Hey y’all!
Sorry for being a little late posting for yesterday, but it’ll be worth it! We started the day early with a cool sighting of a Black Howler Monkey family group (after they had woken us up with their LOUD calls)! We then got special permission to enter the Las Cuevas Cave! The cave is a protected archaeological and cultural site, so we weren’t allowed to take pictures. The cave was enormous inside, with Maya steps, building foundations, and pottery. It is right below a temple that archaeologists think was seen as a special ceremonial place for the Maya.
We then hiked around the trails collecting our pitfall traps–and finding really cool animals like this Wolf Spider hiding in the leaf litter and the Basilisk that Dr. Solomon caught!
We worked as a group to write and draw our findings on our poster and present to the professors, and it was pretty cool to see it all come together with our team work!
After all of our presentations were done, we started probably the most tiresome but breathtaking hike of my life. We climbed about half an hour through and up a steep path riddled with Maya structures. My watch even said I got 2x, 3x, and 4x my stairstep goal in ten minutes! At the hilltop, we climbed up the Bird Tower and watched the most beautiful sunset I have ever seen in my entire life! Minus the station, there was no sign of any human life in the rolling mountains of the rainforest!
From there, the world changed as we climbed down from the heavenly sunset to the eerie world of the nighttime rainforest. The lights from our helmets were all that cut through the heavy curtain of darkness, and I had to remind myself that I needed to look out for all of the predators on the prowl.
Somehow, this hike was the most exhausting, spooky, and indescribably beautiful experience I have ever had, and I would do it all over again if I could!