La Coca Trail

 
 
 
 
Ok - finally getting around to finishing up the pictures of the rainforest trip last weekend. The pictures I'm posting tonight are kinda jumbled and out of order; the program I use to publish to the web is putting up a fight tonight and in the name of getting this done, I'm just going to post them in the order they came up.

We decided to do La Coca Trail on the advice of one of the local blogs I follow. In their opinion, it is the prettiest, most untraveled, and most jungle-like of the trails. It's also the hardest trail in the park, and not on any of the published trail maps. Yep, you throw those descriptions at us, and we're suckers. We're GOING to go. Length-wise, the trail's only 1.5 miles in and then the same distance back out. Not long. The kicker is that it changes elevation close to 800 feet in that mile and a half. Still not too bad. The kicker is the mud. Everything is slick, snotty, boot-suckin mud. THAT made it really difficult. If you weren't fighting not to skate down a cliff face on your butt, you were fighting to get you foot dislodged from sticky goo. They recommended giving yourself 6 hours to do the hike. We spent 4 hours, and didn't even make it to the end. Granted, most of that was because we had to play in every waterfall we passed along the way, but if you ask me, that's most of the fun.

The last 3 photos are from the first waterfall we came to. The rock going up to is was really amazing - it made its own natural ladder for us. I liked the way the water was running around my boot as I stepped up the face too. This was right before I got my boot stuck and tore the heck out of the toe of it trying to get free. As Steve puts it, they're now "happy boots"