Today, we’re hearing from an explorer and filmmaker named Steve Elkins. Steve spent decades searching for a legendary lost city deep in the jungles of Honduras. His search for the city was documented in the New York Times best selling book, “The Lost City of the Monkey God,” by Douglas Preston.
Today, we’re hearing from an explorer and filmmaker named Steve Elkins. Steve spent decades searching for a legendary lost city deep in the jungles of Honduras. His search for the city was documented in the New York Times best selling book, “The Lost City of the Monkey God,” by Douglas Preston.
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-explorers-club-an-interview-with-steve-elkins
CALLI: Not everyone can be a fearless world explorer-type. I’m talking machete in hand, and lots of sweaty khaki. It takes courage, persistence, tenacity, and sometimes - the belief that the impossible is possible. Even if it means going to places you’ve never imagined going - or even wanting to go.
NATE: Take this next explorer, who found himself trekking to… well I’ll just let Calli tell you.
CALLI: What would make you want to go to a place called the Gates of Hell?
STEVE: That's a really good question. And I often question myself when I was there. Why was I doing this? Well, I guess it really boils down to having an insatiable curiosity about everything, not just jungles or lost cities, but pretty much everything my whole life. And when I heard about this lost city, I couldn't resist.
[SFX: Whoosh/Intro Music]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back! Today for our Explorers Club series, we are talking to a man who walked to the gates of hell and lived to tell the tale.
NATE: What kind of person hears about a jungle so dense and dangerous that it has been called “The Gates of Hell,” and decides that’s exactly where he wants to go?
CALLI: The curious kind! And the adventurous kind. Today, we’re hearing from an explorer and filmmaker named Steve Elkins. Steve spent decades searching for a legendary lost city deep in the jungles of Honduras. His search for the city was documented in the New York Times best-selling book, “The Lost City of the Monkey God,” by Douglas Preston.
CALLI: His adventure started in the 1990s when an amateur explorer told him the story of the legendary lost city…
CALLI: So there's a lost city in the gates of hell. That's where you're going.
STEVE: That's what I was going for. Yes. I had heard a legend that there was a lost city somewhere in the misguided jungle that people have been looking for for several hundred years. Since the days of the conquistadors. Nobody has found it. So I mounted an expedition in 1994 with some colleagues and actually with an adventurer who told me the legend. And we went looking. We had a great time, quite an adventure, but we did not find the Lost City. However, in that journey, we came upon a large boulder up in the mountains of the rainforest, you know, long several days of paddling canoes and hiking and trudging. And there was this wonderful carving of a man wearing a strange headdress or hat. He had a look like a stick, and it looked like a sack with seeds or something falling out of it. It was quite beautiful. And it's in a part of the jungle that you could only see maybe 20 feet in front of you. And I went, What's this doing there? There had to be something going on. This carving did not exist in isolation. Maybe that legend is true, and I became obsessed from that moment on to figure that puzzle out. Is it true or is it not?
CALLI: So you would have heard about the Lost City from other adventurers, explorers who had also wanted to seek it out. Been searching for over 500 years. What, if anything, was already known about it?
STEVE: Well, the legend said that there was this fabulous city out there, you know, full of riches, the usual stuff. And that's what the Spanish wrote about. They called it in Spanish. Ciudad Blanco for White City because the stones there, they said they used white colored stones to make the buildings. That made sense because there were a lot of carbonate rocks there with limestone, which have a whitish or gray color. So it made sense to me. They also there was a legend that they worshiped a monkey God, hence the moniker Lost City, the monkey God. And there's enough there archeologists that occasionally went in the area and peripheral areas there, and they would find some artifacts, just like we did in my first expedition there, but never found a big settlement or a city. So we knew something was there, but just never found the mother lode, so to speak.
CALLI: So all of these explorers before you. What made you think you'd be different?
STEVE: Initially, I didn't think I would. I didn't think I was any different than any other Explorer. I did it because I was in the television business and I have a science background. And I used to do a lot of things for National Geographic, for Discovery, PBS shows like that. And I like that kind of program. And I was interested in doing a documentary about this search for a Lost City. I really didn't know what I'd find out, but I got hooked.
NATE: You know, not everyone would be willing to devote their lives to searching for something that may never be found, especially when they’ve only heard about it through stories. But Steve - like many explorers - is cut from a different cloth
STEVE: I've always been curious about pretty much everything. Even my mother tells me when I was a child I'd be out in the backyard just looking at the sky or the clouds or whatever. And she'd say, What are you looking at? And I said, Well, I'm just looking. I'm just observing everything. I don't think everybody has that characteristic, just like some people are born fighters, some people are born pacifists, some are great athletes, some are great writers. We're all a little bit different. I was born with the desire to always know what's around the corner. In fact, my friends growing up would call me over the ridge. Meaning if you go we go out walking in the woods. I'd always have to go a little bit further. I had to look around the next corner, go over the next hill. It's not reckless adventure for adventure sake, but it's wanting willing to do adventure to satiate your curiosity, to learn more about things. Not everyone has it. Explorers do.
CALLI: So Steve went in search of the Lost City, and when he found that rock carving hidden deep in the jungle, he knew he’d stumbled onto something special.
STEVE: This is the one that made me obsessive about proving whether or not the legend was true or not. I just could not resist it. When I saw that carving and I saw the environment, which is in everything that I knew about geology, about climate, about anthropology through a lifetime of experience, said Bingo. There's more to the story than meets the eye. Probably more truth than malarkey.
NATE: He would go back several more times, uncovering pieces of the story with each trip.
STEVE: Each time I went, I learned something. We found something. We just didn't find the lost city. But every time I went, we'd find more and more idiomatic evidence that made me even believe more that the story was true.
CALLI: Steve spent years searching for the Lost City. It became an obsession, each time bringing back more clues. But the longer the search went on, the more his family wondered if he’d ever find it.
STEVE: My wife at the time sort of rolled her eyes every time I talk about it. And she'd say, we have to hear the story about the Lost City again. And my son was young at the time, and he thought it was cool, but he didn't really pay that much attention to it. Other members of my family or friends would go, oh, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, you know what else is new?
CALLI: Steve planned one final trip in 1998.
STEVE: I had contracted with some people at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena to do satellite surveys to try and see if I could find the city with satellite technology that did not work. However, we created maps of the topography that were far superior to anything else that existed at the time. And I could look at the topography and based upon my knowledge of being in the geosciences at one time and just general knowledge, I went. Here are some valleys here, some locations. There are no reported explorations in this area. Topographically, this would be a perfect place for there to be a lost city. And that was going to be my target. And in 1998, I had raised money with a colleague from Chicago, and we were going to take helicopters and go to one of these valleys and see what we could find. Well, unfortunately, 1998, there was a huge hurricane called Hurricane Mitch in Honduras, which wiped out the country, killed over 7000 people. And that was it, end of story. So we all went back to our layers and it would be in the back of my head. I went on with my life.
NATE: Until 2009. When he read a story that would change everything.
[SFX: Whoosh]
STEVE: I read an article in the New York Times in Archeology magazine about an experiment with an evolving technology called LiDar.
CALLI: LiDAR stands for light detection and ranging, and you can think of it like a very detail-oriented RADAR. It uses lasers like RADAR does, to scan the earth’s surface and produce images. But unlike RADAR, which uses sound waves to scan and measure, LiDAR uses light waves. Light waves have much lower wavelengths than sound waves, which means that LiDAR imaging is much more precise than RADAR. That means that an area scanned with LiDAR is going to show very detailed images of an area. It would be precisely the tool you’d need to say, scan a very dense jungle for hidden remains of a Lost City…
STEVE: The story was about there was a group from NASA that was experimenting with light. They wanted to see if light could be used to map the surface of the earth. And the machines were getting stronger and better. They did an experiment at the Maya city of Caracol in Belize. There was a husband, wife, team of archeologists been working there 25 years early, Arlen and Diane Chase. So you could go there as a tourist at the time and you could see the, you know, the rebuilt pyramids and everything. And they were doing their survey of the peripheral areas. Old school walking around. Very slow. Very tedious. Well, they did this late hour scan not knowing what would happen. Well, they found tons of stuff. They said it was this was like inventing carbon dating 100 years’ worth of traditional archeological survey in three or four days. I read about it and I went, Wow, maybe this is how I could find the Lost City. Nobody knew where to start looking. When they went to Caracol, they went to a developer site and they just worked around it. This is just a shot in the dark.
NATE: Even after years of searching and never finding the Lost City, Steve knew it was a shot worth taking. He’d spent so much time and energy searching and this could be his last chance.
STEVE: I had spent, you know, at that time from 1994 to 2012, I've been thinking about this, trying to figure out how to do it and raise money, giving the money back, wasted money, time, effort. My wife was ready to divorce me already. Not really, but because she was tired of hearing about it. So I went to the group that was doing the Light IRA, which was the National Science Foundation project at the time with the University of Houston and University of California, Berkeley. And I proposed I would like to go there and light out, scan this jungle. And they sort of went, No, no, no, we don't think this is going to work. But the leader of the group was open minded as long as I was willing to pay for it and said, we think we could make it work. So if you're willing to pay, we'll try. So I had my target areas that I had found by using satellites years before certain locations I thought would be the place to go. And we took a shot.
CALLI: Despite having gone on several expeditions to find the Lost City, Steve said that this time was different. There was an electricity to the search that they hadn’t felt since that first accidental discovery of the initial carving that set Steve on this journey.
STEVE: We organized this expedition. We flew a special plane. I got all these special light. Our engineers, we mapped it out. It took a lot of politicking, a lot of logistics involved. But we flew the patterns and at night we'd bring home the data. We had all these engineers at this hotel we were staying in and Rhode Island, and they'd process the data. And one day bingo got up at breakfast and they came running in screaming, you got to see what's here. I ran over there and I couldn't believe it there. As plain as day were the outlines of buildings in a pyramid and all kinds of manmade works. And it was right in the middle of the valley that I thought it was in. So I did I was ready to do cartwheels. You know, I went, okay, you know, I went to everybody and, you know, the money's not been wasted. I'm vindicated. I'm happy. And it was a great day.
NATE: Steve had finally found the legendary Lost City. The quest of his life, finally completed. But that wasn’t the end of the story, the entire city still had to be excavated.
STEVE: In archaeology, you have to ground truth that you have to actually go there and touch it, see it, photograph it, you know, be there. So we had a. Figure out how to do that. That took three years.
CALLI: Part of the reason the excavation took so long was permits, politics and government regulations. But the other challenges were all natural. The same forest that buried the Lost City for so long made the site very difficult to reach, let alone explore.
STEVE: The jungle is so thick and so convoluted with the hills and the mountains, there's no openings. So where are you going to land the helicopter. Once again, light hours, save the day. We took our light, our data, and we were able to process it and find a little bend in the river that had a fairly open clearing, big enough probably to put a helicopter. We just got a landing zone. Then we had to set up camp. That took a day. Then the archeologists who were with me, they were they were ready to go. So they had little GPS devices that looked like giant cell phones. They had light our data and they could get a satellite signal even through the jungle. The archeologists, we had one that was a specialist and later one of the few, he said, No, this is the pyramid, this is the plaza, this is a stone wall here. This is a waterworks. This is this a road. And he would show us and then we'd clear it and you could see it. Now, we didn't clear it too. Well, if you go to a place like Coll or Copan where they've been working there for a hundred years, this is still buried, but you see enough to know what you're looking at. That was in the first couple of days.
STEVE: After we surveyed all the large structures by accident, we had a cameraman with us and he stubbed his toe and stumbled on some rocks. And he yelled to me, Steve, Steve, there were these funny looking rocks went back and there were 52 carved stone sculptures partially sticking out of the ground. Unbelievable balls, sculptures of anthropomorphic things. Well, since then it became a very big deal. And we've had archeological teams there and the government had been really participatory. We raised some additional months of funds and we found out through carbon dating some materials that this place is at least 4400 years old. I believe personally, the entire jungle was probably urbanized at one time in the past and not at all what it looks like now.
NATE: After twenty years of searching, Steve and his team found the Lost City and uncovered its secrets. He never gave up on his dream, and encourages aspiring explorers to hold tight to theirs, too.
CALLI: What advice would you give to an aspiring explorer?
STEVE: I strongly believe that we have entered the greatest era of discovery ever in human history. And why? Because of new technology, particularly remote sensing technology. Everybody is now able to see things we couldn't even imagine existed a few years ago, see into our past, see what's around currently and what's probably going to happen in the future. It's incredible. We're expanding our knowledge at a rapid, rapid rate. So if you're going to be doing exploring, you must take advantage of these technologies. The old days of, you know, Indiana Jones with a bullwhip and a machete, thinking you're going to make great discoveries. Well, you might if you're lucky, but you got to use science. That's what I would say. And then persistence, you have to be willing it's almost like deciding you want to be an actor and you're trying to get your first gig. You have to be willing to have the door shut in your face. Many times when you're looking for funding and you're trying to get it together and you can't be afraid of what some people will call failure. It's not failure at all. Just you're learning more and you're getting better at it. Just keep up with it.
CALLI: Success is one. Preparedness means opportunity.
STEVE: Exactly. Thank you for asking the questions and being interested.
CALLI: You have been amazing. Thank you.
[SFX: Whoosh]
NATE: It’s been a pleasure having Steve Elkins join us today. I’m inspired to now explore every single nook and cranny on earth. There’s gotta be another Lost City out there!
CALLI: Maybe use LiDAR or RADAR first, I don’t know how far you’d get on foot.
NATE: We’ll be back next week with some new episodes of Curiosity and another great conversation with an influential explorer from the Explorer’s Club.
[SFX: Whoosh]
SIAN: You know, I've always been an explorer at heart. And so for me, it's about exploration and isn't necessarily discovering something new for humanity. It's about discovering something new for yourself, pushing your understanding of not only our Earth, but, you know, our universe and beyond. And and so when I have opportunity to go and do something new, even in an area I've never explored before, I want to take on that challenge so that I'm discovering all kinds of new things for myself.
[SFX: Whoosh]
CALLI: Until next time, stay curious!