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| In the tropical rainforest |
You will notice I have only one number for two named summits. Los Picachos is not considered a ranked summit. This is a hike I did with Carrie on the 19th of January on our trip to Puerto Rico January 7-22. This entry is taken directly from my travel journal.
We were among the first cars in the forest. The trail we wanted to do left from near the Palo Colorado Visitor Center. We were able to park easily, with our choice of most of the spots, in the small, visitor-center parking lot. We changed, brushed our teeth (seeing a warning about rabid Indian Mongoose in the forest), and headed up the trail. Immediately we stopped to see the Baño Grande, which was just a large rock pool that caught the creek water—it had been a public pool up to the 1970s or so. We then struck out on the El Yunque trail.
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| Bags of fill for trail maintenance |
The trail was paved for the first 50 meters or so and then turned into a nice, well-maintained gravel trail with a nice grade. The rocks were wet and loose and there was some mud, but the grade was great. We had come into the hike in the only tropical rainforest in the United States Forest Service system expecting trails like we had hiked in Africa, or maybe at least some of the steep trails of the Great Bear, but we were pleasantly surprised.
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| Pink flower |
The maintenance they seemed to rely on most was proper drainage and fill. The fill was all stationed in large, neat piles of gravel in clear, tough plastic bags, resembling sandbags. In spots where they needed to make up some grade they would stack as many gravel bags as was necessary. It seemed like perhaps they covered them with gravel to disguise them, but we saw many exposed and being walked on. Another oddity in the maintenance was that the many lateral drains led to a drain across the trail to allow the water off, and most of the drains had large stepping stones or even a couple gravel bags in the middle, not only making the step nice and easier than needed, but also blocking the drain and making it useless.
We carried on despite the confusion over new kinds of trail work. The forest was beautiful, full of greens of every shade in the trees and the moss and the moss on the trees. Flowers bloomed up close to the trail in pearly whites and soft yellows and further from the trail near the running water in pinks, bright against the greens and browns.
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| White flowers |
The day was a little overcast with broken clouds moving in and out, but in the forest it was always a little dark and very few views that were not fully obstructed by giant leaves and trunks of trees. As we neared the top we broke out of the dense forest and found a rocky outcrop. The views down through the forest were impressive. We could see out to all the towns and development along highway 3 and caught brief cloudy views to the Atlantic Ocean. Los Picachos was just in front of us and below us and the summit of El Yunque was right behind us. This was my first view of the towers and I knew this would be no remote, jungle summit.
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| Los Picachos |
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| Carrie climbing summit tower |
Past the rock outcrop we turned on the trail and worked our way back onto a forested side of the mountain. Not long after we came to the end of the trail. It ended at a forest service road. There were towers and a couple small buildings. One green building had a small car parked in front of it and a man inside, with door and windows wide open, watching his television. We said hello and continued up the road towards the highpoint. At the highest point of the road there was a little tower. It had a room with a fire place in the bottom and a flight of stairs that wrapped around to the top. We sat and enjoyed the top of El Yunque. I pulled out a coconut and cracked it on the concrete. We collected what little we could of the milk and then began to eat the coconut. It was a pleasant way to celebrate on a summit in the rainforest.
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| Rainforest summit treat |
After snacking we headed down and started seeing people once we were back on the trail. We turned off and took the side trip over to Los Picachos, which was another nice vantage. When we made it down to the junction with the Mt. Britton trail we decided that we would save time and not go out to it—we could see it from El Yunque and it didn’t look like anything but another stone lookout tower on a point on a ridge. When we were down far enough we looped up our hike by taking the Baño de Oro trail back to the road 50 meters from the car. In all we had seen at least 60 people on the trail. We were glad we had the early start and were the first to the summit, unless the man watching TV drove up there at the beginning of his shift at the communications building. He would have then had to get out of his car and climb to the top of the stone tower to get to the USGS marker. We were probably the first that day.
Elevation gain: 1560' Total gain: 19,980'
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