If you didn’t know, there are a lot of mountains in Ecuador. Quito sits between two mountain ranges, and recently I’ve also visited the mountains of the Paramo, Cotopaxi, and the Cloud Forest. That’s a lot of mountain experiences since my last blog!
These field trip adventures could also be described as mountain-top experiences in the metaphorical sense. I got to see some truly amazing views, learn about fascinating ecosystems, eat more delicious food, and take lots of smiling photos with my cohort. But, when I reflect on the highlights of these adventures, I realize that the photo evidence doesn’t fully explain what these experiences were all about.
So for these next two blog posts, I’m going to share photos of some of my most memorable moments on my three most recent mountain adventures: Paramo, Cotopaxi, and Cloud Forest. We’re going to do a little behind-the-scenes photo tour and see what these mountain-top experiences are made of.
Paramo
Our Paramo adventure took place Monday through Wednesday of the week of the 11th: a short but jam-packed trip. One of my favorite moments was discovering the house we would be staying in.
At this point, we were coming off a delicious lunch followed by the excitement of having just witnessed Andean Condors and a baby Andean Bear. When we saw where we were staying, we were pretty hyped.
Yup, those are the views from our porch. That, along with our perfectly cozy cabin had all of us running around, taking pictures, and exclaiming with delight. It’s easy to see why we were so excited.
A short while later, our professors managed to round us up for a botany lesson. We smushed together and picked apart the flowers they had collected, still full of the day’s enthusiasm.
More than the views and the cabin, I think we were feeling the excitement of the unexpected, and the start of an adventure. The beautiful location was a complete surprise, and the Paramo ecosystem was so new to us all. We had the anticipation of what the next few days would bring.
Here we are on the second day of our trip. In this photo, we are doing our work exam project, which entailed making quadrants and counting the plant species in order to calculate diversity. We look pretty happy, and once again, the landscape is gorgeous. But what you can’t see is that it had been raining all afternoon, and by this point, we were soaked. And cold. And muddy. Add to this that we ran out of time towards the end, so we were feeling the pressure of scribbling down the last morphospecies counts in our water-proof notebooks. Needless to say, we were all very glad when we got back to our cabin and had a dry change of clothes.
This experience was a little miserable for some people, but personally, I enjoyed it. It helped that my socks stayed dry, but I also have plenty of experience being wet and dirty, and I’ve found that really don’t mind it that much. In fact, it makes me feel like a human when I can be totally muddy and nobody cares. So, even though it wasn’t the most cozy experience, it was still a part of the adventure.
Other Paramo highlights included poking at cushion plants and jumping into a freezing lake. Somehow, the tiny plants were just as fascinating as the view, and being cold and wet from the lake was fun, even though being cold and wet from the rain wasn’t.
It just goes to show that only part of what makes an experience good or bad is the events themselves. A big part of it was our group attitude, whether that be curiosity, frustration, or a sense of adventure.
Stay tuned for part 2 to hear about Cotopaxi and Cloud Forest, as well as a bit more reflection tying everything together!
Hasta luego!
-Megan
The post Mountains and what they are made of (part 1) appeared first on Off-Campus Study.