“Did you see anything?” I asked Steve, as he came back into camp.

“It’s beautiful. Unbelievably beautiful. It’s like a paradise.” The pilot had descended almost to the ground, hovering about a foot off a sandbar, while Dave took pictures. Steve described the valley of T3 as much gentler and more open than T1, a vast, parklike expanse bisected by clear rivers with sandy beaches along the banks. The rivers were surrounded by fields of deep grass, over six feet high, broken here and there by stands of giant trees. Most of the actual ruins stood on benchlands above the river and were hidden in the forest. The valley was bounded on the east by a lofty ridge, where an unnamed river flowed through a gap, heading toward the distant Patuca; T3 was surrounded by peaks on the other three sides as well. He said there were no obvious signs of human habitation, “just forest and grasslands as far as the eye can see.” The chopper was able to hover in place for only a few minutes at T3 before heading back to T1.

The following year, Chris and Juan Carlos would attempt a more serious reconnaissance of T3. In mid-January 2016, the Honduran military flew them in a helicopter to T3 and were able to put down the chopper on a sandbar.

“We landed,” Chris recalled, “and the pilot said we had a couple of hours.” But the grass was so high and thick that it took them an hour and a half to go a mere thousand feet, slashing unceasingly with machetes at the tough, thick-stemmed grass. It was impossible to see anything, and they were in great fear of snakes. But when they finally got out of the floodplain and climbed up to the benchland, they came upon an amazing sight: “It was nonstop plazas,” Chris said, “with little mounds around them, and more plazas and little mounds, as far as we could go. It’s much bigger than T1. It was huge. There were a lot of people living there.” The valley of T3, like T1, gave every indication of being another untouched wilderness with no evidence of recent human entry or indigenous use. As of this writing, beyond these two reconnaissance missions T3 remains unexplored.

Around noon, Mark Plotkin arrived back in camp carrying a turtle. I was curious to hear what he, as a rainforest ethnobotanist, was seeing in the valley. “We went upriver,” he said. “We were looking for evidence of recent habitation, but we didn’t see any. But we saw lots of useful plants.” He began rattling them off. A ginger used to treat cancer; a fig-related plant used by shamans; balsa trees; the biggest ramón trees he had ever seen, which produce a fruit and a highly nutritious nut; massive Virola trees used to treat fungal infections and to make a hallucinogenic snuff for sacred ceremonies. “I don’t see any trees or plants that would indicate any recent human presence,” he said. “I’ve been looking for chiles—seen none of that. And no Castilla.” Castilla elastica, he explained, was an important tree for the ancient Maya, who used it as the source of latex to make rubber for the balls used in the sacred game. He had also seen no mahogany trees. “What’s driving the deforestation near here,” he said, confirming what others had told me, “isn’t mahogany but clearing the land for cattle.”

He had run into a huge troop of spider monkeys upriver, much bigger than the family above my camp. “These are the first animals hunted out,” he said. “When you see spider monkeys who don’t run away but come and look at you, that is exceptional.” Later, Chris Fisher went downriver and ran into another large troop of monkeys, who were sitting in a tree above the river eating flowers. They screeched and shook branches at him. When the inner primate in Chris emerged and he began hooting and shaking bushes back at them, they bombarded him with flowers.

Plotkin was profoundly impressed by the valley. He said that, in all his years wandering the jungle, he had never seen a place like it. “This is clearly one of the most undisturbed rainforests in Central America,” he said. “The importance of this place cannot be overestimated. Spectacular ruins, pristine wilderness—this place has it all. I’ve been walking tropical American rainforests for thirty years and I’ve never walked up to a collection of artifacts like that. And I probably won’t ever again.”

I asked him, as an authority on rainforest conservation, what could be done to preserve the valley and site. He said it was a very difficult problem. “Conservation is a spiritual practice,” he said. “This place is right up there with the most important unspoiled places on earth. This was a forgotten place—but it ain’t forgotten anymore! We live in a world gone crazy for resources. Everybody on Google Earth can look at this place now. If you don’t move to protect it, it will disappear. Everything in the world is vulnerable. It’s amazing to me it hasn’t been looted already.”

“So what should be done?” I asked. “Create a national park?”

“This is already supposed to be a biosphere reserve. Where are the guards? The problem is people establish a national park and think they’ve won the war. No way. That’s only the first step—a battle in a longer war. The good thing about this expedition is that at least you’re bringing attention to this place and it might now be saved. Otherwise, it won’t last long. You saw the clear-cutting outside the valley. Absolutely gone in a few years.”

That night, the rain continued to fall. I was astounded to see Dave Yoder packing up his camera gear with a set of portable lights, and loading it all on his back. He said he was dissatisfied with his pictures of the cache so far. The daylight filtering down was too flat. He was going to hike up there in the dark with Sully so that he could “light-paint” the artifacts. This is a difficult photographic technique in which the camera, on a tripod, is left with the shutter open while the photographer sweeps light beams over the objects from different angles, to highlight particular details and add a sense of drama and mystery.