“Any use of this particular area of forest other than ecotourism would be, to me, the equivalent of using the Grand Canyon for a garbage dump.”Īfter a few minutes there were no more roads or cows or any other signs of human settlement, just a few swampy open patches called civales breaking the great green quilt formed by the canopies of the 150-foot-tall ramón (breadnut) and sapodilla trees, whose trunks are slashed by skilled laborers known as chicleros for the sap used to make chewing gum. “All this has been deforested in the last five years or so,” Hansen said over the roar of the rotor. Visible below were clearings in the forest, the smoke of fires, a scattering of cattle, buildings and the occasional road. There are five kinds of tropical forest down there. It’s a self-contained ecosystem surrounded by these ridges. “This is the southern tip of the Mirador basin,” he said. Hansen’s voice crackled over the intercom. We crossed a jungle-covered limestone ridge about 600 feet high. Off to the east were the spectacular Maya pyramids and ruins of Tikal National Park, which is now linked to Flores by road and draws between 150,000 and 350,000 visitors a year. We zipped away from the town of Flores at 140 knots. About a half-hour’s flying time due north was the Mirador basin itself-a 2,475-square-mile tract of jungle in northern Guatemala and Campeche, Mexico, filled with hidden ruins that Hansen and others refer to as “the cradle of Maya civilization.” Next to him up front was the archaeologist Richard Hansen, the director and principal investigator of the Mirador Basin Project. It was a Sunday morning in northern Guatemala, late October. Mercifully, Itzamna, the supreme creator god of the ancient Maya, had favored us with a pilot named Guillermo Lozano, who was now easing his maroon-striped Bell helicopter into the air. Had we been traveling overland, it would have taken two or three days to get from the end of the road at Carmelita to El Mirador: long hours of punishing heat and drenching rain, of mud and mosquitoes, and the possibility that the jungle novice in our party (that would be me, not the biologists turned photographers Christian Ziegler and Claudio Contreras) might step on a lethal fer-de-lance or do some witless city thing to provoke a jaguar or arouse the ire of the army ants inhabiting the last great swath of subtropical rain forest in Mesoamerica.
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