::: QUEST FOR PAITITI FIELD JOURNAL :::
ENTRY SEVEN (June 21, 2004) "REPORT"

Day 14
Contact by satellite phone ended on June 10th, hence our last entry of Saturday, June 11th reflects the team's arrival to the Lago de Angel, the beginning of their expedition into the deeper, northern Andes. It was exactly 8 days later that we received a broken message from Producer, Garrett Strang that the team had trekked two days off course to reach a remote village- just to regain contact with the outside world and let us know all was well and the team was returning to the jungle for 3 more days. He related that not even the emergency back-up system was available to them. We found out months before the expedition was underway, that vast cloud and jungle vegetation render satellite imagery useless, until there is a clearing and the timing of the satellite's passing over is in tandem with this. One can only guess at this point that it was this reason that kept their signal from reaching us.

Garrett reached us again yesterday from outside Cusco. He mentioned that during the down time, the team followed vast tracts of unexplored areas, finding ruins upon ruins along the way. They travelled on foot with a train of pack mules carrying supplies and gear. Reaching neighboring ridges was long, tiring and arduous but was necessary to move forward and to determine, visually, a direction ( eyeing how steep the ascent/descent ) against the rough sketch map that had been fashioned from the results of the 1999 expedition. Unquestionably, we can say that locating ruins in such areas is limited to ground exploration. Meticulous notes of each day were kept by Greg Deyermenjian and we are eager to post these as soon as we receive them.