Wednesday, April 19, Mauricio Tapie of SMES (Mexican Underground Exploration Society) arrived here from Mexico City along with a 200 meter rope that we hoped would reach the floor of Jesus Moreno’s “Bottomless Pit’ described in Subterráneo # 4.

Mauricio is a lively, smiling ever-joking fellow and now sports a mustache “a la Mexicana.” In this 2O’s, Mauricio has explored an incredible number of this country’s greatest caves and published countless articles on them. He and his friends are proof that speleology is coming into its own in Mexico.

Next day, Susy, Jesus, Mauricio and I were again among the tall oaks of the Cerro Grande heading into Terrero, one of the rare towns in Mexico where the houses and fences are made of wood. Leaving Mauricio’s car under guard there, we headed for our campsite, huge clouds of powdery dirt billowing behind us. Not hard to see where Terrero (“Dirt Town”) got its name!

Next morning, we only had to walk four minutes from our campsite to the nearest apparently unexplored pit. Crawling down the steep side of its 60 meter-wide mouth, we reached a tree overlooking a sheer drop. Mitch Ventura had spotted this hole long ago (on a hike from Colima!) and had claimed he could just make out a horizontal passage down at the bottom.

As I lowered myself into the brightly-lit pit, I kept my eye on the large black opening to one side at the bottom. Would it turn out like so many other “possible passages” seen from the mouths of pits... a mere shadow made by a deep crevice?

Forty meters down I touched bottom on a heap of rocks and tree trunks. The opening -was as dark and inviting as ever! The rest of the crew followed, including Susy, who was thoroughly enjoying her longest rappel ever.

Our “passage” turned out to be a cave with two rooms. The first was a high ceiling nicely decorated with largo curtain and stalactites. The floor was solid, nearly black mud.. “Look at these,” shouted Mauricio, shining his hand lamp into a neat round bold about a foot in diameter. From the wall of the hole, two yellow bones were protruding. Several similar boles, were formed by stalactite drip, exhibited bones, probably cow bones, and we wondered just how extensive a graveyard lay beneath the mud and why the bones were inside the cave and not at the bottom of the open pit where you’d expect falling cows to land.

The black wall of the room was decorated with a weird formation said by some to resemble a bas—relief llama. On one side of it was a small opening leading to a little room, beautifully decorated. And there ended the cave, except for a drainage hole bottomed by Jesus at 18 meters below the cave floor.

In the late afternoon, we took Mauricio to ‘Mitch’s Pit,” where our Colima ZOTZ member had recently spent a night under less than ideal circumstances (See Anatomy of a Stuck Caver, this issue). Knowing the pit is over 100 meter deep, Mauricio’s 200 meter “Chewing Gum Special’ (stretcher Italian 9 mm rope) was used for the descent. However no sooner had Mauricio disappeared over the edge, when he shouted, “I’ve seen a picture of this pit. It’s El Pozo de Lentiscos (explored by Carlos Lazcano)!” And thus began a series of interminable jokes and speculations: would we find little messages reading “Carlos was here” at the bottom of every pit in the Cerro Grande? Not likely since Carlos Lazcano himself had suggested, in a recent letter, that we should continue working in this area... so he must have left something for us!

The solution to the problem was brought to us by Sergio Graf, a young man living in El Terrero and representing the University of Guadalajara in the area. When he first appeared at our campsite, it was obviously to check us out. Were we a gang of hunters, arsonists or garbage-strewers? As we began to converse, Jesus mentioned our interest in ecology admitting, however, that having such an interest didn’t necessarily prove we wouldn’t burn the woods down.

That reminds me of a great cartoon I once saw, exclaimed Sergio, and as he told us about it, Jesus smiled... Of course, he was the author of the cartoon and once Sergio found out, he put himself wholeheartedly at our disposal and even invited us to visit his headquarters to Terrero to look over Carlos Lascano’s recently published (by the UDG) bock on the caves of the Cerro Grande. This includes maps, measurements and approximate locations. Thus, we had all the information we needed for determining which of our discoveries even really new and which parts of the Cerro Grande haven’t been investigated.

All day Friday was dedicated to resolving the mystery of the Sotano del Colgado where Jesus Moreno had once spent two hours fixing his ascending gear while hanging in darkness at the end of our 100 meter rope

This pit 15 located at the bottom of a very small, shallow, unpretentious doline and entrance is a slot only half a meter wide. As I did not enter it due to uncooperative bowels, I can’t relate the human drama that took up nearly the entire day. How did they feel when they discovered that 174 meter of Mauricio’s rope lay on the floor of the cave only 26 meter below the end of our rope?

The mystery, at least, was soon resolved. When Jesus had previously tossed a gob of mud into the dark void, it had fallen 26 meters and quietly landed on the soft black mud floor, giving the perfect illusion of having gone into another dimension.

In anticipation of this pit’s exploration, ZOTZ members had spent months learning Morse code and practicing long distance communication by sports-type whistle. But alas, our pains were for nought. The first time we tried sending a message to those below, a far-off, tiny voice pleaded in carefully separated syllables:

For get whist le!!

im poss i ble un der stand due to e cho !!!

Later we asked Mauricio about the technology used by expert stoners to solve the problem. How for example, would he inform the folks at the bottom of a 200-meter pit, that he had reached the top and the rope was free? “Muy Fácil,” he replied. “Before I start to ascend I tell them to wait a half an hour and then start climbing.”

El Sotano del Colgado lies in the zone explored by Lazcano, but was probably bypassed due to the small entrance.

The true potential of this area came to us the next day which naively decided to dedicate to cave hunting..

Ha! in ten minutes we found two new holes and were already running back to camp for our long ropes. The second of these had a nice 50-meter drop and took some time to map its narrow, twisting passage - ways. Mauricio however, kept trying to push things along so he could get back outside to answer one of nature’s louder calls. Alas, we took too long and thus the cave gained its name Sotano El Tapado (Constipation Pit).

Using white paint, we marked the entrances of the four caves we had explored with the symbols (originally Belgian I believe) recommended by SMES for thickly cave infested areas:

From what we’ve seen of the Cerro Grande so far, we may need several gallons of paint before we’re through.