We set up camp, ate lunch, and promptly went for our first hike. Emilie, our guide, suggested that we hike up to a ridge that was just behind our camp. She thought it would be perhaps a four hour hike. We made the hike but we didn’t get as far as expected. To give a brief quote from my journal, “We needed three machetes and three guys to swing them”. But that wasn’t all.

There are no trails in these parks and the vegetation is dense. The ground is boggy with mud holes and small streams. We never found a single game trail to follow. The ground itself was amazingly soft and had tussocks. I would say that nearly the entire surface of the mountain was like a giant sponge or a foam mattress. Our boots would sink down with each step somewhere between two and twelve inches. So we were fighting the underbrush above and struggling with the ground below. I would not call it unpleasant, just hard work. For the most part, we each made our own trail as it was not feasible to try and follow each other. Each step involved decisions and none of us ever made the same ones.

In the first photo, you can see our starting area. It looked dense but not really too difficult. I was not too far in front of Andrew when he took this photo but you can barely see my blue coat in the middle of the photo. April was really in a nice opening in the second photo.

The third photo is not a good photo but I have a story. This is me taking a photo of my left boot. Yes, it’s out of focus. But you might be able to notice that my foot is about twelve to fifteen inches below the surface of the ground. Our feet just disappeared into the ground each time we took a step.

I happened to be behind April in the fourth photo. We covered quite a bit of ground just like this. We only generally knew which way we were going. Shortly after this photo, I looked ahead and April was on the ground. I didn’t see her fall but it happened to me several times. A big branch would push back but my feet wouldn’t give and over I would go. At any rate, I caught up to April and she just said, “I live here now; forward my mail”. I understood.

The trekking got easier as we got up towards the rocky ridge. But even then, as you can see in the last photo, it was still not easy hiking. April and I were coming up but still working hard.