The Coldest Place in Costa Rica

This week we had our first big adventure leaving the reserve, and summited Mt. Chirripo! Chirripo is Costa Rica's biggest mountain, and the second largest in Central America, at 12,530 feet. I think that that makes it the tallest mountain I've ever made it to the top of (though I have been that high before, both in Colorado and Ecuador). It was quite the hike, but well worth it.

Our first hurdle was getting the necessary permits. Chirripo is located in a national park (the one that Cloudbridge abuts), and so a limited number of passes are sold to go in each day. Because we wanted to spend the night at base camp 3/4 of the way up the mountain, we needed permits to stay, as well as simply get in. 15 permits for each day are sold by phone, but these tend to be reserved months in advance. However, they also reserve 10 tickets/day for people who show up at the office and want to climb the next day. The office being a little downhill of San Gerardo (about an hours walk), this was the option for us. So, after canvassing the other volunteers and rounding up two others crazy enough to want to hike with us, we arrived at the office on Friday at 12:05 on our way back from San Isidro in the reserve's truck. We were waved away - the office had closed at 12 for lunch and wouldn't reopen until 1. So we patiently got lunch in San Gerardo before returning by car to the office, where we learned that there were two spots available for hiking up Saturday, but certainly not 4. We came home, and decided to head down in the morning to see if we could go up Sunday. Arriving at 10 on Saturday was still pushing it, as Carlos, the friendly parks ranger in charge, informed us that he remembered us, but we were very late! He'd already sold a lot of tickets that day. Luckily, we were able to get our 4. That night we packed, trying to keep our backpacks as light as possible while also bringing all of our warm clothes. We'd heard the base camp was freezing.

The Chirripo Trail actually begins a bit before Cloudbridge, at something like 4,987, but it later runs through the top corner of Cloudbridge, and there are trails in the reserve that meet up with it. So, when we started at 5:30 AM, we elected to walk out our front door and start heading up, through the reserve rather than down to the trailhead. This was probably a good decision, but definitely made our first hour steeper than it had to be. But, while still in Cloudbridge we saw another Black-speckled Palm Pit-viper! And got pictures of it!

The trail itself was a sloppy mess by the time we reached it. While we are only at the beginning of the rainy season, the porters who can be hired to take your gear up the mountain use horses, which churn everything up. The soil here has a lot of clay in it, so it was slippery going at first.

The hike to base camp is 14.5 km (9 miles), with an elevation gain of about 6,000 feet. We took frequent breaks, and it ended up taking us 8 hours. The first 2/3 or so were in cloud forest, where we hiked through some big old oaks and lots of Spanish Moss. Eventually we came out of the trees into the alpine zone. The area we hiked through had burned, so there were some skeletal trees, but the vegetation was decidedly alpine, and it was hard to imagine what it had been like with trees. I saw indian paintbrush, lupin, and geraniums that all looked similar to those found in the West, but also lots of unfamiliar plants. As the air got thinner and general exhaustion set in, there were more and more inspirational messages such as this one:

I continued my slow plod up the hill (the boys even waited for me fairly often), and we made it to base camp just as the afternoon rains began. We spent the afternoon resting, and even though lights out wasn't until 8, we were in bed by 6:45, preparing to wake up at 3 the next morning.

In the morning we had another 5.1 km (~3 miles) and ~1,500 feet to climb before getting to the summit, where we hoped to see the sunrise. We almost made it... we were making the final ascent as the sun came up. Here's a picture of Chirripo, where you can see someone's headlamp near the top.

Views from the top were great (though we didn't see both oceans), and we sent you all a SPOT at 5:40!

We arrived back at base at 7:45 (4 hours and 6 miles later), where we picked up our packs and headed down the mountain. An exhausting trip, but we're definitely glad we did it!

I'll be putting an album on facebook with more pictures, and will link to it here when I do. Update: Here's the link! Also, notice that we put an option on the right to subscribe by email! Now you don't have to check back all the time if you don't want to :)

Monkeys!!!

Today, probably due to the fact that we forgot our camera, we saw many exciting forest creatures! First, a troop (barrel!) of white-faced capuchin monkeys! They made their way past us next to the trail, and one of the females was carrying a baby on its back. It was adorable, and made me wonder why we call it "piggy-back" instead of "monkey-back." Doesn't a monkey-back ride sound just as good? It was exciting that we saw the troop, because they are a fairly rare sighting at Cloudbridge. Apparently there used to be a lot more monkeys, but then 4 years ago a freak wind event came through, that blew many roofs off houses down in town and blew down lots of flowers and fruit that the monkeys normally eat. So they all moved out, and only recently have started being seen around the reserve again. Now that we've seen the capuchins we're just hoping to see spider monkeys, which are the other kind that may be around here.

Up the trail a ways from the monkeys, we encountered a less welcome animal, the Black-speckled Palm Pitviper. This guy was a beautiful bright green, though we quickly identified it as poisonous due to its large triangular head. He was sunning himself on the path, and wasn't in any hurry to leave, so we scooched around him and continued. Despite my fear of seeing a snake (especially now that I've read up on them and learned that they mostly live in the trees) it was neat to see this one because apparently they are also fairly rare. In fact, the blog that I linked to above was written about a sighting from the hill just across the valley from us! Funny what google turns up sometimes.

In other exciting animal news, we found this super cool bug outside of our house last week:

Looks like he's covered in lichen, but we're pretty positive that that is all him... The day after discovering him, we found a giant spider in our bathtub. We captured the spider and took him as a gift to our good friend Holly (she was thrilled), but upon closer inspection found the legs and other dismembered parts of our lichen friend hidden behind our shampoo. Looks like he made a tasty treat for the spider.

Finally, a picture of a fiddlehead that we've been watching turn into a fern as we hike past every morning:

Also, here's a permalink to an album that Matt posted on facebook the other day, in case you didn't notice it there. This link should work whether or not you have an account.

The Weekend, recap.

This weekend we stayed in town (if you can call it a town) and relaxed.  Saturday we went and visited Klaus’ Secret Garden in town.  Klaus, a German man who looks like one of the seven dwarves, owns this little paradise at the bottom of the Valley.  We walked to this private botanic garden from Cloudbridge, which took us about an hour to get to the bottom of the road.  Inside we were surprised at the quality and expanse of the secret garden, which was well worth our 3 dollar entry fee.  Having hoofed it back up the hill before it rained, we relaxed and cooked Gallo Pinto, the omnipresent rice and beans.  Sunday, we slept in and got a ride down to San Gerardo for the feria, the local farmer’s market, where we bought one of everything there.  Cheese (Mozzarella!) and yogurt from one vendor; Avocados, Spinach, and Platanos from the other.  We completed our shopping at the sole store in town, and then played a little soccer with Sebastian, Jenny’s (the owner) partner’s (the co-owner I suppose) grandson who is visiting for a few days.   The hour walk uphill became a easy breezy 15 minutes in the car, and we went back to cook for the potluck!  I made arepas, and Sama made oatmeal, pecan, chocolate chip cookies (both the pecans and the chocolate chips we can not find in town, but were borrowed from Tom the manager).  BIg hits at the potluck.  We shared a meal with everyone on the reserve, and spent the rest of the evening chitchatting and playing cards.

Today We went up to the research plot and finished a whole quadrat in one day! Woohoo!  2 down, 23 to go.  We came back so Sama could get a spanish lesson from a local, and we’ve made two delicious meals with the abundance of groceries we bought yesterday. 

We send much love to the recently married Kiara and Giorgo, my cousins, and we wished we were there to celebrate on Saturday. 

Matthew

P.S.  Sama will write a blog post tomorrow with updates and pictures.

Trees, trees, trees

New experience of the week: bug bites inside my bellybutton. Somehow I attracted a lovely pest (maybe no-see-ums or chiggers) that Matt has more or less avoided entirely. I'm hopeful that they've done their worst and won't be back, but for now I have itchy red bumps over much of my torso and it many inconvenient places, such as the inside creases of both elbows :-(. I'm just happy that they aren't bed bugs, something that apparently there have been a few problems with here.

In better news, and also related to the bed... we have replaced our pillows and taken all our blankets down the hill to a local hotel with a washer/dryer, and seem to have gotten rid of most of the dust and/or mold that was inhabiting them and making both Matt and I very sneezy and congested every time we went to bed. Now the bed is inviting again! Very important for a couple of sleepy pandas.

After settling in and exploring much of the reserve, I decided to get started on this carbon study. I was able to find the data from 2006 when researchers from the Smithsonian put in the plot, which is great news. Tom, the manager, had been afraid that it was lost in a computer crash a few years ago, but with significant digging through the Cloudbridge hard drive I was able to find it. Tom's really excited too! I'm happy to have this data because it will give me a baseline which I can compare to what I gather.

So, as a quick walkthrough, what I am hoping to do is figure out how much carbon is being stored in the living trees in a hectare (about 2.5 acres) of old growth forest. The way to estimate this is by measuring the diameter of the trees at breast height (defined as 1.3 meters, Mom) and plugging this number into an equation that estimates the dry weight of the tree. Carbon is about 50% of this weight. If you are also able to estimate the height of the tree in the field using a clinometer, you can use a more accurate equation. Because I have the data from before, I should be able to figure out how much carbon has been sequestered by this plot of trees in the last 7 years.

With this idea in hand, Matt and I set out to start measuring trees Wednesday. After a grueling hour hiking uphill (about 1,100 feet elevation gain) we arrived at the plot. (I think that my new morning commute will either turn me into an incredible fit hiker or kill me). As it turns out, old growth cloud forest means that there is a lot of vegetation on a steep incline. Our first day we managed to walk the boundaries of the first quadrat (the hectare is divided into 25 20mx20m quadrats), and measure the dbh and height of 8 trees before coming down for lunch and a rainy afternoon. Today we worked more quickly, taking data on the remaining 13 tagged trees in the plot while also adding 5 that have reached the minimum dbh (10cm) since the plot was established. Even so, this is going to be a long, challenging project to get through the remaining 700 some trees. Matt has already decided that he will never be a field biologist, and I am beginning to think that it may not be what I'm cut out for either. In any case, not in the tropics.

Despite the challenges, I am hopeful that I'll be able to get some interesting data out of this study. We are living in a beautiful place, and our porch seems to be the best place for bird watching in the entire reserve. I just interrupted writing this to go get a better look at a squirrel cuckoo! We're missing everyone, and taking reservations for skype dates! We're available most anytime in the afternoon or evening, and are currently in the Mountain Time Zone.

Cloudbridge, aptly named

We've been here almost a week now, and with the conclusion of today's hike we have seen almost all of it.  Coolest things we've seen so far:

two snakes

a Coati (see wikipedia, but more or less a raccoon)

a Hawk

lots of brightly colored birds, including two Motmots, a Cherrie Tanager, many iridescent hummingbirds

Innumerable plants and flowers

some of the wierdest and most colorful insects I've seen

and most recently, leaf cutter ants!

These ants cut sections of leaves that weigh 10 times as much as they do, and then carry them back to their nest to feed to their fungus gardens.  The fungus they cultivate feeds their young.  Crazy!

Here at Cloudbridge there are at least six waterfalls we can see from the trails.  Yesterday we crossed the river, wading up to our shins to see the one farthest away. To get there we crossed a little covered bridge, and a rope bridge:

Our schedule is pretty regular.  We get up at 7:00 (8:00 for Matthew), eat a little breakfast, and go out in the morning when there is still sun.  Around 11:00 it will start to rain, though right now we are in a little dry spell (called veranilla here) so it hold off until later.  We come back for lunch, and then we have the afternoon to read, nap, research, surf the web, and neglect our blog.  It gets dark promptly at six, and chances are it rains.  Then we cook dinner, and hang out with our housemates Leonardo and Despereaux:

Arrival

First, a couple pictures to illustrate Matt's post from the other day.

This is the Rainbow Eucalyptus that we saw being logged in the park, and below is a pile of the trees.

Apparently they're non-native but used commercially for making paper, so that may be why they were logging them.

Now onto current adventures. Yesterday we arrived at Cloudbridge after a day of traveling that culminated in an old school bus bumping up a dirt road for an hour and a half to arrive at the end of the bus line in San Gerardo. In San Gerardo we met Tom, the reserve manager, who loaded us into his pickup to continue bumping up the dirt road for another couple miles. We're pretty remote here considering how slow the roads are, but distance wise I think we are only 15 miles or so from San Isidro, where we caught the bus. Google is not very helpful in telling me the distance, as it doesn't recognize that there is even a road that goes to San Gerardo.

After a brief tour of the buildings and an introduction, Tom left us to settle in. We are staying in the Casa, the main volunteer/researcher house. It has space for 4 (our double bed and two twin beds in another room), and for now we are sharing it with Veronica, a French woman who is here studying orchids. Tomorrow she will be giving a presentation about her work here, before leaving Saturday. After that it sounds like we will have the place to ourselves for a while - there will be some other volunteers coming in the next week or so, but I think they will be staying in Cabinas up the hill. We have a kitchen and a bathroom with hot water, as well as a mini-fridge (exciting because until recently there was no refrigeration here). Here's our room from our deck:

And our deck from our room:

The view from our deck looks across the canyon into old growth forest. I'm sitting here now, hoping to see a monkey!

Today we went for a hike to explore part of the reserve, before retreating home before the afternoon rain. This will probably be our normal schedule... since it's entering the rainy season we can expect rain essentially every afternoon. The reserve is beautiful - the Chirripo River runs through the middle (and right next to our house, it's a little deafening out on the porch), and so far we have already seen three gorgeous waterfalls. It looks as though we're going to need to be very self-directed here. Tom seems hands-off anyway, and is also leaving next week for two months. It's scary, but hopefully we'll figure it out as we go! This afternoon we're hoping to have a look at what sort of data is already available, both on the computers and in the research library.

That's it for now! We sent a SPOT today, but if you didn't get it, click here to see where we are in Costa Rica!

Day 2

Today, our second and final day in San Jose, we woke up at the break of 9:30, ready to conquer the city.  We strolled down the street to the Centro Colon and printed off a form we forgot in the States, then bought a juice for breakfast.  We explored La Parque Sabana (a big park two blocks from us) and saw what seemed to be the deforestation of the park.  Scores of beautiful trees reminiscent of sycamores, but colored green, orange, and brown alla Dr. Seuss were being logged in the corner closest to us.  After a 5 minute walk into the park, we encountered more trees, but upright and undisturbed.  We then proceeded to look for the Natural Science Museum supposedly right next to the National Futbol Stadium, but to no avail.  We gave up the search, and went off for lunch, where we ate at a cute hole in the wall Mexican place.   To aid our digestion we walked to a nearby park where we saw two men getting fined by the police for what seemed to be taking a bath in the fountain.  2 hours and two chapters later wikipedia told us that the guide book's map was INCORRECT and in fact the museum was not in the park at all, but rather across the street from the stadium we walked around twice.  Lonely Planet needs a better cartographer.

The rest of the day was fairly uneventful.  We wandered back downtown, took in the last of the city, sipped a cafe con leche watching the world go by, and ate at a Mediterranean fast food joint for dinner.  Tomorrow, we head for San Isidro, then San Gerardo, and finally the Cloudbridge Reserve.

San Jose

They let us into the country! Today we arrived uneventfully in San Jose, after Matt's mother's cousin Alexandra kindly drove us back to the Fort Lauderdale airport. The flight was fine (and only 2.5 hours!), immigration was easy, and customs was only an x-ray machine. Immigration didn't end up asking for our proof that we were leaving the country, so a lot of stress in the past week and $100 in fees could have been avoided if we hadn't bothered to buy bus tickets to Nicaragua.... but such is life, and it definitely would have been worse if they'd asked for proof and we didn't have any.

After exiting the airport, we fought our way through all the taxi drivers and found the bus stop, with the bus we needed already there. 1,200 colones later (about $2.50) we happily arrived at our hostel, just in time for an afternoon siesta.

Post-nap we explored downtown. We didn't find anything too exciting, but there are lots of nice parks, which make up for some of the lack of architecture. Tomorrow we'll explore the large park near us, Parque La Sabana. For dinner we made our way to a traditional Costa Rican restaurant that we found in the guidebook. I ordered black bean soup, thinking that it would be a nice simple dish... but when it arrived there were strange globular whitish things floating in it!! Great, I thought, I'm jumping straight into crazy Latin American food. First, we guessed they might be chicken hearts. Then we tried one, and it tasted familiar... maybe a very strangely shaped mushroom? Matthew guessed no, maybe chicken lungs. I was thrilled to hear this idea. I kept nibbling (really, the taste wasn't so bad), and when I cut open the next glob, I found a yolk! My first Costa Rican food adventure turned out to be nothing more than poached eggs.

Setting Sail

Welcome to our blog!  Sama and I are creating this blog so that the people we love can see what we're up to on our big adventure.  We named it The Wind Rose in an effort to combine our two passions (Biology and Geography, for those of you who haven't been paying attention).  A Wind Rose is the old fashioned term for a Compass Rose, and we hope that this blog will function as a sort of wind rose, allowing you to understand and follow our journey more easily. We both hope to provide regular updates, but we aren't promising that you'll see something new every day!

So. We've started our trip, but so far have only made it to Fort Lauderdale. Tomorrow, on to San Jose! We'll stay there for two nights before making our way to Cloudbridge. Yay adventure!