DAY 2-CUEVA EVAPORADA AND HUMO

January 21, 2015



We drive past the Camuy commercial cave entrance and go down another twisting road to the small road with a 50-55 degree slope  straight up to the landowners property where we parked and got ready for the caves.  I talked to the landowners and they were nice enough to allow us to park and visit the two caves near their property. Cueva Evaporada and Humo are some of my all time favorite caves!!

 Cueva Evaporada has a very impressive entrance which takes almost 20 minutes to get down and leave the light zone. It has a large trunk passage that has a room with a karst window, a micro forest in a upper level open air sink hole, and some more flowstone passage that leads to a breakdown pile and the end of the cave. 

Cueva Evaporada Puerto Rico
This is a fragment of a cave system that use to feed  into the camuy cave system and use to be connected to Cueva del humo. Humo has a similar entrance and also has large trunk passage that extended into a large canyon passage and continues down into a lake, has side passages, and a tyrolean traverse section that connects to Angeles cave which connects to the camuy system. This cave is one of the larger systems in all of Puerto Rico but we were running out of time and had to get into this system before the sun went down so we could make it back to Tom’s house.  We hike through thick vine overgrowth and into the mogote’s.  After entering the mogotes, we traverse around and up to a saddle that took us down into the sink where the two caves exist. First, we went to Evaporada and started out hike down the 200ft entrance and around to where one of my favorite views is located looking out of the cave from within.
Cueva Evaporada Puerto Rico
We continued around some massive boulders and entered a massive trunk passage that extended to the karst window room where we took a couple of pictures. I love this cave.  The massive rooms and the echos from the bats and crickets make this cave and Puerto Rico caves so interesting to me.  The development of life in such a remote place ponders my mind as to how adaptive life can be in such extreme conditions . 
Cueva Evaporada Puerto Rico.
We head out of Evaporada and head over to Humo to hike down this 200 ft entrance with a bit more challenge due to the boulders and the slippery conditions.  We get to the bottom level and I shine our lights up into the ceiling to watch hundreds of bat fly down the passage and into other rooms where they hide.  There might even have been thousands of bats!! Their wings made a distinct sound as they flew in colonies at the top of the ceiling passage. We climb up to the top of the formation section and continued to hike down up and around massive ancient flowstone formations and other karst features. We went through a small connection room and popped out into the top of the canyon passage where the cave continued on and down into a small lake.  Divers have pushed this sump before but I can not confirm what they have reported from their dive operation.   We ended up turning around so we could have enough time to make it to Tom’s house and I should have take a few pics of this particular trip but I already took pics of Humo on the last trip.  If I ever come back to do the through trip to Angeles cave or a dive, I will be sure to take some more pics of this wonderful place.


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