MYSTERIES OF PUERTO RICO'S UNDERWORLD.

• Author: Holston, Mark

MASSIVE CAVES AND DEEP PASSAGES OF THE ISLAND'S CAMUY RIVER SYSTEM PROVIDE RARE OPPORTUNITIES FOR SCIENTISTS AND TOURISTS ALIKE

The anticipation of discovery was so palpable Jeanne Gurnee could almost taste it. The year was 1958, and she and her husband, Russell, both world-renowned speleologists who had investigated many of the world's most remarkable subterranean environments, had come to Puerto Rico at the invitation of a friend who assured them that the island had more than its share of caves. But except for local residents who grew up about them, the island's underground world was little known. Any serious scientific investigation, in short, had never been attempted.

"We were driving from the south through the municipality of Lares," she recalls today from her Tennessee home. "The highway map showed the blue line of a river that all of a sudden disappeared and then resumed a few miles north, near the Atlantic coast. At that point, we stopped the car and asked several people who were cutting grass along the road with machetes if they knew of any cave openings in the area. They took us to what's become known as the Clara Cave entrance and the Tres Pueblos sinkhole, and we knew immediately that this would be something exciting to explore."

And explore is what the husband-and-wife team did, first with their Puerto Rican friend Jose Limeres, a doctor who as a boy had poked around in caves near the city of San German, and later with full-blown expeditions into the Camuy River system on behalf of the National Geographic Society and the National Speleological Society. The Gurnees didn't know it at the time, but their association with the Camuy caves would be long running and would transcend the strictly professional interest that had been the hallmark of their active participation in speleological projects around the world.

Authors of the best-selling Gurnee Guide to American Caves, they would eventually write the book Discovery at the Rio Camuy and become responsible for the protection of the land that would eventually become part of the Puerto Rican park system. Initially, the commonwealth government showed little interest in purchasing the land, so the couple, at the urging of a friend, bought the property, only to sell it back to the government for the same price they paid for it when officials realized the importance of the Camuy cavern system to the island's natural history and its potential as a tourist destination. It was then that the Gurnees were asked to design a plan for a park at the site, a process at which they became international...