We just experienced two of the most spectacular cavern dives
of our lives. We always Dive with
Alfredo Duarte from Luum Ha Diving for cavern/cenote dives because they are
exceptionally good dive masters and instructors and their professionalism and
knowledge about the cave systems in Mexico are top notch. Here is the link to their Face book
site: https://www.facebook.com/LuumHaDiver
We have been diving with Alfredo from Luum Ha for 5 years
and experienced many cenote dives but our trip to The Pit and The Pet Cemetery
were by far some of the most challenging and most beautiful we have done.
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| This is a map of the whole system here - we only dove the area called the pit - it is the small squarish part in the upper right of the map -so you can see how much we did not see. |
The Pit is part of the Dos Ojos cave system. Exploration of
Dos Ojos began in 1987 and still continues. The surveyed extent of the cave system
is 82 kilometers (51 mi) and there are 28 known sinkhole entrances, which are
locally called cenotes. Dos Ojos
is one of the top three longest underwater cave systems in the world. Dos Ojos
contains the deepest known cave passage in Quintana Roo with 119.1 meters (391
ft) of depth located at "The Pit" discovered in 1996 by cave
explorers who came all the way from the main entrance some 1,500 meters (4,900
ft) away. In fact the Pit is where
Carlos Coste set the free diving record of 150 mt (490ft) on one breath, back
in November of 2010.
We dove in The Pit. There is a long stairway down to a small
wooden platform. This stairway is
relatively new – only a few short years ago you would free jump into the water
and lover your gear by rope. Jeff
and I have great difficulty with stairs, and Alfredo and the Luum Ha team are
excellent with helping us with our disabilities. They like us believe diving can be done safely for people
with some disabilities and without their assistance in loading our gear down to
the water we would never be able to see the beautiful places. We gear up in the water to take the
weight off Jeff’s back and my abdomen.
This is a fairly common practice of divers with our disabilities. The reason we love diving is that once
in the water; we can feel like we have the same strength and agility we had
before our injuries. Diving allows
us a feeling of physical freedom from pain, and a quieting of the mind we never
have outside the water. We are
lucky to have dive master in Mexico, who understands that diving is healing for
the soul and body and is willing to have his team assist us in getting into the
water so we can experience these amazing places.
Once in the Pit, you descend to about 120ft – the water is
fresh and clear as you are descending and around 95ft you start to see the
Halocline, which is much wider here than in other caves. The halocline is where the fresh water
mixes with the salt water. Salt water is denser than fresh water so when
gravity forces them to mix inside the cave the water stratifies; forming layers
which creating very interesting visual effects. Most cave systems this halocline is just a few feet of
layers mixing, but because of the size and depth of The Pit, the halocline goes
on for many more feet creating this incredible white cloud. As you descend into and out of the
cloud there are old braches of trees reaching out of the cloud. And it looked as if we were ascending
from Mordor as we came up. Here is
a short video of El Pit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggIb4R3QtOw
We are editing our video and will post it soon, but here isa fun on to give you
an idea in the mean time
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| The formations in the large room near the entrance to the pit |
The limestone formations in the Pit are breath taking. The
death of the caves means they are huge.
During the Ice Age the ocean lowered by about 350ft and this whole cave
system was above the water line for hundreds of years. During this dry period
humans and animals used the caves for shelter and tress and plants took
root. So the caves are filled with
fossils of human and animal skeletons.
They have found a female skeleton, in a fetal position as for burial,
and dated her to 12,000 years old.
The Pit has a full skeleton of a giant sloth, which is at least 8000
years old and many other bones.
All of the formations of stalagmites and stalactites in the Pit are
exceptional, some are hundreds of feet tall reaching all the way down the wall
and then there are the shelves with thousands of tiny needle like formations
tucked into the side of the cave.
The main shaft of the cave has several tunnels branching off into other
chambers. We stayed inside the main area as it took almost an hour to just
explore all the incredible formations along the wall as we were ascending back
slowly to the surface. It was a
beautiful slow exploration of some of the coolest formations we have seen:
there was a section where is looked as if some one had melted butter and maple
syrup down the side in big globs for fifty sixty feet.
After the Pit, the tram graciously carried all of our gear
to the surface as we slowly hauled our bodies back up to the van. We always joke that it takes days for
us to recover from the toll it takes on our physical bodies but the joy it
gives our souls is beyond measure.
Personally I never feel more ‘alive’ than when I am diving. Back at the van the team loaded up the
gear and we had a nice lunch break before heading to the next dive at the Pet
Cemetery.
The Ladder down into to big open chamber . . . there was no possible way Jeff or I could go there so the younger couple divng with us took my phone and grabbed pictures of the inside for us. we stood at the top and heard all the "oooohhhhs and aaaaaaahhhhs" and we very jealous.
Meet Heath and Bobbi Allen - they were the second dive team on the trip and they were both great divers and very sweet to help us take pictures in the places where Jeff and I could not walk to on land.
The Pet Cemetery cenote is a shallow dive with max depth of about 25 ft but most of the dive is actually around 10ft. even though this is a shallow dive in extremely clear fresh water, don’t let that fool you into thinking this is a easy dive. The whole path is surrounded by very fragile formation, beautiful formations which make you feel like you are gliding through a crystal palace. This is a difficult dive because the area is tight, the formations are all very close to you and you must have excellent buoyancy control not to tough the formations or the floor.
The floor is covered in fine silt and one tap of fin or hard kick and you will fill the whole tunnel with a giant silt cloud. So you streamline and frog kick very lightly and keep yourself from toughing anything. This is one of the most challenging buoyancy dives we have ever made. Gliding along in and around those formations made me feel like I was flying.
Here is a short video of the Pet Cemetery Dive: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj9U1U_5JpY
We shot our own video and are working on editing it but I thought you might enjoy these videos in the mean time.
This is the small wooden platform at the entry of the Pet Cemetery, this is shallow and ha heavy silt - so the team packed our gear here for us and we very carefully dressed in the water. Dressing in the water allows me to suit up without causing a huge amount of pain to my abdominal muscles. I wear a full 5m suit and an abdominal binder to try and lesson that pain during the dive but dressing in the water is a huge help and the only reason I can do dives like this. Diving is an adrenaline sport, but it can be done safely for people with all kinds of disabilities and the more dive masters understand the type of assistance the diver needs the more the can help more people experience the wonder of being under the water.
The overhead environment is close all around you, you are swimming very close to fragile formations that are thousands and thousands of years old and the floor is a instant cloud of blinding silt. You touch the floor and you fill the clear water with a silt cloud and if you hit the wall or ceiling you are damaging history. So you get your buoyancy right and start gliding along with great care. This is what I meant by a very challenging dive.
The Pet Cemetery gets it’s name from all of the skeletons
found on the floor of the system, where animals wandered in to die thousands of
years ago back before the water rose inside the cave. You can clearly see one full skeleton and several pieces of
a huge jawbone plus many other bones. It is a rather exciting history lesson to
know the how and why of these amazingly beautiful structures we are now blessed
to experience. There is something
quite humbling in those limestone structures, something almost awe inspiring
when you realize the millions of years it took to form, the synchronicity of
the ice age dropping ocean levels and allowing life to flourish inside the cave
and then finally the slow rise of the ocean back to modern levels. All of that
had to happen, in that order over that time to allow us to behold the beauty
now. To know that those caves have
only been being explored by a very small number of people since the late 1980’s
makes me feel very lucky indeed to have experienced them and hold them as part
of my soul.
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| The formations are incredible - he is an example of how the stalagmites and stalactites grow together over time to form columns - now image those columns standing 100's of feet high in the deeper caves. |
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| Large jaw bone with all the teeth still intact and a partial skeleton of a deer below. |
There is now a beautiful new museum on the Dos Ojos site: The Institute of Pre- History of the Americas, that has great exhibits about the ice age and how the fossils came to be all
through out the cave system. Here is their Facebook site: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Instituto-de-la-Prehistoria-de-América/155086507853455
If
you go to Dos Ojos now – stop at the museum. The museum building also serves as a meetinghouse for the
local Mayan community – a gathering place where they can come together and work
with the government researchers.
The cave system is on Mayan land and has been part of their history and
culture from the beginning so it is wonderful to see the cooperation between
the local people and the researchers.
These caves have only been explored since the late 1980’s and there is
so much more yet to find. The museum will soon house a onsite lab where researchers will be working on fossil finds and the public will be allowed to watch how fossils are brought up from the water and then preserved, tested and replicas are returned to their exact locations. This is a one of kind collaboration with the local Mayan population working to preserve the rich history of this land and the peple and animals who have been inhabiting it for thousands of years.
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| This is a reproduction of the site where the skeleton of the female's skeleton pictured above - the bones are arranged in a fetal position as if she had been wrapped for burial. the bones were placed before the water rose and that is why they stayed so close together, the skull had an air pocket inside and as the water rose it lifted and turned allow the air to escape and that is why is rolled off to the side slightly when it return to the silt after the water rose above the bones. To date they have found the oldest fully intact skeleton in the new world - a woman they named Naia and then have found another young man dated about 10,000 years old here in the cave system. This cave system is one of the third largest in the world and still not fully explored so it is exciting to imagine how many more finds there could be in the waters down there. |
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| They did a reconstruction on the skeleton face and determined this is what she would have looked like. She was around 45 years of age but because of the difficulty of her life she would have appeared much older by our modern standards. these people all used their teeth as their main tools, so their skulls and jaw bones and teeth show a lot of wear and infection. |
This is why we are working to help other disabled veterans and civilians learn to dive. SCUBA, and being in the water allows us to feel whole again and move with the agility we had before our injuries or illnesses. Sharing the gift of diving with other disabled veterans is a life long dream so they too can feel whole again in the big blue.
