On February 16, at dawn, the advance team piled into a van and drove to El Aguacate airport, a shabby jungle airstrip built by the CIA during the Contra war. It was located near the base of the mountains about ten miles east of Catacamas. The two helicopters were waiting: the AStar, brightly painted in candy-apple red and white, which had been flown down from Albuquerque, and a Honduran Bell 412 painted in combat gray. This first flight was to be a visual reconnaissance only, to scout out the two possible landing zones: one below the archaeological site, the other at the junction of the two rivers. There would be no landing in T1 on this aerial mission.
I rode in the Honduran chopper with Dave Yoder, while Elkins rode in the AStar. We took off at 9:45 a.m., heading northeastward, under the agreement that the two birds would stay in visual contact with each other at all times.
The Honduran helicopter I was in had trouble getting off the ground and then immediately began flying erratically, with a tilt. As we flew, various red lights and an alarm went off on the console, and then we turned around and headed back to Aguacate, where the helicopter made a crooked, skidding landing. It turned out a computer controller had gone bad. I’d been in sketchy aircraft before, but a helicopter is another level of concern, because if the engine fails there is no glide; the pilot must try to execute an “unpowered descent,” which is a euphemism for dropping out of the sky like a stone. Because helicopters are very expensive to fly and require much maintenance, the Honduran military can’t afford to give its helicopter pilots the same number of flying hours that, for example, USAF pilots have. Even less reassuring was the fact that these helicopters were old and had cycled through the air assets of several foreign countries before being acquired by Honduras.
As we waited at the airstrip, the AStar finally returned. Despite the agreement to stick together, the AStar had gone ahead anyway. Elkins bounded out. “Bingo,” he said, raising his thumb with a grin. “We can land right at the site! But you can’t see the ruins at all—it’s so thick.”
The Honduran Air Force brought in a replacement Bell, and both choppers made a second reconnaissance later in the day into the valley of T1. This time, the AStar pilot wanted to hover over the potential landing zone and scout it out more thoroughly. The military chopper, on the other hand, would be examining the bigger landing zone downriver, to see if it could accommodate its larger size. As the two LZs were only a few miles apart, the two birds would fly in together and maintain visual contact throughout.
Once again I flew in the military chopper. For half an hour we were flying over steep terrain, but vast areas of the mountainsides had been cleared, even on slopes of forty to fifty degrees. This was all new territory to me: In 2012, we had flown in from the northwest; now we were flying in from the southwest. I could see that the clearing was not for timbering; it appeared that few if any trees had been taken out, and were left lying on the ground to dry out and be burned, as evidenced by the plumes of smoke rising everywhere. The ultimate goal, I could see, was to turn the land into grazing for cattle—which dotted even the steepest hillsides.*
Finally we left the clear-cuts behind and were flying over a virgin carpet of jungle-cloaked peaks.
Once again I had the strong feeling, when flying into the valley, that I was leaving the twenty-first century entirely. A precipitous ridge loomed ahead, marking the southern boundary of T1. The pilot headed for a V notch in it. When we cleared the gap, the valley opened up in a rolling landscape of emerald and gold, dappled with the shadows of clouds. The two sinuous rivers ran through it, clear and bright, the sunlight flashing off their riffled waters as the chopper banked. I remembered it from the lidar flight three years earlier, but now it looked even more splendid. Towering rainforest trees, draped in vines and flowers, carpeted the hills, giving way to sunny glades along the riverbanks. Flocks of egrets flew below, white dots drifting against the green, and the treetops thrashed with the movement of unseen monkeys. As had been true in 2012, there was no sign of human life—not a road, trail, or wisp of smoke.
In the larger Bell, we followed the winding path of the river. The AStar was ahead and below us, and as we closed in to the upper LZ, the one near the ruins, the AStar went into a hover over an area along the riverbank covered with thick vegetation. We spent twenty minutes circling this LZ and then circled the second one downriver, which was larger and more open. With both landing zones now firmly identified—one for the Bell and the other for the AStar—we headed back to Aguacate.
The next morning, on February 17, we arrived back at Aguacate at dawn for our flight into the valley, where we hoped to land and establish base camp. The airstrip terminal, a shabby, one-room concrete building, its ceiling tiles falling down, was now full of gear: portable generators, stacks of water bottles, toilet paper, plastic bins packed with Mountain House freeze-dried food, tarps, Coleman lanterns, folding tables, tents, chairs, cots, parachute cord, and other necessities.
The AStar took off with Woody, Sully, and Spud, equipped with machetes and a chainsaw to clear the landing zone near the ruins. The chopper returned two hours later, having successfully dropped them into an area alongside the stream where there were only a few trees, with a plant cover six to nine feet deep, which could be easily cleared with machetes. Only a few small trees would have to be cut.
All was going according to plan. It would probably take them four hours to clear it. We would not have to rope down from a hover after all; the chopper would be able to land firmly on the ground.
Chris Fisher, Dave Yoder, and Lucian Read went in the next flight. Two hours later, the chopper returned and refueled, and then Juan Carlos and I walked out onto the hot tarmac to get in. We each had backpacks with all our essential gear, including food and water for two days, as the camp would not be fully stocked for at least forty-eight hours. We would have to be self-sufficient for those first few days. Because the LZ at the site was so small, and the AStar unable to carry more than a tiny amount of equipment, most of it would be ferried into the valley on the Bell, offloaded at the downstream LZ, and from there shuttled in by the AStar in many back-and-forth trips.
Juan Carlos and I stowed our two backpacks in a basket attached to the port side of the helicopter, since there wasn’t room inside. Steve Elkins brought out his iPhone, and he taped me as I gave a ten-second video farewell to my wife, Christine, since I would be out of contact for the next nine or ten days. It was strange to think about what might happen before I was next in touch with her. Steve promised to e-mail the video to her when he got back to Catacamas.
Just before we lifted off, I had a chance to chat with our copilot, Rolando Zuniga Bode, a lieutenant in the Honduran Air Force. “My grandmother used to talk about Ciudad Blanca all the time,” he said. “She had a lot of stories.”
“What stories?”