Fredy GómezIn Las Orquídeas National Park in Colombia, it rains throughout the year and trails are difficult. Mud pools turn into deep trenches with the passage of time.
Paola Pedraza, assistant curator of the Institute of Systematic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden, writes about her recent expedition to catalog the flora of Las Orquídeas National Park, Colombia.
Julio BetancurThe park is named after its orchids, a prominent component of its flora.Our destination is Las Orquídeas National Park, a protected area named after the many orchids that grow abundantly across the park’s great altitudinal range. The park is located in western Colombia, on the slopes of one of the three separate cordilleras (mountain ranges) of the northern Andes of South America. The park has a reputation as a paradise for plant diversity that can be traced back to 1848, when European collectors started traveling to this general region to extract prized orchids. Nevertheless, botanical exploration of the region has been stymied by its extreme isolation, rough terrain, torrential rains and, in more recent times, the violence caused by the armed conflict in Colombia.
Our goal is to document the plant diversity of Las Orquídeas National Park, and we are heading to Los Venados, a field station in the upper lowland Chocó forest that will be our home and laboratory. Our team of 11 people includes botanists, graduate students and park rangers; all of us are coming from different places and meeting in Urrao, a charming agriculturally oriented town. From here we will have to navigate bumpy dirt roads, but the comfort of vehicles ends very early in the trip, because for two weeks we will have to ride mules and walk. We are heading to a forested area with very rough terrain, so mules are preferred over horses as they are strong, withstand bad weather and have better footing on narrow and muddy passages.
Julio BetancurThe team of botanists, graduate students and park rangers spent two weeks riding mules and walking in the mountains and piedmont.Urrao, in northwestern Colombia, is about 13 hours from Bogotá, the country’s capital, and it is the last town on the main paved road. After Urrao we won’t find supply stores or medical centers, so we need to bring with us everything we may need and more. From Urrao we travel to La Encarnación in four-wheel-drive vehicles, bringing with us the remainder of the cargo that the advance team a week earlier could not carry to the entrance of the park. La Encarnación, a very small village that was practically abandoned after a massacre two decades ago, is a couple of hours from Urrao. Though some buildings have not been reconstructed, bearing witness to the dark past, today the village is a lively place on the weekends as the Indians and farmers that live in and beyond the park pass through on their way to Urrao to buy supplies and trade.
This region is very rainy, and the larger truck gets stuck in the mud almost immediately. It turns out not to be a major problem, but I am concerned that it could be a sign of the bad roads and trails ahead of us. This will definitely be a challenging expedition.
Although it took a day to get to La Encarnación, it is from here that our long journey will really begin, on the back of skilled but stubborn mules. The field station Los Venados is two days from La Encarnación, and we will need to spend the night at the park’s entrance after six hours descending on mules through lush cloud forests. From there, it will be another five hours to the expedition’s main base. Calculating travel time on a scientific expedition is tricky business; we do not walk or ride mules as fast as locals do (we wish we could), and we are constantly distracted by every single bit of green before our eyes. Temptation in this national park is too great. We have come to collect plants in one of the most biologically diverse and threatened places in the world, and we could spend the entire day working in the same patch of forest without advancing more than a hundred meters. Thus, to reach the park’s entrance before nightfall, our strategy is to stay on the mules during the long descent.
After repacking the equipment in sacks made out of agave fibers and watching how skillfully the loads are tied to the mules waiting for us at La Encarnación, we are finally ready to go. We have a big convoy of 17 mules heading to Los Venados before midday — what a success! With all the people, equipment and hard terrain ahead of us, this is a logistically challenging expedition. Fortunately all the preparation is finally paying off, largely thanks to the collaboration of the staff of Las Orquídeas National Park.
Fredy GómezWe are a large team, and it would be dangerous to move in the forests after nightfall. We struggle to ignore the plants along the way.The pace is slow because the mud pools are deep. Mules occasionally get stuck. The trails are sometimes carved into the mountain, turning into narrow trenches excavated by water and decades of transit. They can be more than six feet deep and only a couple of feet wide. In the narrowest passages, we have to pull our legs up sometimes or risk getting scratched or worse. For sure, the mules we are riding are saving us energy, but riding on these treacherous trails is not an easy job. We have to be constantly alert to duck under low branches hanging over the trail, be ready to awkwardly jump over fallen trees with the mules, and avoid slippery slopes. Moreover, mules can have strong personalities and act like, well, mules. Soon enough some of the animals realize we are not mule herders and make our lives more interesting by making their own decisions and ignoring our pleas to stop or turn. A few times I just decide to close my eyes and let my mule, Manzanilla, do her job. She probably knows what is safer; at least, I hope so.
As we are riding downhill most of the time, we have to keep hugging the mules with our legs and knees. By the time we reach the cabin at the park’s entrance we are eager to get off the animals and stretch our legs. At this point I do not think anybody is too thrilled about riding again tomorrow, but we are excited by the work ahead of us as we have seen many trees and shrubs in flower or fruit.
Fredy GómezPrimary forest in Las Orquídeas National Park, Colombia, home to a spectacularly diverse flora.Colombia does not have a reputation as a paradise of biological diversity. But it is a country with a remarkable richness of species, considered the second-richest country in the world in plant species and orchids. And western Colombia, where we are, is regarded as one of the most exciting frontiers for botanical exploration in the New World tropics. Much of Colombia’s territory remains understudied and unexplored, and tomorrow we will experience firsthand the richness of the plants of the endangered Andean and Chocó forests.
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