As I crawled out of my tent and drew on my sodden clothes, Steve next door was looking up at the spider monkeys, who seemed as miserable as we were. He wondered how they could stand the rain, day in and day out. This was supposed to be the dry season in Honduras, but in this remote area a crazy sort of microclimate seemed to prevail.
At breakfast, the discussion turned to T3. The bad weather would prevent the air reconnaissance of T3 planned for that day. The other city lay about twenty miles to the north, and Chris was passionately eager to see a glimpse of it, at least from the air, if only the weather would break.
We waited for a pause in the rain. When it came, the AStar showed up with two more expedition members: Mark Plotkin, the noted ethnobotanist, president of the Amazon Conservation Team, and author of the bestselling book Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice; and his colleague Prof. Luis Poveda, an ethnobotanist from the National University of Costa Rica. Their hope was to record and study the botany of the T1 valley, especially in relation to its ancient inhabitants; they planned to inventory any legacy plants that might remain from pre-Columbian times, as well as identify biologically useful trees and medicinal plants. Almost immediately after the helicopter left, the rains came again. We packed up for another hike into the ruins. This time Juan Carlos carried a huge plastic suitcase strapped to his back. Inside was a $120,000 terrestrial lidar unit, a machine on a tripod, with which he intended to scan the sculpture cache.
While ascending the fixed ropes up the slippery trail, Prof. Poveda, who was in his early seventies, fell and rolled down the hill, pulling a muscle in his leg. He had to be carried back to camp and later evacuated by helicopter. At the cache it was pouring so hard that Juan Carlos had to wait an hour before he dared remove the lidar machine from its box. He set it up on the bottom slope of the pyramid just above the cluster of sculptures. Kneeling in the mud, with a tarp draped over his head, he fiddled with his MacBook Pro, jacked into the lidar unit as a controller. It seemed doubtful his equipment would survive the ordeal. Finally, hours later, the rain let up enough for him to uncover the machine and do an eleven-minute scan of the site. His intention was to do six scans, at different angles, to complete a three-dimensional picture, but a fresh downpour caused a delay and finally shut him down for the day. He left the equipment up there, well tarped, to complete the scans the next day. It poured again all night, and I awoke to the now familiar hammering of rain on the tent fly. My entire tent was now sunken in mud, and water was coming in and starting to pool.
At breakfast, Oscar passed around his cell phone with a picture he had taken that morning from his hammock. Just as he was putting his foot out to step onto the ground, he said, “I had a funny feeling.” He withdrew his bare foot and poked his head out of the hammock, peering at the ground below. Directly underneath him, crawling along at a leisurely pace, was a fer-de-lance as long as his hammock. When it passed by, he climbed down and got dressed.
Sully glanced at the picture. “Lovely way to start the day, mate,” he said, passing it along.
I spent the morning under the kitchen tarp, writing in my notebook, thinking how fast the days had gone by. We only had a few more before we would have to break down the camp, pack up, and fly everything out. I felt a sense almost of panic that we had hardly scratched the surface. Exploring the city was clearly an undertaking that would take years.
Meanwhile, the camp had turned into a quagmire, the mud six inches deep or more, except where there were ponds of water. The bamboo poles laid down as corrugation over the worst spots sank out of sight as soon as they were trod upon, and disappeared into the muck. Spud would cut more to lay on top, and they, too, would be swallowed.
That afternoon, the weather broke long enough for a quick reconnaissance of T3. Steve joined the flight, along with Dave and Chris. I wanted to go but there wasn’t room. The AStar took off in the early afternoon and returned a few hours later.
“Did you see anything?” I asked Steve, as he came back into camp.
“It’s beautiful. Unbelievably beautiful. It’s like a paradise.” The pilot had descended almost to the ground, hovering about a foot off a sandbar, while Dave took pictures. Steve described the valley of T3 as much gentler and more open than T1, a vast, parklike expanse bisected by clear rivers with sandy beaches along the banks. The rivers were surrounded by fields of deep grass, over six feet high, broken here and there by stands of giant trees. Most of the actual ruins stood on benchlands above the river and were hidden in the forest. The valley was bounded on the east by a lofty ridge, where an unnamed river flowed through a gap, heading toward the distant Patuca; T3 was surrounded by peaks on the other three sides as well. He said there were no obvious signs of human habitation, “just forest and grasslands as far as the eye can see.” The chopper was able to hover in place for only a few minutes at T3 before heading back to T1.
The following year, Chris and Juan Carlos would attempt a more serious reconnaissance of T3. In mid-January 2016, the Honduran military flew them in a helicopter to T3 and were able to put down the chopper on a sandbar.
“We landed,” Chris recalled, “and the pilot said we had a couple of hours.” But the grass was so high and thick that it took them an hour and a half to go a mere thousand feet, slashing unceasingly with machetes at the tough, thick-stemmed grass. It was impossible to see anything, and they were in great fear of snakes. But when they finally got out of the floodplain and climbed up to the benchland, they came upon an amazing sight: “It was nonstop plazas,” Chris said, “with little mounds around them, and more plazas and little mounds, as far as we could go. It’s much bigger than T1. It was huge. There were a lot of people living there.” The valley of T3, like T1, gave every indication of being another untouched wilderness with no evidence of recent human entry or indigenous use. As of this writing, beyond these two reconnaissance missions T3 remains unexplored.