The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

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.