Getting Down and Dirty in an Underground River in Puerto Rico (original) (raw)

Adventurer

An Aventuras guide checks equipment before a trip down to the Cueva Angeles in western Puerto Rico.Credit...Alex Quesada for The New York Times

Oct. 5, 2007

SWINGING far above the forest floor on a zip line was a thrill and over way too soon. And rappelling down a 200-foot cliff? I liked the odds. If others survived, why not me? The scorpions, dinner-plate-size spiders and bats? I wanted to see them all. Even the two-foot-long predatory freshwater shrimp.

But what gave me pause was floating on my back through a cavern so tight that I’d have to tilt my head back so that my nose was nearly against the ceiling so I could breathe. The thought of lying in a cold, dark river with rock closing in: that seemed a bit too much like shutting the coffin lid. And the image of those shrimp didn’t help.

I was exploring Cueva Angeles (Angel’s Cave), part of a cave system excavated and linked by the Rio Camuy, which rises on the Cordillera Central of western Puerto Rico, rushes off the mountains, then disappears beneath the limestone hills. For six miles, it winds through echoing caverns, narrow passages and subterranean rapids and falls, reappearing briefly at the bottoms of several huge sinkholes.

Unlike those at the nearby Rio Camuy Cave Park, a show cave with a trolley descent and paved pathways, tours of Angeles by an outfit called Aventuras Tierra Adentro recreate the way the caverns were originally explored — by climbing, scrambling, slogging through mud and swimming.

Our guide was Rossano Boscarino, 44, an experienced caver, accomplished rock climber and animated showman. As the bus pulled out of San Juan just after dawn last spring for our hour-and-a-half trip west, Mr. Boscarino tried to awaken, instruct and rally our band of about a dozen explorers from the island and mainland with rapid-fire patter with his assistant, Anibal Reyes.

Mr. Boscarino’s safety rundown included cave scorpions.

“If you get bit by a scorpion, don’t go running around the cave because the poison will get into your system a lot faster,” he said. “Stay relaxed. Stay calm. And come to me with this attitude: ‘Rossano, I just got bit by a scorpion. What can we do?’ ”

At the cave, we piled out of the bus and fitted ourselves with helmets and life vests as the ethereal tones of the band Uman wafted from a hidden boom box. We cinched up climbing harnesses, got basic instructions, then rode the zip line through the forest canopy to the jumping-off point — literally — for the descent into Angeles Sinkhole.

Standing backward at the lip of the sinkhole, I glanced over my shoulder to the bottom and to the Rio Camuy 200 feet below. Pushing off, I began bounding down a slope as steep as a Victorian roof. The cliff suddenly shifted to vertical, then it undercut so that for the last 80 feet I dropped straight down. Once I relaxed my death grip on the rappel rack so the rope could slide through the brake bars, I dropped into a green moist world of ferns, boulders, heavy mist and the rush of the Camuy’s rapids.

We entered a gaping cave at the base of the sinkhole. Leaving daylight behind, we followed our bobbing headlights. If we had any intention of staying dry or clean, Mr. Boscarino quickly disabused us by leading us, one by one, off a five-foot ledge into a deep pool. We plunged in over our heads and swam to where we again picked up the trail.

Soon we came to the constriction in the cave. Float on your backs, Mr. Boscarino said, feet first. I eased into the current. As the rock pinched down, I tilted my head back to breathe and pulled my way through, face scraping the ceiling. Then, Mr. Reyes grabbed my ankle and pulled me into the next pool.

The Camuy caverns have been known for centuries. Taíno Indians, who inhabited Puerto Rico before Columbus, painted the walls of the Camuy system, including Angeles. Modern systematic exploration began in 1958 with the New Jersey caver Russell Gurnee. Cavers now know of at least 13 entrances to the caves. One of Mr. Gurnee’s fellow explorers, the Puerto Rican caver Norman Veve, pioneered the use of the life vest and swimming through these caves, the same technique we were using today.

Mr. Boscarino got hooked on caves when his father, a reporter for The San Juan Star, brought him along while researching an article about a cavern discovered below El Morro in Old San Juan.

Image

Rappelling into a sink hole entrance of the Rio Camuy.Credit...Alex Quesada for The New York Times

“It was the first time I saw people with helmets and lights,” Mr. Boscarino recalled. “I thought, ‘Wow, I want to do this when I grow up.’ ”

Mr. Boscarino started Aventuras in 1987, and began leading tours through Cueva Angeles in 1994.

As we hiked, Mr. Boscarino spotlighted bats flying and clinging to the ceiling and walls. He pointed out giant “spiders” — more accurately, whip scorpions — that were a foot across. He showed us real scorpions, too.

At one point, he led me up a staircase of travertine dams. In one pool my headlamp illuminated two fiery orange eyes. They belonged to the freshwater shrimp I had read about — though this one measured only about seven inches.

DISPLAYS of the cave’s stalactites, stalagmites, columns and curtains of flowstone were calculated for maximum effect. Mr. Boscarino and Mr. Reyes would gather us around and tell us to turn off our headlamps. Then — ta da! — they would flash their lights on some spectacular feature that we fledgling cavers had failed to notice.

For lunch, we hiked into an immense chamber known as the banquet room. “As soon as you get your food organized and you know where your mouth is, turn off your lights,” Mr. Boscarino said. We did, and ate our lunch, which we had brought in waterproof bags, by candlelight.

We made our way back to the sinkhole by way of the “canyon,” a narrow high-walled area. For nearly an hour, we walked little, but floated and paddled on the current of the river.

The temperature underground was a balmy 76 degrees. This was tropical Puerto Rico, after all. Still, after half an hour, the river chilled me.

Even so, to float through caverns, watching the rock far above, was thrilling. In places, logs were lodged in the ceiling 20 feet or more above our heads, washed there by underground floods from thunderstorms. At times, we bumped along in rapids and had to leap down ledges more than 10 feet high.

At one point, we all turned our headlights off and floated in pitch black. Then Mr. Boscarino and Mr. Reyes put on a light show with their spotlights.

Nearly five hours after we began, we emerged into the base of the Angeles Sinkhole and daylight once again. Though muddy, soaked and shivering, most of us were giddy at our accomplishment.

“The best part was the highest jump that we took off the rock into the water,” said Chuck Fletcher, a police officer from Milwaukee. “That, and probably coming over the lip of the rappel, where you no longer have your feet on anything.”

No need for ropes now. We climbed a steep trail up the wall of the sinkhole. Always the showman, Mr. Boscarino had made sure that as we crested the lip of the sinkhole, a hidden boom box played the theme from “Rocky.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

The cave tour led by Aventuras Tierra Adentro (787-766-0470; www.adventurespr.com) costs $160, with tax, and reservations are required. The minimum age is 15; participants under 21 need a parent’s signed permission. Participants are driven to the cave from the outskirts of San Juan.

Wear lace-up boots or shoes; sandals or water shoes will get sucked off in the mud. The trip is difficult in places, and very difficult if you’re out of shape.

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