Tourism poster for Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, 1980
From an area tourism book of the era:
"While the rural areas of west Texas are known for their sparse populations, one tourist attraction seems to continually generate a steady stream of visitors around vacation seasons. The titular "Mystery Flesh Pit" has been a wellspring of fascination for geologists, biologists, sociologists, engineers and the general public alike. Guests are advised to book age-appropriate tours and activities well in advance of their visit, though the pheromonal discharges and the overall agitation level of the MFP can vary with short notice. Visitors should be advised to be prepared for changes in schedule & availability."
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These tube-like mollusks are similar to a shell-less clam or mussel. They can grow to a length of two meters and are equipped with two retractable, mucosal proboscises which branch into many thousands of microscopic tubes. These small tubes, which are able to penetrate even the densest tissues by finding microscopic fractures in its structure, sap liquid moisture from which the Leech feeds.
Aquifer Leech are typically found in well-oxygenated aquatic environments within the pit such as moisture crops and water bladders . They inhabit the soft, porous substrates of these aquatic environments, often forming large aggregations to feed on nutrient-rich organic matter suspended in the water. The Aquifer Leech also provide an important ecological service, as they help to aerate and clean the substrate of these aquatic bodies, by consuming organic material and expelling crystal clear water in the process. Aside from their ecological importance, the species have been utilized to treat water to an extremely high purity, requiring far less energy than a traditional desalination plant. Additionally, their mucosal proboscis is used in medical research as a way to perform research on the human vascular system and its response to various conditions.
Rare photo from early days of the pit.
This gives a good idea of how small the operations were back in the early 1970s, about 3 months after the pit was "discovered". In this aerial photo, you can see the natural entry orifice (pre-excavation), a temporary electric lift tower, as well as a utility trunk connecting the surface power and ventilation plant to the basecamp down in the pit. There's also a hydraulic dredging crane that was used to "bite" away at some of the flesh down in the pit to enlarge the working area and remove material.
It would be unrecognizable only a few months later as paved roads and a half dozen permanent buildings were constructed, transforming this modest camp into a fully industrial mining and excavation site.
“Why haven’t there been any new posts in a long time?”
“Is this project dead?”
“Trevor get off your ass you lazy hack”
This project isn’t dead! Two major factors have contributed to the relative silence of updates:
1) For the past year, I’ve been taking care of my infant son as the primary at-home caregiver. That won’t mean anything to people who have not been parents, and it wouldn’t have meant anything to me before having a kid, but it turns out that keeping a baby happy, healthy, and entertained is a major drain on your time and energy. Additionally, my office/studio/workspace is also the room he sleeps in (I live in a two-bedroom apartment) so I am limited with how much I can do at night.
2) As many of you know, in June, Fleshpit fans showed up in force to fund the TTRPG kickstarter. In response, I’ve been busy working through a multi-page list of illustrations for the TTRPG book, including wildlife, tools, vehicles, maps, and other ephemera:
“I missed the Kickstarter, can I still pre-order the TTRPG book?”
Yes! Here’s a link to the pre-order store: https://mysteryfleshpitrpg.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
“When is the coffee table art book coming out?”
“Are you finished with the book?”
“What still needs to be finished?”
The main Mystery Flesh Pit coffee table-style book is, like many other projects, paused while I’m working on the TTRPG book. Paid projects take priority! I will continue working on it as soon as I can; much of the art I’m working on for the TTRPG book will also be featured in the coffee table book. The biggest missing piece of the big artbook is the writing. I have much of it finished, but there is still a lot of editing that needs to be done.
“Is spectral haptics still continuing?”
Yes, but see the answers above. Paid projects take priority, and right now Spectral Haptics is third on the list behind the TTRPG and the coffee-table book. There is a possibility of me making time to create a small video for SH if for no other reason than to avoid burnout, but I’m not going to promise anything.
Some of the most sought-after artifacts surrounding the legacy of the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park are those items directly connected to the catastrophic 2007 tragedy. Such pieces of ephemera are rare to find in a salvageable condition, owing primarily to the amount of destruction wrought by the accident. Though the now-infamous CGR investigative report has long been made public, there remain many unanswered questions and inconsistencies, with some official reports offering wholly incongruous numbers with regards to total human casualties. In 2022 it is still unknown if the full scope of the accident will ever be entirely known to those outside of Senate committee chambers or Corporate board rooms. Despite this obfuscation, I believe that the truth can be deciphered from the tattered, bloodied, half-digested mementos and souvenirs of the thousands of visitors, workers, and families who suffered for hours (in a few cases days) as they were horrifically eaten alive in a terrible demonstration of wanton brutality on a scale previously unknown in recorded history. Can you imagine their terror? Can any of us really perceive the horror of those visitors as they realized that the end result of a lifetime of hopes, dreams, relationships, and destinies was to be consumed? These lifeless artifacts remain as more than just a testament; they are all that remain.
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Following its accidental discovery, the Mystery Flesh Pit and the unique phenomena surrounding it were targets of a headfirst and furiously paced campaign of commercial exploitation. Once architects, engineers, geobiologists and clerical members of the development team had done their work to make the park safe and viable, marketing teams faced the daunting task of selling the public on the intriguing and miraculous phenomena of the Mystery Flesh Pit while downplaying the visceral cosmic horror of the pit itself.
Families were a particularly difficult sell, as children often displayed an overwhelming fear and aversion to descending into the throat of the pit. One strategy early in the park’s history was the creation of friendly cartoon mascot Caver Coop. A brief animated film starring Caver Coop was shown at the park’s visitor center, where the character would attempt to assuage worries about being “eaten alive” or “swallowed”, reassuring children (and often parents) that the pit was perfectly safe and reinforced.
When the attraction was absorbed into the National Park System in the early 1980s, signage and other graphic materials were updated to the NPS Graphic Identity. The architecture of the park’s surface facilities was also expanded and renovated during this time to better fit with the “Natural Resort” image of the Mystery Flesh Pit brand, drawing inspiration from the local Santa Fe style integrated with unique bone formations discovered within the pit itself.
-Excerpt from New York Times Bestseller Unearthing the Unholy: Exploring the tragedy of the Mystery Flesh Pit, written by Dr. Rachel Frost, published 2011.
Though the Mystery Flesh Pit National park remained a model of visitor safety until the disaster which led to its closure, the natural hazards of the pit necessitated guests being aware of the nature of the attraction they were descending into. This brochure, combined with a mandatory 3-minute orientation film shown in the lower visitor center, was intended to act as a minimum standard of readiness for inexperienced park guests. Park service staff, rangers, and anodyne mining personnel received much more in-depth training as part of their operations within the pit.
This is a tourist map of Gumption, TX from around the year 1998, meant to be a caricature of the city’s “historic” downtown area. Gumption TX, pop. 11,500 at its peak, is a small town located approx. 22 miles north of the surface orifice of the Mystery Flesh Pit. Throughout the discovery and development of the park, Gumption served as an important staging area for explorations of the pit before full facilities were set up, all the while eagerly selling any and every vice imaginable to the thousands of roughneck workers who flooded into the region to build the infrastructure within the pit. By the middle of the 1980s, families were the primary draw of the unique national park, so the city pivoted to keep up with the demands of tourism. Today, some 14 years after the closure of the park, the city of Gumption is an almost empty town, a fraction of its former size. The few hotels and restaurants left cater mainly to the routine droves of specialist workers and crews which labor to keep the slumbering superorganism contained, its empty streets haunted by the spectre of a golden era gone by.
Coke Heartthrob was first introduced on Valentines Day in 1985 as a limited promotion, but sold so well over the summer that Coca Cola added it to their primary beverage roster in 1986. The defining ingredient in Coke Heartthrob was, of course, amniotic ballast harvested from special glands deep within the Mystery Flesh Pit. The potent aphrodisiacal properties of amniotic ballast were diminished by heavily diluting the chemical before adding it to the beverage, but Coke Heartthrob still developed a notorious reputation for its unusual intoxicating effects. The taste of Coke Heartthrob was described as “Syrupy-Sweet” with hints of “Amaretto & Rosewater”, and the beverage had a light pheromonal scent similar to perfume. A combination of increasing extraction costs after the 2007 tragedy, as well as changing cultural attitudes, ultimately saw the decline of Coke Heartthrob sales until the Coca Cola company decided to discontinue the beverage in 2011.
This chart, and many others like it, were produced by the Park Service as an educational tool for use in classrooms, museums and universities. Popular among natural history enthusiasts, the illustrations featured on these posters were the result of intensive expeditions and surveys into the Mystery Flesh Pit. While visitors are almost certain to encounter common fauna such as the myriad of Macrobacteria subspecies, many organisms such as the Venous Shamble and Abyssal Copepod tend to evade trails and high-traffic areas, making them difficult to spot. As a practical tool, these illustrations were useful in training Wildlife Management rangers in proper firearm techniques for safely dispatching a dangerous organism. For this reason, the designers of this and other charts attempted to represent the scale of the organisms in relation to each other as accurately as possible.
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