I wanted to start off my first Explorer of the Month post with someone that is not in text books or Wikipedia pages and who had also had great influence on me and my sense of adventure. This man I speak of is named Tyson Meyers. Tyson and I met as wayward baristas in a lonely coffee shop on Tucson's Broadway boulevard. He is a giant of a man with a sense of humor and a love for beer. We immediately hit it off. He is the progeny of two very friendly rocket scientists (really, that's a real thing) and very talented with computers. We hung out and talked about treasure, archaeology and places to go for awhile and eventually we settled on our first real foray into the wilderness. There is a fairly popular cave on the soft backside of the Catalina Mountain Range in near Tucson, AZ named Peppersauce Cave. It is said that the there was once an old prospector out in the Catalinas searching for gold who had settled down to eat dinner at his camp fire in front of the wide cave mouth. He had a prized bottle of hot sauce that he had bought from a old Indian woman that he used at every meal. He had set it on the rocky ground next to his pack and mule and went to relieve himself in bushes. Upon his return the pepper sauce was no where to be found.
The cave was very dark and the inside humidity kept the rocks covered in a thin layer of water and muddy dust. The entrance is large but rapidly narrows, a squeeze that I struggled with due to the size of all the gear I had, Tyson, ever fearless dove in and forced himself through. The next section of the cave opened up into a large dome with a rock slide that led to a level below, and if we happened to miss the small hop at the end of the slide there was the ever welcoming blackness below. We climbed through various tunnels and up and down boulders until we arrived at the first of a series of underground lakes. In the 90's a couple of divers from California came to explore the tunnels and lakes and see if what the uncharted regions of the cave system had to offer. They discovered in a second underground lake and small row boat tied to a rock and a ladder propped up against the side of the cave showing that at one time the water had to have been much lower. These couple of artifacts must have been there since at least the end of the 1800's, the last time the water level was recorded that low.
Tyson is also a connoisseur of the abandoned; an avid urban explorer. Urban Exploration is somewhat of a subculture of people who live to see what they aren't supposed to; be it subway tunnels, abandoned factories or drainage systems. These are all places built by man and eventually forgotten or roped off from prying eyes for whatever reason. In my youth I had a similar hobby of exploring abandoned houses in the Nebraska countryside. For the sake of not incriminating anyone and maintaining the sort of secrecy that the Urban Explorer community prefers I will not go into any details of where we had gone or what we had seen. While these places are not the product of nature like what I usually write about, they are prime examples of the roads less traveled, the real point of my blog. I have seen Tyson pouring over maps, floor plans, blue prints, diagrams and planning trips so he could dare see what others did not choose to see. This is an individual that embodies all that the explorer truly is, a drive to see and to do, to go where others haven't dared, and for this I would like to deem him honorary Blank Spaces Explorer of the Month. In a world where the easiest paths are heavily trodden, when no one cares to see what lies beneath their feet, here is a man that is truly an explorer like those of old, in mind and spirit. I raise a glass to you my friend, for boldly going where none have gone before.
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