IT'S ON! The first expedition to Cumorah3 will be a scouting trip to locate some of the cemetarios on Jerry's map and try to get permission to go back and retrieve artifacts to have scientifically dated. WE'LL BE ENTERING MEXICO ON JUNE 12, 2006!

Keep watching this page, I'll try to file photos and reports from the field right here on this page.

I will be leaving St. George, Utah on Thursday June 8th. From there I will drive to Dallas, Texas where I will meet Jerry and Esteban. We plan to leave for Mexico early Monday June 12th.

Tuesday June 13, 2006: We drove a long time again today but I had an opportunity to see how different Dr. Ainsworth really is from other academics, and how unique his research really is. This is a professor who truly is not afraid to get his hands dirty!

At 4 p.m. local time today I for the first time looked upon the hill I code-named Cumorah3. As I was driving, Esteban suddenly said: “there’s the hill!” I looked and even though we were forty or more miles from it, the hill established it’s powerful presence high on the skyline. I raised both thumbs, looked over at Jerry, and said: “that’s outstanding!” There was no doubt in my mind that Cumorah3 is a hill that is unique and would have been known to everyone on trading routes for hundreds of miles .

We had already checked out a museum and not long after seeing Cumorah3 we arrived at the vicinity of the nearest cemetario. It was getting late but in a short time Esteban had talked with several people, found where the cemetario was located, and we went to the house of an old man who knew its history. How many university professors go into small towns in Mexico, seek out knowledgeable people, and learn what the locals have to say? Those two have been doing that for 24 years….

We spent a bit of time at the cemetario and without digging found what may be an old stone ax head, a small potsherd, and a few old bones. We don't know if the bones are human, the spinal cord seems too large.

We drove to our base, got a hotel, and I’m in the parking lot writing this with the satellite dish locked on and ready to send…

Wednesday June 14, 2006: We drove well over a hundred miles today, all of it within sight of that powerful hill that dominates a huge plain that Jerry calls the “The Lands of Cumorah.” But we didn’t get real close. I want to touch the hill if I can before we turn north again.

Again I witnessed how Dr. Ainsworth and Esteban do research like detectives, going from clue to clue, spending much time in small villages where Esteban finds the mayor and old people and talks with them. Friday at 7 a.m. we have an appointment with a farmer who enjoys searching for the ancients and says he will take us to a field where old battle weapons are on the surface.

We stalked two more of the cemetarios marked on the map but were not able to locate them. This may be much more difficult than I had hoped! But Jerry didn’t seem surprised: “It’s never easy” he said.

In one village we heard rumors that two weeks ago a farmer was driving his tractor pulling farm equipment when the tractor suddenly stalled. They pulled out of the ground a huge head with a big mummy inside it! Well, that was quite thrilling, especially because it was so recent, so we tracked down the story.

And yes, we found the stone, the villagers had indeed (they said) pulled it out of the ground, placed it in a pickup that became “weighed down” and carried it to a building in the village. After chasing down the man with a key to the building a few miles down gravel and then dirt roads through corn fields, we got in to see the stone.

No head, and no mummy, but yes, possibly an Olmec (Jaredite?) era stone about six feet high and maybe two feet wide with a head carved into it and less well-defined legs and arms. I took photos and we were on the way again, in places driving through water to get to a village along the river.

We heard in two villages about a place where when it rained enough to flood, huge bones began to appear in the mud. The heads were huge, the thigh bones very long and big. This may describe some of the Jaredites in the Book of Mormon. But they said they just buried the bones again so we didn’t see any.

The last thing before returning to the hotel tonight was a visit to the local museum. Yes, they have quite a few articles on loan from locals, and almost all of it is probably Olmec except for some swords and a few other objects from a nearby war with the French.

We’ll pick up the search for more cemetarios tomorrow…

Thursday June 15, 2006: Well, it has become apparent that the cemetarios marked on the old map are not going to be very useful because we can’t find the locations mapped. Everywhere we hear of big battles nearby but only the parents or grandparents of people we talk to have actually seen bones. Esteban is going to talk with the government people involved in the mapping and see if he can get better coordinates than just a red triangular mark near the name of a village. In most cases the villages did not exist until about the 1930’s and some until the 1960’s.

It’s disappointing for me but normal for Jerry and Esteban, though all of us are of course disappointed. I told Jerry that I’d give him an out re the Finding Cumorah project if he wanted one, but he turned to me and said, "I work better under pressure."

Today we followed the mayor of a small village into the jungle and walked about a mile each way with him swinging a machete. Soon we began to find what may be ancient weapons on the ground. There were no arrow heads found but a lot of what may be axe heads. The man would have led us further to where he said he would show us the remains of ancient buildings, but it was a hundred degrees in that jungle, so we opted to return to the pickup.

I shot a lot of video today, the first time since arriving here that I used the camcorder. However, that means I have very few still shots recorded today. One interesting video scene was an interview in Spanish at the possible battlefield with an old man who came along out of nowhere riding a donkey. He said he had not seen bones on the surface, but hadn't been looking for them.

The next stop was at a small museum where we saw some ancient weapons and one skull, but nothing very significant. As usual Esteban coaxed a name from the museum attendant and we were soon sitting in the home of a retired school teacher whose father and grandfather had been explorers and donated most of the items in the museum. He showed us the skeleton of some beast that looked like a cross between a snake and a huge armadillo. Of course we have no way of knowing if it is genuine and Dr. Ainsworth does not seem interested in it at all.

Skeleton of a beast pulled from the mud two years ago the man said. There's a cartoon drawing in the background that makes it hard to see the skeleton completely. It looked real but of course we can't say for sure that it is. The man said two other "Gringos" took pictures of it but couldn't identify it.

The retired teacher took us to a site a few miles from the village that looked like mounds but turned out to possibly be pyramids, unusual in this area. There was a hole in the side of the largest one so some looting had occurred, but it was probably mainly intact. The man said looting was frequent there. We all agreed that the site probably had nothing to do with our focus on proving Cumorah3, so we left. We next stopped at a huge river of water coming out of a cave in a mountain. This is the Land of Cumorah, there’s a lot of water…

It has been very noticeable to me that we haven’t yet gone anywhere near the hill. I got Jerry and Esteban to admit that they had negative experiences the last two times they were on Cumorah3 about twenty years ago and both felt that they’d been warned not to go to that hill again, unless they felt later that it was ok. They know that I’m anxious to become acquainted with the hill.

It was on that hill almost 20 years ago that Jerry seriously injured a knee. That kept him from being active in squash and other sports and this former Olympic athlete began to put on extra weight that remains to this day. It was there too that they struggled with a giant snake and experienced a snow storm while on the top of the hill. (See the story in the Reading Room.)

We talked with two missionary elders serving here. One is from Idaho, he hardly knows how to speak English anymore! We gave them a few things and copies of Jerry’s book.

Very early tomorrow we’ll be on the way to an appointment with a farmer who plans to spend the day showing us artifacts etc. much closer to the hill than we were today.

Friday June 16, 2006: We were up at 5:30 a.m. today and considering this was intended to be just a preliminary scouting trip, by 10 a.m. we had found what we came for and will head for home tomorrow morning!

You may recall from earlier comments that we had a 7 a.m. appointment with a farmer who said he would show us some things. After a drive down dirt roads, ploughed fields, and two places where the farmer pulled out poles and let me drive over electric fences, we stopped in a huge pasture, parked the pickup under a large tree and walked as I rolled ‘film’ in the camcorder. In the distance, about 12 miles from the pasture firmly stood the hill Cumorah3 as usual dominating the landscape in this otherwise almost flat land.

We hadn’t gone far before everyone started picking up what appeared to be ancient weapons of war and Jerry came to me with half a figurine to get on film. The camcorder dvd’s will tell the whole story. The farmer soon left us and walked home but not before showing us mounds that probably contain artifacts and bones. He said the whole huge pasture if plowed again would yield an abundance of ancient things.

We wandered around a lot and found a lot. We did not enter the trees because the farmer said there are dangerous wild pigs in them. The setting is exactly what I had pictured in my mind before leaving home, spacious fields with trucks parked and film crews working, within distance of Cumorah3...

Near what must have been a pool or pond of water but is now dry, Esteban found what look like bone fragments. Granted, we don’t know if they are human, but they appear to be very old. That pool had been dug deeper a few years earlier, the farmer said. We walked around and found many more very interesting things including figurines, pestles, and many pottery sherds, some quite large.

We shall return!

From there we drove about 12 miles to a road that leads up to Cumorah3 but were stopped at a closed gate by an armed guard. Esteban flashed his official tourist guide badge and persuaded the guard to let us go a bit further to take photos. That will be as close as I get to Cumorah3 this trip and maybe for a long time, we’ll just have to wait to see how this develops.

So, we came to scout out the possibility of finding a place near Cumorah3 to find items to have dated. We followed enough of the targets identified on the old map to conclude that we wouldn’t be able to find the cemetarios that are marked there. Today there are just villages and nobody living there remembers "piles of bones”. The map failed us at this point in time at least, but Esteban’s instincts and tactfulness with the local people gave us what we had come for, a place where bones have been found by the locals and what appears to be ancient weapons of war are on the surface in fields that have been plowed at one time. And it's all close to the hill we call Cumorah3.

I conclude that Expedition 1, a scouting trip, has been a huge success for Mormon Sites…

I suggest also if you haven't yet done so that you read Jerry's article titled The Killing Fields published in The Reading Room.