Buried Treasure

It’s been one full year since I last trusted this anchor. I usually don’t rappel from plants, unless it’s a tree. But this is the Grand Canyon, where most rules of thumb don’t apply, and the eleven-millimeter “pit rope” thrice wrapped around the stiff trunk of a barberry shrub provides more than enough security. Even so, I inspect it with a good bounce-test and, for the fourth time since putting on my harness, give my whole descending setup a thorough ocular pat-down just to confirm, again, that I’m all good. I don’t care what anyone says, rappelling off the rim of the Redwall Limestone is always scary.

A few hundred feet below me lies one of the last uncharted and least understood environments in the Grand Canyon—a vast cave system that remained undetected until 2008. Nearly two decades later, it is far from fully explored, and the small team of specialists mapping the system is slowly piecing together what