gemini://carcosa.net/journal/20210404-mysteryfleshpit.gmi

Everyone seems to be talking about Mystery Flesh Pit National Park lately. I’m not totally sure why… the park closed in 2007, so it’s not an anniversary or anything. I guess the nostalgia cycle runs on a timer of its own, and doesn’t really stay strictly to the calendar or anything. So I’m going to share my experience with the Mystery Flesh Pit, though it’s a bit mundane, and probably not all that interesting to anyone who’s had a real Flesh Pit experience, though maybe if you never got to go there, then it might have something for you.

Although I don't have any photos or other memorabilia from the time, I'm sure the year was 1987, because it was when my Boy Scout troop was on the way to Philmont Scout Ranch in northeastern New Mexico. It was the summer I was 13, which was the youngest age eligible for Philmont. The park was actually a good whack out of our way, as we had to divert from I-40 to I-20 around Oklahoma City, but coming from the eastern US, we knew we wouldn't get another chance for at least several years. We went there on the opening leg of the trip, because after two solid weeks of backpacking at Philmont, we'd all be too tired for even the tourist hikes at the Mystery Flesh Pit.

The day of driving across Texas seemed like forever. Maybe part of that was knowing that we were headed for what I was sure would be the most fun part of the whole expedition, but I think most of it was just riding in a van across the flat, dry terrain, so different from the damp mountains where my trip began. As with most of the rest of the drive, I listened to FM radio stations fade in and out on my Walkman™, and, as they say, “stared at marks on bound sheets of pressed vegetable matter and hallucinated”. I remember I was reading the Dune series on that trip, imagining a desert planet and its vast alien sandworms… a good lead-up to the Flesh Pit, even though I’m sure I didn’t plan it that way.

We were staying at the overnight camping area outside of the pit, because we were arriving after noon, and were going to do a couple of hours of park activities before evening. We weren't setting up until after going on the flesh pit hike, but we did park the two vans at the overnight camping area and walk to the Visitor Center, because of course we did. It wasn't a long walk, so of course it made sense, but at the time, we definitely thought it was something the scoutmaster did just out of spite. The camping area was not great, by National Park standards. Not terrible, but just gravel pads with picnic tables and water faucets, one bathroom building for all the campsites. No electrical hook-ups, but that wasn't as important back then; nothing to recharge, everything portable and electric had replaceable batteries. I think the main thing is that there wasn't that much demand for surface camping. If you were a serious outdoorsperson, you'd want camp at one of the sites in the Pit (never mind that that's not really ‘outdoors’). Most people would have preferred to stay at the hotel, and I’m sure the Park would rather you did, too, considering how much of their budget must have come from Marriott's concession.

We spent a little while at the upper Visitor Center, but we were really itching to get down into the Pit, so all of the scouts ended up hanging around by the entrance to the gondola pavilion a long time before the scoutmasters were ready for us to descend. And to tell the truth, there wasn't a whole lot to see in the Upper Visitor Center anyway, mainly a gift shop and guides to the rim trails and the Historic Ritual Grounds. Which would have been cool to see, too, but not given that we only had one afternoon.

It was hot, waiting out on the gondola pavilion, but not too bad. Coming from Tennessee, we were used to heat with high humidity, so even though it didn't actually get as hot in the Appalachian foothills as it would in Texas or New Mexico on this trip, the dry heat never *felt* hotter than it did in the dog days at home. The sun was pretty fierce on the concrete, though. We were all in what passed for uniforms in our laid-back troop, which meant that when we parked at the campground, we had all thrown on our short-sleeved uniform shirts over whatever shorts and T-shirts we had on for traveling, no neckerchief or matching shorts.

From the gondola pavilion, we got our first look at the Pit itself. I’m not sure what struck me more forcefully at first: the absolute *scale* of the thing, or the moist pinkness of it. The Permian Basin Superorganism (the formal mane for the Mystery Flesh Pit) *does* have skin, of a sort, and it can’t actually be wet – I can scarcely imagine all the water it would lose in the West Texas sun. But the area that Anodyne uncovered looks like someone skinned their knee, then had it covered with one of those big Band-Aid pads for a week, so that it’s covered over with skin, but pink and raw. And around the entry orifice, it’s very… biological. More on that later. But the scale was the other thing that struck me. A skinned knee is a pretty big patch of raw skin. But the exposed part of the Superorganism was something like a block wide and two blocks long. Heavy construction equipment crawled around on it like gnats on a wound. You couldn't really see the people operating the equipment, they were so small, which made me feel pretty small in return.

Finally, after what seemed like an hour of waiting, we got into the gondolas and started down towards the entry. The scout troop fit into two gondolas, though we had to move some people back and forth to get the weight even between them. We could have made it easier by taking a third, but we only had two adults with us, and besides, we were in a hurry. The gondolas are what you'd otherwise call cable cars, I guess, and they don’t just take you down to the entry orifice, they give you an aerial view of all of the surface-level infrastructure. Which is a lot! The retaining forceps that hold the orifice wide open, and the dilation anchors on the walls of the rock layer that formerly covered the Pit are some of the biggest hardware I've ever seen. Just monumental in scale. The entry orifice itself… well, it's a mouth, biologically speaking. I mean, the tunnel down to the Lower Visitor Center isn't artificial, it’s not bored through a mountain of flesh, it’s an actual gullet, that leads down to digestive organs, including, if I remember the signs right, a gizzard. Or was it a crop? The thing is, the entry orifice doesn't look like the mouth on most familiar kinds of animals. The way human mouths are defined by lips and teeth, and mammal mouths by snouts and teeth; I guess I’m thinking of how vertebrate mouths have jaws. This was definitely some kind of invertebrate mouth, though I don’t really know enough to say what it most looked like. It was just a fleshy, muscular hole, being held open by those huge retractors.

The feeling on the gondola I was on was pretty tense as we went down towards the orifice. We had divided up the ages between the two gondolas pretty well, so we had a mix of boys from 13 to 17, a little heavier on the low end, and the assistant scoutmaster. I think we were all a bit nervous, and at first we all got kind of quiet, looking out the gondola windows. But then I don't know if the quiet just bothered some people, or if they realized their nervousness was showing, and some of the guys started being noisy, and pushing each other around, and making dirty jokes, just as a way of compensating. Normally I got along with these guys pretty well. I was a pretty quiet, stereotypically nerdy kid, serious except for an enthusiasm for some cringy humor media, and used to bullying at school, but this wasn't a “bro-y” scout troop. Most of the older kids were what you'd call “scholar-athletes”, and the rest were nerdy, alternative, or both. Relatively low levels of toxic masculinity for an all-male youth organization, is what I'm saying. But there, swaying on a wire over that vast expanse of raw flesh, heading towards a puckered orifice that was about to swallow us, that's what they retreated to for comfort, and I kind of went still in the corner, trying not to be seen. Fortunately, the assistant scoutmaster got everyone under control pretty quickly, and everyone was quiet as we descended into the maw of the Pit, between the tensed giant metal forceps, hearing faint tectonic carnal moans from deep below.

With our eyes adjusted to the bright sunlight of the day, it got dark, quick, as we descended below the rim of the orifice. The gondolas go at that point from being more like a cable car to more like a glass elevator, as they descend into the gullet. You’re still hanging from cables, but now the cables are running down a gantry truss and the car is hooked in to tracks on the gantry. There are lights all along the gullet, but they’re all pointed obliquely at the flesh of the walls, so that you get indirect lighting, and it took me a while to be able to see anything. Eventually, I got my first look at the interior of the Mystery Flesh Pit. It was a lot like you'd see on endoscopic camera footage of a surgery, though if that existed back in the ’80s, I hadn't seen any yet. It’s a big change going from looking at a skinned knee or a mouth to looking at something’s insides, especially when the flesh looks so human, or at least mammalian – even though we’re told the superorganism’s actual biology is deeply alien. The sides of the gullet were definitely wet now, and gently moving in slow waves of muscular contractions. I wouldn't describe the surface as ‘veiny’, but you could definitely see some blood vessels below the surface, some as thick as your arm.

After a couple of minutes of descent, the quiet subsided, but thankfully the boys didn't get back to horseplay, but just looked at the sides and pointed things out – veins, polyps of some kind, calcified spots, gobbets of fatty tissue. It was pretty interesting for a while, even without anyone informed there to tell us what all we were looking at. Was it gross? I guess you’d have to say it was, which had to have been some of the appeal for this troop of adolescent boys. I mean, there was a reason we were going to the Mystery Flesh Pit and not Carlsbad Caverns. We had lots of limestone caves at home, and we’d all been in a few, but absolutely no geobiological anomalies.

The ride down the gullet was *long*. I don’t really know how long, either in distance or time. I do know the gondola was pretty slow, so that contributed to it some. We finally reached the Lower Visitor Center before everyone got too bored. We had a scheduled tour of the “Bowels of the Earth” route starting in a little less than an hour. It was normally a self-guided tour, because it’s fully-enclosed, but for large groups like ours, they want you to wait for a ranger, both in case of any trouble, and, honestly, to make sure you don’t interfere with other groups of tourists. We were all a little disappointed about going on the enclosed tour, because we all had pretty inflated opinions of ourselves as hikers and spelunkers. Except for one boy who was especially fastidious, we would much rather have gone on the “Guts ’n Giddyap” route, which was shorter, but unimproved, and we would actually have been in contact with venterial tissue for most of the hike, including slippery and narrow flesh tunnels. But since we had arrived late and didn't have too much time, it made more sense to do the improved tour, and we would get to see more areas of the Pit this way. I'm sure we would have done pretty much the same thing at Carlsbad if we had gone there.

With the hour wait for the ranger, we had just enough time to get a look at the Lower Visitor Center. This was back before the early '90s refit and redecoration, so the museum parts of the Visitor Center were pretty “old National Park museum”, if you know what I mean. Even though the Flesh Pit had only been in the park system for seven years, and the Visitor Center didn't date back to the roadside attraction days, it still seemed kind of old. I don’t quite know how to explain it. If you've been to some less-visited parks, you'll probably understand, and if you haven't, you won't. There were concessions in the food concourse by the gift shop, but it was park concessions, not the Chili's Too or Hard Rock Cafe that would be there later. A lot of the really iconic exhibits were already there, though, like the life-sized Abyssal Copepod sculpture hanging from the ceiling in the main exhibit hall.

And *that* was quite a shock. It's one thing to know intellectually that the Permian Basin Superorganism is so big that it has parasitic ecosystems that are unlike anything else in the world, it's another to see it for yourself in the form of a realistic model of those ecosystems' apex predator. Especially when that apex predator is a dull-white crustacean the size of a pickup truck. With creepily human-like hands. That's the worst part; they're not totally humanlike, too long-fingered for one thing, but at a point after the second elbow, the arms transition from a clearly hard, articulated chitin, to something that looks like it has an endoskeleton and a waxy translucent skin. It's very Uncanny Valley in a way that a mere giant bug wouldn't be. It's a good thing that the museum was well-lit, even up there by the ceiling. It was very life-like, but being so out of place provided a bit of a psychological buffer.

The rest of the displays were kind of underwhelming. The superorganism really ought to reshape our understanding of the evolution of life on Earth, and probably of basic biology. But that’s not where the exhibits went with it, mostly. A lot of them were about the history of human discovery of and exploitation of the pit, starting with a very cursory note about Indigenous interactions with the pit (including the ritual site that’s part of the park), and moving quickly on to the oilmen who rediscovered it in the '70s and to Anodyne's management of the Pit and their subsequent relationship with the National Park Service, and the foundation of the Park. A really mind-numbing portion of the displays was given over to the industrial uses of various resources extracted from the pit, including amniotic ballast fluid, bulk gastric extracts, and structural bone materials. Since most of these uses were not exactly world-changing, there wasn't much to be said about them, but the displays did anyway.

The gift shop was pretty much what you'd expect of a National Park souvenir shop in the 1980s – books about the park and about other parks in the NPS, stuffed animals of local desert wildlife as well as cute versions of some of the Pit's fauna, bumper stickers, posters, coffee mugs, polished rocks, magnets, and all kinds of little gewgaws that kids would ask for and then lose on the trip home. You can see some of this stuff recreated at the “Mystery Flesh Pit Gift Shop” website, though they're just reproductions based on fliers and so forth that the proprietor there has collected. I planned on picking something up after the hike, so I wouldn't have to carry it with me.

The ranger who showed up to lead our tour was a young white man who looked maybe just out of college, tall, kind of lanky, and bearded. He had a very common name, and I don’t remember what it was. Other than the Smokey the Bear hat and actually matching shorts, his uniform was pretty similar to our Scout uniforms, and he wasn't wearing any of the protective gear that we had seen other trail guides wearing, probably because we were only going on the enclosed trail. It took a while to get everyone rounded up from the displays without shouting, but we managed.

The trail access tunnel was on the level below the exhibits, and we trooped single file down to the room it led off from, got a little speech from the ranger, which mostly didn't say anything we hadn't already heard, and set off. He did warn us that even on the glassed-in parts of the trail, it was possible but uncommon for some of the smaller and more amorphous wildlife to get on to the trail, and not to touch anything in the unlikely event that we saw something on our side of the glass, and to keep our distance until he could identify it. The maps and brochures had said that the park had 12 miles of fully enclosed trail, in addition to all of the unimproved and partly improved trail. We were going to walk a 4 mile loop hitting the highlights of the “Bowels of the Earth” route.

What “fully enclosed” meant, at least for this trail, was that basically a metal frame had been built through inter-organ spaces and paneled in glass. Some of the frame elements were heavy bulkheads or “stents”, which actually held the tunnel open in some places, while others were just there to hold the glass in place. The floor was galvanized steel that was basically part of the frame, with cleats punched through it like you might have seen on a metal staircase. Honestly, the sheer amount of glass was pretty impressive. The trail was about six feet wide in most places, and eight feet tall, so that’s a lot of windows when you consider the trail is miles long. Most of the trail had both internal and external lighting: internal lighting on the ceiling, aimed down at the floor, and external spotlights aimed at features of interest. How close the flesh of the Pit was to the glass varied a lot over the course of the trail. Sometimes, the trail went through vast open spaces, like an open cavern, except the walls are made of meat and other living tissue, and the spotlights illuminated great falls of adipose tissue or bundles of nerves, like flowstone and stalactites in a limestone cave. Other times, the walls pressed right up against the glass of the tunnel on all sides, and it felt like we were walking through a blood vessel or perhaps a loop of intestine. Even though the enclosed trail was nominally air-conditioned, it was still quite a bit more warm and humid than in the Lower Visitor Center. There was a smell to it, not strong, and not easy to describe. When we later stopped at an unenclosed observation deck we got a stronger, unfiltered breath of it. Mostly like a locker room, humid and alive with it; occasionally a metallic tang of blood, or a sour note of digestive fluid. But in the enclosed trail, it was weak enough that we got used to it quickly and stopped noticing it.

Our route initially went by Septum Falls, and we stopped there for a little while to look at it and take pictures. The park signage marks it as a waterfall, but I’m not sure it’s actually water. Majestic, whatever it is; I'm sure you've all seen the postcards. We had our most impressive wildlife sighting between Septum Falls and Thor's Ribcage. We were in one of those sections of tunnel where it's not exactly going through a wide-open space, but there’s still a good ten to twenty feet on either side of the trail. A lot of the sections of trail are like that, and we had seen lots of “macrobacteria” in that kind of area, but nothing bigger. The ranger was walking up front at this point, and he held up a hand and shushed us, while beckoning for us to move in a bit closer. Maybe thirty feet ahead, in the gloom just outside of the cone of a spotlight's beam, something pale and rounded was clinging to the curve of the wall where it became the floor. We all pushed up to the front, trying to be quiet, but also each of us trying to make sure we could see, which weren't entirely compatible goals.

It wasn't very big – about the size of a very large possum, if that's a frame of reference you're familiar with. A bit bigger than a cat or a small dog, but lower to the ground than either. It had a humped-up, segmented shell, like a rolly-poly, but instead of dozens of tiny legs underneath, it had just like half a dozen kind of little paddles, and some antenna-type things. Everyone crowded around, a bunch of scouts saying, “where are the hands?” or “let me see the hands”. But, of course, it was a lesser copepod. The ranger let us slowly scooch up to about fifteen feet away, and we got a pretty good look at it, grey-white and chitinous, until someone made a small but sudden movement, and it skittered away into a fold of flesh.

We took the short loop back that went north of the amniotic thermal springs and the bathhouse, which wouldn't really be an appropriate activity for a scout troop, and there wasn't a whole lot else to see. I mean, there was a lot to see; every turn in the trail was a new wonder and a new horror, and the longer we were down in the pit, the more we could feel its cyclopean mass over our heads, and breathe its dank internal air, in some way taking the Flesh Pit itself into our bodies and changing us forever, but there were no more dramatic vistas or exciting wildlife sightings.

After we rode the gondola up to the Upper Visitor Center, we walked back across the parking lots to the campground, got our gear out of the vans, and set up our tents. It was evening, but it was summer, and there was still a lot of sunlight. We made chili after the tents were up, and ate it around a campfire. Between the scouts there was a lot of the usual banter and teasing, but it still seemed to me that there was an undercurrent of discomfort; of being disturbed or unsettled. No one really stayed up long after the sun set to keep talking, and we all retired to our tents.

I woke up a lot during the night, thinking I heard something outside the tent. A scuttling, whirring sound, like a palmetto bug when it flies right at you, combined with the kind of sound a possum or a raccoon might make rummaging around a campsite, looking for food that's been left out. I shone my flashlight out the window several times and never saw anything, though.

This is the point in the story where, if I were writing an Internet creepypasta, I would say that when we got up in the morning, one of the young scouts in my group was missing, and that all of our searching and our calls to the rangers at the Upper Visitor Center failed to recover him, and we never saw him again. But how much sense would that make? If one of our scouts had disappeared at one of our stops, there is no way that we would have continued the trip to Philmont. Besides the fact that we would certainly have stayed to look for them for several days, we definitely would have headed back home rather than go on. And anyway, tens of thousands of people visited the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park every year, and nothing bad happened to them, at least, not until the disaster in 2007.

No, everyone in the troop was fine; we ate oatmeal in the morning, took down the tents, and loaded up the vans for the last day of travel before reaching Philmont. It’s maybe not much of a story, but that’s how life is. I never got back to the Mystery Flesh Pit after that. Mostly, I've just lived too far east for it to be a manageable trip. It would have been doable when I was in grad school in Louisiana, and that would have been nice, because I was living with my now-wife, and we could have enjoyed the amniotic ballast thermal springs together. But we were both working all the time then, and somehow we never got around to it. Then after that, we were back east, and then the park closed, so I guess I'll never get back to it. But I’m glad I was able to visit that one time, which is more than a lot of people can say. I think it really had a lasting effect on me, just knowing that such things could be.

Remembering my visit to Mystery Flesh Pit National Park