The story of Geoff Robertson getting lost in the El Abra is
an interesting lesson in how not
to navigate in the wilderness. Over Thanksgiving 1980 I took a group of
people to look for a
long-rumored black hole somewhere near Sótano de la Cuesta in the Sierra de
El Abra of northern Mexico.
Cuesta was a well-known and spectacular 170-meter drop. In those days the El
Abra was a popular
destination to look for pits, of which there were many, but with little ease
of access. This was in the
days before GPS or even decent topographic maps. Cavers actually made their
own maps based on flying
over the area, taking photos, and conducting ground reconnaissance.
On this particular trip we were camped out near Cuesta,
several hours' hike from the Otates Mine
road. One evening Geoff decided to hike over to another pit (Sótano de la
Estrella) to photograph macaws
as they came in to roost. Everyone on the trip had a copy of the caver map
of the area, and instructions that
if they got lost, they should hike north because the mine road ran
completely across the mountain range
from west to east. Since we were south of the road, hiking north would
eventually get you there.
As fate would have it, Geoff stayed out a bit too late and
got disoriented trying to follow
the trail from Estrella back to our camp in near darkness. These trails were
made by cavers, and were
not particularly big or obvious. The thorn forest jungle there is incredibly
thick and impenetrable,
and the terrain has little relief and few landmarks visible from any
distance. Nevertheless, locally
the ground can be very irregular, with lots of exposed karst. Ten feet off
the trail, and you could be
totally lost.
According to Geoff, once he realized he was lost and that it
was getting dark, he made the
decision to bivouac in the karst by clearing out a spot between outcrops and
covering himself with
leaves. That was smart. What he did the next day was not.
When Geoff got up the next morning he headed north, as
directed, but soon decided the going
was too rough and decided to try a different direction for a while to see if
it got easier. When that
did not fare any better, he tried again to go north, but he was carrying his
compass and his machete
in the same hand. We later determined that a machete can deflect a compass
by at least 90 degrees, so
no telling what direction he was actually going. He was now totally lost far
from where he had started
or wanted to be.
In the meantime, the rest of our group was beating the
bushes looking for Geoff. Our worst
fear was that he had gotten too close to one of the pits and fallen in. We
looked all around the pits
and also rigged and dropped them. He was nowhere to be found. After a couple
of days of fruitless
searching, our supplies were depleted and people needed to get home for work
and school. Our final
hope was that he had made his way back to the road and that we would either
find him waiting at the
vehicle or down by the highway. Neither turned out to be the case.
Back in Austin a major rescue was organized and a group of
16 cavers headed back down to look
for Geoff. We started fanning out across the karst near Estrella looking
behind every karst pinnacle
in case he had broken a leg or fallen into a hole. Not long after we started
searching, a runner from
the Mexican Red Cross, which had been notified and was on the scene, came
down the trail saying that
Geoff had self-rescued. He had stumbled out of the jungle at a small village
10 kilometers to the
south after hearing the sound of trucks on the highway in the distance. He
had been lost for over five
days, surviving on stump water and orchid bulbs.
Fortunately this affair ended on a good note. Geoff survived
basically unharmed, and we found
a nice pit while looking for him (Sótano de Alegría). Gill Ediger had a
great idea for a tee shirt,
but as far as I know it was never produced. He proposed a compass rose with
every point marked as
North, and a machete for the needle. There is a brief account of this
episode in AMCS Activities
Newsletter No. 12, p. 8 (1982), available for free download at
<http://www.mexicancaves.org/nl/cat.html>.
Mark Minton
mmin...@caver.net
On Nov 3, 2016 David Locklear wrote:
---------------------------------
I did go in a deep pit further north in Puebla once, near the coordinates
below
18°38'08.8"N 97°14'43.2"W
18.635783,-97.245332
with 2 Australian cavers, Rolf Adams and his girlfriend Dr. Anne Gray in
December of
1989, and I did poke around in some caves near Zongolica, Veracruz in
December of 1985,
with a guy named Steve Robertson and his wife Lori Robertson, and 2 Mexico
city
cavers, Jose Luis Soberanes and Jorge Ramirez. And there is a road-trip
report about
that in a 1986 Texas Caver. [ Sidenote: I do not know if any of you knew
those people, but according
to Lori's Facebook page, she got stuck on some job in Hawaii, so they were
forced to move
there. I have not spoken to them in 31 years except for a brief hello at
Alejandro Villagomez's
wake. ] I seem to recall a rumor that Steve's older brother got lost in the
jungle for a week in
Mexico, and I think there may be an old AMCS related story about that.
---------------------------------
David Locklear
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