I've just returned from a month in sunny (but occasionally stormy) Mexico, doing as much caving as possible but eating lots of mangoes as well. 
Joel Corrigan and myself were invited out there by Chris Lloyd, a Canadian caver now living in Mexico who visited Oxford last year. His tales of beautiful river passage in Xalltégoxtli Cave and the potential to make an "easy" connection with another cave upstream had me hooked. Well, needless to say, the connection was not easy, we did not make it 1000 m deep, but at least we did end up with the second deepest through-trip in Mexico.
It was a multinational group - five Mexican, two Anglo-Canadian, two Quebecois, one American and us 2 Brits. Numbers were limited by the fact that we were living inside the cave entrance halfway up a cliff face, and that was about as many as the cave would fit. 
It was ten days in Cueva del Hilton - natural air-conditioning gently turning off at night, and a plentiful water supply just inside the entrance. Carrying our mountain of gear up the hill was made more bearable than it is in the Picos de Europa by hiring some beasts of burden to do the donkey work for us - well recommended. There are in fact two entrances to Xalltégoxtli about 50 m apart; one has a flock of swifts living in it and goes upstream with all the water. The entrance we lived in goes downstream but without the water because the hillside has intercepted the cave at this point. The water resurges just below the twin entrances, making an ideal spot for skinny dipping (and polluting the locals water supply).
The cave downstream has two main branches and the active part starts as a continuous string of beautiful gour pools, many probably deep enough to drown in. 
After two pitches - Pathetic Sharks and 30m deep Topless Caving Nuns (those are the names you end up with if you invite a couple of Brits along to your expedition) - the cave changes completely. A large mud slope leads up 30 m to a complex of passages. Depressingly, this fills up to the roof with water every year, but at least that means all the mud formations are renewable! Snakes and Ladders Rift goes left at the start of the complex part following the apparent main way on and ended in a climb up, the previous years limit of exploration. Ramón, Ruth and Sergio pushed this last year with only two ropes to do the 4 pitches and may explain why Sergio decided not to come this year. Our first push in this section hit a dead end. Vicente politely held the rope while I climbed as high as I fancied, then without any rope he tiptoed delicately up to the roof on crumbling footholds while Jesus (that is his name!) and I cowered beneath. 
This man has been known to solo 5.10, so I wondered what cowardly Brits could contribute to this expedition. (I won't describe Joel's liquid mud sump, Non-stop Homo-erotic Fantasy). Meanwhile Chris had floated 12m into a long narrow canal that turned out to sump and was the deepest point in this rift.
Another passage downstream lead to the Canyon Tenebroso (Spanish for scary or haunted) if one follows the path of the water after climbing back up the mud slope below Topless Caving Nuns. Here the walls are lined with ghostly sculptures of chert which (1) make distinctly unreliable hand and footholds, and (2) mysteriously change shape thereby getting you lost on the way out. Alas, this passage sumped, at the Reservoir of Pleasure, marking the downstream limit and deepest point of the cave (it turned out to be 10cm deeper than the bottom of Snakes and Ladders Rift).
Upstream is different again. A difficult jungle traverse reaches the other entrance (though you can walk on a longer trail that is much less exposed), and for half an hour you are swimming in a somber series of deep canals (neo-fleeces are ace!). Then the Brutal Cascade leads up rather like some of the climbs in Swildons (a cave in the Mendip Hills of England), except you gain a hundred metres in height. 
The upstream limit was in a complex boulder choke. At this point exploration took on a distinctly British character - tight, sharp and nasty of course! A good job we had bought an immense crowbar, called Agent Orange, back in Mexico City. Bed of Nails (crawling in sharp, breakable floor) was followed by Night of the Long Knives (an ascending rift 30 to 50cm wide with numerous knife-like blades pointing upwards that always were threatening to impale you if you slipped), which broke out into passage the size of the London Underground! (a high route in a cave known as 2/7 in the Picos de Europa) We all assumed we had connected with Sistema Ehecatl, our target cave explored by the Quebecois 10 years previously. But where were their survey points? 
After another 15 hour trip, and immeasurable quantities of hypothesis had failed to shed any convincing light on the situation, it was time to bring in the big guns - Chris Lloyd and Ramón Espinasa. Ramón, and his wife Ruth were generous hosts to me and Joel for the duration of our stay, looking after us in their huge flat in Mexico City, driving us around everywhere and taking us caving. Here was the ideal opportunity for us to say thank you. So, after a couple of hours hammering and boulder engineering, (the rock is sharp, but a lot easier to break that it is in the Picos) the half dozen squeezes were annihilated and the old generals could drive their jeeps through. After some time spent climbing around on boulders the size of houses, at around midnight Joel managed to find an old survey tag at the top of a particularly hairy climb. It turned out that somehow the original explorers had followed the water down into the bottom of their huge passage, and managed to miss the other huge passage that we had entered by. At last, we could go home!
Back in Mexico City, multiple e-mails with Canada and Quebec confirmed the connection and the depth of the system at around 740 m with 11km of passage. And there is almost another 2,000 m of mountain above this point! Watch this space for the next installment of my holiday in Mexico.
By: Chris "to eat a mango properly you must be a true eroticist" Densham, May 2000
Taken from an article written for the OUCC Newsletter (Oxford University) with a little editing by Chris Lloyd (mainly to clarify points intended for the Oxford group (who's main caving area is in the Picos de Europa in northern Spain))
All Photos by Chris Lloyd (with help from Vicente and Brad) except where noted.
Since this could become a very significant through trip (it is currently about 600m vertical) I though that it would be good to describe the connection series so others might have a chance of following the complicated route. It goes like this...
Coming in from the lower entrance (Xalltégoxtli) one passes the Brutal Cascade and traverse a section of very steep stream passage with a number of overhanging climbs (none of which were rigged). At the top of this, one hits a wall and must squeeze down and go horizontal through a tight blowing hole which pops out into the Room of High Hopes (as the first people to pop into here thought they had made the connection). Walking again in passage now about 7m wide you come to a drop with a breeze that goes back downstream in a parallel route which still hasn't been connected back into known passage. Instead of going down there, one needs to climb up on the right wall and double back over where you came into the room and traverse along on very big blocks (some 10 to 15m in size) until you can drop down again and arrive at the shore of a 50m long lake. Wade across the lake on the left side and continue along in ascending stream passage, not as steep as the lower section. It is mainly walking though the walls are all big breakdown blocks. Eventually you hit a small pool where the water falls in seemingly from a tight hole in the roof and there is no obvious way on. Backtrack about 8m and climb up on the right side (as you were heading in) in a tight V slot and crawl left through the boulders to where you will see the top of the little waterfall and the large room beyond. Cross this 15m x 20m room and continue following the stream into more big boulders (a fishing line was tied off in this section to act as a guide line). This pops out into another smaller room with a pool in the bottom before closing down to where the real fun begins - this was the end of exploration in 1999.
You should be able to feel the strong draft blowing from the narrow crawl and that is your guide. The first squeeze drops down into a little pothole where you can sit up. From there, either go up again through a chest squeeze that then goes flat out again or continue along in a tight passage 6m to where another chest squeezer awaits (this one you also go straight up into) and joins into the previous route. These two squeezes are now the crux, as the others were removed, and even both of these had to be hammered open (after the initial hammering) to let the fat bastards through. You have now entered the Bed of Nails section which is much more spacious, but never enough to stand up in which forces you to crawl over very thin and breakable limestone blades. A real suit shredder if you rush it. There are a number of alcoves that one can get drawn into which don't go, but eventually you will emerge at the bottom of the Night of the Long Knives rift. This is an ascending rift (about 60 to 80 degrees) 30 to 50cm wide with numerous knife-like blades pointing upwards that always were threatening to impale you if you slipped. Easy climbing up and a real pain going down as the knives hook your tackle sack. There is really only one pathway up through this section, but on the way back down it is easier to get sucked into a blind alley. The top of this pops up through some large unstable boulders (much more stable now than before) into 2m wide rift with more loose blocks before the final squeeze (yes the blocks are looses here too) into a 6 to 10m wide by 1 to 2m high ascending passage (this is another junction that is easy to pass on the way down). Ascend this passage about 40 to 50m to where it joins into a 6m wide horizontal passage. On your left you will see a 2m high rock with some flagging tape (the Xmas Tree Rock) and you are now in the bottom of Ehecatl, though there is some discrepancies between their survey with ours in the dimension of things in this area. Going to the left in the passage that continues in the 6m wide range brings you to the top of a series of drops that end in a room that was not entered by us, but seems to correspond to the pitch marked in the bottom of the SQS survey. Going right from the Xmas Tree Rock you quickly emerge into a large room that is over 40m wide in the mid point, and some 200m long. A large smooth slab ascends on the left side (as you are still walking upstream) which looks just like the one drawn in the SQS survey, but on the opposite wall, after walking down off the big boulders in the center of the room is a 10m wide passage that Chris D. thought was the way on (but isn't, and isn't on the SQS map). Somehow they managed to miss all the leads off this room (including the 6m wide one we popped up from) in following their route to the pits at the end.
If one continues down the center of this big chamber (it has one particularly big flat rock in the center with our survey station on top of it) and stay high on the right you come to a large corner and are now high above the way through. From the big rock you need to head to the left wall and go down the slope into a section with mud covered boulders (obviously the water backs up in this section in the rainy season). We rigged a rope where the wall went almost vertical though just used it as a hand line due to the super slipery mud. Instead of following this section down further you need to traverse across the slope about 25m to where there are a bunch of stalagmites and the slope goes back up onto more level ground. Pass through the big boulders here and you are back in 10 to 20m wide by 20m high passage with similarly large boulders to negotiate. In this section you will hear the sound of water and can follow that down on the left until finally reaching flowing water (Chris D. checked out this part). If you stay high over the boulders you emerge into another big room about 60m by 80m long, with the sound of water down on the left seeming to come out of a large rift on that side, and a climb up into a 15m wide opening which is where Joel climbed and found the last survey marker of the SQS (this was not their last station - just the last one they marked, as they consider survey stations as garbage in the cave - a nice sentiment if one wasn't leaving kilometers of topofil thread left through the cave).
So that will hopefully guide one through the connection area. It must be stressed that this description does not do justice to the size of those lower chambers in Ehecatl. They are big! And the boulders are of similar size. While I am not convinced that the SQS didn't actually see the rooms we passed through it is certainly possible they went through the boulders another way from above and missed what we saw. Anybody contemplating doing the through trip need remember that.
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