THE JOYS OF CAVING
by John Pint
Using the handy index in Subterráneo
10, you can easily locate several articles in Subterráneo 1 and 2 on our
adventures exploring four caves we found years ago in the marble hills near La
Concha, Jalisco. A curious fact about these caves is that not one of them even
remotely resembles the marvelous cavern that people in the area had repeatedly
described to us. "There's this high room," they insisted, "with
a circular staircase that goes down and down, round and round, finally leading
to an underground river. Across this river a log has been placed, making it
easy to cross over to the other side where you find yourself in a long, long
passage and when you finally step out into the light, blinking at the
brightness, why, there you are, standing on the slopes of the Nevado de
Colima."
Since the Nevado Volcano is about
110km from La Concha's small, isolated hills of marble, we forgot about the
"long, long passage" and concentrated instead on exploring La Cueva
del Diablo (no staircase, no river) and the incredible petroglyphs decorating
the marble cliffs.
The
cave at last
However, a new chapter in this story
began to reveal itself in 1995 when we made a concerted effort to photograph
the petroglyphs and investigate their origins. In each of the nearby towns, we
sought out everyone and anyone who might shed light on those fascinating
engravings until one day, the police chief of La Concha casually asked us if we
knew about the caves in the area.
"Of course," we replied.
We've mapped them all."
"Oh, so you have a map of this
one, too?" said the policeman, handing us a set of snapshots.
Well, I nearly swallowed my bridge
when I saw those pictures. "Er... where is this cave?" I humbly
asked.
This is the cave of El Altilte.
There's a circular staircase in it and an underground riv—"
Thus we discovered that we
"professional" explorers had actually never set foot in the cave
people had been telling us about for years.
Swamp?
What swamp?
Not that El Altilte is exactly on
the main drag. The first time we went there was on foot, which means an hour of
slogging through mud puddles trying their best to become ponds. When the road
finally ended, we were staring at a lovely little "lake" (the quotes
are in deference to Chris Lloyd who, for some reason insists on calling it a
swamp) fed by a warm spring: a truly charming spot for camping which we had
never dreamed was only minutes from where we had been caving for ten years.
Better
than Hollywood
Upon arriving at the lake we met a
man named Juan who quickly offered to show us the cave entrance, located only
five minutes from the pond. The entrance turned out to be an ugly, narrow,
horizontal slot. You crawl through and stand up at the edge of a vast room
whose far walls are invisible. Sunlight streaming through the slot spotlights
gorgeous decorations on the ceiling. Water dripping from many of the formations
plus steam rising through the sunbeams give this room the sort of atmosphere
that would make a Hollywood director salivate. So we called it Studio One.
Following the perimeter of Studio
One, we came upon no circular stairway, but we did find several passages
heading off in various directions, one of which actually leads to a body of
water (which we suspect feeds the lake). Many of these passages are still
awaiting exploration and mapping, so look out, Nevado de Colima!
Soup
but not noodles
Spotting a balcony high above the far
end of Studio One, climbers Chris Lloyd, Vicente Loreto and Luis Rojas soon had
Claudio and me risking life and limb to wriggle up a slippery slope to the Soup
Shelf. The "soup" on the Shelf is a disgusting mixture of guano and
stalactite drip sometimes a foot deep. What you see swimming in the soup are
not noodles, however, but four-inch-long millipedes which looked white to my
eyes (during those precious seconds when my glasses weren't fogged up) but came
out tan in all the pictures. Curiously, on hearing mention of the
"soup," Susy suddenly remembered it was nearly supper time and headed
out towards the clean, refreshing lake.
It was much hotter and steamier on
the Soup Shelf than in the rest of the cave, so no one was particularly anxious
to follow Luis Rojas into a low passage he said went for "a long, long
way" but which we would have to crawl through in the company of even more
squirming white critters like those populating the Shelf. "Don't
worry," said Luis, "they're harmless."
Even though I believed they were
inoffensive, the thought of having a couple of these wrigglers down my neck
would take some getting used to.
Nevertheless, the day did come when
a fairly large group of us girded our loins, clenched our teeth and crawled into
the "long, long passage," presently known as Millipede Mile. Now, the
survey says it was only about 23 meters long, but distances are relative when
you find yourself "belly to belly" with a thousand-legger — so
we forgive you, Luis!
Unforgivable, though, is the fact
that what we found at the other end of the Mile has yet to be recorded on film
because the supersaturated atmosphere of the Soup Shelf penetrated everyone's
camera, fogging lenses inside as well as out and later requiring professional cleaning.
Even though its air is breathable, photographers might do well to think of
Altilte as an underwater cave.
Slipslidin'
on the Slabs
If you check out the accompanying
Profile Map, you'll see that Millipede Mile crawlway slowly downslopes until it
brings the crawler to another large room which is just about on the same level
as Studio One, but separate from it. Perhaps this is a route that water took to
get over a layer of harder rock. As the Plot Map shows, this room — Fogworld —
lies right along the cave's main axis, exactly in the direction you would
expect the cave to go.
Once again, we were standing above a
large room whose walls were beyond the reach of our lights. Between us and
those unseen boundaries lay an obstacle course consisting of great, smooth
slabs of rock, each of them covered with a thin layer of guano (about half an
inch) and each tilted at just enough of an angle to make you think you
could walk on it without quickly ending up on your butt, sliding to the edge of
who knows what. To avoid the slabs, most of us followed the right hand wall a
short distance— short because above our heads were some very strange and
beautiful stalactites which we were photographing with great enthusiasm (little
did we know all we would get were blurs). Luis, of course, had sailed right
over the Slippery Slabs and was shouting from somewhere in the distance,
"I'm standing at the edge of a pit and I can't see the bottom!"
At this dramatic juncture, we were
forced to depart Fogworld. As our survey shows, there's lots left to
investigate... even if it doesn't go to El Nevado de Colima.