Adventures High and Low

I’ve been gone for a while, but I am now back into fairly-constant wifi and hot shower territory! 

It’s been a heck of an adventure since I posted last, and the catch-up posts will take at least a few days. General outline: we spent several days in Cuericí, a high montane primary and secondary forest reserve in the Talamanca mountains, right on the continental divide of Central America (not sure about the term “continental divide” here, but that’s how it was described to me), and then hiked 23 km in to Sirena Station in Corcovado National Park on the Osa Peninsula, a huge tract of primary lowland rainforest. Each place was “jungle” like you’d imagine from books and movies, though one was fairly high and cold and wet while the other was low and hot and damp (and buggy beyond belief). 

Those posts will soon follow this one- just to catch you up, we have all just had nice hot showers at Las Cruces Botanical Gardens (an OTS station) and are checking our oodles of emails and messages. Glad to be back in contact with the world- the jungle was getting pretty surreal. Find out why SOON!

 

Tree-root Bridge

One of the best sights from yesterday deserved its own post.

As we were scrambling along the stream on our way to our next sampling site, I came around a corner and saw what looked like a bridge ahead. I was surprised to see a path so far off from where we had expected one… but it wasn’t actually a path at all. It was a huge tree root that sometime in the decades past had reached across the ravine and grown itself supports, anchoring the tree and creating a natural barrier and bridge across the stream.

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The forest here is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Read my previous post for more musings on time.