Around noon, Mark Plotkin arrived back in camp carrying a turtle. I was curious to hear what he, as a rainforest ethnobotanist, was seeing in the valley. “We went upriver,” he said. “We were looking for evidence of recent habitation, but we didn’t see any. But we saw lots of useful plants.” He began rattling them off. A ginger used to treat cancer; a fig-related plant used by shamans; balsa trees; the biggest ramón trees he had ever seen, which produce a fruit and a highly nutritious nut; massive Virola trees used to treat fungal infections and to make a hallucinogenic snuff for sacred ceremonies. “I don’t see any trees or plants that would indicate any recent human presence,” he said. “I’ve been looking for chiles—seen none of that. And no Castilla.” Castilla elastica, he explained, was an important tree for the ancient Maya, who used it as the source of latex to make rubber for the balls used in the sacred game. He had also seen no mahogany trees. “What’s driving the deforestation near here,” he said, confirming what others had told me, “isn’t mahogany but clearing the land for cattle.”
He had run into a huge troop of spider monkeys upriver, much bigger than the family above my camp. “These are the first animals hunted out,” he said. “When you see spider monkeys who don’t run away but come and look at you, that is exceptional.” Later, Chris Fisher went downriver and ran into another large troop of monkeys, who were sitting in a tree above the river eating flowers. They screeched and shook branches at him. When the inner primate in Chris emerged and he began hooting and shaking bushes back at them, they bombarded him with flowers.
Plotkin was profoundly impressed by the valley. He said that, in all his years wandering the jungle, he had never seen a place like it. “This is clearly one of the most undisturbed rainforests in Central America,” he said. “The importance of this place cannot be overestimated. Spectacular ruins, pristine wilderness—this place has it all. I’ve been walking tropical American rainforests for thirty years and I’ve never walked up to a collection of artifacts like that. And I probably won’t ever again.”
I asked him, as an authority on rainforest conservation, what could be done to preserve the valley and site. He said it was a very difficult problem. “Conservation is a spiritual practice,” he said. “This place is right up there with the most important unspoiled places on earth. This was a forgotten place—but it ain’t forgotten anymore! We live in a world gone crazy for resources. Everybody on Google Earth can look at this place now. If you don’t move to protect it, it will disappear. Everything in the world is vulnerable. It’s amazing to me it hasn’t been looted already.”
“So what should be done?” I asked. “Create a national park?”
“This is already supposed to be a biosphere reserve. Where are the guards? The problem is people establish a national park and think they’ve won the war. No way. That’s only the first step—a battle in a longer war. The good thing about this expedition is that at least you’re bringing attention to this place and it might now be saved. Otherwise, it won’t last long. You saw the clear-cutting outside the valley. Absolutely gone in a few years.”
That night, the rain continued to fall. I was astounded to see Dave Yoder packing up his camera gear with a set of portable lights, and loading it all on his back. He said he was dissatisfied with his pictures of the cache so far. The daylight filtering down was too flat. He was going to hike up there in the dark with Sully so that he could “light-paint” the artifacts. This is a difficult photographic technique in which the camera, on a tripod, is left with the shutter open while the photographer sweeps light beams over the objects from different angles, to highlight particular details and add a sense of drama and mystery.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “You’re going up there in the pitch dark, with all those snakes, in the rain, wading in mud up to your balls, climbing that hill with a ton of gear on your back in a suitcase? You’re going to get yourself killed.”
He grunted and hiked off into the dark, his headlamp bobbing around before winking out entirely. As I hunkered down in my tent, listening to the rain, I was damned glad I was just a writer.
The rain stopped in the night and—finally—the morning of February 24 dawned beautifully, with fresh sunlight skimming the treetops. Some of the Honduran soldiers said they had seen petroglyphs downstream, where the river entered the notch on its way out of the valley. An expedition was organized to investigate. Chris Fisher and his crew decided to use the good weather to continue mapping the site, while Juan Carlos hoped to finish up his lidar scan of the cache. Steve and Bill Benenson joined our group heading downriver, along with Alicia and Oscar.
The weather was glorious. I washed my muddy, mildewed clothes in the river and put them back on, then stood on the riverbank in the warm sunlight, holding my arms out and turning about in a hopeless effort to dry my clothes. After so many nights and days of rain, even after laundering they smelled like they were rotting.
The AStar flew our group from our LZ to the Honduran LZ downstream at the river junction. A second group of Honduran soldiers had set up a camp at the junction, with tarps and palm fronds erected for tents, floored with cut bamboo. This was the only landing zone for the Honduran Bell helicopter, and these soldiers helped ferry supplies in and out and served as a backup to the group upstream. A side of deer ribs and two haunches were smoking over a fire, the rule against hunting having not yet been instituted.