousyear’s explorations. The Simas delTío, now renamed Sima del TíoNatán 1 and 2, were the main ob-jectives of the 2003 expedition andwere checked first. Tío 1 ended at adepth of 126 meters after an addi-tional two pits were descended. Tío2 was then tackled. The team’s ham-mer drill fell down a 20-meter pitand disintegrated, and one of theteam members was incapacitatedfor a week due to a serious sunburn.Despite these setbacks, explorationof Tío 2 continued, yielding two morepits, 17 and 11 meters, a series of la-borious downclimbs in rotten rock,and a 25-meter drop. The conditionof the rock made rigging this pitvery difficult and time-consuming.At its base, a 5-meter-long passage

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brought the team to the top of a pitestimated at 15 meters but not de-scended. About 450 meters of ropeand sixty anchors were used in thiscave. The current depth of Sima delTío Natán 2 is 251 meters, and itslength is 471 meters. The 650-meterdepth potential of the area bodeswell for a continuation. (The mapsin this Mexico News show only the2002 discoveries in Simas Tío.)

A number of other caves werechecked and surveyed; most wereless than 30 meters long or 40meters deep. However, toward theend of the expedition, one cave ofspecial interest was found in an areabetween Cárdenas and El Portillo,

the Cueva Santo Domingo (#03-13). An 80-centimeter-high entranceleads through a 10-meter down-climb into a large, decorated cham-ber. A tight, breezy crawlway usedby numerous bats takes you to a 47-meter pit. Following the infeederdownstream leads to an intersec-tion with a major river, El Decarío.Upstream takes you to a sump.Downstream leads to a series ofseven cascades, beyond which thepassage grows to a diameter of 30meters. Eventually the river be-comes a deep lake, where the teamturned around on the last day of theexpedition. Cueva Santo Domingowas surveyed to a length of 1085

meters and a depth of 118 meters.The resurgence of the river in thecave is unknown.

A pit, Puits Paco et Gérard, #03-15, was found during a surface re-connaissance of the area of theCueva Santo Domingo and brieflyexplored. It is located above theunderground river Decarío. After a15-meter entrance pit, a 50-meter pitwas reached but not descended dueto lack of rope and time. The explo-ration of this pit and Cueva SantoDomingo constitute the two mainobjectives for the next EKSA expe-dition, slated for March 2004.Source: Summary by Yvonne Dromsfrom web site http://eksa.free.fr.

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DISTRITO FEDERALTwo female and two male spe-

lunkers (“We had candles, but theywent out.”) aged 20 to 24 werefound and rescued on Wednesday,April 7, 2004, after being lost in asmall lava-blister cave or old minenear Cerro de la Estrella, in Izta-palapa, DF. They were found by fireand rescue teams after a 16-hour

search, 300 meters inside the cavenetwork. They entered the cavearound midnight on Saturday andsoon became lost. Sources: RamónEspinasa and Reuters news serviceat www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N08634252.htm.

GUERREROFrom December 21, 2001, to Janu-

ary 4, 2002, Italians Luciano Filipas,

Marco Sticotti, and Paolo de Curtisof the Commissione Grotte EugenioBoegan joined forces with Mexicanmembers of the Sociedad Mexicanade Exploraciones Subterráneas atthe invitation of Ramón Espinasa inorder to explore and map the larg-est possible number of caves in anarea near Filo de los Caballos, about60 kilometers west of Chilpancingo,capital of the state of Guerrero. (Seealso article by Ramón Espinasa inAMCS Activities Newsletter 25.) Thisarea, covered by deep sinkholes andlocated at 2000 to 3000 meters el-evation in the Sierra Madre Occi-dental, had been checked during asummer pre-expedition reconnais-sance trip by members of the SMES,after receiving some tips from ananonymous American caver, “elGringo Solitario.”

A total of thirty-six caves, all fos-sil pits or active insurgences, wererecorded by GPS, explored, andsurveyed. Of these, eleven werenew finds and four were over 100meters deep. The maximum depth

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reached was at Agua del Carpintero(212 meters), and the maximumlength at Agua de las Golondrinas(634 meters).

The large entrance to Cueva delAgua de las Golondrinas can befound at the bottom of a major sink-hole that takes a permanent stream.The cave consists mainly of a succes-sion of meanders separated by shortpits that never exceed 20 meters indepth. One large chamber in mid-cave is filled with impressive for-mations, and a second large cham-ber forms the bottom of the cave at–193 meters. The bottom is filledwith clay sediment and appearsimpenetrable. Even though it is anactive cave, it is quite decorated,

which was particularly useful dur-ing rigging.

Sótano de Puerto Fresno is lo-cated near Puerto Fresno, on thewestern side of a doline. A balconyin mid-pit gives access to a gravel-floored chamber 5 by 6 meters. Atthe base of the pit, a meander leadsdownward, becoming progres-sively tighter until it ends in a flood-debris plug at –116 meters.

The entrance to Cueva del Aguadel Pipistrello is at the bottom of asinkhole and leads through a shortmeander into a large room with afloor sloping at 45 degrees. At itsbase, at –76 meters, a particularlyconvoluted passage, which had tobe widened by sledge hammer,

leads to a large room. A continuationwas found down an active meander.Unfortunately, the exploration hadto be halted at the top of a shortdrop after running out of time ataround 100 meters depth. A passagewas seen continuing on at the baseof the drop.

Cueva del Agua del Carpinterois very similar in its morphology toAgua de las Golondrinas until itreaches a depth of 100 meters. Be-yond that, a 100-meter-deep cascad-ing pit leads to an 11-meter dropat the bottom of which the caveabruptly sumps at –212 meters.

The results achieved did notmeet with expectations, consider-ing the 900-meter depth potential

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of the area and the numerous en-trances found during the expedi-tion. The main factor affecting thisarea’s potential is the abundance ofsoil and vegetative matter that getsflushed into the karst during therainy season. Source: Paolo Bruno deCurtis and Marco Sticotti, Progres-sione 45, July–December 2002, trans-lated from Italian and summarizedby Yvonne Droms.

Yet another victim was claimedby the Dos Bocas caves when, onApril 11, 2004, a tourist drowned inthe entrance swim of Río Subterrá-neo de San Jerónimo. A groupwithout proper lights or flotationequipment entered the cave and,

after the first two swims, decidedto turn back. The entrance swim islong and has a strong current, andone of them apparently tired anddrowned. Source: Ramón Espinasa.

MICHOACÁNBack in January 1998, Chris Lloyd,

Taco Van Ieperen, and MoniqueCastenguay did a one-day hike torecon a plateau that is shown asCerro de La Lagunita on the topomap. It is located on sheet E13 B76in southern Michoacán about 30kilometers east of Maruata and 10kilometers inland from the ocean.The average elevation of the plateauis about 700 meters. We parked at asmall restaurant on the highway

just after crossing the Río Coal-comán and took the trail that startsjust behind the restaurant up intothe hills. The trail ascends throughremnants of old-growth forest andpasses vague remains of an old log-ging road, complete with rusted-out logging vehicles. The views outover the ocean are quite spectacu-lar. We met a local man who thenaccompanied us up onto the pla-teau, while telling us that therewere no caves. Much of the top hasbeen cleared for planting corn, andwhile the limestone is somewhatkarsted, there are no obvious sinksor entrances. We made it to thesouthern-most doline shown on thetopo map and found the lagunita

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that the plateau is named for, butthere were still no caves to be seen,just as the man had said. At thispoint we figured we had better hikeback down in order to get to ourcampsite at Maruata by sundown.The local man did, however, say heknew about a cave farther to thenortheast from the point we reach-ed, another two hours’ hike (whichwould probably translate into atleast three hours for us non-locals).Anyone attempting to reach thatcave should probably carry bivvygear and plan to spend the night.

More recent investigations, in2003, have identified three lime-stone plateaus with dolines markedon the topos in Michoacán near itsborder with Colima and within 5kilometers of the beach. One is at300 meters elevation, the second isat 600 meters, and the third at 1100meters. None of them has road ac-cess. Hiking access to the 600-meterone has been located, and a local liv-ing partway up it confirms thatthere are caves up there. This is thesame hill where John Pint and fel-low Zotz cavers located a small cavejust uphill from the highway manyyears ago. Now we just need to getup on the top to see what is there.Source: Chris Lloyd.

NUEVO LEÓNMinas Viejas, in the mountains

across the highway from Busta-mante, is the site of Pozo de Monte-mayor, which has two long dropsand numerous shorter ones leadingto a depth of 483 meters. See articleson the cave in AMCS ActivitiesNewsletter numbers 18 and 19 andthe map in “Mexico News” in num-ber 25. There are also numerous oldmines that intersect natural cavities.The ranch is now being operated asan attraction, and the web site fea-tures rappelling, though apparentlymostly on surface cliffs. However,one photograph was taken inMontemayor. Source: http://www.realdeminasviejas.com.mx.

Mexplore, an adventure tourismoutfit, is offering a three-day tourof Bustamante, including a day inGruta del Palmito. Price is $1190.That’s dollars, not pesos. It’s a wholelot cheaper to attend the Texas

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Speleological Association’s LaborDay projects at the cave. Source:http://www.mexplore.com.mx/trips02.asp.

The seventh annual Bustamanteproject at Gruta del Palmito tookplace over the Labor Day weekendin 2003. (See AMCS Activities News-letter 26 for an article on pastprojects.) The road from town to thebottom of the mountain was being

paved, causing some delay anddetours. Much work was donesmoothing the trail from the upperparking lot to the cave, and a hand-rail was installed down to the en-trance gate. As usual, there wasgraffiti removal and work on signsand lighting inside the cave. A spe-cial sightseeing trip to MinasGolondrinas was arranged for Sun-day. Registration for the project,which is sponsored by the Texas

Speleological Association, was 144,of whom 111 entered the cave.Source: Susan Souby in the TexasCaver, October 2003.

Sumidero Anaconda is located3600 meters south-southeast ofGarza, at an elevation of 1730meters, UTM (NAD27) 431860E2656140N. It lies a few hundredmeters north of Cañón el Infiernoin a drainage that used to feed into

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the canyon. Now the drainage is allswallowed by the 13-meter-widecave entrance, which lies under a20-meter-tall headwall. From theentrance, the cave slopes downthrough a narrow, winding, snake-like passage (hence the name) punc-tuated by pools, most of which canbe negotiated without getting wetabove the knee. After 150 meters,the first drop of the Zebra Drop se-ries is encountered. This 60-meter

descent features fractures filledwith white calcite zigzagging acrossthe dark limestone. At the bottomof this, a large passage lowers after25 meters to the Rabbit Wash, anunavoidable duck-under through awaterfall. Then a series of shortclimbs into pools leads to BunnyFalls, a 25-meter pitch. A longstretch of horizontal passage calledGiraffic Park follows, only a fewmeters wide but with a ceiling that

twists up out of sight. A streamflows actively through this section,which after more than 500 metersreaches the final drop, Panther Pit.The cave pinches out in small flow-stone holes with no airflow.

Sumidero Anaconda was discov-ered on December 22, 1998, by agroup of cavers checking streamsinks along a shale contact. Theyinitially explored for 50 meters. Thenext day John Fogarty, Bill Mixon,

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Susie Lasko, Scott Scheibner, WaltOlenick, and Rae Nadler Olenickformed two teams to begin the sur-vey. They descended three dropsand stopped at a fourth. It wasclean-washed, with good airflow.John and Susie continued the sur-vey the next day, along with LauraRosales. Bernhard Koeppen andCyndie Walck rigged ahead, pass-ing through the Rabbit Wash, butran out of rope at a drop. On De-cember 26, John, Susie, Cyndie, andScott Scheibner went to Anacondato continue the survey. They map-ped to the top of a drop, then quit,cold and tired. It was then 712meters long and 157 meters deep.The push continued two days later,with Bernhard and Cyndie riggingahead, while Susie, Peter Sprouse,and Maria Tehrany mapped downthe next two pitches. Then theywere in tall, straight canyon passagewith a flowing stream. They met therig crew coming out after they hadrun out of rope, again. A 12-meterpit had gotten them to the top of animpressive 30-meter pitch. Once atthe bottom of this, it was one shotto the top of a 10-meter drop. Thenext day, Scott, Maria, and Cyndiecontinued the survey in Anaconda,while John and Carlos Nasby rig-ged ahead. The survey stopped at

the top of a drop, and the rigcrew reached a flowstoneend. The following day, thesurvey was finished by Susie,Laura, and Barbara Luke.Source: Susie Lasko and Pe-ter Sprouse in Death CoralCaver 12, 2002.

OAXACAAbout forty cavers from

six countries participated inBill Stone’s Cheve 2004 ex-pedition, which lasted fromFebruary 12 to April 6, in-cluding travel time to andfrom Austin, Texas. The ex-pedition visited neitherSistema Cheve nor its re-surgence, but concentratedon caves with a potential tolead into the unexploredgap between them. The firstpart of the expedition,through March 4, was main-ly devoted to caves in the

Eventually the dig had to be aban-doned when it reached a pointwhere the hole began filling withwater. Sumidero Barranca Estrella,where the river had sunk whencavers last visited the area, turnedout to be dry, a new sink havingcollapsed upstream. The new sinkwas deemed too unstable to dig, butthe old sink was attacked, usingelectric truck winches hauled to thearea on burros and powered bynickel-metal-hydride batteries todrag boulders out of the way. Dig-gers succeeded in finding about 200meters of small passages to a depthof 59 meters, but eventually this toowas abandoned when leads becametoo small to push. Meanwhile,members of the expedition also ex-plored Osto de Cerro Voludo #2 toa depth of 267 meters.

The second planned target wasSumidero Aguacate, which hadbeen surveyed to about 1 kilometerin 1994 and ended at a sump. Thesump proved undivable, but climbsand digs bypassed the sump, and

The bottom of the entrance pitof Osto Atanasio, Oaxaca,explored during the 2004Cheve-area project. KasiaBiernacka and Marcin Gala.

Osto de Cerro Voludo #2, Oaxaca.Kasia Biernacka and Marcin Gala.

Barranca Estrella. The dig at thebottom end of Cueva de la Bar-ranca Estrella (map in AMCS Ac-tivities Newsletter 25, p. 60) waspushed, using a CisLunar Mark Vrebreather rigged with blowers, soit didn’t have to be worn, to refreshthe air, which otherwise quicklybecame too stale for digging.

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2171 meters of new passage wasexplored and mapped, making thecave 3225 meters long and 216meters deep. This cave was the siteof underground camps during theexpedition, including a six-day onein early March and a three-day oneat the end of the trip. While Agua-cate was being pushed, other caverscamped in high karst above ElOcotal and found numerous pitentrances. Pit 25 has a spectacular50-meter entrance shaft and wasbottomed at a depth of about 200meters.

The last weeks of the project weredevoted to high caves in the ElOcotal area. Cave J1 has the largestentrance in the area except forCheve’s, and it ends at an easy dig200 meters in that is likely to con-nect to a large chamber in J2, alsocalled Osto Faustino, which gotmost of the effort during this time.Its survey reached a depth of 391meters and a length of 643 meters,but during the final trip some 400more meters of stream passage wasfound, with an estimated 50 metersof additional depth, to a junctionwith another stream that tripled thewater flow. This cave and Aguacatewill be subjects of future pushes. Alltold, the expedition claims a totalof about 1800 meters of new verti-cal extent and 5400 meters of sur-vey. Source: Expedition reports fromthe field sent to the National Geo-graphic Society by satellite phone,most written by Bill Stone or AndiHunter. See also edited weeklysummaries of these reports andsome photos at the web sitewww.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/caverace.

Renato Dorantes García, ofHuautla, Oaxaca, died at the end ofJanuary 2004. He had been battlingcancer for years, and upon his re-turn from treatments in Puebla, hesuddenly succumbed to the illness.Renato was an early friend of thecavers who passed through Huautlaon the way to explore caves at SanAgustín, and he held many happygatherings at his home, showingcavers his latest video or slides. Hehad a deep interest in the historyof the Mazatecs and was head ofthe Casa de la Cultura, a cultural

museum in Huautla. Renato wasfifty-five years old when he died,and he will be sorely missed by themany cavers who knew him. Source:Ernie Garza.

PUEBLAIn late March 2004, six British

cavers on a Combined Services Cav-ing Association expedition to thecaves of Cuetzalan were trapped byflood waters in Cueva de Alpazat.After a planned night in DeepCamp, they found the cave in floodand managed with some difficultyto reach Camp One, which was wellstocked with food and lightingsupplies and had a cave radio forcommunication with those on thesurface. The passage out proved tobe sumped, and the cavers settledin for a wait. For two days, thewater-level was dropping nicely,and it was hoped that the sumpcould soon be free-dived. But ad-ditional storms in the area causedthe water level to rise 10 meters, andit was necessary to follow a prear-ranged plan to call some experi-enced British cave divers in toevacuate the trapped cavers. Theroute through the sump had beenlined to facilitate this. (Others cav-ing in northern Mexico duringMarch recall a very wet “dry sea-son.”)

Two British cave divers flew overand assisted those who had beentrapped, only one of whom had anyprevious experience in cave diving,out though the 200-meter-longsumped section, a very committingfirst dive, with near-zero visibility.

So far so good. But of course thepress got wind of all this, and theMexican authorities too, whichcould hardly have been avoided. Allsorts of wild stories circulated in thepress and on television, includingsome dispatches by Reuters, whichshould have known better. Muchwas made of the fact that the trap-ped cavers were mostly British mili-tary personnel, and they were saidto be on a secret training missionand even prospecting for uraniumin the caves. The cavers allegedlyrefused Mexican assistance in favorof waiting for “help from the RoyalNavy.” Local authorities claimedthey were unaware of the expedition,

which was ridiculous, consideringthat the CSCA had been visitingCuetzalan in the spring for manyyears. Goaded by the press, Mexi-can politicians, including PresidentFox, made hasty and unfortunateremarks. When they got out of thecave, the trapped cavers were inter-rogated by the military and, despitebeing cleared of all the ridiculouscharges, expelled from the countryfor doing “research” (i.e., cave map-ping) on tourist visas. Televisionstations told Mexicans to report anyforeign cavers to the authorities.The Mexican immigration peoplehave since declared that cave sur-veying requires a research visa, ex-pensive and difficult to obtain.

In fact, the Combined ServicesCaving Association is much likeany other caving club, and themembers were on vacation, sup-ported by their own money and asmall grant from the Ghar ParauFoundation, a private British groupthat supports several foreign cavingexpeditions by British cavers eachyear. The decision to call in experi-enced sump divers, as arranged,was entirely appropriate, and in factMexican rescue groups did supportthe rescue efforts. While it is likelythat little could have been done toprevent all the fuss, it may be thatthe tradition among cavers of justi-fying their hobby as “research” inorder to get access to caves con-trolled by some difficult owners,together with the fact that the Brit-ish Ministry of Defense probablyjustifies sponsoring groups like theCSCA to its taxpayers as “goodtraining,” may have contributed tothe misinformation deluge. In fact,the head of the British Army isquoted in a BBC dispatch as sayingthat the detention of the men wassimply the result of “a grave mis-understanding,” but he couldn’tresist adding that it was a “joint ser-vice adventure training expedi-tion.” Such little lies can come backto bite you.

Considerable efforts are beingmade by Mexican and foreign cav-ing groups, including the Mexicannational caving organization UniónMexicana de Agrupaciones Espe-leológicas, which strongly supportsforeign caving in Mexico, to get the

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newly stated visa rule overturned.Meanwhile cavers should proceedwith caution. Unfortunately, even ifthe rule is formally rescinded or justnot enforced at the national level,local authorities will rememberwhat they saw on television, and areturn to normal visa rules for cav-ing is unlikely to make the eveningnews. Sources: numerous, includingBBC web site, Reuters dispatches,Ramón Espinasa, and JonathanSims.

During the week of April 9through 18, cavers and cave diversfrom Mexico and the U.S. workedtogether near Puebla to search forMariano Fuentes Silva, who waspresumed lost in ResumideroOztoquito, Municipio Tzicatla-coyan, Puebla. Mariano and othermembers of the Draco caving clubhad been exploring the caves nearSan José Balvanera for many yearsand were especially interested infinding a connection between Ozto-quito and Resumidero el Oztoque,separated by about 1 kilometer sur-face distance. The caves are locatedat a boundary between basaltic lavaand severely tilted limestone. OnTuesday, April 8, Mariano and twoother cavers entered the cave by the122-meter entrance drop and pro-ceeded upstream about 500 metersto an unexplored sump. With thehelp of his companions, Marianoentered the sump, using modifiedopen-water scuba equipment and aline reel with polypropylene linefed in from the surface. WhenMariano failed to return from histhird sump dive in the cave, hiscompanions were able to contactcave-diving instructor Juan CarlosCarrillo, from Mexico City, whomade a dive, but was unable to findFuentes in the extremely low, siltypassage. Two cave-diving instruc-tors from Quintana Roo, GermánYañez and Alejandro Álvarez, wereflown in, but were similarly unableto locate the missing caver. Morethan seventy people gathered at thebase camp established near the caveentrance to participate in the rescueactivities, which were coordinatedby Juan Montaño Hirose, presidentof the Mexican caving federationUMAE. A unit of the Mexican Army,

the valves open and regulators fullyfunctional, but the air cylinderswere empty. The sump divers wouldhave been able to bring Fuentes’body back through the underwaterrestrictions only with great diffi-culty, and upon consultation, thefamily elected to leave his body inthe chamber.

Mariano was a gifted biologistwho specialized in troglobitic lifeand an accomplished caver whoparticipated in many projectsthroughout the Mexican republic.Source: R. D. Milhollin. (A plan mapof Oztoquito appears in two partsin Draco, magazine of the MexicoCity caving group Base Draco,numbers 5, 1989, and 8, 1991. A pro-file map of Oztoque is in number 6,1989.)

Following the success of theMexpé 2002 expedition (see articlein this issue), a team of six caversfrom Quebec and two from PaísVasquo, Spain, went to the SierraNegra in April and May 2003 topursue exploration in the HoyaGrande area. Although at one point

some paranoid cavers consideredstopping the expedition because ofthe unusually high concentration ofhuge black and hairy spiders, thesituation quickly returned to nor-mal after a local man from Tepepaexplained that these cave inhabit-ants are non-lethal—“¡Te pica y duelemucho!”

Exploration was mainly concen-trated in Gimnástica Selvática, LaCiudad, and Mygalomania. Atfirst, the main objective was to findnew entrances to Gimnástica thatmight allow reaching a fossil levelseen in 2002 and possibly bypass-ing the –426 sump, thus confirmingthe junction with Las Brumas. Un-fortunately, even an aid climb up-stream of the sump did not lead toa connection. But the Gimnásticasystem now has seven entrances, fora total length of 3206 meters.

During a lazy ridgewalking after-noon near base camp, two impres-sive entrances were discovered.TP6-03-8 and TP6-03-9 finally con-nected to the enormous room, 150by 240 meters, in La Ciudad, a caveexplored during Mexpé II, back in

Guillaume Pelletier rappelling intothe 46-meter entrance shaft of TP6-03-

8 during Mexpé 2003. Alain Goupil.

members of the NationalGuard and state police, Cityof Puebla firemen and para-medics, four state delega-tions of the Red Cross rescueorganization, and numerouscavers, many of them friendsof Mariano, were among thepeople assisting in the ef-fort. The press arrived aswell, with three satellite-television trucks and report-ers from a radio station andseveral newspapers.

On Monday, April 12, theMexican Consulate in Aus-tin arranged special visas fortravel into Mexico, and thefollowing day U.S. sumpdivers Steve Ormeroid fromOhio and R. D. Milhollinfrom Texas arrived at thesite. In a series of dives thatlasted until the following af-ternoon, they were able tolocate Mariano’s body float-ing in a lake chamber on thefar side of the sump, about70 meters in. An examina-tion of his equipment show-ed all equipment in place,

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December 1989.Finally, the Mygalomania cave

gave them hope, up to the end ofthe expedition, of connecting to theAfluente de los Alrededores, thelocal collector stream in SistemaTepepa, but unfortunately both ac-tive and fossil passages became tootight, although the air current wasstill really strong. According to thesurvey, only 130 meters distanceand 53 meters depth separate theends of this potential connection.

With more than 4 kilometers ofpassages mapped, the 2003 expedi-tion showed that lots of new discov-eries lie ahead in the Hoya Grandearea. This is also shown by the sink-ing surface stream of 0.5 cubicmeter per second that has not yetbeen found underground. Does thiswater flow toward the RíoCoyolapa, as proposed by Steve

Worthington in 1989, or is itgoing toward the Río Pet-lapa to the south? Source:Guillaume Pelletier.

On Friday, April 16, 2004,just after breaking camp af-ter the Oztoquito diving ac-cident, the Cruz Roja caversfrom San Luis Potosí wereasked by the Cruz Roja andPuebla’s Protección Civil tohelp recover the body of a20-year-old man, JaimeHernández Cruz, who haddrunkenly committed sui-cide by jumping into a pitthought by those in RanchoLa Garza, near Zitlala,Municipio Huitlalpan, inthe Sierra Norte de Puebla,to be 300 meters deep. Thepit turned out to be about 60meters deep, with the bodyon a ledge 45 meters down.The next day, firefighters,Cruz Roja members, andmembers of Espeleo RescateMéxico recovered the bodyin 3.5 hours. The pit had noname, so locals and the caversinvolved named it Sótanode La Garza (20°01′47″N,97°41′93″W). Local peoplesay there are many more likeit in the vicinity, and thatnobody, Mexican, gringo, orotherwise, has explored

major objectives. The first was toexplore the pits in the Tetepán areain order to find a connection to theknown passages upstream in Coyo-latl. The second objective was to doa surface survey of all area caves inorder to locate them accurately ona topo map, since many of the sitesthat were explored before 1990were only approximately jotteddown on a map, without using aGPS unit.

The GSAB team, composed ofeleven Belgian cavers and twoMexicans from SMES and UNAM,started out by continuing workdone the previous year in TZ-48, orHueso Dos. During the 2002 expe-dition, a major route heading to-ward the resurgence of Coyolatlhad been found there, and explora-tion had stopped at the –240-meterlevel at the top of a 40-meter pit.(See Mexico News, Puebla, AMCSActivities Newsletter 26.) The 2003team descended the shaft, followeda stream canyon to a 10-meter pit,and then continued down the strikealong a large passage, until at –45meters the team reached a majorintersection. Ahead, the streamflowed along a 10- to 20-meter-wide, almost level passage, withceiling out of sight. A series ofinfeeders increase the river’s flowconsiderably over the next kilome-ter, but then a sump bars the way. Awell-decorated upper level near thesump enabled the team to bypassthe flooded section, and the riverwas rejoined. However, a few hun-dred meters farther, a second areaof sumps again stopped forwardprogress. Team after team searchedthe area, where strong air disap-pears into huge piles of breakdown.No way on was found, frustratingly,because according to calculations,the team was less than 100 metersfrom reaching the passages up-stream in Coyolatl. TZ-48 is now3840 meters long and 470 metersdeep.

TZ-44, whose entrance was dis-covered in 2002, was then explored.Successive pits and downclimbsbrought the team to a very largemeander at –140 meters. This pas-sage, intersected by pits, took themto the –270-meter level, whereprogress was stopped by breakdown

The body recovery at Sótano de LaGarza, Puebla. Protección CivilEstatal del Estado de Puebla.

them. Source: Antonio AguirreÁlvarez. (See also http://ermexico.tripod.com/lagarza/lagarza.htm.)

The 2003 annual Belgian expedi-tion, which took place between Feb-ruary 19 and March 21, focused onits project area of Tetepán, locatedat an elevation of 1000 meters in theTzontzecuiculi range in the state ofPuebla. Also called the Sierra Negra,the Tzontzecuiculi massif is part ofthe Sierra Madre Oriental. In 1985,two major resurgences were discov-ered, and it is believed that togetherthey drain most of the area of themassif. One of the resurgences,Coyolatl, was explored by theGroupe Spéléo Alpin Belge in 1985and is located at an elevation of 380meters. The cave is 19 kilometerslong and 240 meters deep.

The 2003 expedition had two

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piles, with good airflow. A goodlead remains in TZ-44 where a sidestream plunges into a pit at –110meters, yet cannot be found fatherdown in the cave. TZ-44 is 630meters long and 270 meters deep.

HU-40, or Tepechicuautli, was(re)discovered during the surfacesurvey. A large opening 20 by 30meters at the bottom of a hugedoline leads to a gorgeous, break-down-filled entrance room bathedin green light. Two pits give accessto a horizontal gallery of great di-mensions (15 by 30 meters) fol-lowed by a narrower network ofpassages that end at the –170 metersat an impenetrable water-filledconstriction. After surveying 410meters, and shortly before the ter-minal constriction, the team foundboot prints in a muddy side stream.It turned out that this was Aztutla,a cave previously explored in 1987,but misplaced on the old maps.

Despite the fact that two partici-pants had to abruptly leave the ex-pedition after getting hurt—onewith broken ribs from a 4-meter falland the other hit on the knee byrockfall—the 2003 GSAB expedi-tion was a success, having returnedwith a –470, a –270, and about 5 ki-lometers of passage surveyed.Source: Summary by Yvonne Dromsof notes in French by RichardGrebeude, Serge Delaby, and SophieVerheyden, Regards 48, May–June2003.

See also the material on Tlaloc2002 under Veracruz.

QUINTANA ROOThe year 2003 marked the second

QRSS convention, which was heldin Playa del Carmen on the eve-nings of September 5 and 6. It wasour intention to provide the localcommunity with two evenings ofpresentations on the status of vari-ous cave investigations in QuintanaRoo. Two new maps of underwatercaves were presented during theconvention. Several presentationsaddressed the expanding pursuit ofdry-cave exploration and survey inthis region. The event was free tothe public, and over three hundredpeople attended. Here is the rosterof talks:

“Conservation and Safety Projects:Past, Present, and Future,” byBernadette Carrion and ScottCarnahan.

“Dry and Wet Cave Connections,”by Fred Devos.

“Underwater Caves of Bacalar,” byAndreas Matthes.

“Understanding the Hydrogeologyof Quintana Roo: Hydrogeologyand Underwater Exploration,”by Luis Marín.

“Methods for Mapping,” by SamMeacham.

“Ancient Maya Rock Art and RitualCave Use in Northern QuintanaRoo,” by Dominique Rissolo.

“Closed Circuit Rebreather Explo-ration,” by Steve Bogaerts.

“Sistema Camilo,” by Renee Power.“The NSS-CDS in Mexico,” by Steve

Ormeroid.“What is the Quintana Roo Speleo-

logical Survey?” by Jim Coke.“Underwater Cave Photography,”

by Denis Tapparel.“Surface Ecology and Biodiversity

of Cenotes,” by Jamie Rotenberg.We would like to thank all of our

speakers for two evenings of superbpresentations and their willingnessto share their work with others. Wewould also like to thank our volun-teers for their help, Greg Brown forhis assistance at the projector tableand Laura Bush for attending to theduties of Master of Ceremonies.Source: Jim Coke in Underwater Spe-leology, November 2003, and NSSNews, December 2003.

A major expedition to push OxBel Ha, longest cave in Mexico andthe longest underwater cave in theworld, was held during November2003. A helicopter was used to takegear to the base camp, moving 1.5tons in an hour. Despite constantrain, the camp held up well. In ap-proximately thirty dives over twoweeks, divers Sam Meacham, BilPhillips, Steve Bogaerts, Roberto

Chávez, and Andrés Labarthe ex-plored and surveyed more than 15kilometers of new passage, makingthe cave 122 kilometers long. Biland Steve accounted for 90 percentof that. At the end of the trip, therewere seventy known cenote en-trances to the system. Source: SamMeacham.

In a span of two weeks in early2004, two new connections fromSistema Ox Bel Ha to other caveswere discovered. Connections toYax’chen and Upstream Ayim addedover 10 kilometers to the overallsystem, which now has 133,439meters of underwater survey, whichshould make it the ninth longestcave, wet or dry, in the world.Source: Jim Coke.

In February 2003, the ComitéDépartemental de Spéléologie duVal de Marne had an expeditionof about ten cave divers, mostlyFrench, to the east coast of theYucatan Peninsula. The agenda in-cluded mainly jungle cave dives inthe heart of Maya country, but somedry caves were also included. Noless than 5.3 kilometers of virginpassage, 5 kilometers of which wasunderwater, was discovered, most-ly at a single large system near theX’el Ha laguna and nature park. Thesystem Pitch-Xunaan Ha will be 20kilometers long when a connectionis made. The flow of 5 cubic metersper second indicated that humanpassage should be possible, even ifareas of collapse are encountered.An exit to the sea will likely befound in X’el Ha if a very fracturedarea can be passed. A 300-meter sec-tion of highway that passes over thearea collapsed a few years ago. Thefresh-water conduits are very large.

But the system defends itselfwell. Virgin leads are increasinglyhard to reach, and up to 7.75 hoursof diving through very mazy sec-tions is required to get to them. Butmachetes, perseverance, and mod-ern techniques will allow explorersto continue to make progress. Tobe able to explore these cenotes,which were water sources for thegreat Maya civilization, in the midstof the Maya ruins on the peninsula,is absolutely magical. Source:

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anonymous note at http//:www.speluncamundi.com/dev/actualite/depeche/php?numero=878, trans-lated from French by Yvonne Droms.

The fourteenth French Yucatanexpedition was held from January30 to February 17, 2004. Participantswere Frédéric Bonacossa, PhilippeBrunet, Bruno Delprat, ChristopheDepin, Anne Dutheillet, BernardGlon, Philippe Imbert, ChristianThomas, and Marco Rotzinger.More than 10 kilometers of virgincave rewarded the efforts of theeight cave divers, who continuedthe French exploration of the cen-otes on the east coast of the YucatanPeninsula that they began in 1996.The expedition’s main objective wasto pursue cave-diving leads, butsome dry caves were also on theprogram, all in the heart of theMaya lands in the south of Mexico.

The underground river in theCave of Pitch was not connected toits continuation in Xunaan-Ha inspite of the fact that 1.5 kilometersof new flooded passage was discov-ered downstream. There are still afew dozen meters missing from aconnection that would create a 23-kilometer system.

Farther south, Cenote Sole,which runs under a hotel, waspushed. Two kilometers of passageled downstream to an underwaterresurgence at –5 meters in the oceanand upstream into a convolutednetwork of passages.

A new start at the downstreamendpoint of Altar Maya, beyond acollapse that we were able to locatein the jungle by GPS from our sur-vey data, allowed us to progress afew kilometers in a network devel-oped parallel to the coastline.

To the north, the cave Aluxes issimilar to Altar Maya, but out of thewater. The addition of a few kilo-meters of passage makes it the long-est air-filled cave in the Yucatan.Source: An e-mail posting to theFrench caver list-serve by FrédéricBonacossa, translated from Frenchby Yvonne Droms. See also theSpelunca Mundi web site http://www.speluncamundi.com/dev/actualite/depeche.php?numero=992&acces=1.

• •

The Local Speleo Survey Projectwas introduced in 2002 to bring lo-cal caver divers into the exploration,survey, and cartography commu-nity. The targets selected were Cen-ote Angelita and Cenote el Bal-neario. Permission to survey Ange-lita was denied by the local INAHrepresentative. The exploration andresurvey of el Balneario was con-ducted in mid-2002, and since thenthe data have been sitting idle,largely due to a strong high-touristseason. Matt Matthes has now fin-ished the first draft of the map.Source: ProTec Newsletter, August2003.

A new cavern tour has been es-tablished in the Kukulkan sectionof the Chak Mol (or Chac Mool)cave system. The installation hadtwo main objectives. First was tocreate a new cavern tour for thegrowing cenote tour business inorder to take some of the pressureoff of other entrances and distrib-uting the visiting divers among cav-erns. The second was to give cav-ern guides an option not to use therestriction between the Little Brotherentrance and the Kukulkan cenote.The original white line has been re-placed by new yellow main line,and new warning signs have beenplaced close to the restriction andthe Kukulkan passage.

The partially deteriorated yellowguide lines in Ponderosa-Edenhave been replaced. In the river run,the first 500 feet have been changedto new line, and a warning sign hasbeen installed at the beginning ofthe passage. In the main cavern areatoward the Coral cenote, all of theline has been changed to a new yel-low line, and a warning sign hasbeen installed at the jump line to-ward the Chapel. The Chapel jumpline has been cut back some 80 feet(24 meters), as well. Source: ProTecNewsletter, August 2003.

During March 2003, members ofthe Cambrian Foundation diveteam met in Akumal to conduct itsfifth expedition to Sistema Camilo.About 1422 meters of new cave wasadded to the system, and 828 metersresurveyed. The cave, whose mainCamilo entrance is a karst window

with marginal flow, now has morethan 9 kilometers of passage.Depths range from 10 to 25 meters,mainly the deeper part of thatrange, which is unusual for that partof Mexico. The halocline is in therange from 21 to 24 meters deep.Most of the cave is very dark, butthe run between Calavera andMuchachos cenotes is much lighterand highly decorated; it is also theshallowest part of the cave. The ex-pedition conducted some scientificwork, some educational outreach tostudents in the U.S. by e-mail, andsome filming for National Geo-graphic Today. Source: UnderwaterSpeleology, July 2003 (where there isa small, totally illegible map of thecave).

SAN LUIS POTOSÍDuring a BASE-jumping expedi-

tion to the Sótano de las Golon-drinas, there was an accident onNovember 19, 2003. For many of theparticipants, it was their first timeat the cave, so they were all rap-pelling in to inspect the landingarea and get a feel for the dimen-sions of the cave before makingtheir first jumps. They were usingPetzl five-bar racks on nearly new11-millimeter static PMI rope.

Dave Flannell was approximately120 meters from the bottom of the330-meter rappel when for reasonsunknown he lost control of his de-scent. Three team members alreadyon the bottom reached Dave withinthirty seconds, and resuscitationefforts were begun. Another teammember who is an EMT was low-ered from the top and took overtwenty-two minutes after the fall.After forty-six minutes, with nosign of recovery, CPR was stopped.The next four hours were spentcarefully recovering Dave’s bodyand extracting [with a winch] theremaining team members from thebottom of the cave. Dave’s body wasnot moved from the top of the caveuntil after a prayer ceremony by aHuastecan priest and a candleplaced by Dave’s body had burnedout late at night. The Huastecs’genuine care and concern was verymoving. The group called off theirplans to jump into the pit out of re-spect for Dave’s friends and family

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and the local people.The victim was wearing rappel-

ling gloves but no helmet. Totalweight on rope was about 210pounds (95 kilograms). There wasno gear failure of any kind. Nodrug or alcohol was involved, theweather was cool, and the victimwas well hydrated and had waterwith him during his descent.Sources: Bryan [last name unknown]on BLiNC magazine message boardat www.blincmagazine.com/forum/, post number 15614, November 23,2003; and reply by Jay EpsteinRamírez, post 15473, November 29.

Note: It is likely that a rappel intoGolondrinas is the first rappel formany of the BASE jumpers. Golon-drinas would not seem to be a goodplace to learn to rappel. Anothercomment on the BLiNC forum(#15461) by a BASE jumper says, “Ifyou can be a confident skydiver andBASE jumper, a free rappel is a walkin the park.” Now they know.

On December 1, 2002, MichelMenin from France and CatherineLéger from Canada crossed the topof Sótano de las Golondrinas on atight wire 131 feet long, up to 1131feet above the floor. This was awomen’s record for Léger. Midway,the two funambulists passed on thewire, another world altitude record.Source: Catherine Léger.

A group from Saltillo did Golon-drinas the day after the BASEjumper’s accident. They were rockclimbers who occasionally try theirhands at other activities, apparently.The group, obviously inexperi-enced at what they were attempt-ing, had rented a 13-millimeter ropeand had great difficulties usingtheir racks. At least one person tooktwo hours to reach the bottom. One“added a safety carabiner to hisrack, which allowed him to relievesome of the pressure of the rope”and descend in 25 minutes. Twoothers declined to go down at all,and one descended 10 meters be-fore climbing back out, followingwhich “she was lowered down tothe bottom attached to the rope.”Sources: Mónica Ponce and FofoGonzález.

• •

de El Abra Cave Map Folio in 1989,but the plan has not been publishedbefore.

TAMAULIPASCueva de El Abra is a roadside

cave south of the town of CiudadMante on the main highway southto Valles. You can’t miss the hugeentrance if you are heading northduring the day. You can now driveyour car to the base of the trail, andthere is a new concrete stairwaywith pretty orange handrails all theway to the cave and through thehorizontal section. It appears thatsomeone has been clearing an areain the cave of breakdown, perhapsto make a level area for tourist talks.You can now do the upper part ofthe cave, back to the domepit, wear-ing flip-flops. Source: David Locklear.

The Mexican magazine Expedi-ción, September-October 2003, con-tains an article on a Proyecto Espe-leológico Purificación undergroundcamp in Cueva del Tecolote. Thearticle is by Rodolfo González Lunaand Gustavo Vela Turcott and is

heavily illustrated with photo-graphs by Gustavo. The same March2003 trip, which added 3913 metersof survey to make the cave 40,475meters long, is the subject of a re-port in Death Coral Caver 13.

Recent attempts to reach theDragon River section of SistemaPurificación from the Cueva delBrinco entrance have been thwartedby a sump at the Mud Funnels,which used to sump only in wetweather. Perhaps shifting break-down downstream of the sump hasmade it permanent. Further at-tempts to push the Dragon Riverwill be made from the Sumidero deOyamel entrance. Source: DeathCoral Caver 13.

Cueva Oscura, Los San Pedros,Tamaulipas. Length 120 meters,depth 95 meters. UTM coordinates458752E, 2641500N. Cueva Oscurais located 3.6 kilometers northwestof Los San Pedros at an elevation of1881 meters. It is north of the LosSan Pedros–El Chihue road. Fromthe entrance sink, a steeply sloping

Wire-walkers over Sótano de lasGolondrinas. Ben Kim.

Mercedes Otegui and Gil-berto Torres prepared a re-port on the sacred cavesCueva del Brujo and Cuevadel Aire, located at the west-ern end of the town of Hui-chihuayán, municipio ofHuehuetlán, on Rancho SanJuanito, and their impor-tance to the local Tenek,Nahuatl, and Pames indig-enous people of the Huaste-can region. Based on theirritual importance and theecology and biodiversity ofthe area, the governor of SanLuis Potosí arrived there onDecember 27, 2003, and de-clared the site a “wild andprotected place.” Source: JimSherrell.

This old map of Sótanodel Nopal Grande, which isnear Sótano de los Monos inthe Sierra de El Abra, wasrecently discovered by BillRussell and has been re-drawn by Bev Shade. Theprofile was previously pub-lished in the AMCS’s Sierra

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passage leads under a 10-meterheadwall, soon reaching the top ofa pit, which drops down throughan opening in flowstone and thenvertically 15 meters to a tilted massof flowstone across the bottom ofthe pit. The passage at the bottomwas once large, but is now mostlyplugged with flowstone. Afterabout 30 meters, there is a secondpit, only 22 meters deep but requir-ing a 35-meter rope. At the bottomof this pit is another mass of erodedflowstone. Behind the flowstone, awindow leads to a 5-meter dropto a climbdown, where the cavedefinitely ends in a small pool.Throughout the cave there is exten-sive eroded flowstone, evidence ofa change from a period of deposition

cave on January 1, 1986. Source:Death Coral Caver 13, 2003.

Cueva de El Violín, La Canoa,Tamaulipas. Length 169 meters,depth 5 meters. UTM coordinates454621E, 2648300N. This cave is lo-cated 3300 meters east-southeast ofConrado Castillo. It is located on aledge in a massive cliff at 1160meters elevation. In the wet seasona stream flows out of the entranceand cascades off the ledge to thebottom of Cañón la Cueva. Thereare many pools throughout thecave, and five sumps. There is anupper level near the entrance thatends in a sump. The dry cave pas-sages are floored by bedrock andflowstone. About 60 meters into thecave are three sumps clustered to-gether south of the main passage.The cave was surveyed to a lengthof 162 meters and explored south-east another 90 meters to a fifthsump. This is a very promising cavethat probably leads into a majorcave system located parallel to andbetween Sistema Purificación andthe caves of the Río Corona drain-age. It should be revisited duringthe driest season, when the sumpsmay be open.

The existence of Cueva de ElViolín was inferred during an air-plane flight by the Oztotl FlyingClub in September 1989, when awaterfall was spotted coming off aledge in the wall of Cañón la Cueva,below the meadow known as ElViolin. A group of cavers bush-whacked to a point where the cliffcould be rigged from above on No-vember 27, 1991. Peter Sprousemade a 150-meter rappel to theforested ledge and located the en-trance. Since a short rappel was re-quired to reach it from the ledge,he had to cut a short piece off of themain rope. He then radioed for JohnFogarty to come down, and theyexplored and mapped the cave. Thelong climb back up the cliff in thedark afforded views of the citylights of Santa Engracia. Source:Death Coral Caver 13, 2003.

The Death Coral Caver, source ofsome of the material in this “MexicoNews,” is the annual magazine ofProyecto Espeleológico Purificación.

to a time of erosion. Cueva Oscurawas found on October 18, 1985, byMark Minton and Nancy Weaver,who explored the first drop. Theyand William Russell surveyed the

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Purificación Area Speleometry

Long Caves Length (m)1. Sistema Purificación, Tamaulipas 93,7552. Cueva del Tecolote, Tamaulipas 40,4753. Sótano de Las Calenturas, Tamaulipas 8,3084. Sistema Cretacico, Nuevo León 6,0655. Cueva de La Llorona, Tamaulipas 3,5406. Sótano de la Cuchilla, Tamaulipas 2,7167. Cueva del Río Corona, Tamaulipas 2,3018. Cueva Paraíso Difícil, Tamaulipas 1,7999. Sistema Manicomio Paralelo de Satanas, Nuevo León 1,639

10. Cueva del Borrego, Tamaulipas 1,464

Deep Caves Depth (m)1. Sistema Purificación, Tamaulipas 9532. Sistema Cretacico, Nuevo León 4653. Cueva del Tecolote, Tamaulipas 4244. Cueva de La Llorona, Tamaulipas 4125. Sima Chupacable, Nuevo León 4026. Sistema Manicomio Paralelo de Satanas, Nuevo León 3267. Sótano del Caracol, Tamaulipas 3018. Sumidero Anaconda, Nuevo León 2789. Sótano de la Cuchilla, Tamaulipas 207

10. El Hundido, Tamaulipas 186

revised from Peter Sprouse, Death Coral Caver 13, 2003.

Issues of the magazine are availablefrom the AMCS or the PEP. Formore information on the PEP, seewww.purificacion.org.

Number 303 (May 2002) of MéxicoDesconocido contains “The FantasticUnderground World of the South-west of Tamaulipas,” by Jean LouisLacaille Músquiz. Featured areCueva de El Abra, Grutas de Quin-tero, and the Nacimiento del RíoMante. Several other caves in theSierra de El Abra and the El CieloBiosphere Reserve in the Sierra deGuatemala are mentioned. The ar-ticle mentions that machinery usedin mining phosphates in Quinterohas caused much damage to thecave, part of the good conservationmessage in the article. An Englishversion of the article was found atthe magazine’s web site http://www.mexicodesconocido.com.mx/english/deportes/terrestres/.

NASA has approved a substan-tial (for caver projects, if not NASA)three-year grant for principal in-vestigator Bill Stone and others toenhance the sonar cave-mapper

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technology developed for Stone’sWakulla II Project in Florida. (See,for example, the NSS News, Septem-ber 2000.) The goal of the DEPTHXproject is to build a system capableof autonomous underwater explo-ration and return navigation, with-out the divers that drove it atWakulla, and of searching for andreturning with biological samples.Caver Marcus Gary will be incharge of logistics at the project’s

field-testing location, Rancho LaAzufrosa, Tamaulipas, where thedevice will be used to explore thedeep cenotes, including El Zacatón.

VERACRUZA joint Italian and Mexican cav-

ing expedition, Tlaloc 2002, washeld in December 2002 and January2003 in east-central Mexico. Twelveto fifteen cavers participated in tworeconnaissance camps, the first

from 18 to 29 December 2002 in theHueytamalco area, Puebla, and theother from 6 to 9 January 2003around San Andrés Tenejapan, nearOrizaba in Veracruz.

The Hueytamalco area had pre-viously been checked in 1998, whenseveral caves were explored bysome of the members of the currentexpedition. One notable cave wasfound, Miquizco, previously calledAmiquisco, with a length of about

25


1.5 kilometers. It is a large insur-gence located at the bottom of ablind valley. A sizable stream flowsinto it, and it can also be accessedby means of two ojos, parallel pitsapproximately 70 meters deep. Inaddition to a few side passages inMiquizco, other interesting and to-tally or partially unknown caveswere explored and surveyed: Cuevadel Cocinero, 190 meters long and57 deep, and Sótano de los Cochi-nos, over 500 meters long and over80 meters deep. The second of thoseshows potential. The in-cave riverwas partially followed, both up-stream and downstream, and thearea it traverses bodes well; its sur-vey is incomplete. Numerous otherentrances found in the area shouldbe checked better in the future.

In the San Andrés Tenejapanarea, new to us, we concentratedmainly on two caves, Capaka, 161meters deep, over 350 meters long,and which showed no trace of pre-vious exploration, and Petlacala,168 meters deep and over 200meters long, in which evidence wasfound of a partial prior descent byunknown cavers. The entrances, lo-cated just minutes away from camp,were pointed out to us by some lo-cal villagers. We believe that muchmore could be discovered by en-larging the area of search.

In addition, another very inter-esting region was checked in thevicinity of Santa Catarina Ocotlán,near Nochixtlán in Oaxaca, whereMexican cavers are exploring somepits. However, here we had to dealwith the hostility of some of the lo-cal authorities, who did not lookfavorably on the presence of strang-ers in their territory. Therefore wehad to break camp after only onenight.. The situation should havebeen cleared up since, thanks to theintervention of some supporters oflocal caving, an encouraging pros-pect for the future.

A special team dedicated itself tothe photographic documentation ofthe expedition, while also checkingout some other caves of esthetic in-terest, both karst and lava, amongwhich Juxtlahuaca in Guerreroshould be mentioned. The nameTlaloc refers to the Aztec god of rainand water. His attentions blessed

the entire expedition, in spite of re-sults that did not meet our expecta-tions.

Participants were from GruppoSpeleologico Cai Belpasso, G. S.Bergamasco le Nottole, Speleo ClubIbleo, Unión de Rescate e Investiga-ción en Oquedades Naturales, andthe speleological section of themountaineering club at InstitutoPolitéchnico Nacional. Source:Giorgio Pannuzzo in Speleologica 47,December 2002, translated byYvonne Droms.

YUCATÁNAn INAH underwater archaeol-

ogy project took place in cenotes innorthern Yucatán in March 2001.One of the major sites, dubbed in-formally The Well of Time, was en-tered by a 20-meter drop through ashaft into a large room. The lakecovering the floor of the roomyielded many valuable finds, in-cluding the first well-articulatedMaya skeleton found in an under-water cave and a burial, obviouslyceremonial, with pots of offerings,including the skull of a dog. Unlikesome well-known sites, such as thecenote at Chichén Itzá, these sitesdid not have a lot of gold and jew-elry. A cave off the coast, enteredwhere freshwater resurges, waspushed to back under the mainlandduring three dives, the longest ofwhich reached a penetration of 482meters. Sources: National GeographicMagazine, October 2003, and Ad-vanced Diver Magazine 16, 2004.

The web site http://mexico.aim -net.mx/Yucatan/, evidently somesort of tourist promotion site, hassome information, in poor English,on caves in the state. Included is acrude map of Actun Kaua, calledhere Gruta Kaab de Kaua, made byEspeleogrupo Yucatán A.C. in 1991.The text says, “To enter the cavernfirst you have to through a smallentry, that has 4 meters length and5 of width. You can also enter bymaking holes with explosives. . . .”

The May-June 2004 issue of Ar-chaeology magazine has an article onunderwater archaeology in Yuca-tán. Many of the cenotes containskeletons, pottery sherds, or other

evidence of the ancient Maya. Onephoto in the article shows a stone,once part of a monument of somesort, containing the glyph for 3 Ix,a day in the 260-day sacred countmade by combining thirteen num-bers with twenty day names. Thesacred date and the day of the 365-day year together combine to forma date in the Calendar Round thatwon’t repeat for roughly 52 years.The article mainly discusses thework of Guillermo de Anda, a cave-diving archaeologist at the Univer-sidad Autónoma de Yucatán. Thereis, according to a footnote to thearticle, an interactive web site on thesubject at www.archaeology.org/interactive/cenotes.

MAPSThere’s an interesting interactive

map of Mexico at the INEGI sitehttp://galileo.inegi.gob.mx/website/mexico/viewer.htm. You can click toenable different features like con-tour lines or geology. There’s evena button to show cave entrances, butthey don’t seem to have actually putany cave locations there. Source:Peter Sprouse.

I recently heard from someonewith contacts in the Mexican mapagency INEGI. He helped answer aquestion I’d been wondering aboutfor quite awhile, What datum weretheir topo maps in? While theystated NAD27, they did not specifywhether it was NAD27 CONUS(continental US) or NAD27 Mexico,both of which appear on GPSmenus. There is a difference ofabout 2 meters, which could be sig-nificant to cavers. According to mysource, they used NAD27 CONUS.

INEGI has now switched toITRF92 datum, which you probablywon’t find listed in your GPS. I amtold that it is essentially the sameas WGS84, however. I understandthat WGS84 (or ITRF92) is about 8centimeters more accurate thanNAD27, but I’m not sure it wasworth switching. Now we will haveadjoining maps with grids thatdon’t match up by 200 meters.Source: Peter Sprouse.

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SEVENTH MEXICANCONGRESS OFSPELEOLOGY

The Federación de Espeleológicade América Latina y el Caribe, theUnión Mexicana de AgrupacionesEspeleológicas, and the mountain-eering club at the Instituto Tecno-lógico y de Estudios Superiores deMonterrey invite you to the SeventhMexican Congress of Speleologyand the Fifth Congress of FEALCin Monterrey, Nuevo León, Febru-ary 2–6, 2005. The meeting will beat Monterrey Tec, with the themeLegislation and Protection of theSubterranean Environment. The

event will have a strong interna-tional component, both in speakersand participants.

Events will include a welcomedinner, a formal dinner, a field trip,and a closing dinner. Registrationis US$50 until October 1, 2004, and$100 afterward and covers events,entrance to the conference, and aregistration package. (Students andmembers of UMAE receive a 50percent discount.) Lodging andmeals other than those mentionedabove are the responsibility of thoseattending. There will be hotelrooms with various prices available,as well as camping.

There will be both poster and oral

presentations. The deadline for sub-mitting abstracts is November 1,2004. Subject of presentations isopen, but they ought to have somerelation to the theme. Send abstractsto [email protected].

Prospective vendors should con-tact Denisse Ovalle ([email protected]) or Andrés Castro([email protected]).

For further information, contactRodolfo González, [email protected] or see http://www. m o n t a n i s m o t e c . c o m /congresoUMAE2005. Source: FofoGonzález.

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DEEP CAVES OF MEXICOMark Minton

May 2004Depth in meters

Updates and corrections:

Mark MintonDepartment of Natural SciencesNew Mexico Highlands UniversityP. O. Box 9000Las Vegas, NM [email protected]

Sistema Cheve Oaxaca 1484Sistema Huautla Oaxaca 1475Cueva Charco Oaxaca 1278Akemati Puebla 1226Kijahe Xontjoa Oaxaca 1223Sistema Ocotempa Puebla 1070Akemabis Puebla 1015Sonconga Oaxaca 1014Guixani Ndia Kijao Oaxaca 956Sistema Purificación Tamaulipas 953Sistema Perrito Oaxaca 906Sistema Tepepa (Ehécatl+Niebla) Puebla 900Nita Cho Oaxaca 894Sótano de Agua de Carrizo Oaxaca 843Sótano de El Berro Veracruz 838Sótano de Trinidad San Luis Potosí 834Resumidero el Borbollón San Luis Potosí 826X’oy Tixa Oaxaca 813Nita Ka Oaxaca 760Sistema H31-H32-H35 Puebla 753Sonyance Oaxaca 745Nita Xonga Oaxaca 740Yuá Nita Oaxaca 704Aztotempa Puebla 700Sótano de los Planos Puebla 694Sótano de Alfredo Querétaro 673Sistema Cuetzalan Puebla 658Sótano de Tilaco Querétaro 649Nita Nashí Oaxaca 641Cuaubtempa Superior Puebla 640Sistema Atlalaquía Veracruz 623Cueva de Diamante Tamaulipas 621R’ja Man Kijao Oaxaca 613Sistema de los Tres Amigos Oaxaca 604Nita He Oaxaca 594Meandro Que Cruce (H54) Puebla 588Sistema del Encanto Puebla 584Yometa Puebla 582Sótano de las Coyotas Guanajuato 581Sótano Arriba Suyo San Luis Potosí 563Sistema Tepetlaxtli Puebla 535Sótano del Río Iglesia Oaxaca 531Sótano de Nogal Querétaro 529Resumidero de la Piedra Agujerada San Luis Potosí 521Grutas de Rancho Nuevo Chiapas 520Sótano de Ahuihuitzcapa Veracruz 515Sistema Soconusco Chiapas 513Sótano de las Golondrinas San Luis Potosí 512Hoya de las Conchas Querétaro 508Sótano de Los Hernandez Querétaro 507

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LONG CAVES OF MEXICOMark MintonMay 2004Length in meters

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Sistema Ox Bel Ha Quintana Roo 133439Sistema Purificación Tamaulipas 93755Sistema Nohoch Nah Chich Quintana Roo 61143Sistema Dos Ojos Quintana Roo 56672Sistema Huautla Oaxaca 55953Cueva del Tecolote Tamaulipas 40475Sistema Cuetzalan Puebla 37676Kihaje Xontjoa Oaxaca 31373Sistema Tepepa (Ehécatl+Niebla) Puebla 26500Sistema Cheve Oaxaca 26194Sistema Sac Actun Quintana Roo 24404Sistema Soconusco Chiapas 21733Sistema Naranjal (Najarón-Maya Blue) Quintana Roo 21374Coyalatl Puebla 19000Sistema Aerolito Quintana Roo 18000Sistema Nohoch Kiin Quintana Roo 17386Sistema PonDeRosa (Pondazul, Eden) Quintana Roo 15019Grutas de los Aluxes Quintana Roo 14200Cueva de Alpazat Puebla 13678Sistema Yaxchen East Quintana Roo 13090Cueva del Río La Venta Chiapas 13000Atlixicaya Puebla 12200Cueva Pitch Quintana Roo 12000Sistema San Andrés Puebla 10988Cueva del Mano Oaxaca 10841Sistema Taj Mahal - Minotauro Quintana Roo 10600Actun Káua Yucatán 10360Grutas de Rancho Nuevo (San Cristóbal) Chiapas 10218Cueva del Arroyo Grande Chiapas 10207Sistema Abejas Quintana Roo 9743El Chorro Grande Chiapas 9650Sistema Tepetlaxtli Puebla 9600Sistema Chac Mol - Mojarra Quintana Roo 9193Cueva Quebrada Quintana Roo 9000Sótano de Las Calenturas Tamaulipas 8308Gruta del Tigre Quintana Roo 8200Nohoch Actun Quintana Roo 8200Xel-Ha Quintana Roo 8000Sumidero Santa Elena Puebla 7884Cueva Yohualapa Puebla 7820Cueva de la Peña Colorada Oaxaca 7793Cueva de Comalapa Veracruz 7750Sistema Xunaan-Ha (María Isabella) Quintana Roo 7600Sistema Camilo Quintana Roo 7397Sótano del Arroyo San Luis Potosí 7200Sistema Perrito Oaxaca 7148Cueva de la Puente San Luis Potosí 6978Sistema Huayateno (Guayateno) -Tecaltitlán Puebla 6911Sistema Actun Koh/Heder Quintana Roo 6800Cueva Charco Oaxaca 6710

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DEEP PITS OF MEXICOMark Minton

May 2004Depth in meters

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El Sótano (de El Barro) Entrance drop Querétaro 410Sótano de las Golondrinas Entrance drop San Luis Potosí 376Sótano de Tomasa Kiahua Entrance drop Veracruz 330Zacatón Entrance drop Tamaulipas 329Sótano de Alhuastle P’tit Quebec Puebla 329Nita Xonga Psycho Killer Oaxaca 310Sotanito de Ahuacatlán Second drop Querétaro 288Sótano del Arroyo Grande Entrance drop Chiapas 283Sistema de la Lucha Entrance drop Chiapas 280Sima Don Juan Entrance drop Chiapas 278Hálito de Oztotl Entrance Drop Oaxaca 250Sima Dos Puentes La Ventana Chiapas 250Resumidero del Pozo Blanco Entrance drop Jalisco 233Sótano del Aire Entrance drop San Luis Potosí 233Sistema Ocotempa Pozo Verde Puebla 221Live in Busch Entrance drop Oaxaca 220Sótano de Eladio Martínez Entrance drop Veracruz 220Sótano de los Planos Puits Tannant Puebla 220Sótano de Coatimundi Entrance drop San Luis Potosí 219Sótano de Sendero Entrance drop San Luis Potosí 217Resumidero el Borbollón Tiro Grande San Luis Potosí 217Sima de la Pedrada Entrance drop Chiapas 217Sima del Chikinibal Entrance drop Chiapas 214Cueva del Tizar Third drop San Luis Potosí 212Kijahe Xontjoa Son On Jan Oaxaca 210Nacimiento del Río Mante Macho Pit Tamaulipas 206Hoya de las Guaguas Entrance drop San Luis Potosí 202Sistema H3-H4 Puebla 200Kijahe Xontjoa Lajao Se Oaxaca 200Sima La Funda Entrance drop Chiapas 198Sótano de Soyate Entrance drop San Luis Potosí 195Sótano de Alpupuluca Entrance drop Veracruz 190Cuaubtempa Pozo con Carne Puebla 190Sótano de Tepetlaxtli no. 1 Entrance drop Puebla 190Sótano de Puerto de los Lob Entrance drop San Luis Potosí 189Sótano de Hermanos Peligrosos Second drop Veracruz 186Sima de Veinte Casas Entrance drop Chiapas 180Ahuihuitzcapa Entrance drop Veracruz 180Sistema Soconusco Darwin Chiapas 180Hoya de la Luz Entrance drop San Luis Potosí 180Croz 2 Entrance drop Puebla 180Sima del Cedro Entrance drop Chiapas 175Sótano de la Cuesta Entrance drop San Luis Potosí 174Sima Dos Puentes Entrance drop Chiapas 172Sótano de los Monos Entrance drop San Luis Potosí 171Sótano de Otates Third drop Tamaulipas 171El Socavón Entrance drop Querétaro 171Sótano de Tepetlaxtli no. 2 Entrance drop Puebla 170Sótano de los Ladrones Entrance drop Oaxaca 170Nita Diplodicus Entrance drop Oaxaca 170

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THE BURRO AND THE PICKLE:PROYECTO CERRO RABÓN 2004

Mike Frazier

It was a snowy, cold Januaryevening in the Rocky Mountains.

Mike Frazier and Nathan Noble hadpacked the Burro, a ’93 four-wheel-drive F-150, with the necessary sup-plies for a long journey. Like an oldburro, the truck sagged under theload, but it began to work its waysouth toward the Mexican borderand beyond. Minutes, hours, andthen days passed. They arrived atSan Bartolome Ayautla, the placebeneath the clouds, home of theirfriend Enrique and his family. Theyrented a secure room, distributedbaby clothes to local families, andprepared for the days that followed.

A morning found the duo cling-ing to the back of a small

pickup truck as it made its way upthe mountain. Their destination wasthe Río Santo Domingo canyon. Inthe canyon are the resurgences toseveral large cave systems. Arrivingat the put-in, a bridge just outsideof Quiotepec, at dusk, they inflatedthe Pickle. The Pickle was a brightgreen whitewater raft. They floatedto just past the town and madecamp. The following day waswindy. They ran several rapids andportaged another. Then one of themhit himself in the eye with a back-pack frame. Blood poured out,which could have been bad becauseof the remoteness, but it turned outto be only a lacerated eyelid. Theywere both getting a little sick, butwere happy nonetheless.

The third day on the river proveda little more sporting. They hadagreed at the start of the trip thatbecause they were a small team on

a remote, basically unknown river,it would be best to err on the sideof safety and portage any question-able rapids. Several times one of thepair insisted that the rapid justahead could be run. Several timesthe other talked him out of it. “Ithink we can make it,” said one.The other shook his head. “Dude,”he said, “I don’t think so.” Finallymachismo or perhaps stupidity pre-vailed. Gently eased into the chan-nel, the bright green boat wasquickly grabbed by the current.They attempted to back-paddle, butthe water quickly enveloped themand pushed them over a 2-meterdrop. Things soon turned from badto worse, when the inflatable hit arock and flipped the pair likehotcakes into the boiling froth. Mostwhitewater enthusiasts know tokeep their feet down-river, so as tobounce off rocks with their legsrather than their heads. The riverhad different ideas and shot themheadlong into the next rapid, upand over some large boulders. Theywere both fortunate to find refugeon a branch sticking up out of thewater. Even more miraculously,they had both held onto theirpaddles. From their vantage point,they could see the boat bobbingupstream, apparently caught in atug-of-war between water and rock.The dry-bag was still attached to itlike a giant yellow leech. They de-cided that one of them would haveto try to retrieve the boat, while thesecond stayed at the tree like a near-drowned rat to catch it in case itworked itself free. Swimming upthe river was out of the question.

The only possibility was to swimdownstream across to the oppositeshore, hike upstream, and approachthe boat from above. This of courseinvolved swimming the rapid allover again. By carefully picking hisway along the opposite shore, test-ing the water depth with his paddle,one of them was able to work hisway to the boat. A good nudge freedthe boat, and he quickly threw him-self onto it. Safely passing the rap-ids, he picked up the river rat.

Onward they descended. Theywould take unwanted baths twomore times before reaching the endof their journey, beyond the resur-gences of the Cheve and Huautlacave systems, respectively the deep-est and second-deepest in the West-ern Hemisphere. The water fromthe many limestone springs greatlyincreased the flow and turned theriver a clear aquamarine color.One’s eyes can’t help glazing overwhen they gaze across the remote,rugged landscape. How many un-charted leads remain to be found?In some places the river cuts can-yons with cliffs hundreds of metershigh.

Since the start of the river trip, thetwo had been sick, with vomitingand an evil dose of Montezuma’srevenge. They had lost the last pageof the map to an malevolent wave,but thought that they must be near-ing Ayautla. They were weighingtheir options when they passed un-der a footbridge swinging some 5or 10 meters above the river. Abridge meant there was a goodtrail, and good trails generallylead to people and towns. They

31


maneuvered the Pickle into an eddyand onto the sandy shore.

The day was still young as thepair rolled up the heavy boat andattached it to the backpack frame.Although the burdens were heavyand the trail immediately headedsteeply upward, they were enthu-siastic, because they had finally got-ten relief from the sickness that hadplagued them for several days.Trading packs now and then, theyclimbed upward through bananaand orange groves for several hours.The heat soon became intense, andthe water in the hundred-ounceCamelback they shared began todwindle rapidly. More hours pass-ed, and they ran into three menpicking coffee beans in a field.“Ayautla?” they asked, gesturingto the trail disappearing into thehillside above. “Si, Ayautla arriba,”replied one of the men, pointing to-ward the top of the mountain. Thisgave them renewed hope. They hadguessed that the distance from theriver to Ayautla was only a few ki-lometers, and it seemed that theyhad already come seven or eight.Looking at the ridge before them,they joked about its being a falsesummit. More hours passed, as theysweltered and rationed their pre-cious water, counting gulps. Thesummit indeed turned out to be afalse summit, the edge of a long ridgeclimbing ever skyward. They werelooking down on what they hadonce seen as the top when they con-sumed the last of their water andthe sun sank low in the western sky.Their once-crisp pace had turnedinto a slow, painful trudge. Theyhad hiked the entire day, and stillno sign of town. The day was turn-ing to dusk when the cavers cameupon a small thatch house. Theyasked the man who came out to seewhy his dogs were barking for di-rections to a spring. The farmerstepped into his house and returnedwith a pitcher of water. They drankit all, and the man then graciouslysupplied more. A woman soon ap-peared from inside the dirt-flooredhouse and offered some tamales,which the cavers politely but hun-grily ingested. The woman cleareda table inside and began preparingcoffee. The cavers related their river

journey from Quiotepec and thehike up the mountain seekingAyautla. The Mixtec man explainedthat the pair was about a half hourfrom San Isadoro and about an hourfrom San Juan Coatzospan, a townthat the cavers had passed throughon several occasions, including fourdays before riding in the back of atruck to the beginning of this adven-ture. San Juan is a Mixtec town sur-rounded on all sides by Mazatecareas. It is high on the southwestflank of the Cerro Rabón, a shorttwenty-minute drive up the moun-tain from Ayautla. They had left theriver too soon and been on thewrong trail, which took them muchhigher than necessary. As darknessset in, the cavers asked about a placeto sleep, and again the man showedhis generosity. Only after much in-sistence by the cavers the followingmorning did he accept fifty pesosfor his kindness. The pair onceagain set off on foot, and two hourslater they finally reached the high-way, where they soon caught a ridedown the mountain to la casaEnrique.

There were a few days to kill be-fore the caving in the Cerro

Rabón was scheduled to start. Hotshowers, cold beer, and a last-minute shopping spree in Tuxtepecwere on the schedule. Street grunt-ing (caver slang for buying mealsfrom street vendors) kept one caverfull and the other all too empty ashe went back into vomit mode.While heading back to Ayautla thenext afternoon, the men decided totake a 30-minute detour down a dirtand gravel road for a last dunk inthe river. While they drove acrossthe shifting cobbles along the river’sedge, the front sway bar broke freefrom its mounting on the frame. Itthen swung under the belly of theBurro and snapped the passenger’send of the tie rod. If this had hap-pened on the highway, it could havebeen deadly, and even here, 10 or12 kilometers from a paved road,this could have spelled big trouble.The nearest town with any kind ofauto parts store was a couple hours’drive down the highway, and it wasSunday afternoon and all the shopswould be closed. Again they had

good luck, this time in the form ofa young gentleman named Santos.First he helped pull the brokenparts. Then he drove to Jalapa deDíaz to look up a friend of his whowas a welder. Returning to theBurro with the repaired parts, hereassembled the suspension, andthey were back in business in lessthan two hours at a cost of aroundUS$20. They made it back to la casaEnrique as darkness fell and weregreeted by the smiling faces ofPolish cavers Malgorzata Barcz,Tomek Fiedorowicz, Artur Nowak,Katarzyna Okuszko, and PawelSkoworodko. The Proyecto CerroRabón team was assembled, and allthat remained was to receive per-mission from the town.

The first year of the project, per-mission had been acquired throughthe municipio. The second year, per-mission had had to be obtainedfrom the municipio and the presidenteof the town. This year, as mighthave been expected, they had tohave permission from the munici-pal government, the presidente, andthe conasupo of the edijo, head of thecommunity lands. Luckily, GraceBorengasser, Ernie Garza, Matt Oli-phant, Nancy Pistole, and CharlieSavvas, who were in the area forcaving or rafting adventures,showed up with copies of permis-sion letters from higher authoritiesjust moments before the scheduledmeeting with the conasupo—theonly meeting, coincidentally, wherethe letters were requested. At atown meeting, the cavers listenedto the story of a large, man-eatingbird that once lived in a nearbycave. She often feasted on the locals,until one day she picked up a fierceyoung Mazatec who managed toslay her with his machete. Thetownsfolk then banded togetherand delivered to the bird’s hatch-lings the same fate as their mother’s.At the meeting the cavers also hadto ease some of the standard appre-hensions: No, cavers weren’t look-ing for treasure, worshiping thedevil, or paying off any of thetown’s leaders. They were then pro-vided with three members of theVigilance Group to serve as guides,guards, and carriers. (The VigilanceGroup is appointed by the town to

32


watch over and protect the ejidoresources.)

The group woke up the nextmorning with sleepy eyes,

rushing feet, and last-minute cram-ming of items into pockets of thealready bulging packs. At the lastminute, somebody remembered theneed for cooking gas. Advice aboutthe river was given to the group thathad brought the letters, and the twogroups wished each other luck withthe river or Sistema de los TresAmigos.

The conasupo’s office lay on oneof the uppermost streets in Ayautla.After each guide was matched witha pack, the team headed eastwardtoward the edge of town, then be-gan veering northward along amuch thinner trail. The trail splitsat a large rock overlooking the high-way and the Río Santo Domingo.One branch slopes down toward thehuge resurgence of the Río Urua-pan [see AMCS Activities Newslet-ter 26, pp. 78–81]. The other turnssteeply upward toward Tres Amigos.Skirting above or sometimes belowsteep cliffs, the trail eventuallypasses a spring. Just beyond thespring is a much fainter trail head-ing downward. This trail ends at acave that has yet to be checked outby cavers. Their trail headed up-ward and north across clear-cutfields on east-facing slopes, thenloosely followed the cliff line eastagain.

Up ahead, a team member wasshouting wildly. Asked about thecommotion, he said, “Just steppedon a fer-de-lance.” There are severallittle nasties that make their homesin this cloud forest. Many are notso obvious. There is the tree whosebark is covered with a coating ofthick, sharp needles just waiting fora poorly placed hand. Even morenotorious is the mala mujer, whosenettle-like spines inject an itchy oil-based poison when they come intocontact with flesh. Scratching onlyspreads the oil, making things veryunpleasant all over.

The oldest guide, a stout man ofsixty-five, was starting to showsigns of fatigue. He was assuredthat tranquilo es bien and he need notrace. They had all day. A while later

he caught up with the others, whowere resting. The other guides ap-peared uncertain as to the locationof the cave. Only one of the guideshad ever been out this far fromtown, and that was as a sherpa forthe project in 2003. The cave had tobe close. (“Caves, they can hide, butthey can’t run.”— Nathan Noble.)Holding a finger to his lips, a gringoturned to the guides and whis-pered, “Escucha.” The forest wasfull of sounds, the usual shrills ofexotic birds and even the tumblingof a leaf from the canopy some 50meters above. But the sound theteam was listening for, the sound offalling water, could not be heard.“Esperar aqui,” the gringo said, anddisappeared into the forest alone.It was only a few minutes before hisvoice broke the silence. “La cuevaaqui.” He looked concerned, how-ever. Normally a small shower ofwater can be seen and heard flow-ing from a small lead high in theentrance shaft. Now it was only anoccasional drip. Hunters’ tricks likecutting a vine and letting it draininto one’s mouth might work wellfor a small drink, but it might be-come quite a task to collect enoughwater for group meals.

The team assembled in a semi-flat area just above the cave. Thiswas to be their base camp. Theypaid the guides, who, after a drinkof agua de maíz, disappeared in thedirection of town and left the caversto the work at hand. A lot had to bedone, and everyone set right to themany tasks. A tarp was set up in theentrance shaft to begin collectingwater. Tepolote fronds were col-lected and placed on the forest flooraround the camp. (Tepolote is anedible plant whose flavor raw isquite bitter, but which mixes wellwith black beans and salsa on a tor-tilla.) The fronds provide a goodbase for beds and walking, keepingthe mud to a minimum when itrains. The area gets about 6 metersof rain a year. A group shelter waserected, a latrine was established,and so on. By nightfall they had acozy little area, where three tentssnuggled happily, sides touching.There was also a modest groupcooking area and a zone for groupgear.

The next morning, six of theseven entered Sistema de los

Tres Amigos. One group of threewas headed to El Corazón de laAmiga, an immense, 5-acre roomwith a 120-meter-high ceiling thathad been found in 2003 [see AMCSActivities Newsletter 26, pp.70–75].They would try to push through thebreakdown at the bottom of theroom and scour it for other leads.The other group headed for Ave-nida So Co Mo Gro, a windy anddry, as far as it was known, passagethat takes off from the bottom of thefourth pitch, which is 41 metersdeep. The Corazón team workedtheir way into the breakdown flooran estimated 30 meters below thedeepest previously surveyed sta-tion in the cave. The SCMG teamprevailed as well, surveying openpassage before them. The floor be-came muddy soup where a smallspring joined the passage from atight, crawly side lead. They work-ed their way down through me-anders and several short drops toadd 40 meters to the depth of thispassage. The cave seemed to be go-ing, but they ran out of water.

The morning of February 5, twogroups of three entered the cave.One group returned to the Corazónroom to survey the previous day’sscoop and push some more. Thatteam ended up surveying the pre-dicted 30 meters of depth, stoppingat a constriction. The SCMG teamfared a little better. They ran out ofrope after pushing the passagedown an additional 82 meters indepth. They turned back where thecave had good air and water flowand the passage appeared to be get-ting bigger. During his exit from thecave, one member of that group hada close call. He discovered that hisD-link had opened and he washanging by only one side of his har-ness and one leg loop. Terrified, thecaver hooked one leg over a nearbyprojection and pulled himself closeto the wall to un-weight his harnessso he could reattach and readjusthis system. It’s your ass—checkyour system often. It turned out tobe a dramatically wet exit for bothgroups. Heavy rains that had begunfalling earlier in the day had turnedthe occasional drips in the 41-meter

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pit into a pounding shower. It wasa bit disconcerting for those in thegroup who usually cave in placesso cold that being hit by falling wa-ter means you are probably goingto die of hypothermia. Fortunately,everybody got out just fine. Therains continued throughout thenight.

At first light it was clear that thedrizzle would continue. Crawlingfrom their nests one by one, thecavers were shocked to see that atree about a third of a meter in di-ameter had fallen in the night. Itripped down part of the group shel-ter and missed one of the tents bycentimeters. They soon chopped offenough branches from the 10-meter-long tree to reopen the trailto the latrine. A group of five en-tered the cave armed with all theremaining Cancord 9-millimeterrope, 176 meters, as well as the longhandline from the slope in the en-trance passage.

When they reached the virgin pit,three people began to survey, whilethe remaining two started riggingdown a drop to a pool and througha short meander containing anothershort drop. Then, after climbing upa short distance, they reached theedge of an immense void. First alead line was set. Then two boltswere placed for a self-equalizingfigure-8. From here, one descendsto the first rebelay, and after cross-ing it safely, down to the second,then still downward to yet another,where it is possible to take in thetrue vastness of the pitch. From thefourth rebelay, it is finally possibleto view the sloping floor below.Once down, one can descend theslope to the top of another pit,where the team ran out of rope.

Meanwhile, on the surface, thesteady rain was beginning to makeits way into the floors of the tents.The surface-watch crew dug deepdrainage trenches around the groupof tents. They had to work quicklyand became wet and covered withmud.

Since the team was out of ropeand there was a deep, going pitwaiting to be dropped, they de-cided to derig the Corazón side ofthe cave for rope to push the goinglead. The following day a group of

three entered the cave. After anhour or so, two of them returned tothe surface, citing discomfort withthe water in the 41-meter pit, bynow also known as Tarantula Pit forthe fuzzy arachnid hanging out ona ledge partway down. The remain-ing caver managed to derig the bigroom and take the rope up to thejunction just below the 41-meter.

That night everyone was awak-ened by the thunderous sound of ahuge rock fall. The next morningthe group arose to find that anothertree near camp, this one perhapstwice as large as the one that hadfallen before, had been snapped offlike a twig during the night. Appar-ently a giant boulder had struck itscanopy and broken the large hard-wood 3 or 4 meters above theground. Three people then enteredthe cave to continue derigging theother main passage and to put a re-direction in near the top of Taran-tula Pit. This set the stage for furtherexploration the next day, when theyawoke to rays of sunlight breakingthrough a rising fog. A day withoutrain was a welcome change. Break-fast was big, spirits were high, andplans came together in the usualeasy-going way. Three of the sevenwould go into the cave loaded withthe new supply of rope and pushthe waiting deep, virgin shaft. Twowould do an ultra-light recon to thetop of the ridge, where the karstrises to an elevation of over 2200meters.

When the in-cave crew reachedthe top of the virgin pit, they beganto make music, first the familiarping of a hammer hitting hard rockand then the sweet sound of a mea-suring tape bleeding out of its reel.The cave quickly dropped another80 meters through an area thatmight best be described as Swiss-cheese passage. Then after a brief15 meter respite of horizontal pas-sage, the music continued, and thecave dropped another 25 meters.

Meanwhile high on the moun-tain, the recon crew had settled intoa relentlessly energetic rhythm.There was a lot of ground to cover.Using the GPS had been nearly im-possible under the tall canopy of theforest lower down, but once theyreached the more open pine forest

above, they were able to navigatewith it quite well. Navigationwasn’t the problem up there; move-ment was. They found themselvesbalancing on razor-sharp rockspires and stepping over deep crev-ices onto slick rotting logs whilevines attempted to trip them up andpull them down onto the forestfloor that lay somewhere below.Traveling on this “killer karst” canrange from tricky to deadly. It cantake more than an hour to go only afew hundred feet. They climbeddown sinkhole after sinkhole,checking for caves. As the sun wasstarting to get low, the two agreedthat this was no place to be afterdark. They made their way to theedge of the pine forest to find aplace to camp. True, the forest floorwas friendlier, but it was still steepmountainside. Finding a semi-flat1-by-2-meter spot for the hammockproved difficult. They came to aplace that, if a dead tree was re-moved and its stump and the rockscovered with enough pine needles,might work. After sharing rationsof a half pack of tuna, a candy bar,and three gulps from the Camel-back, the two set in for a very longand very cold night in crampedquarters.

Early the next morning the sunonce again lifted the plumes of fogto reveal the Cerro Rabón. Twocavers entered the now-familiarentrance shaft of Tres Amigos. Pick-ing up the duffle of ropes and rig-ging supplies stashed along theway, they pushed onward towardthe pit lead at the bottom of knownpassage. Once there, they rigged a30-meter drop, which was followedby another. At the bottom of the sec-ond pitch they arrived at a funnel-shaped sump, the Swimming Hole.Mud oozed into it from a tight holeon the other side. This was not away on. The depth of the cave is 604meters, and the surveyed length is2073 meters.

The two on the mountain real-ized that checking all five of thesinks they had marked on the mapwas not possible in the time theyhad allotted themselves. The firstsinkhole alone was almost a kilome-ter wide and filled with scores ofsmaller sinks and pits. They agreed

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to drop back into the first one foran hour or so and then head over tosink number five. Dropping into thekiller karst once again, they beganskirting the edges of deep, vine-covered shafts with dead bottoms.OK, enough of this already. They re-versed direction and headed to-ward sink five. This sink was a littleover a mile away and directly on theother side of a formidable ridge. Asthey struggled toward the summit,an hour or so later they came upona 2-meter-wide shaft that, judgingby dropped rocks, was fairly deep.Noting its location with the GPS,they continued. Looking down a

while later on the first sink, theysaw an obvious opening in the trees,far into the sink and dark looking.They had been so close. They de-bated going back down there, butdecided to push on. Up and overthey went, recording another smallshaft along the way. Sink five wasfriendlier than sink one, but still itwas difficult to tell where the low-est point was, due to the manysmaller depressions in it. Cut,bruised, and fatigued, the twomade it back to base camp by night-fall.

That night somebody uttered theword beach. It is truly amazing how

quickly a cave can get derigged anda camp broken when rout-feverspreads. By the next evening theywere back at Enrique’s drinkingcold beverages.

The members of the project thankthe sponsors, two of the finest cav-ing clubs in Colorado, the NorthernColorado Grotto and the SouthernColorado Mountain Grotto. Theircontinuing support over the yearshas been the key to successful ex-ploration in this renowned cavingarea.

Cerro Rabón 2004

En enero y febrero del 2004, dos espelólogos de Colo-rado, EUA, descendieron en balsa por el cañon delRío Santo Domingo en Oaxaca, de Quiotepec a cercade Ayautla. Entonces, junto con cinco espeleólogospolacos, acamparon en las laderas inclinadas delCerro Rabón, sobre el nacimiento del Río Uruapan,y exploraron el Sistema de los Tres Amigos a unanueva profundidad de 604 metros. La exploracióninicial de Tres Amigos es descrita en la AMCS Ac-tivities Newsletter 26.

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MEXPÉ 2002—SISTEMA TEPEPA

Matthieu Lévesque and Guillaume Pelletier

Reprinted, somewhat revised, fromthe Canadian Caver, number 60,2003. A version also appeared, inFrench, in Sous Terre, volume 17,number 1, 2003. The foldout map isfrom Sous Terre.

During April and May 2002,eighteen cavers from Quebec,

Mexico, the United Kingdom, andFrance met in the Sierra Negra topursue the Société Québécoise deSpéléologie cave-exploration pro-ject called Mexpé. The whole ven-ture started back in 1987, andMexpé 2002 was the tenth SQS ex-pedition to this world-famous karstzone. The expedition objectiveswere really motivating, since wewere almost assured of making twoimportant connections to make Sis-tema Tepepa almost 27 kilometerslong and 900 meters deep. Further-more, this would create a 781-meter-deep traverse between thehighest entrance and the resur-gence. Even though everyone waseager, there was still a lot of uncer-tainty about getting permission toexplore in that area. [An article onthis appears in Sous Terre, vol. 17,no. 1, fall 2003.]

As some might remember, the2000 expedition ended in a ratherlarge cave rescue of a friend whowas injured by a serious fall in theAndroméde part of TP4-13, at adepth of 340 meters. Consequently,the evacuation of the victim wasquite complex, with cavers, CruzRoja, “grupo especial,” and Mexicanarmy and police coming to the si-erra to try to help us. [See AMCSActivities Newsletter 24, pp. 25–30.]

The political and diplomatic im-pacts of the rescue were significant,as it involved diplomats in bothMexico and Canada. The interna-tional press did an ugly job of re-porting on the rescue. Mexpé 2002was undoubtedly going to have adifficult task of administration anddiplomacy.

Once the dust had settled afterthe rescue, it was obvious that ex-ploration in the area needed to con-tinue. The Sociedad Mexicana deExploraciones Subterráneas orga-nized an expedition to the SistemaTepepa resurgence cave, Xallté-goxtli. [See AMCS Activities News-letter 24, pp. 39–47.] SMES cavershad been involved in the Mexpéproject since the beginning in 1987,and they had concentrated theirwork on the resurgence zone. TheApril 2000 expedition was led bySMES cavers, accompanied by threeSQS members, and since it wasmainly Mexican and took place onDon Tutillio’s private land, specialexploration permits were not need-ed. It found an extremely importantjunction between Xalltégoxtli andEhécatl. To celebrate this, it wasdecided to make Mexpé 2002 thefirst large joint SQS-SMES project,with lots of cavers from both groups.

The study area is in the south-west corner of Puebla, bor-

dered by Oaxaca and Veracruz. It’sa two-day journey from MexicoCity, and transportation is nowavailable all the way to Tepepa deZaragoza. Up in the sierra, whereNahuatl is spoken, the locals havebeen receiving us with open arms

since the beginning of the Mexpéproject.

Every expedition has broughtback interesting results. Most of theearly explorations were done inTP4-13, known locally as Olfastlede Niebla, and Sistema Ehécatl-Xalltégoxtli, both with about 10 kilo-meters of large passage. In January1994, a Quebec-France expeditiondiscovered TP4-27, which wouldbecome a key cave in the study area,with 5 kilometers of passage to adepth of 311 meters. That year theteam thought they’d connected it toTP4-13, based on finding topofilthread. In fact, the connection hadbeen made, but it was in a maze ofpassages where it proved difficultto hook up the surveys. The TP4-27entrance leads to a high, fossil partof the cave, but with a stream in acanyon 30 meters below. The teamexplored upstream in this Afluentede los Alrededores and stopped atthe base of a 25-meter, very wet cas-cade. In a hurry at the end of theexpedition, the cavers concludedthat upstream in the Afluente wasprobably going to connect to TP4-13, but it remained unexplored un-til Mexpé 2002.

In January 1997, a second en-trance to the TP4-27 cave wasfound. TP5-17 gave quicker access,down 150 meters of vertical cave,to the Afluente stream . In fact, itcompletely bypassed the fossil sec-tion explored in 1994.

Data compiled in December1999, before the Mexpé 2000 expe-dition, showed that a connectionwas possible not only with TP4-13,but also with Sistema Ehécatl-

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On the way to base camp atHoya Grande. Gustavo Vela.

Left to right, standing: VicenteLoreto, Jonathan Sims, Annick

Normandin, Rich Gerrish,Humberto Tachiquin, Jesús

Reyes, Joel Corrigan, MatthieuLévesque, Christian Chénier,

Guillaume Pelletier, Luc LeBlanc, Ramon Espinasa, Marc

Tremblay. In front: ChrisDensham, Gustavo Vela,

Christian Francoeur, JacquesOrsola. Gustavo Vela.

Xalltégoxtli. According to the data,downstream in the Afluente shouldlead right to Ehécatl, 30 metersaway vertically and 70 horizontally,where exploration had ended in1991 at the base of a 25-meter cas-cade. Upstream, aid climbing couldlead to TP4-13. These connectionswere the objective in 2000, but in-stead participants ended up work-ing on the rescue.

The 2002 expedition was to makethese connections. Once linked,

these caves would make up SistemaTepepa. There would also be muchsurface work to seek access to moreupsteam parts of the undergroundstream in the Afluente de los Alre-dedores and generally gain moreknowledge of the whole area. Thefirst and most satisfying connectionwas made at the beginning of the

trip; it was surprisingly easyto make. On March 27, ateam went down the TP5-17entrance into the Afluente.Once in the river and goingdownstream, they quicklyarrived at the top of the cas-cade seen in 1991 in Ehécatl.After it was rigged, a teamof five rappelled down andquickly found a permanentsurvey station left more thana decade before. The teamthen split in two, one to sur-vey the connection and theother to seek a fossil passagegoing upward to TP4-13.Neither was able to com-plete its mission that day,but pizza and CabernetSauvignon were on themenu for a celebration sup-per at base camp that night.

The second connection turnedout to be substantially more diffi-cult. It took four trips, including theone on March 27, before we werefinally able to map the 106 metersof a connection, Via Lactea, betweenTP4-27 and the upper part of TP4-13. We lost a lot of time trying toget back up to the fossil part of TP4-27 from the Afluente. The mappingthat had been done in 1994 from thefossil part gave us the impressionthat we could easily make the climb,but in fact it was impossible to climbto the upper levels from the activestreamway, which we were reach-ing via the TP5-17 entrance. Afterthe second unsuccessful attempt,another team entered TP4-27 by theoriginal entrance and left a rope

hanging down into the Afluente, sothat, on a fourth try, a team finallymanaged to map a connection toTP4-13.

The TP4-13 to TP4-27 connectionhad been an objective of the Mexpé2000 expedition, so it is interestingto note that during the rescue then,Guillaume had actually explored,without knowing it, the area of theconnection when setting up theunderground antenna of the Nicolacave radio in a small inlet. He wasquite amazed to connect TP4-27 twoyears later through this tiny pas-sage.

In the heat of the Mexican sun, sur-face prospecting is not an easy

task. The difficult terrain and thedense jungle make it quite an ad-venture to go out and search fornew caves. Many entrances arefound, but few pay off. Over theyears of the Mexpé project, searcheshave become farther away, higherup, and generally more remote. Fi-nally, on April 6, 2002, a team offour found a tiny sinkhole at thebottom of a long gully. The terrainwas so difficult that just getting tothe entrance was an adventure. Itwas a steep downhill climb, withsharp limestone and huge cracks allover the place. About 100 meters ofrope was used to just reach the en-trance. We named the cave Gym-nástica Selvática. It consists of anactive stream flowing gently intothe heart of the Sierra Negra. Weimmediately supposed it wouldlead toward the head of the Afluentde los Alrededores, and people

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were excited by the prospect ofmeeting fellow cavers coming up-stream in the Afluente.

From the entrance the cave fol-lows a meander that is sometimes

more than 30 meters high. A slopereaches one of the highlights of thecave, where vertical shafts of 22 and26 meters lead toward the Grave-yard Shift hall, later the site of a

connection from the Puerte duCimetière, a second entrance foundnot more than 100 meters fromcamp on the eve of our departure.It consists of 150 meters of pure

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Jonathan Sims enjoying the water inthe Afluente de los Alrededores.Gustavo Vela.

Jonathan Sims and Marc Tremblayupstream of the 25-meter cascade

near the junction between theAfluente de los Alrededores and

Sistema Ehécatl-Xalltégoxtli.Gustavo Vela.

Mexpé 2002—Sistema Tepepa

Durante la expedición 2002 de la Société Québécoisede Spéléologie al área de Tepepa de Zaragoza en laSierra Negra, Puebla, dos conexiones se lograron.TP4-27, explorada por primera vez en 1994 fueconectada fácilmente al sistema Ehecatl-Xalltegoxtlisiguiendo la corriente del río subterraneo. Laconexión a TP4-13, Olfastle de Niebla, fue más difícilpero finalmente se encontró en niveles superiores.El nuevo Sistema Tepepa tiene 26,500 metros delongitud y 900 metros de profundidad. Una nuevacueva, Gimnástica Selvática, fue explorada en los tresúltimos días de la expedición. Probablementeconecte a través de un sifón a Las Brumas.

vertical cave of amazing dimen-sions, and it takes you right into theheart of the cave in about one hour,once everything is rigged. BeyondGraveyard Shift there is a long,huge chamber of impressive dimen-sions: 120 meters by 70 meters. Thename La Salle des Colonisateurswas given to underline the event ofhaving French, British, and FrenchCanadian cavers exploring togetherthe day it was found. From –240meters to the final sump, the dimen-sions of the cave passage are justwhat one expects in a Mexican cave.A final pitch of 14 meters takes oneto the sump, where exploration wasstopped.

Gymnástica Selvática turned outto be a fantastic 1.5-kilometer-

long cave with a respectable depthof 426 meters. It was explored dur-ing three big trips on the last twodays of the expedition. This givesus new knowledge of the under-ground drainage system in thispoorly known area, Hoya Grande,the 1000-by-500-meter dolinewhere the base camp was located.When we plotted the survey on amap of the area, we found to our

surprise that the sump isabout 70 meters from anupstream sump in a cavecalled Las Brumas, ex-plored back in 1991 duringMexpé IV. So an underwa-ter connection to this caveis possible. Since Las Bru-mas has a good chance ofconnecting one day to Sis-tema Tepepa, the wholesystem could easily gainanother 6 kilometers oflength.

As for Sistema Tepepa,we still haven’t found anupstream river flowinginto the Afluente de losAlrededores, which is a bigmystery. A serious amountof water, more than 1500liters per second in a bigflood, flows in this passage,hence the importance oftracing its route. Once again,this expedition showedthat lots of interesting workstill lies ahead for genera-tions of cavers.

Participants in Mexpé 2002: FromMexico: Ramón Espinasa, Gustavo

Vela Turcott, UmbertoTachiquin, Jesús Reyes,Juan Antonio MontañoHirose, and Arturo Rob-les; from Quebec, Chris-tian Chénier, Christian

Francoeur, Luc Le Blanc, MatthieuLévesque, Annick Normandin,Guillaume Pelletier, and MarcTremblay; from Great Britain: JoelCorrigan, Rich Gerrish, ChrisDensham, and Jonathan Sims; fromFrance: Jacques Orsola.

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CAVING IN SISTEMA CHEVE, OAXACA

R. D. Milhollin

Adapted from a series of articlesthat appeared in the Maverick Bull,publication of the Maverick Grotto,volume 15, numbers 9–12, 2003. Thereader may want to follow along onthe map of Sistema Cheve that ap-pears on page 51 of AMCS Activi-ties Newsletter 23.

Sistema Cheve is the deepest cavein North America. It is located

at the low end of a huge sink in themountains of the Mexican state ofOaxaca. This cave has been ex-plored for many years, most re-cently in the spring of 2003. Theexpedition was organized by vet-eran caver Bill Stone, perhaps bestknown for his efforts in the Mexi-can cave Sistema Huautla and hisprojects at Florida’s Wakulla Springs.I had met Bill on a caving trip to thePurificación project region of Mexicoand was asked to participate atCheve.

My traveling companions for thelong drive down were MelanieAlspaugh and Philippe Sénécal,who journeyed from France to at-tend, and Paula Grgich, who hadjust earned her masters degree ingeology. Paula flew into Dallas fromPittsburgh, and we picked upMelanie and Philippe in San Anto-nio. The drive down was a littlecramped, but we managed well. Acouple of adventures along the wayincluded finding a Mexican hard-ware store in downtown Monterreythat carries nut-grade carbide andtraffic hassles when we unwiselyentered the federal district that sur-rounds Mexico City. In the first caseI drove right through the traffic to

the store, following my memoriesof Monterrey from when I was lastthere at age twelve. That place haschanged! After staying overnight inCiudad Victoria and a fine lightbreakfast in the city market, we pro-ceeded south past the Aquismónregion and into the mountains ofthe Sierra Madre beyond Tamazun-chale. Bill had advised taking thecoastal route all the way to Veracruzand then turning inland throughTehuacán to Oaxaca, but we de-cided the route through the capitallooked faster and would be morescenic and interesting. We assumedthe traffic would be horrible, andwe were willing to just look outthe windows at the sights of thegreat city. But we were completelyunaware of the restriction on auto-mobiles entering into the definedurban limits. Each day only vehicleswith certain ending digits on theirlicense plates may enter. On the daywe were there, my plates did notmeet the mark. The traffic policewanted to issue a ticket and told usto follow them to the station, butpersistent and tactful refusal byMelanie resulted in our freedomafter about thirty minutes of nego-tiation involving at times four of-ficers. As we skirted the city, weenjoyed spectacular views of thegreat volcanoes of the Valley ofMexico, Popocatepetl, which waserupting steam as we passed by, andItzaccihuatl. A few navigationsnafus ensued, but nothing thatcould not be corrected by backtrack-ing for a few minutes. We did getstopped outside of Puebla by thearmy checking for explosives. The

back of the truck was packed tightwith all manner of equipment, andthere was some tenseness when thefriendly troops uncovered severalsmall canisters of Coleman propanefuel. We were able to assure themthe gas was essentially harmlessand could not be reasonably usedfor terrorist purposes. They neverasked to see inside the ten-gallonmetal can filled with calcium car-bide.

We had pretty good directions toLlano Cheve and had been fore-warned that the road up into themountains was narrow and veryexposed. We did not arrive atCuicatlan, the town at the base ofthe range, until about midnight, sowe elected to sleep there before pro-ceeding. Cuicatlan is a nice townwith a fine market, so we stockedup on things we thought we mightneed or want while we were atcamp for two weeks. The road onup lived up to its reputation, andwe carefully made our way to thetop, where the village of Concep-ción Pápalo balances precariously,and followed the graded road on towhere the track to Cheve turns off.It took a few minutes to realize thatthe large valley we were descend-ing into was in fact a huge doline.After about fifteen minutes of driv-ing in it, we found where the trucksof the other cavers were parked.From there, it is about fifteen min-utes of hiking downhill to wherethe base camp for the expeditionwas located. The “field house” wasa series of tarps suspended bypolypropylene ropes, with the backwall being the rock wall of the

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doline itself. The shelter was com-plete with other walls and a seriesof work tables. A generator nearbysupplied AC power for the lightbulbs and charging power-toolbattery packs. Drinking water wascollected in five-gallon containersfrom the stream flowing over a wa-terfall 10 meters away. Colloidal sil-ver drops assured water cleanliness.Large propane canisters suppliedtwo Coleman-style cook stoves, andcookware and food stashes con-sumed the rest of the large space.Groups of tents were situated alongboth sides of the llano. When wearrived, there were around twentytents belonging to cavers from sev-eral European countries and allover the U.S. A rebelay course on afifty-foot-high rock wall had beenset up at one end of the llano. Wewere supposed to be able to pass aknot and three rebelays up anddown in a set amount of time be-fore venturing into the cave. Thecourse looked pretty easy, but wasmore difficult than I thought whenit came time to try it. We spent acouple of days acclimating to theelevation by hiking around andworking on the rebelay course, andthen we decided we were ready asa team to venture in.

Two days before, a large teamhad departed into the mouth of

Cheve, planning to stay under-ground for seven to ten days. Thecave had been rigged a month or sobefore by a different team, as fewparticipants save Bill could stay theentire duration of the project. Duringthe initial phases, a parallel effortwas being made at the neighboringcave of Charco, and another cave upthe side of the llano from Cheve wasrigged and explored for severaldays as well. We were late arriving,and would leave before the expedi-tion began to pull up the mile ofrope rigged below us.

As we began to make day tripsinto the cave, the first trip I madewas solo, and I slowly made myway down four short rope drops ofabout 6 to 10 meters each. The cavefollows a small stream in the initialsection. The ropes were rigged foreach of the first drops in a verystraightforward fashion, with only

one rebelay at most. The second tripI took was with a small group, andwe passed where I had turned backbefore and crossed a two-ropetyrolian affair. I personally didn’tthink the two ropes, one rigged tautand the other tied back at an angleand rigged more loosely, were nec-essary there, but it proved to begood practice for what would comelater, when such a configurationwas the only way to cross canyons.To cross, the long cow’s tail isclipped onto the taut rope, whiledescender and ascender are used tofirst lower oneself to the bottom ofthe rope arc and then to climb backup to the opposite side.

The stream we had been follow-ing disappears into the wall, andfrom this point we crossed througha narrow vertical slot, aided by ahandline, and entered what wasprosaically referred to as the Birth-day Passage. This is a huge room,probably 50 meters across and 75meters high, that slants downwardat a steep angle to, at this time forus, parts unknown.

My next venture, with the samegroup, took us downward throughthe Birthday Passage, past severalmore rope drops, to where the hugebreakdown floor gives way tosmooth bedrock and a streamemerges to flow along the passageonce more. A couple more shortdrops led us down to the first ma-jor pitch of this cave, Elephant Shaft.From where the rope was rigged itdropped off into darkness, but therewere three rebelays located alongthe 50-meter drop. A short distancefrom the bottom, a large streamroars down a series of pitchesknown as Angel’s Falls. On the nexttrip we passed through this area,which is inherently wet and hasthree drops and a climb-up. The lastpitch had a tricky redirect and arebelay right next to the rushingwater. It is a very good idea to besure to make that maneuver quicklyand correctly. At the bottom ofAngel’s Falls, a narrow, wet passageopens up into a large, boulder-floored room that leads immedi-ately downward to the Camel’sHump, where the last vertical workfor awhile, a simple downclimb, isencountered. The cave changes

personality here. The way on is overand through house-sized bouldersthat slope upward for as far as wecould see. The gurgling stream filtersaway through the breakdown, andthe ceiling looms massive, 30 metersabove. Off to one side of the cavepassage is a small sandy beach thathad been designated Camp 1 byearly expeditions into Cheve andhad been used for that purposeearly in the 2003 effort. This firstcamp had since been abandoned,and most of the equipment fromthat camp had been taken down toCamp 2. From the crest of themountain of breakdown, the floorbegins to plunge downward, andone has to carefully pick one’s waythrough the jumble to avoid settingrocks crashing down the steepslope. This area is called the Giant’sStaircase, and it took us about anhour to descend the first time. Weknew that on a real trip, carryingheavy gear packs, this would be oneof the most exhausting areas of thecave on the way back to the surface.At the bottom of the stairs, the ceil-ing plunges down and nearly meetsthe floor. Here we carefully pickedour way along the now steepergradient, holding onto whateverhandholds we could, because weknew that somewhere ahead lay theprincipal vertical obstacle in this ex-tremely deep cave, a drop knownplayfully as Sacnussem’s Well. Justfor fun, and to be sure we knewwhat we were getting into, a coupleof our team made the drop to thebottom of the 130-meter pit, pass-ing thirteen rebelays along the way.The top of the pit was dry but cool,but the bottom was like a hurricane,with high winds whipping atom-ized water from a falls of the stream,which reappears from the cave wallabout halfway down the drop. Ourtotal time to the bottom of the welland back to the surface was aroundnine hours.

We returned to the camp andtook a day off from caving, explor-ing the sinkhole-pocked llanos in thehills high above the Cheve entrance.The in-cave teams began to wanderback to the surface during this in-terval. The Dutch team came out,followed by some of the Poles. AsPauline Berendse and Jan Matthesius

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walked through camp, their com-rades prepared cool bottles of Dutchbeer to celebrate their return. Jan re-sponded by ceremonially removinghis caving harness and solemnlyplacing it in the raging campfire.When asked what this meant, Jan,an experienced caver with lots oftime in Mexican caves, replied thathe was retiring, that “once you havecaved Cheve, there is nothing else.”The following morning he retrievedthe metal buckles from the ashes ofthe fire. Early the next morning Billand the British cave divers camemarching out of the cave. They hadmade the trip in a single effort, by-passing all three camps along theway. The divers carried with themtheir homemade rebreathers. These“closed-circuit” scuba kits allowdivers to use very small gas cylinders.Bill had designed computerized,multiple gas-mix, triple redundant,high-tech Cis-Lunar rebreathersmany years before for the Huautlaand Wakulla projects. But thesedivers had their own simple, small,but completely non-redundantunits they had built themselves andwere comfortable using. This wastheir decision, and Bill helped themcarry their gear down past Camp 3to the sump, where they wouldhave to depend on them. At leastone Cis-Lunar Mark V sat unusedin the back seat of Bill’s truck theduration of the expedition.

The next day reality struck, andbit. We had of course arrived

just a little too late to be part of themain push that had just ended. Themain exploration crew was notplanning on going back down forseveral days. Life on the surface isvery pleasant, more appreciatedthan usual after eight or nine daysunderground. Little things like sun-light on your back, a regulated andobvious difference between dayand night, and stars at night makeone just a little reluctant to go backdown for a while. The next seriouspush would not be over until pastthe time that a couple of us neededto be heading back to responsibili-ties in Texas. I had taken off twoweeks work to participate, and Paulawas scheduled to interview with thedean of the geology department at

UT Austin for admission into thePhD program in geology. We need-ed to make a move, and knowingthat we had only a short windowof time to make a long cave trip be-fore we had to be back on the sur-face to prepare for the trip back toTexas, we began to feel around fora project we could do as a smallgroup, Philippe, Melanie, LewisCarroll from Washington D.C., andme. Bill Stone agreed that we couldproceed down to Camp 3 and pickup dive cylinders left over from the1995 expedition and some climbingrope and other gear at that deepestcamp that would no longer beneeded during the remainder of theexpedition. Unfortunately, since wewere all new to the cave, therewould be no opportunity for origi-nal exploration or survey.

We took all morning to pack. Itook a close look, then a secondlook, at everything I put in the cavepack. How much did it weigh, wasthere an absolute need for that item,could another item do double dutyso only one was needed, could alighter one be substituted, howmany meals would be eaten, howmuch for each meal, what would weneed to be completely filled, with-out being wasteful or gluttonous?All these questions flashed by overand over again as we packed andrepacked in the morning shade.Each camp had treated water and astove with limited fuel. We neededa light pot to boil water, and eachteam member needed a bowl and aspoon and a cup. We packed soupand dehydrated meals, a variety sowe could trade around and not gettoo bored with the same thing overand over. Bill showed how he puthis dehydrated food through aSalad Shooter food processor to fur-ther reduce the needed number ofhalf-gallon Nalgene wide-mouthcontainers we used to transportfood. Nalgene was one of the ex-pedition sponsors, and a smallmountain of used containers hadbeen sitting around the cooking tentsince the last team had dumped outtheir packs. A few of the experi-enced members pulled me asideand advised not crunching the food,since what little texture there wasin the food would be destroyed, and

hence one of the few small enjoy-ments of camp. Bill advised thateach team member choose onesmall luxury to take along. I choseEarl Grey tea bags, because theywere light and would be easy tocarry, and if I left them in the foodstash the Brits might use them allbefore I returned to the surface. Byaround noon all of us were begin-ning to look as though we wereready to make the trek down intowhat Bill already realized was go-ing to be the deepest cave in thehemisphere once the numbers fromthe first push were entered in thesurvey database. One of the lastdecisions was what to wear intothe cave. The pre-expedition notesindicated a need for expedition-weight polypropylene and PVC-coated caving suits, especially be-cause we would be passing throughor very near high waterfalls on theway to Camp 1. But we had seen Billand a few others venturing down-ward in reinforced shorts overmedium-weight underwear. I optedfor a compromise: medium weightwith the oversuit. For the first sev-eral hours of steep downwardclimbing things were hot, but I didnot regret the cumbersome PVCsuit later that night.

We made our way down throughthe Birthday Passage and the El-ephant Shaft, familiar from mywarm-up trips. Three hours hadpassed when we began negotiatingthrough the Angel’s Falls series, nota major thing, but tricky and a littletime-consuming unless you haddone it a lot. Then Camp 1 and anhour and a half down the Giant’sStaircase to the top of Sacnussem’sWell, where it took a couple ofhours for all cavers and all gear todescend, even though we could allbe on the rope at the same time. Atthe bottom, the cave turns wet, andit stayed wet for hours. Here iswhere the PVC suits were most ap-preciated. We waded down a shortway until the passage narrowed toa point where the route goes up intoan aven. There was a small supplydepot here, and one of the light-weight fiber-wrapped scuba tankswe would be transporting to thesurface was here. Onward, werappelled down into the racing

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river, and we were in and out of thatstream for several hours. At the ap-proach to the Salmon Ladders, thecave walls are smooth and black,polished by running water. Youcould look up into the ceiling andsee that seasonal floods would com-pletely fill the large canyons wewere traveling through. We passedthe Turbines and continued to dropin elevation, though because wewere so busy with rope-work, it washard to tell how much depth wewere actually gaining. The waterroared so loudly that communica-tion between team members wasimpossible, and it was here that Ifirst felt the immense sense of lone-liness or isolation that can comefrom deep cave exploration. On thisportion of the trip you could notreasonably depend on anyone else;we were each on our own. At thePiston, we dropped down intomore level passage, although upperpassages, some of which are fossilstream passages, some active,abound. At the Sumplands, a criti-cal junction, a trail was markedthrough a dry, upper-level passageknown as the Wind Tunnel, whichpresumably saves lots of time in thewater. We passed along precari-ously perched sand dunes far abovethe stream barely audible some-where below, and at one point weentered a chamber that is highlydecorated, for no apparent reason.Most of the passage we had beentraversing for the past eight hoursis active streamway with little depo-sitional decoration. But in one areaof the bypass we encountered sodastraws yards long, lots of them, andthe ceiling was brightly decoratedwith multi-colored flowstone. Thebeauty was serene, and we stoppedto admire this curious and strangelybeautiful display of nature.

Almost as soon as we began mov-ing again, we were jarred back intothe reality of the dangerous natureof deep cave exploration. To theright of the path and up a smallslope is a fantastic collection of sta-lactites and intricate flowstone. Weclimbed up and looked into anempty grave. We were in the AvalonConnection Room, where anothercave that descends from the surfaceintersects the Cheve System. In

1991, nineteen-year-old Chris Yeagerdied as the result of a fall at the nextdrop, the prosaically-named 23-Meter Drop. His body was broughtup the drop ten days later and bur-ied in the alcove we were lookinginto, where it remained for a year,until an international group ofcavers removed it from the cave.The temporary headstone was stillin place. It contained his name,dates of birth and death, and hisexpedition nickname, The Kid.

This grim discovery put some-what of a damper on our fun, andwe realized we were tired and hun-gry and needed to get to the shelterof Camp 2. There was some steephiking left in the Connection Room,and then a tricky climb-down to the23-Meter Drop. Everything wasrigged, but we stopped to inspectall anchors we could find and getto. One by one we dropped thethree pitches of the drop, and oneby one we descended into the EastGorge. Suddenly we went from aquiet, dry, sandy floor to a slick,wet, screaming rock world. Thewalls of the canyon are marbleizedby black and white stripes, a verydistinctive look. Philippe was eagerto get on, and Melanie was com-pelled to follow ahead quickly,while Lewis and I used a slower,more controlled pace. We trudgedon through the knee-deep water,looking up for an obvious way tothe camp we knew had to be in thevicinity. We were feeling exhausted,and after what seemed too long wefound some indication that othershad made what looked like a trickycrawl up some flowstone on theright. In our tired state it took sometime to find the correct route, butafter climbing up a rope out of theEast Gorge, we passed through asmall tunnel into an alcove about 20feet high and 40 feet across, abouteleven hours after we left the sur-face. Melanie and Philippe were al-ready set up in a comfortable spotnext to the supplies, and showed uswhere the stove, water, and latrinewere located.

The twenty-four hours we spentat Camp 2 were somewhat weird.There is of course no way to telltime using any kind of natural ref-erence; daylight is just an empty

concept that deep underground. Inthe center of the camp there is anopen area with a big flat rock thatserved well as a table of sorts. Alongthe corridor leading deeper into thecave is an area with little alcovesjust the right size for personal spotsconsisting of a sleeping space anda little room to stack and organizegear. Slumberjack was an expedi-tion sponsor, and their light-dutypolyester sleeping bag stuffed rightinto a gallon wide-mouth Nalgenebottle, so they had been pretty easyfor the initial crews to pack downto the camp. Large trash bags werein the camp to store the bags in sothey would stay fluffed but reason-ably dry in the damp atmosphere.The camp being thus equipped withbags, stove, and fuel, all we had topack down was personal gear anda bag liner so the shared bags wouldstay clean. We all seemed overlyconcerned about conserving batterypower and carbide fuel, so much ofthe time we just sat in darkness.Exceptions were when someonewould fire up the stove to heat somewater or when someone wouldleave a sleeping bag to trek to thelatrine. I had no idea what time Iwoke up, but it was late in the day,and I had slept more than elevenhours. Others had been up, ate, andgone back to sleep, but some timein the late afternoon we all decidedthat we needed to set a scheduleand keep to it. Melanie insistedrightly that in order to be at ouroptimum we needed to stick to asurface schedule, sleeping at “night”no more than eight hours and trav-eling during “daylight” hours. Wecompared notes and agreed that sit-ting still and doing nothing washaving negative effects on us. I washearing all kind of sounds of thingsthat were not there and seeingflashes of light, and Melanie saidthat her over-active imaginationwas making skulls out of the dimshadows cast by a carbide lamponto the ceiling. When movingthrough the cave we had no time tobe so distracted. We stayed in campthe rest of the day and night, andby 8:00 AM the following morningwe were up, had breakfast together,and were soon departing the campfor parts unknown to us.

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At Camp 2 the East Gorgestream thunders on down be-

low to a sump and disappears.Years ago, cavers had discoveredthe perched beach and upper-levelcave passage that led onward. Theway is dry and fairly level, forCheve, that is. We were still climb-ing up and over rock piles, but norope work was required for a coupleof hours. We climbed up a precari-ous slope into the Low Rider Park-way, a wide passage with a flat,monolithic ceiling. After anothercouple of hours the ceiling was low-ering and the floor was becomingmore uneven, and finally we cameto the edge of a precipice. This isthe Widow-Maker Shaft, and itseemed fairly straightforward at thetop, but the lower pitch is tricky. Atthe bottom the route intersects theresurged cave stream, crashingalong with what seems renewedvigor. We could move along, butcarefully, from boulder to footholdto scramble up. This quickly degen-erates into one of the more enter-taining passages in the cave, theSwim Gym. Contortion and balanceare the name of the game here. It ispossible to keep out of the water bycarefully choosing handholds, butgetting wet actually helps cool oneoff at times. Here communicationis very difficult, even with nearbyteam members, due to the roar ofthe water churning through the con-voluted streambed and the need tobe constantly climbing up or down,over and through holes in the rockwall. Just as I was getting tired ofthis, things changed suddenly. Arope led straight up a flowstonewall and through a space betweenlarge boulders wedged in the 10-meter-high ceiling. The rigging wastricky, and concentration was need-ed to make the right move whilesoaking wet and carrying a bag half-filled with water. All around us afine finish of tiny crystals on thewall shone in our headlights. A two-story formation blocks the canyonpassage, and we had to climb overand around, carefully trying not todamage the huge stalagmite. On theother side we slowly climbed downinto a large chamber that seemed toemit its own soft glow. Along theleft wall are huge columns and tall

stalagmites all lined up, running thelength of the room and seeming toflow from a continuous crack highabove. The floor is littered with bro-ken stalactites fallen from the ceil-ing, and we noticed that most of theformations are cracked and broken,as if by the action of an earthquake.We were obviously in the Hall of theRestless Giants. This is more likeNew Mexico caving than anythingelse we had seen in the cave. Thespray of the crashing waters is farbelow; occasionally we could heara faint roar from holes in the floorsomewhere down under the break-down. There was a calm serenityhere, and at the end of the passagewe stopped on a high point to havelunch.

We all thought from what we hadgathered by talking to other caversthat we were near the halfway pointto Camp 3, but the hardest parts ofthe trip lay ahead. We chilled rap-idly in the large room, for right be-hind us was a dark hole that wasblowing cold air like an industrialair conditioner. Lunch over, we be-gan to inspect the next descent. Thedrop was rigged from a precariouspoint high up a slippery flowstoneslope. The rope dropped away to aredirect visible about 10 metersdown. From there, it was hard totell, but it looked as though the restof the drop was uninterrupted for20 meters to the bottom. We wereright, the redirect was a little tricky,but the rest of the drop was straight-forward. Toward the bottom thepassage narrows down, and we de-scended into a maze of cementedbreakdown and water-carved chan-nels, now dry. After several hun-dred feet of stoop walking, shortropework, and squeezing throughtight passages, we found the “key-hole” we had been briefed on. Thisis a body-sized tube that you haveto climb up to, and it drops down-ward into darkness. The recom-mended technique is to drop throughfeet-first, feeling for footholdsblindly while holding onto the rimof the hole and lowering one’sweight slowly. It was a little unnerv-ing, but took only a very short time.From there we entered a short butvery confusing breakdown mazethat forces the caver to dash under

small waterfalls and slither throughwet crawlways. At the top of a shortclimb up, we popped out into ahuge, quiet void our lights couldbarely illuminate. We had reachedthe Black Borehole.

The echoes were eerie. The darkwalls somehow absorbed our lights.The continuing passage appearedghost-like off in the distance, andthe proportions were unclear. Thehall is about 20 to 30 meters wideand up to 50 meters high in places,I think. It was hard to judge dis-tances in this vast chamber, becausethere are no reliable references. Wefelt like small insects climbingslowly along over huge pieces ofthe ceiling that had fallen in somelong ago geologic age. Even thoughwe were working hard, our travelpace seemed infuriatingly sluggish.At times we had to climb up ropesrigged somewhere high above us ona piece of the wall that appeared tobe suspended in space. The imagethat kept appearing to me wassomething out of some old movie,possibly Land of the Lost, but no di-nosaur ever stuck its head out of ahole just as we were slithering alongone of the many precarious ledgesalong the route. The blackness ofthe cave walls and the breakdowncomposing the floor were over-whelming and probably added tothe feeling of physical insignifi-cance we felt as we negotiated ourway through this massive room.After a couple hours of this, thebreakdown seemed to be filling thechamber more fully, and in fact atone point the boulders piled up infront of us all the way to the ceil-ing, completely blocking the wayonward. But the wind was appar-ent. You can hear the wind surgingthrough this huge rock pile, and itseems to be more powerful on theleft side, and of course this is theside most difficult to get to. It tookabout thirty minutes to climb downonto what appeared to be a floor,then over to the left wall where thewind was blowing out. Marks onthe wall indicated we had chosenthe correct path; this is the begin-ning of a passage that leads nearlystraight up through the breakdownmountain. The route was prettywell marked, but we occasionally

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had to backtrack, because the body-sized squeezes limited seeing whatyour feet were doing at severalpoints. Pulling the packs in Throughthe Looking Glass, as this section iscalled, was the hardest part. Thebody can bend and contort, and youcan alternatively pull and push witharms and legs, but the bag is justdead weight and has to be poweredthrough. Here a little teamworkwent a long way.

At the top of Through the Look-ing Glass, the sensation was akin topopping out of a manhole coveronto a huge city street. Only in thisinstance the street is a cave passageeven larger than the Black Borehole.The walls and ceiling here are light-colored and reflect light well, sothere was a lot more to see. I didn’ttry, but it might be a ten-minutehike from one side of the passageto the other. This conduit is ofCarlsbad dimensions, slopes steep-ly downward, and also continuesback upward past where we hadpopped up into it. Just to be sure,we added another rock cairn at theinconspicuous hole we would needto spot on the way out, and we be-gan to descend toward the faintsound of crashing water some-where below us. This is the A. S.Borehole, named as a second trib-ute to Jules Verne’s fictional ex-plorer. Upslope is another largeroom descriptively but unimagina-tively dubbed the Mud-FlooredBorehole. The way we were head-ing was down, though, and we wereall growing noticeably tired fromthe long, hard day. It was nowaround 6:00 or 7:00 PM, and fatigueand hunger were becoming factorswe would need to deal with soon.The A. S. Borehole continues down-ward with a slight twist to the left,and within thirty minutes we werepeering down to where a massivetorrent of water spills from a con-duit coming up from the break-down floor. Here the directions wereceived called for a sharp climb up,but the trail was not well marked,and we ended up high above wherewe needed to be. Philippe andMelanie had gone ahead of Lewisand me, and we saw their lights offin the distance along the right wallhigh above the stream. They had

located Camp 3, and we were ableto join them there within a few min-utes.

Like Camp 2, this camp is also asand beach perched high above themoving waters, but there the simi-larities to that camp end. The roomwe were in is a huge tunnel slopingdownward, and the camp is perch-ed at the top of a steeply slopingwall facing across the river to amassive, vertical rock wall. Theceiling is similarly of gargantuanproportions, and the sound of thewater slamming the rocks far belowis absorbed or muted by the tremen-dous volume of the chamber. Ourplan for the day, formulated withthe benefit of a full day of rest anda renewed optimistic outlook earlythat morning, called for us to reachCamp 3, drop off unneeded weight,and make a quick dash down theriver passage to the first sump, 1362meters beneath the highest Cheveentrance. Reality at Camp 3 in theearly evening was that we were allexhausted and hungry, and that tripto the sump was not going to hap-pen. This would be the end of ourdownward progress in Cheve thisexpedition.

Dinner was rehydrated some-thing or another, and we tried

each other’s cups for variety. HotEarl Gray was a treat, along with acandy bar or granola bar squirreledaway for this occasion. The latrinewas a mess, as we expected, but theair was being sucked downstream,or so it seemed, and up in the sleep-ing area we were not bothered bythe smell. Sleep came easy thatnight. I wrote a little in my journal,but a feeling of intense isolation re-turned after everyone quieteddown. Living in an American cityin the twenty-first century, one sel-dom finds himself so completelyseparated from society and from thecomforts and gadgets we are accus-tomed to. The knowledge that thiswas perhaps the farthest away fromthe world I knew was overwhelm-ing, and I wondered when I wouldever have the chance to experiencethis stark reality again. I turned offthe light, sat back, and savored thatrare sensation.

The night passed peacefully. In

the morning we made coffee and aterehydrated something for break-fast, packed up our own gear, andthen began gathering up the trashand excess gear we were supposedto bring back to the surface. The big-gest items were a 50-meter climb-ing rope that was no longer neededthat deep and a steel and fiberglasshigh-pressure diving cylinder thathad been left full at the sump forseveral years following a previousexpedition. The air inside had re-mained good and at usable pressureand had been used on the divingefforts the previous week. We hadtraveled down light, and now wewould be loaded down climbingback up. We would need to carrythis weight back up about 1200 ver-tical meters to the cave entrance.

The trip out went well. We trav-eled continually, stopping only torest for no more than fifteen min-utes at a time. While one of our teamwas climbing on rope, the others gota little reprieve from work. Wemade it past the big rooms and intothe water passage by early after-noon, and we had to slog throughthe Swim Gym already tired. Thelast of the day’s travel was up intothe Low Rider Parkway, where wegot disoriented and lost about a halfhour trying different leads up toCamp 2. Eventually olfactory hintsfrom the latrine led us into theproper passage, and we collapsedinto sound sleep after quick nour-ishment.

The next morning we split up.Philippe and Melanie decided to goout at a faster pace than we hadbeen traveling the day before, whileLewis and I were concerned aboutoverexerting ourselves with nocamp or supplies between us andthe surface. This leg of the tripwould require the lion’s share of theclimbing, with the water Olympicsat the beginning of the day whenwe were strong. Lewis and I keptto what we thought was a measuredpace, and before noon we had climb-ed up to the wet part of the cavebelow Sacnussem’s Well. This wasthe hardest part of the trip, for wewere pushing continually upward,at times almost completely im-mersed in the rushing stream. Bothof us lost body heat here, and I

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credit the PVC oversuit with allow-ing me to be as comfortable as Imanaged to be. As we dropped intothe aerosol canyon leading up to theSacnussem’s Well, we knew themost difficult part of the trip wasover and that the way on was pri-marily dry.

The problem we faced at the topof the pit was time; it was well intoevening, and we knew there weremany hours to go before we wouldsee the sun or stars, as the casemight be. Steadily we pushed up-ward, but I finally had to drop thediving tank I was carrying at Camp1, where it would easily be foundby the other teams that would bedown in a few days. Besides thetank, between us we had been car-rying personal gear, camp trash,and a 50-meter wet rope. I felt baddropping the tank, but we reallyneeded to get out of the cave, andlosing the excess weight and bulkhelped immensely. All night weclimbed at what seemed a snail’space, but we were conscious of ourexhaustion and were determinednot to take any risks that could re-sult in an accident. The last fewhours were painful, knowing thatthe sun would be rising shortly, andwe were beginning to make smallmistakes. We began to snap at oneanother, as communication nar-rowed to only the essentials.

Among the last few pitches, I acci-dentally tossed an ascender into apool far below the trail, and real-ized I had been asleep while climb-ing. We made it out as the sun wasrising over the camp.

Philippe and Melanie had gottenout during the night and had

gotten some sleep while we wereclimbing out. The camp was justbeginning to wake up, so we grab-bed coffee and some real food be-fore giving a debriefing on our trip.The next day we enjoyed sleepinglate and stayed out in the sunshine.It had been raining for all of the timewe had been underground, and thecamp had been soggy. Many of thepeople on the surface we had leftfour days before had departed fortheir own corners of the world.Those cavers remaining were readyto get back underground.

We drove out of camp with atruckload of cavers for a meal inConcepción Pálapo, the village wehad driven through coming up intothe mountains. The simple foodserved in a rustic setting was appre-ciated as much as if we had stum-bled upon a three-star restaurant.Well . . . , maybe not. But we enjoyedit immensely. In the village wewere supposed to pick up a con-tainer of diesel fuel Bill had orderedsome days before. Through some

miscommunication, the local policehad picked up the container andhad driven away with it just as wewere beginning to inquire about it.We had to chase the police truck allover the side of the mountain to getthe fuel back, and it was a goodthing for them we did, because theirtruck ran on gasoline, not diesel.

Back at Llano Cheve, we had onemore day of caving before weneeded to pack up and head home.I spent it on a trip back in to recovermy lost ascender. At the pool whereit had landed, I elected to strip offmy clothes and swim naked, ratherthan risk being too chilled in wetclothes by the brisk breezes blow-ing against me on the way out.

The next day, the last explorationcrew left the surface for a complexset of tasks down below Camp 3.Paula Grgich and I packed up toleave, since she had an appointmentand I had to get back to work.Melanie and Philippe decided totake their time going back, spend-ing a day in Ciudad Oaxaca andthen taking a bus back to the bor-der and onward to San Antonio.Paula and I would take the bulk oftheir equipment and deliver it toMelanie’s mother’s house there. Wemade our appointments Mondaymorning on time and adjusted backto life after the Cheve Expedition.

Notas de Cheve

El autor participó por dos semanas enla expedición 2003 al Sistema Cheve enOaxaca. Describe el viaje alCampamento 3 en la cueva.

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CAVES ON THE JALPAN QUADRANGLE,QUERÉTARO

Gerald Moni

In December 2002, Gerald Moniand Preston and Shari Forsythe

searched for caves west of Puertode Huilota and around Pinal deAmoles, Querétaro. From Puerto deHilotla they took dirt roads south-west to Puerto Escanelilla andDerramadero de Juárez. They stop-ped just east of La Yerbabuena.They found nine pits and one cavewest of Puerto de Huilota and threecaves near Pinal de Amoles.Lengths in the descriptions are hori-zontal lengths, not total survey.Most of the caves are named for lo-cal guides. All caves are on theJalpan topographic map (F14C48).

Sótano de Agoaz, 21°12'15"N99°37'24"W, length 24 meters,depth 43 meters. The pit entrance,0.6 kilometers east-northeast of LaYerbabuena, is 6 meters long and 3wide. The entrance drop is 14meters, and the bottom slopesdown, 20 meters long by 12 meterswide, to two pits, one 10 metersdeep and the other not checked butestimated to be 25 meters deep.

Sótano del Apalonio, 21°12'27"N99°36'30"W, length 50 meters,depth 65 meters. Located 1.2 kilo-meters southeast of Derramaderode Juárez on the north-northwestslope of a ridge, 6 meters north-northwest of a major trail. The pitentrance is 15 meters long, 12meters wide, and 34 meters deep.The floor is 15 meters in diameterand slopes down at 40 degrees for15 vertical meters to a second pit, 5meters deep. From the bottom ofthe second pit, another slope for 15vertical meters leads to a room 8meters in diameter, the end of the

cave.Sótano La Charca. 21°12'27"N

99°35'58"W, length 7 meters, depth19 meters. Located 2.0 kilometerssoutheast of Derramadero de Juá-rez, 15 meters above the floor of aravine on the southwest side. Theentrance is 3 meters below a majortrail, 100 meters up the trail fromwhere it crosses the ravine. The pitentrance is 1 meter by 1 meter and5 meters deep. The floor slopes 2meters to a second pit, which is 13meters deep. The bottom is 6 meterslong and 3 meters wide, the end ofthe cave.

Cueva de Leona. 21°11'26"N99°38'53"W, length 50 meters,depth 8 meters. Located 0.5 kilome-ters southeast of Agua Enterrada,300 meters northeast of the next tolast house on the dirt road. The caveis 150 meters southwest of Cuevade Zuniga, at the base of a 6-meter-high bluff and 12 meters below thetop of the ridge. There are two en-trances. E1 is 4 meters long by 3meters wide. E2 is 1.5 meters highby 6 meters wide. Both join the mainpassage just inside at a skylight. Thepassage is 50 meters long, 4 meterswide, and 7 meters high. It ends ata clay fill.

Sótano de Maximo. 21°12'04"N99°37'26"W, length 107 meters,depth 40 meters. Located 0.5 kilo-meters east of La Yerbabuena, thepit is in a patch of trees in a pasture260 meters east of the school inYerbabuena, on the northeast sideof a hill. The pit entrance is 15meters long by 3 meters wide. Thefloor of the 8-meter pit slopesdownward at 40 degrees to a room23 meters long, 20 meters wide, and

15 meters high. A passage 6 meterssquare goes 110 meters to an unex-plored crawl.

Sótano La Mesita. 21°12'38"N99°35'52"W, length 21 meters,depth 26 meters. Located 1.9 kilo-meters east-southeast of Derra-madero de Juárez in Ejido Puertode Alejardria. The pit entrance is 6meters above a barbed-wire fence,8 meters long, 5 meters wide, and26 meters deep on the low side.Halfway down, it is 15 meters longby 5 meters wide, and there are noleads at the bottom, which is 6 by20 meters.

Sótano de Noe. 21°11'32"N99°38'52"W, length 25 meters,depth 25 meters. Located 0.5 kilo-meters southeast of Agua Ente-rrada, 350 meters northeast of thenext to last house on the dirt road.The pit entrance is on the hillsideon the southeast side of an arroyo.It is 100 meters north of Cueva deZuniga. The pit is 6 meters squareat the top and slopes downward 30meters to a depth of 25 meters. Thebottom is 12 by 6 meters. A shortpassage on the bottom goes 6 me-ters.

Sótano El Pandito. 21°12'40"N99°36'00"W, length 21 meters,depth 20 meters. Located 1.7 kilo-meters east-southeast of Derra-madero de Juárez, 8 meters above amajor trail. The entrance is 1 by 2meters and 18 meters deep to a bot-tom 2.5 by 6 meters. A walking pas-sage 5 meters high and 1 meterwide slopes downward for 15meters to a room 2 meters deeperthan the bottom of the pit. The roomis 3 by 6 meters.

Sótano de Sixto. 21°13'02"N

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99°36'38"W, length 12 meters,depth 38 meters. On the northeastside of a ridge 0.5 kilometers eastof Derramadero. The pit entrance is5 meters in diameter and 30 metersdeep to a slope that goes 8 metersvertically lower. There are no leads.

Cueva de Zuniga. 21°11'30"N99°38'54"W, length 200 meters,

depth 30 meters. Located 0.5 kilo-meters southeast of Agua Enterradain a sink in a pasture 300 metersnortheast of the next to last houseon the dirt road. The cave is 100meters south of Sótano de Noe and150 meters northeast of Cueva deLeona. The entrance is 8 meterswide and 2 meters high. A 50-meter

slope downward through a largeroom leads to a canyon passage 1meter wide and up to 10 metershigh that goes 125 meters. A tightcrawl goes to a 5-meter climbablepit. Passage at the bottom with air-flow was not explored. Two sidepassages to the left from the canyongo to climbs up that are flowingstreams in wet weather.

Cueva del Judio. 21°07'18"N99°37'42"W, length 100 meters,depth 20 meters. The pit entrance(E2) is 10 meters north of theclimbdown entrance (E1), 1.6 kilo-meters south of Pinal de Amoles ina national forest. From the forestgate, follow road 1.2 kilometers toa dirt road upward to the left. Atthe top of that road, go down a trail75 vertical meters, then left down-hill 25 meters to another trail. Goleft on that trail 200 meters. En-trance is downhill to the right 15vertical meters. E1 is a 6-meterclimbdown 8 meters in diameter toa sloping passage. E2 is a 3-by-8-meter pit that is a skylight approxi-mately 12 meters above the floor ofthe sloping passage that ends at alarge room 25 meters wide and 15meters high. A nice, large cave.

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Gruta Ojo de Agua de Pinal deAmoles. 21°07'59"N 99°37'34"W,length 50 meters, depth 5 meters. Inthe south side of the town of Pinalde Amoles, the entrance is 50meters southeast of the spring and5 meters above the valley. The caveis 250 meters southwest of the mainchurch in the middle of town. Thespring is the source of water for thetown. The entrance is 0.7 by 0.7meters. A downward-sloping crawlgoes 2 meters to a junction. To theright is a narrow crawl. At the bot-tom of the slope is a room 1.8 metershigh, where a low crawlway contin-ues. Not explored, but locals say thecave goes 50 meters as crawlwayswith small rooms.

Cueva de las Trancas. 21°05'18"N99°37'23"W, length 40 meters,depth 8 meters. One kilometersouthwest of Potrerillos on thesouthwest side of Arroyo El Plá-tano. The entrance is 150 meterswest of a bridge in an orange-col-ored bluff 40 vertical meters higherthan the bridge. The entrance is A-shaped, 8 meters high and wide,with four large columns. A largewalking passage goes 30 meters andends at a crawl to the left. The crawlstarts as a belly crawl that leads to10 meters of hands and knees crawl.

Cuevas del Cuadrángulo de Jalpan,Querétaro

Ubicaciones y descripciones de trece pequeñascuevas en el cuadrángulo topográfico de Jalpan,Querétaro.

53


OX BEL HA, SPRING 2003

Bil Phillips

The Steven Douglas Corey Me-morial Expedition 2003 to

Sistema Ox Bel Ha, Quintana Roo,took place in February. It was an Ex-plorers Club Flag Expedition. Thefirst phase was conducted fromCenote Ak Al Ché (Mayan forSwamp Water). This unattractiveentrance was the closest one to apossible underground route intothe Sian Kaan Biosphere Reservefrom Ox Bel Ha. This part of theYucatan jungle is virgin territoryboth above and below ground.

Using closed-circuit rebreathersand diver propulsion vehicles, ex-plorers Steve Bogaerts and BilPhillips pushed beyond known pas-sages in search of a new cenote thatwould aid in future explorations.The ends of the existing lines layabout 2200 meters from the en-trance. The first dive resulted in thediscovery of 899 meters of new cavepassage beyond the end of the oldline. The cave ran south, headingdirectly toward the reserve, but nonew cenote entrance could befound. With a new penetration dis-tance of 3 kilometers from the near-est entrance and dive times of sixhours, the challenge of further in-vestigation was great.

Nevertheless, a second attemptwas made. This time additionalopen-circuit bailout tanks werestaged along the route in the cavefor more safety in case of a cata-strophic CCR failure. Each diveralso used two DPVs, towing onewhile riding the other. The use ofthe DPVs allowed more time topush on beyond known cave, whileminimizing bottom time. This effort

was a success. Beyond 473 metersof new passage, an opening to thesurface was discovered and namedCenote So’sook, Mayan for tangled,because of the vegetation in the col-lapse zone and surrounding jungle.A GPS reading was taken to pindown the position of the new en-trance. Steve and Bil’s three-hourreturn journey through the cavewas long but satisfying, becausethey had found a new entrancefrom which future pushes could beconducted.

The following day Bogaerts con-ducted a last dive from Ak Al Chéto recover stage tanks and make afinal check for leads. Less than amile in, he noticed an opening thathad been previously overlooked.Steve ran a line to the southeast init, and soon a large tunnel openedup before him. “I have never seencave so big,” he exclaimed uponsurfacing. This section was namedMiddle Earth and will be the objectof future investigations.

The second phase of the expedi-tion was conducted from a

cenote discovered in April 2002.Cenote Ix Tikia Kax Tik (DifficultFind) lies between Ox Bel Ha andSistema Naranjal, which was at onetime the longest underwater cave inthe world and has about 21 kilome-ters of passage. Previous attemptsto connect the caves had been madefrom both ends, but from either endpenetrations had reached over 2 ki-lometers, mostly in passages whereDPVs could not be used and wheredivers must pass through small, side-mount restrictions. No attempts to

connect had been made for severalyears, but the discovery of Ix TikiaKax Tik and reconnaissance divesthere that verified its potential ledto new hopes.

The first day, Sam Meacham en-tered the water for a single-stage,side-mount, open-circuit dive toattempt to connect the new cenotewith Ox Bel Ha, an estimated 300meters away. This goal was realizedafter he unwound 485 meters of linethrough low bedding planes andpassage with deep brown silt. Si-multaneously, Bogaerts and Phil-lips, using CCRs and carryingdouble 80-cubic-foot open-circuitbailout tanks, headed southeast to-ward the distant Orion line in an-other part of Ox Bel Ha, some 1200meters away as the crow flies. Theywere soon discouraged when ahuge breakdown section confront-ed them. A steep, muddy embank-ment led up through a hydrogensulfide layer to a small surfaceopening. This opening was seen tobe unsuitable as a practical en-trance, but did offer an emergencybailout point should the need arise,so Cenote Spidge was recorded anda surfacing line installed. Contin-ued attempts to get around thebreakdown led the divers throughsmall, unstable passages, where thebulky CCRs and the extra tankswere a hindrance. Backtrackingthrough zero visibility from stirred-up silt suggested that it was time toabort the dive, but another lead,below the halocline, was alsopushed; it ended after a hundredmeters or so. The line was beingsurveyed on the way out when a

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The new Watermelon Connec-tion Line that was explored andsurveyed during that six-hour divehas a maximum depth of 15 metersand a length of 1582 meters, whichmay be a new record for the mostnew underwater passage discov-ered on a single dive. Dives like thiscome once in a lifetime, as one hasto have been lucky in choosing theright sort of gear for unknown pas-sage, the dive has to be free fromequipment failures or mistakes thatterminate it prematurely, and, ofcourse, the cave has to be there.

On the second day, Meacham’snew connection line of the day be-fore, the Orient Express, made iteasy for rebreather divers to reachthe ends of the lines in Ox Bel Hanearest Naranjal, about 600 metersaway. Bogaerts and Phillips set out,each with a CCR, two open-circuitbailout tanks, and a DPV. Sam’s newline was nicely placed and allowedthe diver to mostly move quicklythrough the low, silty passages. Thehalocline, where fresh and salt wa-ter meet, was right in the middle ofthe conduit, causing blurring thatreduced visibility in the wake of thepropellers. Any delay in the restric-tions resulted in total visibility lossfrom silt, and the divers had to stopand feel their way along the guide-line until the visibility improvedenough for faster progress.

Within an hour and a half theywere at the end of the existing ex-ploration line toward Naranjal thathad been installed by Bogaertsmore than a year earlier. Tying offand feeding new line from theirreels went smoothly. Finding a pathwhile swimming against the cur-rent made pathfinding much easier

Bil Phillips (left) and SteveBogaerts prepare for a re-breather dive in Cenote Ak AlChe. Santos Mejia, Jr.

low side passage was noted. Thiswas a change in fortune, and Bo-gaerts and Phillips wound theirway southeast with the flow of wa-ter until the first exploration reelwas empty, then the second. Finally,on their third reel, they were leddirectly to the end of the Orion linein Ox Bel Ha. A short underwatercelebration at the connection wasfollowed by a return along the newline, recording distance, direction,and depth between line tie-offs,while monitoring the CCRs andother conditions for safety.

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Team members: Standing, leftto right, Santos Mejia, Jr., Sam

Meacham, Steve Bogaerts,Santos Mejia, Sr., Olegario Hau

Hau, Demetrio Herera Cano.Below, Jose Mejia, Bil Phillips.

Bil Phillips.

than it had been going downstreamwith the silt the past few days. For-ays into tunnels that ended causedonly short delays, and finally thegoing passage was found. Eventu-ally, 924 meters of line was installedand surveyed in big saltwater tun-nels heading directly toward Na-ranjal, getting within about 300meters before closing down wherefresh water was flowing in throughimpenetrable cracks in the ceiling.Three hundred minutes on therebreathers at an average depth of18 meters gave the divers 100 per-cent of their daily oxygen-exposurelimit, but resulted in only a fewminutes of decompression require-ment. Once again the CCRs provedtheir worth.

The last day of the project wasdedicated to exploring and survey-ing going passage close to the IxTikia Kax Tik entrance. Beforebreaking camp later in the day,Meacham, Bogaerts, and Phillipscollectively got another 1337 metersof new cave, the new lines giving aclearer picture of the area and pro-

viding information needed for fu-ture pushes.

Altogether, the project was ex-tremely successful and met

many of its objectives. The connec-tion to Naranjal remains elusive,but much has been learned. A totalof 6.6 kilometers of new underwa-ter passage was explored and twonew cenote entrances were found,in eight dives with a total bottomtime of forty-three hours. Averagedepth of the passages was 17meters, with a maximum of 21. Thenew length of Sistema Ox Bel Ha at

the end of the project was approxi-mately 350,000 feet or 106 kilometers.

The divers’ support team was Ole-gario Hau Hau, Demetrio HereraCano, Santos Mejia, Sr., SantosMejia, Jr., and Jose Mejia. Thanks forpermission and support to EjidoTulum, Commissario Abran CamaraPech, and landowner Victor Balam.Also special thanks to Buddy Quat-tlebaum and Hidden Worlds CenotePark for gas mixing and tank fill-ing. The expedition was made pos-sible by the Steven Douglas CoreyMemorial Fund.

Ox Bel Ha, primavera del 2003

En febrero del 2003 buzos exploraron en Ox Bel Ha, la cueva máslarga en México y la cueva subacuática más larga del mundo, desdedos cenotes de entrada, Ak Al Ché y Ix Tikia Kax Tik. En una solainmersión encontraron 1582 metros de pasaje nuevo. Un total de6.6 kilómetros de pasajes nuevos fueron encontrados, con dosnuevas entradas, pero los exploradores no tuvieron éxito en conectarcon el Sistema Naranjal, al norte, o con la Reserva de la BiósferaSian Kaan al suroeste. Después de la expedición, la longitud de OxBel Ha fue de alrededor de 106 kilómetros.

56


MAYA CAVE SHRINES ALONG THECENTRAL COAST OF QUINTANA ROO

Dominique Rissolo

In July 2003, my search for LatePostclassic (AD 1200–1500) ma-

sonry cave shrines along the centralcoast of Quintana Roo took a fortu-itous route through the bush whenI was invited to accompany FredDevos to a rather large cavern justnorth of a popular show caveknown as Aktun Chen. I was eagerto also view and record the cave’spetroglyphs, rock art being amongmy abiding interests within thegrowing sub-field of Maya cave ar-chaeology. I was not disappointed.This cave contained an unusuallyextensive corpus of carved images,as well as two masonry structuresbuilt around stalagmites.

Since 1995, my archaeologicalinvestigations of Maya cave use onthe Yucatan Peninsula have largelyfocused on the inland region ofnorthernmost Quintana Roo (Ris-solo 2003). Recently, I have turnedmy attention toward the Caribbeancoast, where cave sites provide,among other things, a uniqueglimpse into Maya ritual practiceand notions of sacred space on theeve of the Spanish conquest. Archi-tecture, like iconography, offers apalpable link between the con-structed ceremonial precincts ofsurface sites and the intensivelyused and often physically trans-formed subterranean realms. Theseforays during my short summerfield season constituted a first steptoward compiling an archaeologi-cal and architectural inventory ofmasonry cave shrines in QuintanaRoo that will hopefully lead to areassessment of this fascinatingLate Postclassic cave-use tradition.I should mention that my researchinto coastal cave shrines has been

facilitated in the field by Fred Devosand Sam Meacham, with valuableinput from Jim Coke and Bil Phil-lips. Brief, rather informal investi-gations of coastal cave sites have sofar been accomplished at the discre-tion of local landowners and ejida-tarios and under the supervision ofthe Instituto Nacional de Antro-pología e Historia (INAH). Accessto the Aktun Chen area was gra-ciously granted by Lorenzo AconaDíaz de León.

Before I provide a more detaileddescription of the cave near AktunChen, as well as an overview ofother cave shrine sites along thecentral coast, it is perhaps useful toconsider the fundamental charac-teristics of Late Postclassic east-coast architecture. The Caribbeancoast of Mexico is famous for itsenigmatic, almost quixotic templesand shrines; it is within this archi-tectural canon that cave shrines ap-pear to exclusively reside. LatePostclassic buildings in QuintanaRoo are typically crude affairs,coated with multiple layers ofstucco plaster and typically paintedblue-green and red. The high, cor-belled vaults of the Classic Periodare absent; instead, buildings arecapped by low, simple vaults (e.g.,beehive vaults) or beam-and-mortarroofs. Interiors are sometimesgraced with spectacular murals ex-ecuted in the so-called Mixteca-Puebla style. Temple facades aretypically encircled by characteristicmoldings and often support high-relief stucco sculptures.

Shrines can be, in essence, min-iature temples, since they containsome of the interior and exteriorarchitectural details of temples, but

executed on a smaller, cruder scale.Only five examples of such struc-tures have been reported in cavesalong the Quintana Roo coast. An-other category of shrine can be de-scribed as a more open structure ormasonry feature that may closelyresemble the masonry altars or“thrones” found within temples atsurface sites, such as Tulum orXcaret. It is this type of shrine thatwas constructed in the cave nearAktun Chen.

This cave is located exactly 5 ki-lometers due west of the coastal re-sort community of Akumal, not farfrom the show cave of Aktun Chen.I hesitate to attach a specific nameto the cave since it currently enjoysat least three monikers. This task isperhaps better left to both the land-owner and the original surveyors.A preliminary survey of the cavewas conducted in 2003 by FredDevos, José Mis, James Reddell, andMarcelino Reyes, and the cave wasprovisionally named Gruta LasCaritas. Prior to their efforts, thecave was extensively explored byLorenzo Acona Díaz de León andvisited by INAH archeologist LuisLeira. The description that followsis based on my preliminary inves-tigation of the cave’s archaeologicalremains during my first trip withFred and two subsequent trips withSam Meacham.

The archaeological features in thecave are primarily located withinthe expansive, beautifully deco-rated twilight chamber at the cave’ssouthern entrance. This broad, hori-zontal, south-facing opening lies atthe bottom of a pronounced depres-sion and measures 18 meters inwidth and a maximum of 13 meters

57


Shrine 1, near the entrance ofGruta Las Caritas.Dominique Rissolo.

in height. Along the 246.5 meters ofsurveyed passage to the north aretwo additional entrances, which canbe described as large skylightsabove massive debris cones. Shallowpools are found in the main entrancechamber, in its associated passage-ways, and throughout the cave.

The well-preserved wall of a ma-sonry feature is immediately notice-able upon entering the cave. Thisstructure was designated Shrine 1.Most striking is not the constructionitself, but rather the fact that it waspositioned around a stalagmite.Speleothems are closely associatedwith rain and fertility by the Maya.In their landmark paper, Brady etal. (1997) deftly and convincinglyarticulated the symbolic functionand meaning of speleothem use.

Shrine 1, which forms a U-shapedenclosure around the stalagmite, is2.33 meters long, 1.11 meters wide,and roughly 0.70 meters high. Thenortheastern half of the southeast-facing shrine appears to have col-lapsed at some point in the past and

to have been crudely rebuilt bysimply stacking stones atop one an-other. The intact walls of the south-western half of the shrine werecoated with a thick layer of stuccoplaster and appear to have beenpainted blue-green. The stalagmitemeasures 2.1 meters in circumfer-ence at its base and 0.95 meters inheight. The shrine’s stucco floor oncesurrounded the stalagmite, but hassince been destroyed, possibly bylooters. This unfortunate excavation

exposed what appears to be an ar-tificially carved niche at the base ofthe stalagmite, which may haveoriginally housed a sub-floor votiveoffering.

Near the shrine we identifiedfragments of a modeled ceramic ef-figy incense-burner in the form ofChac, the Maya rain god. (This LatePostclassic ceramic type is knownas Chen Mul, after the famous cen-ote at Mayapán.) This is vaguelyreminiscent of Balankanche Cave,where effigy censers of Tlaloc, theAztec rain god, were placed arounda prominent column (see AndrewsIV 1970). We also found a conchshell nearby that was probably partof an offering. One of the cave’s sixpanels or groupings of rock art liesjust behind Shrine 1. On the smoothceiling above a flowstone mound,we counted at least twelve red,positive handprints. Such imagerycan be found on the interiors oftemple walls at various sites alongcoast and on Cozumel. A simple facewas etched into the flowstone, oneof at least a dozen found in the cave.

Shrine 2 is located along the east-ern wall of the main entrance cham-ber, on the edge of a shallow pool.This U-shaped shrine was also con-structed around a stalagmite. Un-like those of Shrine 1, the flankingwalls of Shrine 2 are stepped backand closely resemble the “terracedwings” of the altar in Structure 1 atthe site of Xelha (Lothrop 1924: fig.136). Shrine 2 is in a remarkablygood state of preservation. It ap-pears as if efforts to produce

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Shrine 2, on the far side of theentrance pool in Gruta LasCaritas. Dominique Rissolo.

smooth plaster surfaces focused onthe interior walls of the shrine, leav-ing the crude masonry of the exte-rior exposed. The north and eastwalls of the roughly west-facingshrine were built into a sloping por-tion of the low cave ceiling. Thethick, elevated plaster floor of theshrine is largely intact, but it is clearthat someone attempted to excavatearound the base of the stalagmite.The stalagmite itself is 1.84 metersin circumference and 0.62 metershigh. Interestingly, there is an ab-stract U-shaped element carved intothe stalagmite. Also noteworthy isthe base of a broken stalagmite, lo-cated directly in front of the shrine,that was carved into the shape of acylindrical column.

In 2003, in addition to visits to theAktun Chen area, I attempted to

relocate four cave shrines in the vi-cinity of Xcaret that were originallyreported by Andrews IV andAndrews (1975). Three of the caveshrines reported by Andrews IVand Andrews could be described asminiature temples. I was successfulin relocating the shrine in Group YCave and hope to return in the nearfuture. During my search, I had thegood fortune of briefly visiting apreviously unreported cave shrinenear Xcaret that strongly resemblesShrine 2 in the cave near AktunChen. In this case, however, theshrine was built around a “throne,”rather than a stalagmite. Manythrones in or atop shrines through-out Quintana Roo now sit empty,

because the idols that once occu-pied them have since been spiritedaway or smashed; the fragments ofthese doomed sculptures some-times litter the shrine’s floor.

Outside of the site of Xcaret, onlytwo other shrines have been re-ported in caves along the centralcoast: Cueva de Satachannah, south-west of Xcaret (Martos López 2002:222–225), and Aktun Na Kan, southof Xcaret (Leira Guillermo andTerrones González 1986). I stronglysuspect that there are many morecave shrines than those reported inthe archaeological literature. Thereis both great potential for discov-ery and a hope on the part of archae-ologists that locals will share theirknowledge of such sites.

A systematic program of detailedmapping and archaeological re-cording in the impressive cave nearAktun Chen is certainly warranted.Only then can we more closely ex-amine the cave’s rock art, artifacts,and architectural features in theirbroader archaeological and speleo-logical context.

Andrews IV, E. Wyllys, 1970. Balan-kanche, Throne of the Tiger Priest.Middle American Research Insti-tute, Publication 32. Tulane Uni-versity, New Orleans.

Andrews IV, E. Wyllys, and An-thony P. Andrews, 1975. A Pre-liminary Study of the Ruins ofXcaret, Quintana Roo, Mexico:With Notes on Other Archaeologi-cal Remains on the Central EastCoast of the Yucatán Peninsula.Middle American Research Insti-tute, Publication 40. Tulane Uni-versity, New Orleans.

Brady, James E., Ann Scott, HectorNeff, and Michael Glascock, 1997.Speleothem Breakage, Movement,Removal and Caching: An Unre-ported Aspect of Ancient MayaCave Modification. Geoarchaeo-logy 12(6):725–750.

Leira Guillermo, Luis Joaquin, andEnrique Terrones González, 1986.Aktun Na Kan. Boletín de laEscuela de Ciencias Antropológicasde la Universidad de Yucatán14(79):3–10.

Lothrop, Samuel K., 1924. Tulum:An Archaeological Study of the EastCoast of Yucatán. Carnegie Insti-tution of Washington, Publica-tion 335, Washington, D.C.

Martos López, Luis Alberto, 2002.Por Las Tierras Mayas: Arqueologíaen el Área de CALICA, QuintanaRoo. INAH.

Rissolo, Dominique, 2003. AncientMaya Cave Use in the Yalahau Re-gion, Northern Quintana Roo,Mexico. Association for MexicanCave Studies, Bulletin 12. Austin,Texas.

Altares Mayas en cuevas

Una cueva cerca de Aktun Chen, 5 kilómetros al oeste deAkumal, Quintana Roo, contiene dos altares mayas. Ambosson paredes construídas alrededor de estalagmitas. La cuevatambién contiene arte rupestre, incluyendo impresiones demanos y caras grabadas en calcita.

59


SPECIATION IN AQUATIC TROGLOXENESIN CENOTES

Adriana Barona and Luis Espinasa

This article is a summary of a BAthesis written by AB. Authors areaffiliated with CEAMISH, Univer-sidad Autónoma del Estado deMorelos, and/or Shenandoah Uni-versity. Correspondence should beaddressed to LE, Biology Depart-ment, Shenandoah University, 1460University Drive, Winchester, Vir-ginia 22601, [email protected] Granados and GerardoObispo gave help and support dur-ing the field studies.

The Yucatan Peninsula is a largelimestone platform with a vast

expanse of karst topography. Oneof the Yucatan’s most striking fea-tures is the complete absence of anysignificant surface fluvial system.Essentially all water flows under-ground through long cave systems.Access to the water networks can begained in places where the roofs ofthese underground rivers or aqui-fers have dissolved or brokendown. These karst windows areknown as cenotes.

The direction of the water flowand communication among thesedrainage systems has importantimplications for the biologicalcommunities, as well as for the in-habitants of the Yucatan Peninsula,but, unfortunately, very little isknown about these cave systems.Pollution of hydrologically con-nected cenotes is a constant threat.We were interested in studyingthe degree of relatedness amongfish populations inhabiting differ-ent cenotes and, potentially, indi-rectly establishing the extent ofinterconnectedness of the caves by

determining how much migrationor gene flow there is among the cen-ote populations. Our results did notresolve questions about the level ofconnectedness, but as it often hap-pens in science, the unexpected re-sults proved to be more remarkablethan what we originally had plan-ned to investigate.

In non-karstic parts of the world,aquatic organisms freely disperseby following upstream or down-stream water networks. Their dis-persal is mainly restricted whenthey encounter geographical barri-ers, such as waterfalls or rapids, orwhen the organism is not adaptedto different physical conditions,such as temperature or pH, encoun-tered along the course of the stream.Since most aquatic animals cannotdisperse over dry land, species tendto be restricted to hydrological sys-tems, and as long as they encoun-ter no significant barriers, membersof a particular species can be foundalong long stretches within thesesystems (Chen and Borowsky,2004).

Dispersal opportunities withinthe Yucatan hydrological networkare different. Despite an almostcomplete absence of waterfalls orrapids (the Yucatan Peninsula islargely flat), the contrasting condi-tions in illuminated cenotes and thedark passages connecting them canbe insurmountable barriers forsome species. Water pressure canalso be a significant barrier. Under-water galleries or cenotes can go todepths of hundreds of meters. Iforganisms are to disperse from oneopen cenote to another, they have

to be able to cope with the continu-ous darkness, the different sourcesof food, and often the high waterpressure found in some of thesegalleries.

Since the Yucatan’s hydrologicalnetwork can be characterized as anessentially underground systemwith a scattering of karst windows(cenotes), one might predict thataquatic troglobites are able to dis-perse with relative ease, and, con-sequently, members of these specieswill be widespread and found inmultiple localities. The biogeogra-phy of several organisms supportsthis idea (Reddell, 1977); two aqua-tic shrimps, Typhlatya pearsei andCreaseria morleyi, are highly adaptedtroglobites with a broad rangethroughout the peninsula. The lat-ter has been found in at least thirtydifferent localities. Most troglobiticfish studied behave similarly. Oneof the more distinctive members ofthe Yucatan cave fauna is the blindeel, Ophisternon infernale, and itsrange encompasses the north coastalplain from east to west. Anothertroglobitic fish, Typhliasina pearsei,shares a similar range.

Is the situation drastically differ-ent for aquatic trogloxenes that livein open cenotes? These organismsmay not be able to survive long inthe underground passages, and onecould postulate that their dispersalis restricted to events sporadic innature, such as flooding of the sur-face land or having their eggs getstuck to the legs of waterfowl, whothen fly to nearby cenotes. Since thesubterranean hydrologic connec-tions that presumably exist between

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neighboring cenotes are an unlikelyoption for their dispersal, aquatictrogloxenes living in open cenotesmay be as isolated as land animalson islands in the middle of theocean. Only species that are able tosurvive the overland journey will beable to disperse regularly. Foraquatic trogloxenes, the open cen-otes of the Yucatan may not be acontinuous network of streams andrivers, but instead are akin to iso-lated islands in an archipelago.

In order to characterize the levelof isolation for an aquatic troglo-

xene living in open cenotes, we es-timated the number of migrants bymeasuring gene flow among fourpopulations of Gambusia yucatanawith two molecular biology tech-niques, RAPDs (DNA fingerprint-ing) and isoenzymes. Gambusiayucatana is a small (less than 4 cen-timeters) colorful fish in the samefamily as the guppy, Poeciliidae. Itschools at the edge of streams,where it feeds on algae and insectlarvae. Gambusia clusters near thesurface, seldom swimming below

20 centimeters from the surface.They have internal fertilization andgive birth to live fish. Gambusiayucatana is abundant in the Yucatanand can be found in open cenotesthat are well illuminated and havealgae. They are clearly trogloxenes,and show no adaptation to the caveenvironment.

Live fish were collected fromfour open cenotes 30 kilometerssouth of Mérida: Babay (20°36.490′N89°43.849′W), Abal-haa (20°38.620′N89°41.115 ′W), San Marcos(20°35.040′N 89°36.850′W) andSabak-ha (20°34.792′N 89°35.299′W).The shortest distance among themwas between San Marcos andSabak-ha (2.73 km) and the longestwas between Babay and Sabak-ha(15.19 km). Fresh muscle tissue wasused for the isoenzyme analysis,and DNA was extracted from finclips for RAPDs analysis in the labo-ratory. Nine loci for the EST (2 loci),IDH, AAT (2 loci), 6-PGD, MDH (2loci), and APH enzymes were stud-ied in thirty-five individuals fromeach population. Five loci werepolymorphic and therefore infor-

method) with data from DNA fin-gerprints (seventy-three bandsscored, 42.4 percent of which werepolymorphic) from five individualsfrom each of the four populations.The phylogenetic tree was also con-sistent with low levels of migrationamong populations. All four popu-lations were monophyletic, and ev-ery single individual was moreclosely related to members of itsown cenote than to any individualfrom any one of the other popula-tions. Genetic distances from boththe isoenzyme and RAPDs datashowed the same two populationclusters: Babay and Abal-haa popu-lations were the most closely re-lated, and then San Marcos andSabak-ha populations.

One theory of evolutionary biol-ogy postulates that if two popula-tions are isolated from each otherand do not exchange genes, theyeventually splinter, each followingits own evolutionary course aschanges in genes accumulate. Astime progresses, they will increas-ingly diverge, both genetically andmorphologically, until they becomeseparate species (Mayr, 1963). Thisprocess is known as allopatric spe-ciation. Our results demonstratethat for the Gambusia living in whatis for them geographically isolatedcenotes, gene flow has been low,and they have already experiencedmuch genetic differentiation. Thisprompted us to study the Gambu-sia’s morphology to, in a sense, seespeciation in progress.

We took twelve different bodymeasurements from seventy-fivefish from Babay, fifty-nine fromAbal-haa, seventy-one from SanMarcos, and forty-seven fromSabak-ha, and divided them furtherinto males and females. We thenperformed a statistical analysisknown as “principal components”and established that the four popu-lations were each clearly morpho-logically distinguishable from oneanother. Overall, individuals fromAbal-haa and San Marcos were theleast distinct, while those fromBabay were the most, although eachpopulation had its own distinguish-ing set of factors. For example, SanMarcos fish are characterized by apointed face and a curved body,

mative (EST-2, IDH, 6-PGD,MDH-1, and MDH). Het-erozygosis was low; 0.04instead of the expected av-erage of 0.09. (Low het-erozygosis happens insmall populations that donot migrate to other neigh-boring populations, thuspromoting endogamy).Average Fst (an estimate ofgene flow) among the fourpopulations was 0.52. Thisindicates very great geneticdifferentiation and ex-tremely low migration(Nm = 0.22). This numbertranslates into approxi-mately one single indi-vidual in the populationmigrating every four gen-erations. To give some per-spective, humans havemuch higher gene flow es-timates among populationsliving on different conti-nents (Nm close to 5.1), andanimals have an Nm closeto 1.2 on average.

We also obtained a phy-logenetic tree (UPGMA

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Above: Morphological differ-ence between two typicalfemales from cenotes San

Marcos (top) and Babay.Below: Male gonapodium, tip

of anal fin. Top specimen isfrom Babay, bottom specimen

is from Abal-haa.

while those from Babay are flat-headed with parallel-sided body. Amost significant distinguishing fea-ture was the gonopodium. Thegonopodium is the anal fin, whichin males is modified and appearsas a semi-penis to help them withthe internal fertilization. The tip hasa set of spines, which are used bytaxonomists to differentiate be-tween poeciliid species. So diagnos-tic is this character that the numberand position of the spines is usedin biological keys as the main char-acter to differentiate species. In thecase of the four populations westudied, Babay males had an aver-age of 5.60 ± 0.51 (standard devia-tion) spines in the gonopodium,Abal-haa 6.57 ± 0.49, Sabak-ha 4.73± 0.49, and San Marcos 5.65 ± 0.41spines. The individuals from Abal-haa and the ones from Sabak-ha didnot even overlap in the number ofspines. Abal-haa fish had six ormore, while all the Sabak-ha indi-viduals measured had fewer thansix spines. If it was not for the factthat these two cenotes are only 12kilometers apart, some taxonomistswould have no problem consider-ing this character enough to assignthe two populations to two differ-ent subspecies or even differentspecies.

CONCLUSION. Gambusia yucatanais a trogloxene fish that lives

near the surface of the open, illu-minated cenotes in the Yucatan Pen-insula. Since the fish almost neverdescend more than 20 centimetersbeneath the surface, they are essen-tially unable to disperse by swim-ming from one cenote to anotherthrough the underground passages.Dispersion among cenotes is alsorestricted for this species because,unlike most fish, Gambusia yucatanagive birth to live fish and do not lay

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eggs. Therefore they cannot use thetraditional egg over-land transport-ing devices such as sticky eggs ad-hering to the legs of waterfowl orsimply being blown to a differentlocality. The result of these behav-ioral and ecological characteristicsmeans that cenote populations ofGambusia are extremely isolatedfrom one another. Geographic iso-lation restricts gene flow amongpopulations, and a low level of geneflow allows for genetic differentia-tion, which then may be reflectedin their distinct morphologies. Allof these factors are present in Gam-busia yucatana, and all of these arethe basis for speciation.

We have demonstrated that fourarbitrarily selected cenote popula-tions of Gambusia yucatana withinan 8-kilometer radius have enough

genetic and morphological differen-tiation to be classified as differentsubspecies or even species, depend-ing on the criteria being used. Suchdivergence in non-karstic riverswould typically be expected only ifpopulations are much farther apartor even in different hydrologic sys-tems.

Why is this relevant? There arehundreds if not thousands of opencenotes in the Yucatan Peninsula. Ifeach cenote has its own subspeciesor species, we may need to considerthe Yucatan Peninsula as one of thebiggest “hot spots” of speciation forfish. It even opens an interestingdoor for conservationists: Typicallygovernments do not protect one lo-cality unless it houses some uniqueorganisms. If the validity of our re-sults can be extended over the

whole peninsula, perhaps each cen-ote has its own unique and endemicGambusia. This might be an ichthyo-logist’s dream, but for the taxono-mist who has to catalogue them all,it is his worst nightmare.

Chen, K., and R. L. Borowsky, 2004.Comparative phylogeography ofXiphophorus variatus and Heteran-dria jonesi (Poeciliidae) usingRAPD data. Ichthyol. Explor.Freshwater 15(1): 25–40.

Mayr, E., 1963. Animal species andevolution. Belknap Press of Har-vard University Press, Cam-bridge, Massachusetts.

Reddell, J. R., 1977. A preliminarysurvey of the caves of the YucatanPeninsula. Association for MexicanCave Studies Bulletin 6:215–296.

Especiación de troglóxenos acuáticos en cenotes

Investigadores intentaron estudiar las conexionessubacuáticas entre cenotes en Yucatán midiendo las simili-tudes entre los peces superficiales en los cenotes. Estudiosde ADN y morfología demostraron de hecho que laspoblaciones de Gambusia yucatana en los cuatro cenoteseran bastante distintas, indicando que no viajan de uno aotro para reproducirse. Si los biólogos estimaran estasdiferencias como suficientes para definir nuevas especies,habrían cientos de especies similares en los cenotes deYucatán.

63


CAVING IN CUETZALAN

Chris Lloyd

Cuetzalan, Puebla, has to be oneof the best weekend caving ar-

eas in the world. Where else can aMexican caver drive for a longweekend (or even a regular week-end if he lives in Mexico City) toover one hundred kilometers of ex-plored, mainly large stream pas-sages, with loads of potential fornew stuff? You don’t even have tocamp out, unless you like campingin the rain. The hotels, food, and,most importantly, drink are all stillvery cheap. There is the small mat-ter of its caves’ reputation forfloods, but I think that is a bit over-done. We went. We didn’t getcaught in a flood. It must be over-done.

My trip began in Guadalajarawith two friends, Victor Hugo andAlberto Cortés, on a Thursday af-ternoon in February 2003. Westopped in Mexico City for the nightat the house of Ramón Espinasa.The next morning, with Ramónjoining us, we continued on towardCuetzalan, thinking we could makegood time, since it was a holidayand cross-town traffic was unusu-ally light. Our good fortune did notlast, of course, as we got stuck forover an hour in stop-and-go trafficjust to pay the toll to get out oftown, confirming that the biggesthassle in caving in Cuetzalan is thetraffic in Mexico City (although thepolice in Toluca do their best to grabthe top spot). Unless you travelthrough or out of Mexico City be-tween midnight and 6 AM, you arealmost sure to get stuck in traffic forat least an hour. Caving in Cuet-zalan, once you get there, is the easypart of the trip.

Once out of Mexico City, after afew hours on the road crossing thehigh, volcanic plateau of centralMexico, one begins to drop off theedge into steep, heavily dissectedterrain with an almost permanentcloud bank. Along the windingroad, the karst of the Cuetzalan areaslowly becomes apparent throughthe clouds and light drizzle knownas chipi chipi.

The area we had chosen to ex-plore is actually to the west ofCuetzalan and above it, centeredroughly around the smaller town ofJonotla. This area was also exploredby the Americans, with some Cana-dians, Brits, and Mexicans as well,in the 1970s and early ’80s, but evenless was published about it thanabout the main Cuetzalan area. Asa result, Ramón has been pokingaway for the last ten years or so atproperly mapping the known cavesin this area. Our trip was to add tothat, as well as do a top-to-bottomthrough-trip in Sistema Huayateno,which we figured had never beendone before. The whole of the sys-tem is about 6.5 kilometers long,with many leads still to push, whilethe main through-trip traversesabout 3.5 kilometers of passage.

Due to the traffic problem, weweren’t in the Jonotla area until 3PM, so we decided to just have alook at a cave Ramón knew to bejust under the highway, with only afive-minute approach hike. It re-surges about 500 meters downhillon the other side of the highway.Starting the survey at the drip line,we headed downstream over clean-washed cobbles set between sand-banks. Two side passages right by

the entrance were left for later inhopes of a quick through-trip. Butthe cave had other things in mind.About 150 meters in, still withinsight of daylight, the stream headedunder a wall into ugly-looking stuffthat we had no intention of push-ing, since the main passage seemedto head off to the left, where, fortu-nately, it continues in ample size, 20by 15 meters, until a corner pre-sented us with a large pile of treetrunks that must have been washedin by the last hurricane, about fiveyears ago. We continued along theleft wall over a pile of rotting woodand then over big breakdown blocksinto much smaller passage. Somenarrow bits and small chambersquickly took us to a dead end,where there is a small water inletand an even smaller outlet, but noway on for us. Hmmm. We musthave missed something somewhere.Backtracking, we checked out theright side of the wood pile andfound a couple of ways on intosmaller passage with the sound offlowing water. This would be theway to check sometime when wehad more time. We needed now toget over to Cuetzalan a find a hotelroom for the holiday weekend.(This cave is Sumidero de Ague-yaco, described by Randy Spahl inthe Canadian Caver, volume 15,number 2, 1983, but whose map hasnever been published.)

Once in Cuetzalan, we quicklynoticed that the streets were

full of SUVs, many sporting bikesin racks, not a good sign. Sureenough, our usual hotel, the HotelVicky, was completely full, but as

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the owners know Ramón, they letus use for a couple of nights a housethey are converting into a smallhotel. Thus settled, we were able toget ready for our big through-tripthe next day.

Ramón had not been to the topentrance in ten years, and we didnot know how long the traversewould take. We figured six to eighthours plus the hikes to and from theentrances. We parked at the samehouse, Don Tobias’s, as the day be-fore and set out in rare sunshine onthe one-hour hike to the upper en-trance. As we hiked, Ramón point-ed out various other entrances, aswell as the house that Mike Boonand Randy Spahl had used as a basewhile exploring this area sometwenty years ago (see the same ar-ticle in the Canadian Caver).

The upper entrance we used isactually a fossil entrance in a smallheadwall about 50 meters from theactive entrance, where the streamflows underground, and some 100meters away from where the samestream emerges from the lower endof Sima Estefan, another through-trip cave, 1 kilometer long. Our firstobstacle was a climb right in theentrance that looked a bit tricky, butturned out to be quite easy once wewere on it. From the base of theclimb, in passage 3 meters wide by4 meters high, a passage is seen go-ing both uphill and downhill, with

a small inlet coming in across fromthe base of the climb. The uphilldirection was not checked, while Ihad a quick look into the active in-let, scooping about 40 meters ofwalking passage that has not beenmapped. But we were there for asport trip and headed on down intothe known cave.

About 40 meters in, the streamcomes in on the right from a walk-ing-size passage that quickly getssmaller. It is possible to follow thewater in from the wet entrance, butthat entails crawling in the flowingwater, so we had taken the easyroute. After another 40 meters inever-larger passage, one passes un-der an 8-meter-diameter skylightbefore coming to a junction wherea large passage comes in from theleft. This is the Tepantitlan section,which I had helped explore in 2000from its surface entrance downthree pitches to the top of a fourth.This trip we strolled upstream in it50 meters to see the 7-meter-highwaterfall that had stopped us then.

Continuing down the main route,we soon came to the next obstacle,a 7-meter cascade. We had broughta rope just in case, but finding noth-ing to rig to, we just used it to lowerour packs, and we down-climbedon one side of the water. The climblooked quite tricky, but handholdsappeared just as they were needed,and nobody was washed into the

crashing water. Below the cascadeis a large breakdown chamber witha couple of possible routes onward.The right way is down through theblocks, which pops one out into alower level that continues in solidrock, leaving the breakdown be-hind. Shortly, another junction isreached, where the left side goes toanother climb and cascade, both ofwhich can be bypassed by going tothe right through some hands-and-knees crawlways. As crawlways go,these are not too bad, though mostof the floor is cobbles in conglom-erate, which makes it uncomfort-able on the knees. Before long, wepopped out high up in the wall ofthe main drain. Now this was morelike it, 10 meters wide by 15 metershigh, with an exposed but easydownclimb to get into it. Oncedown, we walked back upstream tocheck out the waterfall pouring intoa 25-meter-wide chamber, wherewe decided that the crawlway by-pass had been worthwhile.

The main drain continues on infine style, with a clear flowingstream quietly sliding by gravelbanks or between large blocks inpassage 10 to 20 meters wide. Sucheasy going never lasts, though, andbefore long we were back up on topof big blocks and could see anotherwaterfall on the right, which marksthe inlet from the La Casita En-trance. One hundred meters farther,

65


we climbed up out of the main routeto pass through the Claraboya (Sky-light) Entrance. Here we stoppedfor lunch and enjoyed the lushgreenness of the damp vegetationat the bottom of the 30-meter-deepand 20-meter-wide pit. Off to oneside, another high inlet came infrom a passage that led up to thehouse that Boon had used. Oppo-site that was a 10-by-8-meter open-ing leading down into the rest of thecave.

The next section of the cave hasthe biggest passage, with some ofthe breakdown blocks here widerthan any of the passage seen previ-ously. Some places reach 40 metersin width and some 30 meters high,with the stream somewhere underthe blocks. Also in this section is theonly notable formation in the cave,a large flowstone bulge along onewall, with a nice stalactite and drap-ery above it. Beyond that formation,the size of the passage decreases to5 to 10 meters wide again, and be-fore long we came to yet anotherentrance, the Entrada de Dos Clara-boyas. This one is particularly im-portant, as it allows you to checkthe weather outside before commit-ting yourself to the last 500 metersof the cave. So far, moving alongwith occasional stops for photos, wehad spent only five hours under-ground, but five in the afternoonput us in the prime time of day forrain. Fortunately, a look outsidesuggested that we were unlikely toget a shower, so we plunged on intothe most sporting part of the trip.

Plunge may not be quite the rightword, as the first pool, which usedto be a swim, is now only a wade,due to the last hurricane bringingin a lot of sand and gravel. This hadbeen noticed throughout the cave,actually, as nowhere did we needto make the swims that Ramón re-membered, though we did get wetup to the armpits in a few places.After the wade, the passage nar-rows down into a tall canyon. Wefollowed narrow ledges near theroof, while the stream rushed along3 to 5 meters below us. Most of thetime, the passage is narrow enoughfor comfortable bridging, but a fewwide spots made us stretch to reachthe other side. Where boulders

block forward progress, we had todrop down to water level again,before being forced back up by asection too narrow to pass. Then theheight of the passage drops to justa few meters, and we were in thewater and trying to avoid plungepools. Following a few cascades, werounded a corner to be confrontedby a boulder blocking the passage.Ramón says he squeezed by the lasttime he was here, but, ten kilogramsheavier, he had no such luck thistime. Time to look for the supposedbypass.

Backtracking upstream, we failedto find anything that we couldsqueeze through, so we decided tosee if the skinny guys could get pastthe boulders and maybe help theheavyweights from the other side.Fortunately, before we did that, Vic-tor took a look at the floor of thepassage and thought that he couldlie in the water and get past theboulder that way. Sure enough, itwas not tight at all, and it did noteven require full immersion.

So now, with the tightest bits be-hind us, we cruised through morebridging rift over the stream and afew deep pools before popping outthe lower fossil entrance, havinglost the water under boulders acouple of turns back. I found thisentrance a bit disappointing, as itwas only a couple of meters in di-ameter, nothing like some of thehuge entrances in the area or likemuch of the rest of the cave, for thatmatter. But we were out in sixhours, did not get flooded out, andstill had daylight to hike back up tothe car. Quite a good day on one ofthe classic through-trips in Mexico:3.5 kilometers of everything youcould want in a cave. Now if wecould just get rid of a couple ofthings we didn’t want, like thosecrawls in the upper bit. . . .

After being delayed somewhatSunday morning by the local

market, we set off to see if we couldcomplete the through-trip in Sumi-dero de Agueyaco that we hadstarted on Friday. It took quite a bitof willpower and no shortage ofwhining to put back on wet clothesin the light drizzle now falling, buteventually we made it back down

into that cave. This time we took thefirst side passage to see what it didand quickly knocked off 150 metersof survey in walking passage, fol-lowing a trickle of water and abreeze. This took us into a boulderpile, though, that some of us weren’ttoo keen to push. But finally theyoung lads got to show their keen-ness by pushing on ahead. Victortook a tight, stooping stream pas-sage, while Alberto headed up intothe boulders, managing to get abovethe pile and into big passage again.Unfortunately, Victor’s streamwaydrops to a crawl after 30 meters, andthe big stuff up above didn’t seemto go very far. Considering the goodbreeze in the start of that section, itis definitely worth a good push tripto find the way on. We had comefor the through-trip, though, so weheaded back into the main part ofthe cave, passing four frogs alongthe way, prompting the name Pasajede las Arañas.

Back at the woodpile, we headedin on the right side and passed anarrow part, before the passageopened up again to 2 to 5 meterswide. That didn’t last long beforewe had to drop down into a smallsection with a flowing stream. Fol-lowing the stream briefly, we triedto stay with the air and the biggerpassages in what appears to be arectilinear maze. Leaving behind anumber of side passages, we pushedon, with Victor probing the routeahead into a modest-sized chamber.Continuing on through boulders atthe right end of that room, wepopped out into a very large room,50 meters wide, 20 meters high, andabout 30 meters across, with thestream flowing across roundedcobbles. This was more like it; thisstomping passage had to be themain way on. But once again thecave had other ideas.

Leaving small leads in the cor-ners of the room, we headed down-stream, where the size quicklycloses down again to normal walk-ing size. We surveyed around a pil-lar to avoid a dunking, and then thepassage split again, one taking thestream to the right, while the mainair seemed to be going left. Butnow we were out of time and hadto call a halt in favor of starting our

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thirteen-hour drive home (oh, joy).But a quick scoop ahead by theyoung lads confirmed that we stillhad lots to come back for. So far wehad about 500 meters of survey inwhat was supposed to be a trip be-tween entrances 500 meters apart,but we had in fact only advancedhalf of that straight-line distance.Who knows how much more awaitsus?

Cueveando ed Cuetzalan

El artículo describe una travesía en el SistemaHuayateno, Puebla, y el comienzo de latopografía del Sumideron de Agueyaco, en lamisma área.

The Devil’s Book of Culture: History,Mushrooms, and Caves in SouthernMexico. Benjamin Feinberg. Univer-sity of Texas Press, Austin; 2003. 6by 9 inches, 272 pages. SoftboundISBN 0-292-70190-x $23.95, hard-bound ISBN 0-292-70550-6 $55.00.

Feinberg is an anthropologistwriting about the Sierra Mazatecaand primarily about the long his-tory of Huautla, Oaxaca. Up untilabout fifty years ago, the SierraMazateca was a little-known, iso-lated area with few, if any, roadsinto it. This all changed in 1957,when George Wasson, a mycologist,wrote an article for Life magazine.He revealed the existence of a cul-ture in which shamans used themind-altering abilities of psyche-delic mushrooms in curing ceremo-nies. By the mid-1960s, a rough,unpaved road had reached Huaut-la, and hordes of hippies started todescend on the area seeking themagic mushrooms. To add to themix, cavers went there to check outthe many sinkholes indicated ontopo maps. Not long afterward,

regular caving expeditions began toSótano de San Agustín and othercaves near the village of San Agus-tín.

There was a local backlash againstthe hippies, and they were orderedout or prevented from going intothe mountains. Since cavers at thetime appeared no different, caveexploration in the area becamemuch more difficult. A six-year hia-tus in caving ensued, until trips re-sumed in the late 1970s. It is withthis background that Feinberg’sbook can be read with particularinterest in his take on the role thecaves play among the Mazatec.Most of the book deals with po-litical, commercial, and culturalhistory, making it read like a spe-cialized anthropological journal.But within it are scattered many tid-bits of interest to cavers, includinga long chapter on caves. In every-day language, he includes amusingstories about his truck and the ad-ventures he had during his manytrips to Huautla.

The cavers, ecstatic at havingfound world-class caves, at first

gave little notice to the importancethe indigenous people placed onthe caves, which they had used forhundreds of years for ceremonialevents and burials for the nobility.Feinberg tells of legends of buriedtreasure and myths of El Chato, ahalf-beast, half-human that inhab-its the caves. This devil-like creaturewill provide wealth in return forsexual favors to anyone who ven-tures underground.

It is small wonder that cavers metwith such ire from the traditionalMazatecs. Despite his efforts atpublic-relations, some still thinkthat Stone’s expeditions are takingthings of value out of the caves. Af-ter almost forty years of caving inthe Sierra Mazateca, the issue of thecavers is still not clearly resolvedamong the local people. FromFeinberg’s book one can at least getan idea about why relations be-tween the Mazatecs and cavers havebeen so contentious. Perhaps a bet-ter idea will emerge of the Maza-tecs, custodians of some of the mostspectacular caves on earth.

—Ernie Garza

BOOK REVIEW

67


FIRSTSPELEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF MEXICO

TRIP

T. R. Evans

HISTORY

Here is a letter written by T. R.Evans and addressed to Orion

Knox. Both were cavers from Austin,Texas. The letter is dated October30, 1962, and is on SpeleologicalSurvey of Mexico letterhead, whichlists TR as editor and James Reddelland William Russell as associates.Reddell and Russell are still activein what is now called the Associa-tion for Mexican Cave Studies. Theletter is printed here with TR’s per-

mission.The first cave mentioned is Sóta-

no de El Crucero, Veracruz. As faras I can tell, no map of this cave hasbeen published. The second cave isSótano de Oztoatlicholoa, Veracruz.A map of it appears in AMCS Ac-tivities Newsletter 22, on page 55. Thecave in the Xilitla area is Sótano deHuitzmolotitla; a map exists but hasnot been published.

TR wrote a longer article on the

trip for the Texas Caver, volume 7,number 12 (December 1962), pages135ff., and it was reprinted in thetenth anniversary issue of the Asso-ciation for Mexican Cave StudiesNewsletter, volume 4, number 1(January 1973), pp. 23–26, under thetitle “First Speleological Survey ofMexico Trip.” The article says thatthe trip began on November 11, 1962,so either the date on the letter or thedate in the article is wrong.—Editor.

The trip to Mexico was far out, and we turnedout some far out spelunking. The first stop wasthe area that I found this summer near Orizaba,which was even further out than I had antici-pated. The first sotano we went in (Terry and Iwent in the deep ones while Reddell and BillRussell watched the top and located others) wasa spastic 364-foot drop in one clean shot. It is alarge domepit filled at the bottom, with no pas-sages. The second one, at Tequila, is the mostimpressive cave sight that I have even seen. Youdrop down a 15-foot-in-diameter hole for about100 feet, and at this point the ceiling cuts backand goes out to the sides, so you are in a room100 feet long and about equally as wide, with thefloor some 250 feet below and out of sight—a trueabyss. At the bottom of the first 350 is another100, and shortly after another 100, through a littlewaterfall that soaks you and the rope. Here the600-foot rope ran out, and we were looking downa 50-foot or so. Air was moving out and watergoing in. The passage was a fissure some 8 to10feet wide and 75 to 100 feet high. Probably goesfor miles. We found numerous others in this area(at least fifteen over 200 feet) that we didn’t havetime to bottom. One you drop a rock in and hearthe last bounce after 10 seconds—after that it

fades from audibility. The 364-foot took 6.5 sec-onds for a rock to hit, glancing off the verticalwalls.

After this area, we bounced to Xilitla to seewhat we could do with the “6 Second Sink” thatGlen Merrill and crew took 1000 feet of rope toand spent 10 hours going down only the first 350.(They took safety precautions that we didn’t; af-ter Tequila, we were used to tossing the rope overand blasting down without fanfare.) We got tothe top of the 350 at 2:30 one afternoon, and Terryand I were on the bottom at 3:00. Drove a boltand went down the second drop (175 feet) usingthe same rope (the 600). We retied it to the ex-pansion bolt. We explored over a mile of passageand were on the surface 6 hours later, at 8:30P.M.—a record of sorts. The last 175 is through alittle waterfall, and the mile of passage is a waterpassage. The water is from ankle to neck deep,and the passage all walking. No end in sightwhere we stopped. Will also add that many swal-lows inhabit the cave, so at night prusiking outyou have at times eight or ten birds clinging toyou and the rope. One knocked Terry’s carbidelamp off, and he lost it. We both prusiked at thesame time with no trouble. May go back Christ-mas.

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CHIROPTERPHOBIA

Chris Lloyd

This article appeared in slightly dif-ferent form in the Canadian Caver,number 60, 2003.

Some cavers are so afraid of batsthat at the slightest contact with

or even the sight of a bat they feelcompelled to run from the cave.This would have to be considered atrue phobia, and it is obviously nota good thing for a serious caver tobe afflicted with. So if you have it,how can you get rid of it? Well, theNational Geographic Society is go-ing to show you how.

Recently I had the opportunity towork for a film company that wasproducing a series of shows on ani-mal fears for the National Geo-graphic TV channel, and I got tohelp with the one on bats. Quite aconvoluted route led NG to me andmy local cave, and the process thatactually cured someone’s bat pho-bia was amazing. It all started, forme at least, with an e-mail out ofthe blue. A neighbor, John Pint, con-tacted me from Saudi Arabia, wherehe was working, in response to arequest he had received regardinga quest for a bat-filled cave inMexico. The film company that hadwon the contract from NG to do thebat program had seen Louise Hosein another NG film about caves andhad contacted her. It turned out thatLouise was one of the few seriouscavers afflicted with a real bat pho-bia, and since she already had “act-ing” experience, she became theirstar. Then they needed a cave fullof bats where they could filmLouise being cured of her phobia.So Louise contacted my friend, who

normally resides in Mexico, insearch of a foreign cave to give a bitof exotic appearance to the film. ButPint was overseas, so he suggestedto me a cave close to my home inGuadalajara. I tried to suggest somelarger and more bat-infested caves,but they all tended to be in placesnot as safe and convenient for a filmcrew, so they decided to go with thecave near Guadalajara and use meas their “fixer.” The deal was that Iwould provide the cave and setthings up so that they could fly in,shoot their film, and fly out againwith minimal fuss. They didn’tmention that they wanted to use mein the film, but I guess I should havefigured out that I would be the mostlikely candidate to guide Louiseinto the cave. If the bats did not per-form as promised, I would be righton hand to explain the problem.Fortunately, the bats did perform,though not the ones I was planningon.

Our bat cave was Cueva delChapuzón, which is located onlyforty-five minutes away from Gua-dalajara and a very short walk fromthe road. It has a good ten thousandor so bats, apparently of some sevenspecies, in passages that are some-what narrow, forcing you into closeproximity with the bats—perfectconditions for the film. They wouldinterview Louise in Los Angeles toget the background on her phobiaand then have her talk to a psy-chologist who was supposedly go-ing to cure her. Then they wouldbring her down to the bat-filledcave to show that the cure reallyworked. After many e-mails, we

agreed on the first week in June2002, at the start of the rainy sea-son. I warned them that I mighthave to leave to do my real job oflooking for gold, but I figured it wasunlikely, as things were so slow inthe gold business that I had beentwiddling my thumbs for manymonths. But a jump in the price ofgold changed that, and not long af-ter we’d gotten everything sortedout, I was sent on a trip to Hondu-ras. Fortunately we were able todelay the filming a week, until I gotback, and we were able to do theshoot in three action-packed days.

I was a little shocked, needless tosay, to see Louise hobbling oncrutches and limping in her footcasts when I met them all at the air-port in Guadalajara. How was thestar of the show going to get thoughthe cave in that condition? It turnedout that both of her feet had beenoperated on about ten weeks earlierand were just getting to the pointwhere she was allowed to walk. Italso turned out that she did just finein the cave.

During our first meeting, overdinner, I got to meet the team. Theproducer was a young lady whogrew up in Hong Kong and is theonly person I have seen adjust toMexican driving without fuss. Shebrought with her a cameraman whowas a producer when he could getthe work and a soundman who wasa cameraman when he could get thework. Of the three, only the sound-man had been in a cave before, andhe seemed to have enjoyed crawl-ing around, so I didn’t expect anyproblems from him. The other two

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I was not so sure about. But they allseemed keen, so I tried to get themprepared for crawling around in batguano and a possible swim in thelower entrance. Also at that dinnerwas a group of local Mexican batbiologists whom the producer hadsomehow tracked down and askedto check the cave to make sure thebats were actually at home. I hadpresumed they would be, as I knewthey had young ones in September,although I didn’t really know whenthey were born. The biologists hadbeen out to the cave the day beforeand found that at least two of thespecies had babies with them, andso we were asked not to disturb thatmaternity colony. This put a bit of acrimp on our plans, because theidea had been to get shots of Louisein a passage with lots of bats flyingaround her. A bit of a panicky plan-ning session ensued to figure outwhat we could do to salvage theshoot. After a good bit of translat-ing back and forth between the crewand the Mexican biologists, welearned that there was a colony ofvampire bats in the main passage,while the main maternity colonywas in a side branch. Disturbing thevampires was not considered aproblem. So instead of having amass assault by bats, Louise wasnow going to have to confront herbat phobia by getting friendly witha group of vampire bats. Not quite

what the producer had planned, butwe would have to make it work.Louise did not seem overly thrilledby the change in the script, but waswilling to give it a go.

Driving out to the cave, Louisepicked up right away the fact thatthere did not seem to be any lime-stone outcrops anywhere. It had notoccurred to me to mention it, as Iwas used to the fact that everythingin the area is volcanic, seeing as myhouse sits on the north rim of a largecaldera that is still smoking. Thecave is located just to the south ofthat caldera, in volcanic rocks. Sowhile the film crew was runningaround checking out filming anglesand so on, Louise and I sat down tolook at the rocks. While I knew thecave was developed in a volcanicflow of some kind, I had never both-ered to look at it closely. Now, withanother geologist to make up sto-ries with, I took a critical look.

It turns out that the big rock frag-ments I had noticed before werepart of a large eruption cloud thathad collapsed and flowed awayfrom its source to be deposited here.To clarify the terminology a bit:Volcanologists sometimes describethings flying through the air asflowing. Sometimes an eruptionproduces mainly small particles,like grains of sand or smaller. Thinkof the typical nuclear-bomb mush-room cloud and you have an idea

of what a volcanic eruption lookslike—not the cap-like nature of it,necessarily, but the big-cloud-going-up part. Those grains of sand fallout of the cloud after gravity takesover, and that leaves a downwindsurface covered in ash and sandgrains. You have probably seen thephotos. This is called an air-fall de-posit and is not what happened atCueva del Chapuzón.

The rock unit at Cueva del Chapu-zón is a heterolithic tuff, with rockpieces making up over 50 percentby volume, the fragments beinganywhere from 0.5 to 20 centime-ters across. Those rock fragmentswere ripped out of the wall of a bigmagma chamber and sent about 3kilometers or more up into the skyin one of those large mushroomclouds. Eventually the energy thathad sent them up there ran out, andgravity took over. A portion of thatcloud collapsed, and the particlesbegan their return trip to earth. Asthose rock fragments built up speeddownward, they entrained thesame hot gas that had sent them up.The combination of rock and gastravels like a fluid; it flows. Thatfluid, at least 200 degrees C, flowsback down the edge of the risingcloud and spreads out over the sur-rounding countryside, burning andburying everything in its path. Ifyou are thinking Mt. St. Helens,that is way too small, and it was a

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horizontally oriented blast erup-tion, a somewhat different beast. Ifyou have seen footage of Mt. Pina-tubo in the Philippines, you are onthe right track, but again way toosmall. Eruptions from volcanoestend to be small affairs, with a verybig one, like Krakatoa, erupting upto 100 cubic kilometers of magma.Caldera eruptions, on the otherhand, start at about 100 cubic kilo-meters and go up from there, wayup. A big caldera eruption canhave over 2000 cubic kilometers ofmagma going up the pipe.

Were the rocks that host Cuevadel Chapuzón produced by thePrimavera Caldera my house is lo-cated on, or another one? A littleresearch in my files at home unearth-ed an article on the Acatlán Caldera,which is located about 40 kilome-ters southwest of Guadalajara andabout 15 kilometers southeast ofthe cave. The article describes alithic-rich tuff unit that sounds verysimilar to the one we saw at Cuevadel Chapuzón, and the limits of dis-tribution of the tuff shown in themap in the paper would cover thecave. As the Primavera eruptionsdid not tend to be lithic-rich, it ismost likely that the cave is in thelithic tuff of the Acatlán eruption.That eruption has not been welldated, but it is thought to have hap-pened about one million years agoand been about 140 cubic kilome-ters in size. While not large bycaldera standards, it was enough tocover well over 200 square kilome-ters with over 30 meters of semi-molten rock that settled and cooledto become the rock we see today.Not a good day to have been outlooking for caves.

Once we had studied the rocks,we had to get down to some

real, in the eyes of the producer,work. I figured I had better first takethe film crew in to let them see whatthey were getting themselves intoand give them a chance to picksome shooting spots. A quick tripwithout gear would make it easierfor them later. So in we went. Themain upper entrance to Chapuzónis located under a big fig tree whoseroots spread out over the rocks, al-most hiding the small opening we

had to crawl into. After a shortstoopway, the cave opens up towalking passage, where one entersa small streamway that has cutdown into the soft volcanic rock.Right away there are a couple ofdownclimbs that land in water-filled pools. Crossing over them dryrequires a bit of tricky bridging thatwouldn’t be an option for Louise,as she could not risk a fall. All thebetter, said the film crew. Shots ofLouise getting wet would be fine.After the short bit of big stuff, thenext section is mainly stooping pas-sage or hands-and-knees crawl. Ihad originally planned to take themup the other branch, where the pas-sage is at least 15 meters high, butwith the baby bats there we werestuck with this lower section. Afterabout 100 meters of that, the filmcrew called a rout, saying that theyhad gotten the idea just fine, thankyou.

So now it was time for lights,camera, action, which in realitytranslates into putting people intostaged positions and waiting whilethe cameraman gets set up, thesound guy does his level checks, theproducer tells everybody what shewants done, and then the cameraruns for ten or twenty seconds. If itworked (in this case they had a digi-tal camera and could actually checkright away whether it worked), wewould then advance to the nextplace they wanted filmed. So we didthe going-into-the-cave shot, andthen the looking-out-the-entrance-as-we-entered (again) shot, and soon farther into the cave. I got to al-ternate between being the guy hold-ing the diffusing reflector for thelight and being the cave guide tak-ing Louise into the cave. Threepeople were to appear in the cavein the film, Louise as the star, me asthe guide, and Yunuhen Rodríguezas a bat biologist, which she reallyis.

We set up shots everywhere theproducer thought might look good.Fortunately the speaking parts werelimited, so it did not take too muchtime. My first lines were to exclaimover the first pile of vampire guanowe happened upon. I, of course, hadbeen alerted to its presence wellbefore seeing it, as it smells so bad,

but I had to make it look good forthe camera—my exclamation, thatis, as nothing can make vampireguano look good. About lunch time,we finally hit the chamber with thevampires. A lunch break was calledto get some food down before be-ing overcome by the noxious guanosmell.

While the others were headingout, Louise and I took the time tolook at the cave walls to get a betterunderstanding of how the cave hadformed. Up to that point we hadseen what mainly looked like bed-ding-plane development that hadbeen downcut by the stream inplaces to form a small canyon, aswell as some almost-round phreaticdevelopment with nice scallops onthe walls. The only problem is thatvolcanic rocks are not noted fortheir bedding planes. But that is notto say they can’t have any, and whenwe looked closely it was quite clearthere was in fact a bedding planecontrolling the development of thecave. Looking more closely, wecould see that the bedding planewas filled with about 1 centimeterof clay. It therefore appears thatwater must have reached the bed-ding plane by fractures in the over-lying rocks and then started to flowalong it, eroding out the soft clay.Then little by little it just enlargedthat opening, eroding away the vol-canic tuff, mainly along the beddingplane. Uplift was obviously goingon at the same time, and before longthe passage started to be downcutinto a canyon. None of these fea-tures were well developed up tothat point, but I knew from previousvisits that good examples of eachlay ahead. The vampire-bat cham-ber is actually the best-developedhorizontal area in the cave, with aroom about 10 meters across andonly 1 meter high. Right beyond it,a sizable canyon has been cut, mak-ing a passage about 8 meters highthat grows to 15 meters high fartherdownstream. Quite an interestingcave.

But we weren’t there to marvelat the cave, so after lunch we

had to get down to the real businessat hand, demonstrating how Louisecould now happily hang out with

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bats, even if they were vampires.Back in Los Angeles, Louise hadtalked with a psychologist abouther phobia, but not before she wasinterviewed by the film people,who had a script of questions fromthe psychologist. The psychologiststudied that tape, and by noting herunconscious physical reactions(pauses, looking away, things likethat) to the questions was able to geta good idea of the nature of herphobia. Then when they met in per-son, the psychologist asked Louiseto close one eye and describe thefirst encounter with bats that cameto mind. With her left eye closed,she described a big chamber with abunch of bats flying around in thedistance. When asked, she said shewas agitated by the vision, but notpanicked. With her right eye closed,the first image that came to her wasone of being in a confined spacewith lots of bats flying around. Shewas visibly panicked and almostready to run out of the room. Theseresponses were much as the psy-chologist expected, having to dowith the different responses of thetwo sides of the brain to the samestimulus. Once that had been iden-tified, the psychologist was able totalk Louise through her differentfeelings and try to get her to replacethe panicky image she saw with herright eye closed with the manage-able image she saw when her lefteye was closed. In that manner, ba-sically, Louise was almost cured ofher phobia. They had then taken herto a barn that had a large colony ofMexican freetail bats and filmed hersitting in the corner testing out her

new awareness. Little by little shegot over the feeling of panic and gotused to the bats flying around. Nowthey wanted to test her out in con-fined spaces with vampires.

Part of the vampire chamber inCueva del Chapuzón is just bigenough to stand up in, though thatputs your head in contact with thebats walking around on the ceiling.Then there is the pool of liquid vam-pire guano on the floor that youhave to straddle. In all my previousvisits to this cave, I had alwaysrushed by this spot, as the smell ishorrific, but this time we had tohang out while the bats rushedaround and the film crew got theirfootage. We had Yunuhen capturea bat, and we got more footage ofus petting it and exclaiming howcute it looked. All in all, Louise tookit very well and stayed put throughthe whole experience. I was prob-ably more anxious to leave than shewas, as I had lots of previous expe-rience seeing vampires up close andhad no incentive to stay and put upwith the smell. We didn’t get thehundreds of bats swarming aroundthat we had hoped for originally,but vampires did keep flying throughthe little room and bouncing offLouise or one of the others, so theresult was deemed a suitable test ofher cure.

On the second day, we went backand repeated some of the shots andfilled in with some more, as well asgetting a staged shot of Louiserappelling over the 20-meter-highcliff by the lower entrance, rightthrough the waterfall. While onedoes not need to rappel the cliff to

get to the cave, it did look quiteimpressive on film. The neatestpart, though, was when they tookin an infrared camera to try filmingthe bats with it. I still have no ideahow it works, but that thing can re-ally see in the dark. We could pointit at the cave wall with all ours lightout and see the wall in the viewer.Then we swung it around until wepicked up some vampires. Playingaround a bit more, we happened tospot a cluster of twelve or so youngvampires hiding in a crevice. Wewere able to watch them on themonitor without disturbing themwith our lights. While it was only agrayscale image, it was quite im-pressive to watch them cleaningthemselves, looking around, andthen finally one or two taking off tofly. Hopefully some of that footagewill make it into the film.

The person who actually spottedthe bats hiding in the crevice wasthe girlfriend of the director of thenearby Primavera Forest Park, whostopped by for a visit to see how wewere doing. She had never been ina cave before and decided to pop inin her street clothes for a look. As Idescribed earlier, much of the caveis stooping or hand-and-knees inwater, and there she went in hernice leather shoes, white blouse,and the works. Back on the surface,I was flabbergasted to see not aspeck of dirt on her clothes, justpartly muddy hands and a big smileon her face. The most natural caverI have ever seen. And no phobiaabout bats, either.

Quiropterofobia

Espeleólogos visitaron la Cueva del Chapuzón, en Jalisco,con un equipo que grabó un programa para National Geo-graphic sobre el temor a los murciélagos de una espeleólogay cómo fue curada de él. La cueva tiene varios tipos demuricélagos, inclusive vampiros. La fotografía subterraneafue en una bóveda con vampiros. La cueva está formada enrocas ígneas, aparentemente siguiendo un estrato formadopor una capa de arcilla.

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GRUTA DE SAN SEBASTIÁN

Ricardo Arias Fernández

Adapted by the editor from a Janu-ary 2000 report by the author.Thanks to Elizabeth Hernandez fortranslating the original for theAMCS.

This report presents the resultsof a visit in December 1999 by

members of the Sección de Espeleo-logía of the Asociación de Excur-sionismo y Montañismo at theInstituto Politécnico Nacional to theGruta de San Sebastián, Oaxaca. Toreach this cave, go 15 kilometerssouth from Oaxaca city to a junc-tion with road 131, which leads toPuerto Escondido. At about 58 ki-lometers, after the town of Lachila,in a place known as El Vado, youwill find a turn toward San Sebas-tián. This road follows a small, clearstream about 10 kilometers to thecenter of town. About 3 kilometersbeyond the center, you will findcabins and parking for the cave. TheGruta de San Sebastián is inside anambitious ecotourism developmentby SEMARNAP, CIIDIR, and the com-munity. The plan is to offer visitorscomfortable air-conditioned cabinswith kitchenettes, full-size andbunk beds, and a bath with hot wa-ter for 50 pesos a person. Due to anearthquake that recently ravagedthe area, the cabins are damagedand not in service (winter 1999–2000). Repairs should be completedwithin four months. These cabinsoffer comfort and convenience forspeleological explorations in theregion. The Juquilita dining room,which is near the cabins, is goodand economical. Don’t leave thearea without trying the famous local

mescal, Tobala. On February 2, theDay of the Candalaria, a colorfulfestival is held, and they open asmall floodgate in the sinkhole tobegin irrigating the land for thespring planting.

The Sierra Madre del Sur, whereSan Sebastián de las Grutas is lo-cated, is where the deepest cavesin Mexico, except those found inthe Sierras Orientales de Oaxaca(Huautla, Chilcholta, ConcepciónPapalo, etc.), are located. The karstof the range has been little studied,except for the Cerro Grande area inColima and Jalisco (Carlos Lazca-no’s 1988 publication, now availableas AMCS Reprint 4). In general, thekarst is developed in a warm,subhumid climate and folded moun-tains. There are plains at the high-est elevations where sinkholes arecommon, separated by wide valleysof non-karst rocks. The isolatedlimestones are Cretaceous in age.Gruta de San Sebastián is in theTeposcolula Formation of Albian-Cenomanian age.

An early visit by cavers to thecave is recorded in a trip report byBill Russell (Association for MexicanCave Studies Newsletter 3(4)70–71,1972). In the summer of 1994, caversfrom Cruz Roja in Oaxaca, togetherwith two Americans, supposedlysurveyed about 1300 meters of thecave, but the water passage was notsurveyed because of the rainy sea-son, and the map was never com-pleted or published (note by LouiseHose, “Mexico News,” AMCS Ac-tivities Newsletter 21, p. 4, 1995). Amining geologist in the state ofOaxaca named Manuel Aragón

supposedly also surveyed the cavesometime in the past, but that mapwas also apparently never pub-lished.

The Gruta de San Sebastián is lo-cated in the Sierra de Miahuat-

lán, a part of the Sierra Madre delSur, just at the edge of the VallesCentrales, where small valleys lie inthe folds of the mountains. The en-trance is in the side of the Cerro deLa Gruta, 150 meters from the cab-ins at a west-northwest azimuth of292 degrees. A footpath leads to theentrance in a rocky bluff 4 metershigh. The artificial entrance, madewith explosives around 1970, has ametal gate and will lead you di-rectly by a smooth slope to a room5 meters in diameter named LaColumnita. A passage to the rightcontains the formation and is 10meters long. An apparent passageto the left ends after a few meters.The natural entrance is 5 metersabove, where one previously enteredwith a rope to begin a journeythrough the cave. The continuingpassage, 5 to 8 meters high, showsvarious dissolution forms andpasses though the Salón de laCostilla de Res (Cow’s Rib) and pastthe curious formation named ElElefante. From here on, the passagehas the classic keyhole shape, frominitial formation full of water andthen down-cutting as the streamsought the lower levels where itnow runs. In a stretch of 70 meters,the guide points out imaginativelynamed figures Señora ViendoHacia la Pared, Mujer con PeloMojado Peinandose, La Cobra, El

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Dinosaurio, and El Buho. In frontof and to the left of The Owl isbreakdown in conglomerate, wherethe ceiling height increases to 12meters. Immediately ahead are for-mations, including Perro deMickey, in the Salón de Pluto andthe prettiest room in the cave, theSalón de las Columnas, which is 14meters high. Then the passage wid-ens to the right and the ceiling getseven higher at the Salón de laCascada, with live flowstone on thewall. Just beyond this, on the left, isan irregular opening about 5 metersin diameter and 5 meters deep thatleads to the river passage.

The main passage begins to dis-play a pronounced upward slope,with some concrete steps, andpasses by formations or areas calledAgua de la Esperanza, Pareja deEnamorados, Fuente Monumental,and Salón del Rey Mago. In theRoom of the Wise King, you canobserve the collapse of the ceilinginto a great pile of breakdown.From here the Vampire Passage be-gins. Then the ceiling of the mainroute descends abruptly, and theroom becomes a small passage 1.5meters high, where a strong air cur-rent can be felt, that takes you to theSalón de la Cruz and the Gran Salóndel Colapso, a giant collapsed room70 meters in diameter with abun-dant breakdown and a steep slopewith concrete steps to the exit fromthe cave. The tourist route is 397meters long and rises 10 meters.

For convenience, we rigged the5-meter drop from the main pas-sage into the Ramal del Río Sub-terráneo with a rope. Beyond thedrop, a mud ramp 50 meters longwith an average slope of 30 degreesleads to a room that is 50 meterslong, at the bottom of which runsthe river. In view of the mud on thewalls, it can be seen that the riverrises considerably during rainy pe-riods, so you should not visit thispart of the cave during thosemonths. Following the river down-stream will lead after 26 meters toa place where the roof lowers to 40centimeters high, making it impos-sible to follow the water, whichflows off on an azimuth of 100 de-grees. Upstream, the river flowsthrough an ample passage. After

100 meters, a tributary on the rightascends between the rocks with abeautiful display of sparkling wa-ter, jumping between smooth lime-stone veined in black and white.This passage, which you can go upwithout difficulty for 60 meters tothe source of the water, is withouta doubt the most beautiful sectionof the whole cave. Past the inlet isthe Salón de Independencia, whichcontains a beautiful column alsonamed Independencia, as well asother formations that divide theroom. The stream passage ends inhuge breakdown blocks from whichpart of the flow of the river comes.The length of the SubterraneanRiver Passage is 291 meters, and itsdepth below the tourist passage is13.9 meters.

The Ramal de los Vampirosdescends from the Salón del ReyMago at an angle of 30 degrees be-tween blocks of breakdown. Thisleads to a room with a sandy floorand conspicuous horizontal bed-ding. Ahead, the passage changesto irregular, muddy terrain with anabundance of huge debris overwhich one climbs and descends forabout 80 horizontal meters, towhere the floor becomes more level.After 12 more meters, there are twopools on the right of guano from thevampire bats that inhabit ceilingdomes above them and give thepassage its name. After another 65meters, climbing over anotherbreakdown pile, one reaches a room11 meters wide and 10 meters high,the Salón México. Finally, the pas-sage flows into another large room,where great stalagmites in theshape of long tapered candles un-der a ceiling 14 meters above givethe name Salón de los Cirios. Stay-ing low for 30 meters, we foundmarvelous white calcite flowstone,which narrows the route down to asmall, abundantly decorated room,the Sala Fantástica. If instead onegoes up the 20-meter ramp to theleft beyond the candles, he reachesa high room with a low ceiling andabundant sodastraws above smallstalagmites. A short ramp and anexposed ledge, where a rope wasnecessary, lead to the Sala Colgada,where we were disappointed tofind no continuation. The total

length of the Vampires Passage is389 meters, and its depth below theRoom of the Wise King is 22.6meters. The total length of thewhole cave is 1078 meters.

The stream in the cave flows onthrough Cueva de la Ventana, de-scribed below, and surfaces at thespring that is the source of the RíoLas Grutas, a tributary to the RíoAtoyac. The Atoyac is a branch ofthe Río Verde, which flows into thePacific Ocean at the Bay of Chaca-hua. There is a small cave 25 metersdown the hill from Ventana inwhich flowing water can be heard.This functions as an overflowspring in wet weather.

The entrance to Cueva de laVentana is located 65 meters

downhill from the entrance to SanSebastián, at an azimuth of 305 de-grees from the cabins. The entranceis 90 centimeters high and 3 meterslong, at the edge of a drop 6 metersto a slope of dirt and boulders. Thispassage, which is 3 meters high,slopes down to the river. Up-riverand to the right, the water becomesover 2 meters deep, and we wereunable to continue, although thepassage continues with the samedimensions. The left branch of theentrance room extends 20 meters,with an abundance of mud on thewalls. It ends at a small passage 1.5meters wide, containing water 1.6meters deep, that closes down af-ter 8 meters. The total surveyedlength is 95.4 meters. The stream isabout 5 meters below where it isseen in San Sebastián and 9 metersabove the elevation of the spring.

The entrance to Cueva de laMaternidad is somewhat hidden ina bamboo thicket. It is a crevice 3.1meters long and 60 centimeterswide, 211 meters approximatelynorth from the spring. An easychimney down 3 meters leads di-rectly to the stream in the cave,which consists mainly of one room38 meters long, 4 to 6.5 meters wide,and from 2 to 6 meters high. Thirtymeters in are some solution domesin the ceiling. The temperature wasvery warm in comparison to theother caves discussed here. Thisriver rises from a small and beauti-ful lake of turquoise-blue water,

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where a huge stalactite disappearsinto the water. The underwater con-duit that feeds the lake is on the leftside and appears large enough forscuba exploration.

Cueva de Llano Grande is 5 kilo-meters from San Sebastián de LasGrutas on the road from Las Grutasto San Vicente, near concrete elec-tricity pole number 073, in the hillto the left. From a bushy tree, wewalked straight ahead to the baseof the hill, then 80 meters to theentrance, which is at an azimuth of218 degrees from the tree. It has asmall, circular entrance 1.25 metersin diameter at the foot of an oaktree. A slope of 8 meters leads to adecorated room, from the end ofwhich another sloping path leads tothe lower part of the room, wherethere is a lot of breakdown. Slidingdown the breakdown, we found asmall passage and a drop of 3meters that leads to a lower passagewith two branches. These lead to afinal room that is beautifully deco-rated with a white column and livesodastraws. We also noted vandal-ism and graffiti, as well as brokenbits of clay pots, chicken bones, andegg shells that local people leavebehind as thanks for health, rain, orgood crops or even as a supplica-tion for bad luck to an enemy.

Along the same road and 10meters to the left of pole 045,Resumidero del Paso Ancho is asinkhole that captures an enormousamount of water from two streamsduring the wet season. Slidingdown 3 meters will take you to anarrow passage that leads 18 metersto the edge of a drop of unknowndepth.

Finally, our companion in thisproject from CIIDIR, Ing. Alberto,says that in the town of San PedroTotomaxapa, 15 kilometers fromCueva de Llano Grande on the roadto San Vicente, there is a cave withcave paintings of historical or cul-tural value that should be studied.

Thanks for support and collabora-tion to our companions from theCentro Interdisciplinario de Investi-gación para el Desarrollo IntegralRegional (CIIDIR) Oaxaca: biologistOlga Herrera Arenas, director of theecotourism project at the Grutas de

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San Sebastián; Ing. Manual RubioEspinosa, chief of the Departa-mento de Vinculación; and Ing.Alberto Floreán Cruz, fellow moun-taineer and enthusiastic promoterof the natural splendors of the state.Also companions in the explorationand survey José B. Guerrero Ale-gría, Carlos A. Aguila Aznar, Ale-jandro Vallagrán Hernández, andJavier Guitérrez Gracia. And Anto-nio García Pérez “Luis,” cavernguide, Martín García García, goodfriend, and León Pérez López,comisariado. Finally, the federal andmunicipal authorities, particularlyof San Sebastián de las Grutas, fortheir interest in promoting theecotourism projects of CIIDIR, whichfurther the development of Oaxacaand contribute to the knowledge ofthe subterranean world of Mexico.

Gruta de San Sebastián

En diciembre de 1999, miembros de la Sección deEspeleología de la Asociación de Excursionismoy Montañismo del Instituto Politécnico Nacionalexploraron y topografiaron esta cueva turística enOaxaca, además de dos cuevas cercanas máspequeñas. La ruta turística en la cueva principalentra por un túnel artificial y deja la cueva a travésde una entrada natural bastante grande. Losniveles inferiores en la cueva se inundan durantela estación de lluvias. La longitud topografiadade la Gruta de San Sebastián es de 1078 metros.

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GRUTAS DE BALANCANCHE

Bruce Rogers

This rather breezy look at Grutasde Balancanche is the result of

numerous visits to the cave over thepast twenty-two years. It is adaptedfrom an informal guidebook I’vewritten for traveling companionsthat I have taken along on myYucatecan junkets. The cave is lo-cated near the world-class archaeo-logical site of Chichén Itzá. The caveis commercialized and has toursfrom about 8 AM to 4 PM. Costsvary year to year depending on thebudget of the INAH, the Mexicanpark service, but entry is usuallyabout 20 pesos—about two dollarsin 2003. Every Sunday is free entryat all national parks in the Yucatan.In the recent past, English-spokentours departed at varying hours,usually staggered with tours inSpanish, or when enough peoplegathered to merit a tour. As of early2003, however, all tours departedhourly and were in Spanish only.Normally the guides try to hurrythe cave visitors through the tour,which is about 500 meters round-trip, in a half hour or so. However,if people show up with their ownlights and are decidedly not will-ing to be rushed, they often candrag their collective feet and extendtheir tour to fill the allotted fullhour between tours. Some guidesalso dislike visitors using their ownlights, but most are accommodatingenough if the lights are used tact-fully.

The cave’s Mayan name, Balan-canche, also spelled Balaamcanche,Balaancanche, Balankanche orBalancanchén, means Throne of theJaguar Priest. This refers to a local

elite, not some ragtag big cat scuff-ing around in the bush. The cave hasbeen known to the Maya since wellback before the Preclassic, probablyat least three thousand years ago.The cave was used as a source ofwater, as well as venerated for itsconnection with Chac, the Mayarain god. Chac was the same entityas the Teotihuacano god Tlaloc.Sometimes the Teotihuacanosmerged Tlaloc with their springgod, Xipe Totec. Much of thisTeotihuacano mythology meshedwith the Maya in the area ofBalancanche, since pottery vesselsdedicated to both entities are foundin the cave. Broken ceramics foundon the ground surface surroundingthe cave date from the Preclassic(300 BC) to just before the Spanishinvasion (ca. AD 1250–1400), withthe most intensive use during theTerminal Classic to Early Postclassic(AD 900–1200). The cave was firststudied in 1932 for its biologicalcontent.

Balancanche Cave, just as allcaves in the Maya region, has beenvenerated as a portal to the OtherWorld, the world of spirits and an-cestors. In mid-1959, a cave guidediscovered that the pile of break-down sealing the back end of thecave was actually a stuccoed stonewall. After being alerted to this dis-covery, archaeologists working atadjacent Chichén Itzá descended onthe cave and carefully removed thewall. The back part of the cave hadbeen blocked at about the end of theTerminal Classic, between AD 830and 1000. The stucco coating hadbeen officially sealed with glyphs

and shamanic signatures. As thearchaeologists excavated the walland recorded the wealth of artifactsinside the newly unsealed back partof the cave, the local Maya becameworried that these actions wouldoffend Chac and that he wouldwithhold the much-needed winterrain. As a result, famed Mayanistarchaeologist E. Willys Andrews IVhad the local shamans conduct aceremony to pacify the gods. Thisceremony had apparently neverbefore been conducted in the pres-ence of non-Maya folks. Unpre-pared for the magnitude of thisundertaking, the archaeologistsfound themselves participating ina ritual that ran for nineteen hoursnonstop, both in and out of the cave.The archaeologists reported that theceremonies were exhausting, withthe oxygen level steadily droppingin the cave, resulting in nearly ev-eryone ending up with a splittingheadache. Apparently the cer-emony worked, however, for thecave still holds water, no one hasbecome lost in its depths, and thelocal villages still have bountifulharvests.

The cave is located just north ofHighway 180 about 3 kilometerseast of Chichén Itzá. A small bo-tanical garden surrounds the caveentrance, with plants labeled in En-glish, Spanish, and Mayan. In thecenter of the garden is a modest-sized sinkhole that leads southinto the cave, which is T-shaped inplan. The first part of the cave isroomy, wet, and modestly deco-rated with white sodastraw stalac-tites and flowstone. The cave is hot

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and humid, despite the three 18-inch-diameter ventilation holesbored in 1992. The initial cave pas-sage is elliptical in cross-section,with an artificially leveled clay andsand floor. Large, shallow scallopshave been dissolved into the wallsof the passage, indicating it hadbeen slowly dissolved under thelocal water table.

To their credit, the governmenthas left most of the cave undevel-oped, except for the tourist trail it-self; indirect lighting enhances thecave experience. To the east are a

series of low, muddy stream pas-sages. Initially phreatic tubes, theyhave been invaded and modified byvadose streams as they flowed tothe east to several shallow pools.Seasonal streams still course downthe sinkhole entrance and followseveral routes to these pools. Aftercovering nearly 75 meters of pas-sage averaging 8 meters wide and5 meters high, the visitor enters thelarge Tiger Room. This “Throne ofthe Jaguar Priest” room has an ElTigre in vermiculations high on theeast wall. Adjacent to El Tigre is La

Cabeza, a large breakdown blockresembling a skull; a bit of the localanise-and-honey liquor Xtabentunassists this impression. Straightahead is a dead-end passage, par-alleling the one the cave visitor hasjust come through, and just beyondthe room another low passagesnakes off to the east for nearly 50meters to another small pool.

Ahead on the main route, aboutanother 40 meters to the south, is achoke point in the cave. This iswhere guide José Humberto Gómezdiscovered that the end of the cavewas really a stuccoed wall. As out-lined above, the recognition andremoval of the wall was a major ar-chaeological event in the cave’smodern history. The cave constrictshere, then immediately opens upinto the Column Pots Room. Hereare large numbers of ceramic incen-sors and water-collecting pots,some firmly cemented to the floorby large amounts of calcite flow-stone. The decorations are attrac-tive, but it’s the artifacts that catchone’s eye. Several squat, round,lipped pots have been placed tocollect virgin water for rituals con-ducted in and around the cave.Virgin water is water that hasn’ttouched the profane surface of theearth. Rain water and underground

Incensors in the Column PotsRoom, just inside the old Mayawall. Bruce Rogers.

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drips qualify. At least two of thesepots have become cemented to thefloor by sheets of white calcite flow-stone. Several “pots” nearly 0.3meters in diameter and heightamong the water collectors are re-ally incense burners well over athousand years old. The image ofChac or Tlaloc decorates some ofthem.

After another 60 meters or so, oneclimbs up a very narrow fissure intothe rounded Wah-chan or La CiebaRoom. Several of the large combi-nation drapery-stalactites you passthrough or under to reach this roomappear to have been mined by theancient Maya for calcite for potterytempering. This room is also calledthe Throne (Room) of Balaam. Overthe eons, a small crawlway enter-ing the ceiling from the southeasthas brought water to deposit a cir-cular umbrella of golden-coloredstalactites. The dripping water hasalso formed a thick column, whichdominates the room, resting on amassive flowstone dome that car-pets the room. Scores of ceramicpots are scattered over the flow-stone apron supporting the Sky ofthe World Tree. The Mayan namefor this edifice is Wah-chan, alsointerpreted as Raised-up Sky. Atsome time in the past, Maya sha-mans left bright red handprints onthis column, sort of a professional-shaman calling card to the godChac.

The pots are of two types. Themost obvious pots are to collect vir-gin water. The other pots are reallywastebasket-sized receptacles inwhich the Maya burned copal, rub-ber, and other incense. During caverituals, the cave atmosphere musthave, as noted by the archaeolo-gists, become somewhat poor inoxygen, high in carbon dioxide, andheavy with incense. This oxygendeprivation may have assisted theshamans and elite Maya in their ef-forts to see Chac-Tlaloc and speakwith the gods. In any case, this roomis worth a little contemplation time.

The cave passage tees at thisroom. The right branch is nominally

closed, since it is low and “danger-ous” to the average tourist. At itsend is a small offering of metates,manos, incensors, pots, and conchand jade beads. This is one of theoff-route areas we have had no suc-cess at all in visiting. The main tourroute goes to the left (east), drop-ping down through a narrow trenchdug into bedded silt, sand, andflowstone of amazingly varied col-ors. About 20 meters farther is theend of the cave route. A fairlyroomy breakdown room, Quarto delos Camarones (Shrimp), intersectsthe water table here. A pair ofroomy passages half filled withwater snake off into the distance.The northeast-trending passage isthe most obvious. When first en-tered by archaeologists, a TerminalClassic–period carved stone headwas found perched on a breakdownpile. It sat in regal splendor in thepartly flooded passage and wasquite striking. This passage itselfextends for nearly 80 meters to atiny dry room whose floor is lit-tered with more offerings. A fewyears ago, INAH officials removedthe head from the cave and trans-ported it to the National Museumin Mexico City. Local Maya werevery upset with this act and are stilldemanding either its return or atleast a copy of the sculpture to re-install in the cave. Such sculpturesor artifacts are considered represen-tatives of the site’s soul, and remov-ing them is tantamount to killing

the site.A second, shorter passage opens

down to the southeast behind thebreakdown in the Quarto de los Ca-marones. This low, partly floodedpassage winds on to the southeastfor about 40 meters, past several dryareas to another siphon.

The Shrimp Room has a largecollection of metates, manos, pot-tery, and other artifacts, mostlygathered from other parts of thecave; in 1959, archaeologists col-lected tripod dishes and other arti-facts and put them on display herefor the visitor. In the partly floodedpart of the room, lucky explorerscan sometimes see white, eyeless,troglobitic shrimp. There are evenunverified reports of white, eyelesscave fish having swum into sight forthe lucky visitor. The visit to thisroom completes the cave tour. Thevisitor then waves gaily to the blindshrimp and fish, winds his wayback out of this sauna-like cave, anddries off outside.

Once back outside, the travelercan take a little time to inspect

the park grounds. The low lime-stone-rubble wall surrounding theentrance sinkhole is of recent build-ing. Four totally ruined platformswith what appear to have beensmall temples surround the cave’sentrance farther out from the sink-hole. The ticket office has a smallmuseum with a collection of black-and-white photographs, among

The column and artifacts onthe flowstone mound in the

Wah-chan Room. Bruce Rogers.

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which are photos taken during the1959 nineteen-hour Chac blessing.Formerly, a small gift shop andsnack bar were operated for the visi-tor, but these were closed duringour February 2003 visit. Cleanrestrooms are available, however,and are usually well stocked withpapel higiénico.

It is highly recommended thatone stay at the nearby Hotel DoloresAlba. A recent enlargement has ex-panded the hotel to about thirty-five clean and modestly decoratedrooms set in the lush rainforest.More importantly, the new swim-ming pool is unique in the Yucatan.The hotel owners merely excavatedthe thin terra rossa soil out of thekarst and then sealed the karst.Within the pool are four short “cavedives” through solution tubes inkarst pinnacles. The Cenote Momota(Turquoise-browed Motmot BirdCenote) across the highway is nowopen for visitors, and they arrive bythe busload from both Cancún andMérida. Occasionally it is open forswimming. In 1993, before tourismtook such a stranglehold in the area,we were rudely run out of theplace at shotgun point and toldnever to return—my how thingshave changed. This finishes your vi-carious tour of the not quite world-famous Grutas de Balancanche. Wenow return control of your day-dreaming to you.

Artifacts displayed in theQuarto de los Camarones.

Bruce Rogers.

Gruta de Balancanche

Balancanche es una cueva turística arqueológica cercade Chichén Itzá en Yucatán. La mitad posterior de lacueva fue descubierta en 1959, cuando se descubrióque el final de la cueva era en realidad una paredconstruída por los mayas entre los años 850 y 1000 denuestra era. El recorrido sigue el pasaje principalhasta el Cuarto de los Camarones. Están en exhibiciónmuchos metates, ollas e incensarios.

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DIVING THE CHEVE SUMPS

Rick Stanton

This originally appeard in some-what different form as a dive reportin the Cave Diving Group Newsletter150, January 2004.

During March and April 2003,the U.S. Deep Caving Team,

led by Bill Stone, planned an assaulton the terminal sump of the 1386-meter-deep Sistema Cheve in theSierra Juárez highlands of Oaxaca.Jason Mallinson and Rick Stantonfrom the Cave Diving Group ofGreat Britain were to be the leaddivers on the project, and grantswere kindly provided from SportsCouncil funding and the DavidHood Fund to enable participationin this venture. Other group mem-bers present were Richie Hudsonand Robbie Warke, who were to act,along with Bill Stone, as divingsherpas should the need arise. Be-cause of the remote location of thesump, we decided that all explor-atory diving attempts would bemade with our own homemadelightweight, chest-mounted re-breathers, in preference to the largerCisLunar units that were also avail-able. To this end, each unit had beenreworked and improved for the taskahead to increase both reliabilityand ruggedness.

The Cheve cave system holdsgreat potential for a world depthrecord. The main entrance is locatedat an elevation of 2800 meters, andthe sump is situated at 1464 metersabove sea level. The much lowerresurgence cave and its fossil resur-gence, Cueva de la Mano, hadbeen previously visited and push-ed to a conclusion by Stanton and

Mallinson in 1997 and 2001 (seeCave Diving Group Newsletter 124and 142 and AMCS Activities News-letter 25). The total depth potentialof the system is 2547 meters, whichimplies that the terminal sump inCheve is perched 1160 meters aboveresurgence level, an exciting pros-pect for exploration. Dye-tracingexperiments have shown a flow-through time of eight days fromsump to resurgence. With a straight-line distance of 12 kilometers, thisfast flow suggests that much of themissing cave passage consists ofopen streamway. The cave’s mor-phology also suggests this, with anentrance shaft system droppingdramatically to –500 meters, fromwhich the stream heads down-dipwith a gradient of approximately1:10. This gradient can be projectedbeyond the sump to match up withthe resurgence in the Río SantoDomingo canyon.

The cave length from entrance tosump is 8 kilometers. The sump hadbeen previously dived by Americansump-diver John Schweyen in 1991,helped by a large team of the origi-nal explorers. He progressed, usingopen-circuit scuba of limited dura-tion, for 100 meters at 20 metersdepth to a point where he reportedthe cave closing down into manysmall passages. He was unable tocomplete a follow-up dive due tothe death of a caver in an SRT acci-dent.

Stanton, Hudson, and Mallinsonarrived at base camp, located justoutside the cave entrance, on March13, 2003; others had been there fora week. Debilitating effects of the

elevation are noticed when walkingaround the entrance area beforebecoming acclimatized. (After aweek at the bottom of the cave, thisacclimatization is lost, to turn whatshould be an easy exit into a realplod.) The U.K. contingent expect-ed to be in the field for a period ofat least five weeks, so enoughfreeze-dried food had been broughtin to cover the duration, to besupplemented with local sup-plies from the nearest village, about7 kilometers away. On our first daythere, a rescue situation developed,and all personnel assisted in theevacuation of a caver with a dislo-cated knee from about 250 metersdown in the entrance series. Thiswas the only accident of the wholetrip.

Before our arrival, much of thebase-camp infrastructure had

been set up, and some of the equip-ment had been carried in from thevehicles that had been used to trans-port it down from the States. Thesefour-by-fours were able to reach apoint within 2 kilometers of camp.Rigging teams had begun the taskof taking in the 1.8 kilometers ofrope that was eventually usedthroughout the cave. Initially,Mallinson and Stanton gatheredand prepared the items of dive gearthat were to be taken down andstarted carrying them to a depot at–500 meters. Eventually, after eightdays, enough rigging and diveequipment and supplies of foodand camping gear were in place atsufficient depth to allow Mallinsonand Stanton, with a team of about

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ten other people, to enter the caveon the start of the diving trip. Thisturned out to be a six-day stay un-derground. It took thirteen hours toreach Camp 3 with the large bags.This was the divers’ camp and waslocated an hour’s caving from thesump. (Initial plans to camp at theactual sump were dismissed as un-suitable.) The next few days werespent ferrying equipment along tothe camp and then rigging the finalsection of cave, which was reminis-cent of a Yorkshire pot, down to theterminal sump pool, followed bymoving gear to the pool and settingit up for the dive. Most of the caveis large, but there are two notablebreakdown sections that containsqueezes. These require tackle bagsto be unpacked, and this was ex-tremely time-consuming. Observa-tions at the sump showed a possibleroute that went back on itself, ratherthan the main route straight aheadthat Schweyen had followed.

The dive was made on the fifthday underground, March 26. Twin10-liter composite cylinders wereused, in addition to the ventralrebreathers. Water temperature was12 degrees C, so drysuits were wornover the top of Fourth Element un-dergarments that had been kindlydonated. The thin drysuits werelighter to carry than full wetsuits,and they would allow more com-fortable long dives if necessary.Stanton led and acted as route-finder, while Mallinson managedthe line and reel. The route oppo-site the one Schweyen had takenquickly turned back around to con-tinue in the general direction of thesystem. An air-bell was met after 25meters, and then the passage con-tinued along, at 12 meters maxi-mum depth, passing over a shaft at60 meters. After 110 meters, therewas a hole in the right-hand wallbeyond which the floor, which con-sisted of white shingle at this point,was observed to rise up. Recogniz-ing the significance of this feature,both divers ignored the main-looking route ahead, darted throughthe hole, and surfaced 10 meterslater to the sound of a cascadingriver.

The gear was stashed immedi-ately beyond the sump, the only

suitable area in the next few hun-dred meters. The cave consists of anarrow, highly eroded canyon pas-sage 1 meter wide carrying the fullflow of the Cheve stream cascadingdown a steep gradient. Two trickywaterfalls were down-climbed,beyond which the passage startsleveling off and becoming larger.Sitting down on a rock for a rest anda bite to eat, the divers discussedthe origin of various unusual shin-gle deposits, not knowing that theywere only 20 meters from a second,very spacious sump pool. Whenthis sump, which clearly backs upin high flow, was found, it was anunexpected setback, and the diversreturned to Sump 1, having esti-mated the distance covered as about500 meters, with a drop of 50meters. This passage was not goingto be an easy portage for taking geardown to the second sump.

On the return dive through Sump1, the passage continuing beyondthe hole in the wall was examined.This led to a series of very low, de-scending shingled beddings fromwhich the water flows. The shaft atthe mid-point of the sump wasthen descended, to meet up withSchweyen’s line from 1991. Stantonfollowed this downstream at 20meters depth to its end, which isclearly at the base of the same low,shingled bedding, no more than 15meters from where they had seen itfrom the top end. Both divers leftthe sump along the old line in themain tunnel, much to the surpriseof the waiting sherpas, who ex-pected the divers to come out thesame way they’d gone in. Timeaway had been six hours, of which4.5 hours were spent exploring thedry cave.

After some discussion on how toproceed, it was decided to make forthe surface the next day, have somerest time, and then return withenough gear to enable two moredivers to pass through Sump 1 tohelp carry equipment to Sump 2and complete a high-grade surveyof the new passage. Traveling light,it was possible to gain the surfacefrom Camp 3 in ten hours. Mostpeople then took a few days off at abeach resort, a twenty-hour journeyin itself.

Having regrouped after fourdays away, we gathered equip-

ment, and another, similar assaultwas begun, with about half of thecavers replaced by new arrivals.This was to be another six-day stayunderground, the first few of whichwere taken up with the transport ofthe extra dive gear. On April 5,Stanton and Mallinson made a stag-ing dive, transporting two compos-ite tanks and some lead to Sump 2.Ropes were installed on the pitches,and an equipment tyrolean was setup on one of them in readiness fora push on Sump 2 the followingday, when Stanton and Mallinsondove through on the closed-circuitrebreathers, followed by Hudsonand Stone on open circuit. Once atSump 2, Stanton and Mallinsondove on, while the other two com-menced the survey back towardSump 1. This time around, Mallin-son did the route-finding and belay-spotting, while Stanton operatedthe reel. A straightforward dive inan elliptical passage 5 meters high,3 meters wide, and 12 meters deepled to air after 290 meters. At firstglance, this appeared to be a cham-ber of boulders with no way out ofthe water, which certainly ex-plained why the whole sump hadbeen noted to back up. After de-kitting, they found a route upthrough the boulders that led to apassage and some climbs down toa static pool. A further passage ledoff there through solidly bondedboulders to an area of squeezeswhere no further progress could bemade. The sound of flowing watercould be heard coming from somepoint ahead, but it could not bereached. The whole area showedsigns of being completely scouredby a strong current; there was noloose material present, not even onestray pebble. Back above the sumppool, another climb through boul-ders led to a strange, circular, funnel-shaped surge chamber that wasblind. They left the sump after fourhours, which had mainly beenspent squeezing through bouldersin a concerted attempt to find a waythrough. Some considerable drysuitwear and tear had been sustainedfrom this.

As there was no sign of Hudson

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and Stone, the divers carried a loadup to the pitches, then, as they stillhadn’t met up with the surveyors,returned for another load. Whenthey met up with the survey teamat Sump 1, they were told that thedistance between sumps that theyhad estimated at 500 meters is infact just under 800 meters, and thedepth gained is around 100 meters.All went back to the pitches for onelast load. The dive out was compli-cated by the fact that some lead andtwo cylinders were left at Sump 2for posterity. As there was then notenough gear for all four to dive outthrough Sump 1 in one go, Jasonmade a return dive to relay backequipment after he and Rich haddove out. During Stanton’s trip out,

he completed the survey of Sump1. All arrived back at Camp 3 verytired after nineteen hours away.

It was clear that, unfortunately, nomore diving progress could be

made, so the next day all gear waspulled back from the sump, thenmost people left for the surface thefollowing day, carrying heavyloads. Many camped overnight atCamp 2 to break the journey. Hud-son, Mallinson, and Stanton re-turned to the U.K. a few days aftergaining the surface, having spentfive weeks on the expedition.

The divers would like to expresstheir thanks to all those who as-sisted with the transport of equip-ment during the whole mammoth

project, with special mention of thePolish contingent. In conclusion,the diving efforts added 1260 me-ters to the length of the cave. Otherteams stayed on to complete someclimbing leads in an effort to bypassthe sump, but were unsuccessful inachieving this. In total, an addi-tional 1.9 kilometers of passage wasmapped at the bottom of Cheve,which brought its length to 26,194meters and its depth to 1484 meters,making it the deepest cave in theWestern Hemisphere and the ninthdeepest in the world. At 9.3 kilome-ters from the nearest entrance, thebreakdown collapse beyond Sump2 apparently represents the mostremote point inside the earth reachedby humans.

Buceando los sifones del Sistema Cheve

Buzos británicos reportan sobre las inmersiones en los sifones 1 y 2al fondo del Sistema Cheve, Oaxaca. Durante el primer campamentosubterraneo de la expedición Cheve 2003 bucearon el sifón 1,determinando una longitud de 120 metros. Condujo a alrededor de500 metros de pasaje seco que aumentó la profundidad de la cuevaen aproximadamente 50 metros. El sifón 2 fue buceado durante unsegundo campamento en la cueva. Era un tubo de 5 metros de altoy 3 metros de ancho, con una profundidad máxima del agua de 12metros y longitud de 290 metros. El corto pasaje seco después delsifón está bloqueado por derrumbes. El punto más bajo en Cheve esahora el fondo del sifón 2, aumentando la profundidad total a 1484metros, el más profundo del hemisferio occidental.

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CAVES OF ATOYAC, VERACRUZ

Ricardo Arias Fernández

The municipio of Atoyac is lo-cated in the Sierra de Atoyac,

central Veracruz. Atoyac is onINEGI topographic map E14 B57, at18°54′32″N, 02°21′47″E (relative toMexico City), elevation 461 meters.There are many small communitiesin the area, which is warm, with anaverage annual temperature of26°C, and dry, except during thewet season. Heavy rains occur inJune and September, with total an-nual rainfall 3.2 meters. Soils in thearea are clayey, acidic, and poor innutrients. Because water for thecommunities is distant and expen-sive to transport, especially duringthe dry season, presidente Lic.Fernando Pimentel Ugarte askedthe Sección de Espeleología of theAsociación de Excursionismo yMontañismo at the Instituto Poli-técnico Nacional to investigatecaves in the area to see if a deep,permanent source of potable watercould be found.

During two months of expedi-tions to the area in 1999 led byCarlos Aguila Aznar, thirty caveswere found and explored. Unfortu-nately, none of the caves was deepenough to reach a water table, andonly seasonal water sources werefound.

Adapted from a report by the cav-ing group at IPN. Thanks to OscarBerrones for translating the reportfor the AMCS.

1. Sótano del Potrero, property of Sr. Erastos Hernández, lo-cated near the village of Progreso, municipio of Atoyac,Veracruz. Depth 35 meters, drop of 15 meters. 2. Cueva delAguaje, La Aurora, municipio of Atoyac, Veracruz. Length 300meters, depth 30 meters. Water is pumped from this cave tosupply the community of La Aurora.

1

2

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3. Cueva de la Calavera 2, property of Sr.Fernando Morillo, village of Progreso, municipioof Atoyac, Veracruz. Depth 40 meters. 4. Sótanosin Nombre, property of Sr. Clemente Blanco,25 minutes before reaching Progresso. Verticaldrop of 40 meters. 5. Sótano del Gordo, prop-erty of Julio Escamilla, village of Progresso,municipio Atoyac, Veracruz. Vertical drop of 25meters, total detph 48 meters. 6. Sala de Agua,located at the village of Zapotal, municipio ofAtoyac, Veracruz. 7. Sótano del Agua, propertyof Sr. Abundio, Progresso, Veracruz. Totaldepth 55 meters.

3

5

4

6

7

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8. Sótano de la Tina, property of Sr. SilvinoCruz. Total depth 34 meters. 9. Sótano delDiablo, Tlacorrancho, Veracruz. Total depth 57meters. 10. Sótano Magico, ejido of Tlacorran-cho. Total depth 45 meters. One of the mostbeautiful caves in the area, a classic collapsepit worth the trouble of a visit. 11. Cueva delEncanto, property of Sr. Bartolo González, 35minutes from village of Progresso, municipioAtoyac, Veracruz. Depth 23 meters. 12. Cuevade Nogales, village of Progresso. Total depth30 meters, pool depth 1.5 meters.

8

10

9

11

12

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13. Cueva de la Reata, commu-nity of Zapote. Vertical drop of10 meters, cave very tight.14. Sótano del Encanto 2,property of Sr. Bartolo Gonzá-lez Hernández, Progresso.Drop of 15 meters. 15. Sótanodel Horno del Sr. ClementeBlanco, village of La Charca,municipio Atoyac, Veracruz.Total depth 45 meters.16. Sótano del Sr. JacintoPalma, located 15 minutesfrom village of Progresso,municipio Atoyac, Veracruz.Total depth 60 meters.

1315

14

16

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17

18

19

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17. Unnamed, property of Sr.Artemio Morales Martínez,ejido Tlacorrancho, Zapotal,Veracruz. Depth 70 meters.18. Unnamed, property of Sr.Aurelio Hernández, village ofProgresso. Total drop 30meters. 19. Sótano de Horno,property of Sr. Evaristo More-no, Tlacorrancho, Veracruz.Drop of 56 meters. 20. LaCueva del Pozo, located in thevillage of Charca. Total depth150 meters, technically verydifficult because of loose rocksin the shafts.

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21

23

22

24

21. Cueva de la Calavera 1,property of Sr. FernandoMurillo, Progresso. Total depth38 meters. 22. Sótano de laSeñora Tila Mesa. Total depth23 meters. 23. Sótano delGemelo del Panteón. Propertyof Sr. Abundio Marquez,Progresso, Veracruz. Depth 8meters. 24. Sótano del Solita-rio, property of Sr. ClementeBlanco, municipio Atoyac,Veracruz. Total depth 20meters.

Cuevas de Atoyac, Veracruz

Miembros de la AEMIPN exploraron cuevas alrededor deAtoyac, en la parte central de Veracruz, buscando fuentesde agua permanentes para los poblados de la zona.Hallaron varias cuevas pequeñas, pero ninguna losuficientemente profunda para llegar al nivel freático.

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GEOGRAPHY OF CAVES INQUINTANA ROO

Jim Coke

Cave explorations in the YucatanPeninsula well before the first

European incursions into the NewWorld are documented by paleon-tological evidence. 14C radioisotopedating of charcoal and bones con-firms that a small number of primi-tive inhabitants investigated drycaves on the peninsula, with tragicresults, prior to 7000 BC. Archaeo-logical evidence indicates that bothMaya and Toltec civilizations uti-lized numerous dry caves in the re-gion. Even today, modern explorerscontinue to stumble upon forgottencaves in the jungle where petro-glyphs, paintings, stone walls,burial sites, and intricate ruins waitto be catalogued into the archivesof history. There is a measure ofspeculation concerning the inten-tions of these early explorers. Whywould ancient people explore oreven bother with these dark andforbidding geological marvels?Current analyses of ancient popu-lation centers and cave inscriptionssuggest their explorations were aquest for a reliable supply of freshdrinking water for a growing popu-lation of thirsty inhabitants. Geo-logical circumstances have alwayslimited surface freshwater drainagesystems in the northern regions ofthe peninsula. Only a scattering ofcenotes and dry caves allow regu-lar access to the area’s shallow fresh-water aquifer.

Cave explorers are rediscoveringmany of the karst features in thestate of Quintana Roo that were ofprime importance to earlier cul-tures. Present studies, however, arestimulated by cave science, sport

exploration, and, on occasion, byprofits collected from ecotourism.Whatever their incentive, mostpresent-day explorers are mappingtheir discoveries and submittingraw cave-survey data to the Quin-tana Roo Speleological Survey forarchiving. At this date, the QRSS ar-chives data for over 500 kilometersof passage in more than 110 under-water caves, together with morethan 4 kilometers of surveyed pas-sage in numerous dry caves. Thisinformation is geo-referencedthrough the Global Positioning Sys-tem to reveal details of frequency,distribution, and hydrological envi-ronment of regional karst features.It is a rather new development, asmodern cave exploration in Quin-tana Roo is still in an emergingphase.

Advanced cave explorationscommenced on mainland QuintanaRoo during the late 1970s, prima-rily at two coastal sites near the fish-ing village of Playa del Carmen. By1985, only four surveyed caves wereknown, with less than 5 kilometersof combined survey. A number ofobstacles limited modern karst in-vestigations in the region until theearly 1980s. One concern is the com-plexity of access to interior jungles.Few roads and known trails pen-etrate this dense tropical forest. Itis also partitioned into an enigmaticconcoction of unmarked private,communal, and federal holdings. Itis not uncommon for a naive tres-passer to face a tense reception bysuspicious ejido or private land-owners. Local inhabitants have al-ways figured prominently in karst

studies, but early explorers did nothave occasion to befriend local in-habitants who were cognizant ofinland property boundaries andcave locations. This situation limitedinvestigations to the immediateshoreline of Quintana Roo, prima-rily at freshwater discharge pointson the Caribbean, known locally aslagunas, caletas, or ojos de agua.

Coastal caves may be consideredimmature in a geological sense.They negotiate relatively unconsoli-dated limestone deposits, sub-merged in a saltwater intrusion thatis infused with freshwater flowfrom interior drainage patterns.Fault-oriented and bedding-planeconduits containing large, unstablebreakdown boulders and powderywhite silt typify their passages. Ini-tial reports of unstable tunnels,poor visibility, and undersizedmaze caves likely inhibited furtherprobes into the Quintana Roo karst.Finally, the technical character oflocal caving generally requirescompetence with specialized life-support equipment for cave diving.Proper equipment for cave divingwas not available in the Yucatan,unless brought by a pioneering visi-tor. These problems would serve todefer effective inland ventures un-til 1984.

The potential for inland cave ex-ploration materialized over a fewshort years. By 1988 over threedozen caves within 12 kilometers ofthe coast were under active explo-ration. Over 70 kilometers of roadand trail surveys linked many of thecave plots into a regional portrayal,exposing an elaborate northwest-

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to-southeast configuration of pas-sage evolution. The majority ofthese tunnels are situated within 16meters of the surface, channelingfreshwater drainage through isolatedkarst windows toward coastal dis-charge exits. The basic frameworkused to assemble this analysis ofemerging karst patterns was, how-ever, inherently flawed. Overlandsurveys were too time-consumingand consequently unable to keeppace with new discoveries. Prob-lems with cumulative survey errorover long distances and identifyingindistinct survey stations for futuretie-ins were also symptoms of anailing system in need of change.GPS appeared to be a logical alter-native for obtaining location datafor widely dispersed caves, al-though initial attempts to harnessthis promising technology were dis-appointing. Selective-availabilityerrors and an old four-channel GPSreceiver meant that our skills atbungling geography far surpassedour abilities as cutting-edge explor-ers. However, results have sinceimproved. SA is turned off, andnew computer software and civil-ian twelve-channel GPS receiversare far superior in accuracy. Way-points and track records are nowcollected in WGS84 datum usingGarmin 2+, V, and eTrex receivers.Both Garmin 2+ and V models arecapable of using a Tri-M MightyMouse 2 external active antenna.The active antenna amplifies satel-lite signals that are weak due to adense jungle canopy or poor satel-lite locations and can be raised 5meters above the ground to im-prove signal detection. Underoptimal conditions, estimated po-sition errors with this antenna rangefrom 3 to 9 meters. Field data aretransferred from the receiver to acomputer through a cable interface.

GPS has proved to be an efficientmeans of linking cave surveys intoa regional plot using Compass orSMAPS cave-mapping software. Yetcoordinate information is equallyuseful in other geographic applica-tions. Fugawi 3 mapping software

is designed to import scanned topo-graphic maps or aerial photographsin any scale or datum. Following ashort map-calibration procedure,waypoints and tracks are convertedby the program for accurate positionand display on the map or photo-graph. Not only are past navigationrecords available for study, but cre-ating target waypoints for promis-ing sites on a scanned map is asimple matter. Loaded with the co-ordinates of these potential sites, aGPS receiver can act as a guide to apromising jungle location that is,hopefully, not just a speck of duston a dirty computer screen.

The recent field application ofGPS is making valuable contribu-tions to exploration and site evalua-tion in Quintana Roo. The majority

of underwater caves in the regionhave shallow, nearly horizontalprofiles that encourage lengthypenetrations from an entrance. Infavorable geological settings, analy-sis of the QRSS database suggeststhat it is reasonable to anticipate akarst window to the surface forroughly every 800 meters of hori-zontal cave traversed. Pinpointingthese cenotes in the jungle is indis-pensable for extending a survey.The ability to move overland to an-other entrance greatly extends therange of gas supplies carried by adiver, two-thirds of which must beheld in reserve for the exit from thecave. All too often, offshoot tunnelshave been left unchecked for wantof sufficient underwater time. Anew entrance not only stimulates

Area map showing the fourcaves that had been surveyed

by 1985.94


deeper penetrations into virgin ter-ritory, but it also allows branchesfrom older passages to be reas-sessed.

In the past, a diver would surfacein a remote cenote at a prearrangedtime and summon a machete crewwith blasts from a toy trumpet orwhistle. Given large support groupsand distances under 1.5 kilometers,the method proved to be better thanlocating the new cenotes by cave-survey data. Although a reliableazimuth and distance to an open-ing can be found from survey data,it is a challenge to hold a precisebearing in a dense and thornyjungle and gauge how far one hastraveled. Locating a distant andobscure hole by azimuth is agamble.

Integral to today’s underwatercave kit is a compact GPS receiverhoused in a waterproof container.Equipped with a GPS, a diver cansurface at a new location and col-lect a waypoint in just minutes.There is no need to wait hours for amachete team while blowing a plas-tic horn; the waypoint is saved andunderwater exploration continued.Today’s longest underwater cavesystems are explored in this man-ner, using GPS to later establish

trails or place remote camps for ex-peditions.

While it is common to stumbleon weathered remnants of

Maya or chiclero cultures in thejungle or in shelter caves, finding alarge structure or sophisticated rockart in a sizeable cave is a singularevents. A team of divers exploringin a remote section of an underwa-ter cave 4 kilometers from the oceanrecently chanced upon what firstappeared to be a sizeable air-bell.They surfaced for a quick look, todiscover it was actually a largesump occupying nearly 75 percentof a large cavern entrance room.Dry caves of this size are unusualat this distance from the ocean, asland elevation averages 4 to 5meters above sea level. Moreover,the cave has two 5-meter pits to thesurface, rather than a walk-in en-trance typical for the area. At thebase of one pit they picked out astone edifice with a clump of smalltrees whose trunks soared throughthe skylight to open jungle. Theychose not to cut or flag a trail duringthe next visit, guided by a recordedwaypoint, in order to protect whatappeared to be an intact archaeo-logical site. The waypoint proved

invaluable as they bushwhackedthrough the jungle. Both pits areundetectable beyond just a fewmeters. Two or three small rockstructures surround the entrancesat odd intervals, while low rockwalls appear to intersect one or twostructures at cardinal or astronomi-cal angles and continue off into thejungle. The structure at the base ofthe pit is formed on a raised plat-form oriented to the cardinal points.Although tree roots have damagedthe walls, a thin layer of lime stuccoremains visible on the outside cor-ners. Lending a bit more mysteryto the ruin is an arrangement of flatstones that line the sump perimetersurrounding the ruin. It appears tobe a paved incline for walking in orout of the sump. Its complexity andbreadth, however, seem too extrava-gant for everyday use by humans.This ruin and ramp may be a quaintoffering to the Aluxes, mythical for-est elves held responsible for hunt-ing mishaps or rich harvests on themilpa. At trail intersections in re-mote areas of Quintana Roo it ispossible to find Alux gifts com-posed of short stone altars adornedwith candles, bones, and smallshells. Today cave entrances remainlikely areas to encounter curiousartifacts intended to appease thesetiny spirits.

Petroglyphs are usually found innaturally illuminated areas of acave; they rarely occur at any dis-tance from the entrance. They nor-mally take the form of a humanface, characterized by three or fourengraved features. The eyes, nose,and mouth are represented assimple holes or straight lines carvedin the rock. The outline of the faceis often represented by a limestoneknob or bulge that acts as a three-dimensional rendering of the head.These faces serve to welcome or di-rect visitors to a nearby pool of freshwater. Detailed petroglyphs, suchas the iguana emerging from a smallrock hole in the photograph, arevery rare. A second, unidentifiedglyph appears below and to theright of the lizard. The glyph set

Underwater and dry caves inthe QRSS database in early2004.

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was found near an extensive sumpin a cave that contains a small Aluxruin complete with long, squatstone walls built to guide an Aluxtoward the sump pool in the backof the cave.

It is very difficult to determinethe age of petroglyphs and ruins wefind in these caves. A few may datefrom the Classic period (AD 600–900) when the city of Cobá reachedits zenith. Others are much young-er; a few pieces of rock art are nodoubt inventions of bored chiclerosriding out a hurricane in a dampcavern. Discoveries of any histori-cal value are always reported tolandowners as a courtesy. The QRSSalso maintains open communica-tions with the Instituto Nacional deAntropología e Historia as a mat-ter of cooperation and respect forMexican federal laws. Both ruinsand rock art are considered centralto Mexico’s history, and are there-fore protected by law.

The QRSS database includesnearly three hundred GPS lo-

cations for underwater and drycaves. The resulting overview ofentrance locations and actual cavemaps suggests a few patterns of

cave speleogenesis in QuintanaRoo. At this time the largest propor-tion, 76 percent, of mainland cavesis confined to a zone between Playadel Carmen and a few kilometerssouth of Tulum. Caves within thezone appear to be controlled bythe geology of the interior. Longhorizontal underwater cave devel-opment in Quintana Roo declinesapproximately 12 kilometers fromthe coast. Beyond this boundary, el-evations generally rise abruptlyfrom 8 to 18 meters above sea level,which is sustained to the Yucatánstate border about 50 kilometersinland. Known caves in the western

Small structure, perhaps anAluxes house, below a pit

entrance in a remote part ofSistema Sac Actun. Jim Coke.

Iguana glyph in Cueva de lasRuinas. Jim Coke.

part of Quintana Roo are wet or drypits; only two horizontal dry caveshave lengths over 150 meters. A sec-ond, less evident pattern becomesdiscernible, especially in the vicin-ity of Tulum. Points between Playadel Carmen and Tulum tend to con-verge into groups aligned on anorthwest-to-southeast configura-tion. Tight clusters symbolize onecave or a few closely related caves,while scattered clusters indicatemany loosely associated caves. Eachgroup of caves, whether loose orscattered, shares a common drain-age path, according to cave survey.This could suggest a penchant forspeleogenesis along preferred flowroutes, rather than an amorphous“inland lake” drainage model sug-gested by a few researchers.

Quintana Roo has been a fertilearea for cave exploration over thepast twenty years. It continues to bea fruitful arena for a variety of sci-entific studies and new discoverieswithin the Playa del Carmen toTulum zone. Many of the currentexplorations involve fringe caves lo-cated at the 12-kilometer perimeter,where pushes in their downstreamsections, toward the coast, are moresuccessful than bids for upstreamgrowth. Investigations are also ex-panding south of Tulum and intothe Cobá area, once considered

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highly sensitive due to apprehen-sive or suspicious landowners.Residents in remote areas associatecaving or technological equipmentwith land developers or govern-mental intrusions into their way oflife. Establishing trusting land-owner relations is paramount to ourstudies. With landowner approval,GPS proves to be an efficient meansto document site exploration andassist navigation toward new en-trances discovered by surface orunderground searches.

Geografía de cuevas de Quintana Roo

La Asociación de Espeleología de Quintana Roo tiene archivosde más de 500 kilómetros de cuevas subacuáticas, con más de110 entradas. Hay además 4 kilómetros de pasaje topografiadoen varias cuevas secas. Los mapas muestran el aumento deentradas conocidas desde 1985. La mayoría de las cuevassubacuáticas largas se desarrollan a menos de 12 kilómetrosde la costa. Los buzos frecuentemente encuentran nuevasentradas a cenotes desde el interior de la cueva y portan unGPS en un recipiente hermético para poder registrar laubicación de la nueva entrada. Las cuevas conocidas en laregión occidental de Quintana Roo son en su mayoría pozossecos o húmedos. Sólo dos cuevas horizontales ahí tienen másde 150 metros. Algunos hallazgos arqueológicos se muestranen las fotografías.

Guillaume Pelletier at the top of a 14-meter pit in LaCiudad, Hoya Grande, Puebla, during Mexpé 2002.Photo by Gustavo Vela Turcott.

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A VAMPIRE ROOST IN A COLD CAVE

Gerardo Obispo Morgado, Luis Espinasa, and Monika Baker Alpheis

This article is a summary of a BAthesis written by GOM. Authors areaffiliated with CEAMISH, Univer-sidad Autónoma de Estado deMorelos and/or Shenandoah Uni-versity. Correspondence should beaddressed to LE, Biology Depart-ment, Shenandoah University, 1460University Drive, Winchester, Vir-ginia 22601, [email protected] Gradados, Adriana Barona,Paulette Arellano, and Karla Pulidogave help anjd support during thefield studies.

Encircling the northern portionof the warm valley of Cuerna-

vaca in Morelos, Mexico, is a steepvolcanic mountain chain known asthe Sierra del Chichinautzin. Thebase of the Sierra del Chichinautzinlies at 1500 meters above sea level,and its peaks reach up to 3450meters above sea level. Major sec-tions of the mountain chain wereformed from lava flows, and withinthem is one of the most extensivelava-tube systems in the world(Espinasa Pereña, 1999). During asystematic search for unexploredcaves in the area, a cave known tothe locals as Cueva Pelona wasfound. Cueva Pelona is located inthe Municipio of Huitzilac, More-los, at an elevation of 2205 meters(19°00′25.4″N, 99°11′51.8″W). It hasa 30-meter-deep, 24-meter-widebell-shaped entrance pit. From it,three passages 209.3, 24.6, and 25meters long branch off. At the endof the last passage, in a chamber of2 by 3 and 3.5 meters high, we madean unexpected discovery: a smallvampire roost.

Why was this unexpected? Be-cause the common vampire bat,Desmodus rotundus, typically livesat elevations below 2300 meters(Greenhall et al., 1983) in tropicaland subtropical regions (McCracken,1993). Vampire bats avoid roostingin caves or sites where temperaturesdrop below 15°C (Villa, 1966; Acha,1968; Trajano, 1996), essentiallylimiting their distribution to geo-graphical areas whose minimalisotherm for January is higher than10°C (McNab, 1973). The area ofCueva Pelona has an average an-nual temperature of 12° to 18°C. Atthe nearby Huitzilac meteorologi-cal station, the minimum isothermis 9.7°C. Perhaps most impressive,however, was the low temperaturein the vampire chamber. The tem-perature ranged from 15°C to 13°Cyear-round, according to a min/maxthermometer we installed in thevampire chamber, 2 meters from thevampires.

The restricted range of Desmodusrotundus is due to the metabolic costof maintaining normal body tem-perature with energy input from adiet composed mainly of water(William, 1970; McNab, 1973). Themaximum amount of blood ob-tained during a meal is limited byhow much a mother vampire witha newborn can carry in her stomachand still fly. In very cold environ-ments, this energy intake is simplynot enough to maintain normalbody temperature. Cueva Pelona issituated at a higher elevation andin a colder place than any othervampire roosting site recorded inMexico. Before this study, the

highest reported vampire roost wasin Ostoyohualco Cave (18°59′45.4″N,99°03′37.6″W), also known asCueva del Diablo, at an elevation of1961 meters above sea level (InVilla’s 1966 original description hemiscalculated the elevation of Osta-yohualco, putting it at 2300). Theinside temperature of Ostoyohualco,20°C, is balmy in comparison toCueva Pelona.

Four other caves in the same areawere explored to determine if otherDesmodus populations were nearby.Although Artibeus, Glossophaga, andan unidentified vespertilionid werefound in those caves, no otherDesmodus roost was found. Theclosest reported colony of vampiresis in Naranjo Rojo cave, which lies3450 meters to the south at an el-evation of 1765 meters above sealevel (18°58.77′N 99°10.94′W), nearthe base of the Sierra del Chichi-nautzin. We expected the colony ofCueva Pelona to migrate during thecolder months of the year, but vis-its to the cave in winter showed itwas still occupied by vampires.Therefore individuals are able toendure the extreme conditions. Asthis cave is clearly at the ecologicaldistribution limits for the species,a demographic and behavioralstudy was conducted to better under-stand the factors that permit vam-pires to survive under sub-optimalconditions.

A total of twenty visits to the cavewere made between April 1999 andMarch 2001. On eleven occasionsthe vampire gallery was enteredwithout light with the help of anight-vision digital Sony Handycam,

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and the colony was filmed. Record-ings were done each time at aboutnoon. By the end of the study, a to-tal of 134 minutes of analyzablevideo tape was available. Since eachscene monitors the activity of closeto fifteen individuals, 2030 bat-minutes were on tape. In the labo-ratory, the tapes were analyzed,frame by frame when necessary,and the number of vampires, theirrelative positions, and the numberand types of activities in which theyengaged were noted. A total of 625self-groomings, 137 sniffings, 46attacks, 29 allogroomings, 1 copu-lation, 1 attempt at copulation, and1 regurgitation were recorded. Hi-bernation or lethargy was notpresent during the winter. To thecontrary, on average a bat engagedin some activity about once perminute in winter, while the fre-quency was about half that the restof the year.

The colony was structured in thenormal way for the species (Wilkin-son, 1990): A main central group offemales, juveniles, and some males,closely surrounded by “near satel-lites,” which are mostly adultmales, and “distant satellite” adultsof both sexes scattered outside thecore groups. The total number ofindividuals forming the colony var-ied little throughout the study, av-eraging 59. The lowest number was52 in April 1999, and the highest

dates in February 2001, she waspresent one day and not the other.Based on the observations, we esti-mate that individuals occupy theCueva Pelona roost only about 30percent of the time.

Births occurred throughout theyear, al though two peaks ofbirths were found, in June-July andOctober-November, as seen by thenumber of newborns attached totheir mothers. There appeared to befewer newborns in the coldestmonths of the year than during therest of the year. The figure showsthe number of newborns recordedover the two years of observation,condensed into a single year to vi-sualize seasonal births.

Self-grooming was performed atsimilar rates in all parts of thecolony, whereas allogrooming wasperformed mainly among near-satellite individuals, which, basedon the sex distributions discussedabove, consisted mainly of males.Of the twenty-nine allogroomingsobserved, only one was from amother to her newborn. All otherswere from an adult directed to an-other adult. Our results corroboratethe notion that allogrooming has adifferent function than that of self-grooming (Wilkinson, 1986). Whileself-grooming has a cleaning func-tion and is performed by all adultswith the same intensity, allo-grooming apparently has a moresocial function, because it is per-formed mainly by the near-satellite

was 62 in July 2000. Thecentral group averaged 37adults or subadults and 2.5infants. Near-satellites aver-aged 6 individuals, and dis-tant-satellites averaged 13.

From September 1999 toApril 2000, twelve malesand six females were cap-tured with a mist net at theentrance of the vampire pas-sage. They were measured,tagged with an adjustableplastic neck band, and re-leased. The bands had ablack-and-white code easilyseen on the video tapes. Ofthe twelve males tagged,five were not seen again. Ofthe six females, only onewas never observed again. Ifwe exclude the six individu-als not seen again, tagged in-

dividuals were seen on average for13 months. The longest time atagged individual was observedwas 18 months from tagging to thetermination of the study. Not everytagged individual was spotted onall days of observation between thedate it was tagged and the last timeit was seen. For example, a femalewas tagged on November 19, 1999,and subsequently observed on July12, 2000, February 4, 2001, andMarch 12, 2001, but could not befound inside the cave on June 29,2000, December 14, 2000, January23, 2001, and February 3, 2001. Notethat even on the two consecutive

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males that control access to the fe-males in the central group.

Attacks and sniffings also appearto be performed mainly by males,according to the positions in whichthey were observed. Attacks wereperformed an order of magnitudemore frequently by near-satelliteindividuals than by central or distant-satellite individuals. Near satellitesalso sniffed other individuals moreoften than those elsewhere in thecolony. These activities could alsobe associated with male dominanceinteractions.

CONCLUSIONS. Not only did theCueva Pelona vampire colony

not migrate during the coldestmonths of the year, but it also re-mained nearly constant in size. Geo-graphical factors may contribute tothe ability of this population to en-dure the extreme conditions. Thiscave is only 4 kilometers away fromthe warm valley of Cuernavaca,clearly within the 5- to 8-kilometerflying range of vampires in searchof food (Greenhall et al., 1983). In-dividuals could be descending tolower and warmer elevations intheir search for food, as corrobo-rated by ranchers’ reports that vam-pire wounds are scarce on cattle athigh elevations. Furthermore, al-though the colony size is stable, theindividuals themselves do notspend every day in this particularcave, since it is estimated that bothmales and females are there onlyabout 30 percent of the time. Sinceno other cave at this elevation ap-pears to be occupied by vampires,but several caves in the Cuernavacavalley have large vampire colonies,individuals from Cueva Pelona mayspend two-thirds of their time inwarmer roosting sites.

If a vampire does not eat for threedays, it dies. Food sharing by regur-gitation among individuals is anefficient way to reduce this meta-bolic constraint (Denault and Mc-Farlane, 1995). Although one mightexpect that in an energetically chal-lenging environment, increasedfood-sharing could potentially in-crease survival rates, that is not astrategy particularly used by theCueva Pelona colony. Food sharingby regurgitation was observed onlyonce during the study.

Reducing reproductive rates inwinter and using several roostingsites appear to be factors that enableindividuals from Cueva Pelona toendure its extreme conditions.These tactics are not restricted tothis population, but instead are partof the adaptive ensemble of thespecies. Nuñez and Viana (1997)showed that vampires in Trinidad,Brazil, and Costa Rica also have twobirthing peaks at times other thanwinter, and Greenhall et al. (1983),Wilkerson (1990) and Trajano (1996)reported that individuals in popu-lations inhabiting warmer areasalso use several perching sites. Itwould then appear that no newstrategies were developed by themembers of the colony in CuevaPelona to endure the extreme con-ditions there, but that they simplyemploy the adaptive characteristicstypical of the species to their limitsof effectiveness.

Acha, N. P., 1968. Epidemiología dela rabia bovina paralítica trans-mitida por los quirópteros.Boletín de la Oficina SanitariaPanamericana 64:411–430.

Denault, L. K., and D. A. McFarlane,1995. Reciprocal altruism be-tween male vampire bats, Des-

modus rotundus. Behavior 49(3):855–856.

Espinasa Pereña, R., 1999. Origeny evolución de tubos de lava enla sierra Chichinautzin: El casodel volcán Suchiooc. Tesis deMaestría en ciencias. UNAM.

Greenhall, A., G. Joermann, and U.Schmidt, 1983. Desmodus rotun-dus. Mammalian Species 202:1–6.

Macbeath, T., and F. Urbina, 1995.Historia natural del área de protec-ción de flora y fauna silvestrecorredor biológico Chichinautzin.Centro de Investigaciones Bio-lógicas. UAEM.

McCracken, G., 1993. Bats and vam-pires. Bats Magazine 11(3):14–15.

McNab, B. K., 1973. Energetics anddistribution of vampires. Journalof mammology 54(1):131–143.

Nuñez, H., and M. Viana, 1997.Estacionalidad reproductiva enel vampiro común Desmodusrotundus (Chiroptera, Phyllosto-midae) en el Valle de Lerma(Salta, Argentina). Revista deBiología Tropical 45(3):1231–1235.

Trajano, E., 1996. Movement of cavebats in Southeastern Brazil, withemphasis on the population ecol-ogy of the common vampire bat,Desmodus rotundus (Chiróptera).Biotropica 28(1):121–129.

Villa, R., 1966. Los murciélagos deMéxico. Instituto de Biología.UNAM.

Wilkinson, G., 1986. Social groom-ing in the common vampire bats,Desmodus rotundus. Animal behav-ior 34:1880–1889.

———, 1990. Food sharing in vampirebats. Scientific American 262(2):64–70.

William, A., 1970. Thermoregula-tion and metabolism in bats. Bi-ology of bats 1:312–313.

Un nido de vampiros en una cueva fría

Cueva Pelona, en la sierra del Chichinautzin, en Morelos, es la cueva a mayorelevación, 2205 metros, de que se tenga noticia con una colonia de murciélagosvampiros comunes, Desmodus rotundus. A pesar de las bajas temperaturas losmurciélagos están presentes todo el año y no disminuye su actividad eninvierno. La cueva está solamente a cuatro kilómetros del valle templado deCuernavaca y los murciélagos probablemente acuden ahí en busca de alimento.

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Review of Devil's Book of Culture (AMCS Activities Newsletter)

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