Trips about Hiking
Buttermilk Falls
Not having a car when I first at Cornell, the only park I could get to by bus was Buttermilk Falls State Park, which is where I went on this day. Like all of the areas around Ithaca, it's a beautiful area.
Tumac Mountain
One of the other REU students was an avid hiker, and got two of us to go hiking with her up Tumac Moutains - in the Cascade mountains. Not the hardest hike, but very nice and beautiful scenery. The only problem was the large number of mosquitoes - more than I've ever seen before. In fact, it's possible to see them in some of my photographs. Still, we did survive to make it back down the mountain.
Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica
Please see the first post on Costa Rica for important details about this post.
Manuel Antonio is one of the most popular parks in Costa Rica. This is good because the trails are well maintained and the good facilities. It's bad because of the number of people and the fact that the wildlife is completely not afraid of humans. The national park is definitely known for its 3 beautiful beaches that are better maintained than the one in Manuel Antonio. Upon entering, the first beach is Playa Espadilla Sur, beautiful but not that popular:
Further into the park is the most popular beach, Playa Manuel Antonio, which is sheltered and thus has calm water:
And finally, there's Playa Punto Escondido, where iguanas like to spend as much time as humans:
Supposedly, one of the best ways to see things at such a park is to use a guide. However, we were better at spotting animals than our guide and the animals are generally so plentiful that its hard to miss them. Sloths are one of the trickier animals to spot, but we were lucky enough to find this one climbing up from the ground:
Another common animal is the capuchin or white-faced monkey. Those were the easiest to spot as they were simply everywhere:
Among the more rare larger animals was this anteater I spotted:
Finally, there are plenty of smaller creatures everywhere. Among the more prevalent kinds are land crabs and iguanas, as well as weird grasshoppers:
All in all, Manuel Antonio was interesting, but it felt more like a zoo than a real park. Animals were just too plentiful and too unafraid of humans.
Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge, Costa Rica
Please see the first post on Costa Rica for important details about this post.
At the time we were in Puerto Viejo, the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge was all private land with trails leading through it and which almost required a guide due to the lack of signs. It seems that as of 2008, the refuge is now a national wildlife refuge with an entrance fee and (hopefully) better maintained trails. In any case, we hired a guide who was absolutely amazing (his name is Tino), could find birds by the sounds they made, and had probably memorized just about every inch of that refuge.
The diversity of wildlife in the refuge was extraordinary. Birds were everywhere and I was even able to get several photographs of hummingbirds:
Besides birds we saw poisonous frogs and snakes, sand crabs, howler monkeys, and interesting mushrooms:
Rincón de la Vieja National Park
Please see the first post on Costa Rica for important details about this post.
Not too far from Liberia is Rincón de la Vieja National Park - one of the more remote parks in Costa Rica. After driving over 20 km of gravel road, one reaches a small parking lot with a ranger station and a trail map, from where you can hike to several different places. One of the nicer areas is supposedly some waterfalls, but unfortunately halfway to the waterfalls it started pouring and the trails flooded very quickly.
However, right at the beginning of the trial we started hearing an increasing number of rustling noises. In a few minutes we watched a whole group of coatis (related to raccoons) cross the trail and field, including several young coatis. Here's some of them:
We finally got back to the car completely soaked, but luckily with nothing damaged.