I never made my final post about PESH because I never had the last round of photos. Now I have them all! I didn’t take any of them because my sole skill is pestering other people about sending me their beautiful photos. A few of these were in a previous post, but here they are all collected. Please enjoy. I’m choosing to write less this time around and let the images speak for themselves.

Note: If your photo is in here and you want me to take it down, just shoot me a message! I tried to ask & be respectful but things can always change. Photos in this post by Georgia Schneider, Tiffany Nardico, and Matt Tomlinson.

Entrance

Elliot doing the first rappel of the entrance, when we rigged the high side. Tiffany photo Me with a rather large pack. Tiffany photo

Anthodite Hollow (Tiffany Nardico photos)

Formations near the top along Anthodite Hollow; note how they angle along the beds. Vonny Droms photo A skeleton trapped in the calcite floor. Tiffany Nardico photo A crystal-topped stalagmite in Anthodite Hollow. Vonny Droms photo

Me sketching in Anthodite Hollow. Tiffany Nardico photo Tristan and Georgia in Anthodite Hollow. Tiffany Nardico photo

Isle of the Blest

South Wind Pit

We haven’t yet photographed what is in my opinion the most beautiful and weird area of the cave, which is tongue-twistingly called the Angel of Black Death and the Rimstone Scene. It features ancient rimstone dams 12m deep, where you hop from edge to edge, and a thick mat of fallen black anthodites covering the floor.

Hill of Hope/Campamento Bertha

We pick up the story from this post in the huge room Elliot and I found, and after Georgia made it out of the cave.

That room is called Hill of Hope officially, in honor of a particular song, but when we established the camp there its name was quickly changed to Campamento Bertha in honor of our host family’s mother. I’ll say this: it’s definitely the biggest house I’ll ever have.

Pit series

Just before moving in the team discovered a large pit series coming off the upslope side of the room, which turned into two parallel vertical routes, each more than 150m deep, meeting up in a wet lower level.

Rolland christened some of this area the Shotgun Stream, owing to shotgun shells found washed up on a stream bank. The current low point of the cave is here, -408m. There’s a lot to do here…

CCS: Cavers Can’t Swim/Corey’s Cave Stream/Cave Cowboy Shit

The water source for Camp Bertha is a waterfall coming in the uphill side of the room. Rolland and Matt, after we had run out of bolts, did some “cowboy shit,” wrapped a boulder, did a scary gravel traverse, and surveyed a lot of beautiful clean-washed passage going upstream towards another known cave. It’s going, and going big–the survey team stopped because they didn’t feel like swimming.

Silver Shadow Borehole

There was a lead we’d revisited during Georgia’s exit, where if you were heading straight in the passage above the big room (camp Bertha), the passage takes almost a 180 degree turn and you must do a climb up to continue towards the entrance. On the way out we kept going straight towards a deep pit you had to climb over, going the “wrong way,” which was actually bigger, nicer passage than the way we came in. Hmm…

Two days before it was time to leave the camp trip, Elliot and I visited this “wrong way pit.” We surveyed quite a lot of passage, including some very lovely formations.

(my photos)

Gypsum crust on the ceiling Gypsum grass Gypsum beards and needles

At the very end of the day, Elliot did a horrifying climb up about 25m of slippery flowstone in an ever-widening chimney. The defining quote is “I’m up!” “Can I come up?” “No! And I’m not sure I can get down!”

When he down climbed–which I was too nervous to watch–he said it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

So we had to go back, unfortunately. The next day he did the climb again while Georgia and I tried to distract each other at the bottom, and he put a rope up, and did not perish. Woohoo!

And once up, we knew he was right. All three of us were speechless, and we would stay speechless for a while.

Above the climb the whole floor looks like this:

And the ceiling looks like this:

Georgia Schneider photo

And at the end it got really gypsumy, and weird things started happening like calcified millipede husks, and big needles everywhere, and curls on the floor, and the walls got kinda blinding, and my sketching ability had never been so outclassed.

The passage is also 20-30m across in this entire section.

Here’s a pretty cool video of the final room.

Reverie Alley

And then we went the other way, and it started to look like this.

Reverie Alley, Georgia Schneider photo. Elliot next to the Wall Monster. Georgia Schneider photo

Survey was a whole new kind of stressful, as we tried not to break anything or get stabbed by the thousands of tiny silver needle bushes.

me sketching, stressed Elliot in Reverie Alley (Georgia Schneider photo)

And at the end, an absolutely bonkers room called the Lotus Eaters’ Lair, it looked like this.

The name of the Lotus Eaters’ Lair comes from the floor. It looks like regular brown calcite except it refracts technicolor sparkles when hit with a light. It looks like someone’s spilled multicolored chunky glitter all over the floor. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it, and we spent so long looking at it we thought we might never leave.

This photo trip with Gerardo and Matt was the last trip in the cave, the final day of a six-day camp trip. Everyone else had left, and after seven weeks of caving in Mexico I was moving at half my usual pace, having wrung every piece of available energy from my reserves. It was very memorable and very worth it, and as we packed up PESH and went home, I was left with dreams of alien formations, crazy sparkles, and hopefully more to explore next year.