Still behind . . .

Now that you had something interesting to read, it´s back to the laundry lists so I can be on track when I get back from the coast. We leave on Monday to commence such diversions as counting crabs, hitching rides in the backs of pickups, poking limpets, and tanning.

So after our last stop at Papallacta, we started back down, observing disturbed areas along rivers and roadsides while still trying to not get hit by speeding semis. See pictures of crazy plants on facebook. We said goodbye to our hitchiking frineds and beat it to the hotsprings - perhaps the best by-product of volcanic activity that everyone can appreciate. A favorite activity was going from the hottest pool (complete with brown algae), to submersing ourselves in the small stream that ran around the back. Estimated temperature difference - forty degrees.

Hmm, that was last Friday. Now I´m only about five days behind.
Saturday was a series of Indian markets and a volcanic lake, an dSunday was the Cotopaxi volcano where we started *gasp* science.

And now for something completely different . . .

 So I read through my blog just now and realized just how much it sounded like a laundry list of bus rides. All of you apparently think fondly enough of me to read it anyway, but I decided to spice it up a little by throwing in some field notes. Great, you think. Now something that IS a laundry list. But these are the unofficial field notes that I´m not turning in, which means they morphed into something much more enjoyable. To write, at least. But after all this explaining you´re really not gonna stop reading, are you? 

The Evolution of Field Notes

Actually, it´s more like the original idea of descent with modification. I didn´t mean to do it, it just happened that way. Note the pivotal transition to sentence form.

Pine plantations

good wood, economical

planted in rows

so that those closest to the road

are simply stripped, shortened

used as living fenceposts

Same is done @ park entrance --- recognizeable only for the sign that marks it.

These ones are cut to a point, and the tops are painted white to deter rot.

They look like giant pencils.

I want to pull one out and color the Andes - big triangles with jagged snowcaps.

Then the angry volcanic fissures, almost poked there with a tightened fist.

Then the boulders awkwardly littering the paramo

like foreign pebbles cast from a giant´s shoe.

slate grey looming on a brown cover that looks deceptively fertile

Then I would shade in the washouts and a tiny whitetail would spring into penciled existence, bound up the hillside and away. 

Perhaps a rabbit would skitter frenzied from the shrubby cover lower down - reduced, mouse-like ears flattened against the harsh wind, heart bashing equally against the ribcage.

Then a hawk, with shiny black wings caked in graphite, might seize it for the biggest meal it would land in a week. Anything left would be pounced on by one of three naked-headed vultures, each one twice as black and four times as ugly as the last.

Then suddenly the wind would change, and all would go about their lives alone

And I would put the pencil back 

because it is alive, 

after all.

High and, wait, Not dry

Then we  inched up into increasing whiteness  - a fog I had never even seen on the arctic tundra - which made the whole endeavor a lot mistier than I expected. Dominant vegetation - bunch grass. We picked up a couple of birwatchers who had been unsuccessfully scanning the indistinguishable sky since 6 AM. Fortunately, we had a half-empty bus and a captive audience, and so found out that they were actually biologists from Southern California - Stephanie White a marine biologist, and Rob Baty whoo had worked on the extensive effort to rehabilitate the California condor. Break out the snacks and let the stories begin.

The cool thing about snacks is that, with this kind of altitude, you have to eat sugar all the time. I decided to do it the local way, and bought a brick-sized hunk of brown sugar, panela,  for 50 cents, broke it up with the kitchen mallet intended for that purpose, and shared the wealth.

We would make one more stop on the way up, to a zonation populated only by cushion plants and lichen. And a bunch of nutshells hualed up there to prevent erosion. Lesson of the day- No, children, palm nuts are not found at 14, 000 feet . . .

Into the forest

So . . . there we were in the Polylepis forest, one of the last strongholds of native vegetation in the country. The trees grow in cool, boggy areas, so we crawled down into what would have been a swamp if it wasn´t for tons of moss and sharp grass to make the ground solid.

It sort´ve makes one feel a part of the slightly creepy, but still delightfully strange part of the pre-Disney fairy tales. Legend even tells of Llagantes, or Incan treasure hidden in Polylepis lakes. But I´m pretty sure they only tell that story to white peeople . . .

The trees themselves are low, gnarled, and slow growing, which is why they were replaced by beech, pine, and eucalyptus for construction purposes. As, is, they make for perfect climbing, and the bark has the texture of layers and lyaers of half'burnt paper. The was all kinds of moss everywhere, and little snapdragons that looked like shoes )zapatitos.) I got my own shoe wet crossing the stream for optimal tree climbing, but there were dry socks  and still half the mountain waiting up at the road.

OK back to Papallacta . . .

So, after we visited the sewer river on Saturday, we headed up the gradient a bit and stopped at another bridge. The landscape looked surprisingly familiar, and before I even got off the bus, I had to verify that the surrounding rock was indeed tufa. What I didn´t know was that tufa is already an hispanization, and that real geologists call it ´tuff.´

Tufa is way harder than I had previously thought, being comprised of volcanic ashfall bascially compressed to a brick. It is surprisingly resistant to erosion, despite its sandy appearance, and it took quite a while for the river 300 m below to establish itself. There were a few flowering plants, some shrubs, the ever-present eucalyptus, and huge agaves just hanging off the cliffside. You know the soil´s not ideal when native plants still grow there . . .

The bus continued its climb up Papallacta into un ambiente increasingly colder, mistier, greener, and full of domesticated llamas grazing on 50-degree slopes. We stopped along the highway and crawled down into what I can only describe as the prehistoric birthplace of hobbits, otherwise known as the elfin forest (that is, if the speaker alludes to the gnome-like keebler elf and not the proper Tolkienesque counterparts . . .)

Dang it - I´m out of order

So Papallacta was Friday and Cotopaxi was Sunday. Both involved planty and geology things. Will sort it out tomorrow . . .

Haha - left you hanging . . .

Wow, it´s a good thing not too much happens during the week, ´cause I have a lot of weekend catching up to do . . .

So we drove up to Cotopaxi National Park on roads that make the Main Hill road look like a great place to start your teenager driving. Quito is at about 9,000 ft, so we were climbing pretty high just to get up there. Wow, I realize how bad my English sounds and it would actually be kinda funny if my Spanish was better . . .

Right at the bottom of the Cotopaxi volcano itself is a eucalyptus plantation. Eucalyptus is everywhere, and is not native. It was brought from - guess where? - as a fast-growing, straight tree for construction. Its fragrant smell is actually a chemical that inhibits the growth of other plants. This makes for virtually no understory, a change in the overall soil chemistry over time, and there aren´t even koalas for compensation . . .

I realize this is a diverse audience, but for those of you who doubt that I am doing sicence;

We did a few little excercises with (plant) species diversity in the area, and averaged about ten - from the Eucalyptos themselves and the few mosses that cling to them, to the hardiest grass that can somehow tolerate growing in cough-drop-flavored dirt.

We continued on for another 20 min to the museum that every park is obligated to have.
The tiny, dated exhibit showcased (in the form of taxidermy and washed-out 80´s photos) a bit of what we were about to see in the Andean highlands - not much, but a few cool things including a small deer, a few hawks, a rabbit that looks a lot like a pika (the general rule is that your extermities, ears inlcuded, get smaller as the temperature drops), and the Andean Wolf. It looks like a coyote, lives like a fox (solitary) and is genetically a wolf.
here was also a stuffed condor, young, but still huge. It´s actually the heaviest bird that can still fly, and the national symbol of Ecuador. I think I like the eagle better. I´d even go for the wild turkey. But I guess there is something impressive about a vulture with a ten-foot wind span . . .

But we came to see plants in the Paramo (PAHR - uh -mo), and nobody goes to a museum to learn about plants, so after partaking of the 25-cent empanadas, we piled back into the bus to continue our ascent.

More tomorrow . . .