A typical week on the mountain

Friday – 16 June

It has been another busy week in Monteverde. My students and their projects are progressing well, and they all seem content in their work. Even the group I’ve helped the most, who are trying to design a handicapped-accessible trail at the Santa Elena Cloud Forest Reserve are managing to keep optimistic. Considering the amount of bushwhacking through dense jungle they’ve taken on, that’s pretty good. The big consideration for accessibility is maintaining a gentle slope, and in the terrain around here that’s not easy! So we’ve been carefully measuring the grades along various trail alignments with a laser level, stadia rod, and tape measures to verify that we can keep the ramping sections under a certain maximum slope… this gets particularly challenging in a downpour, which we experienced twice this week! The work does have it's rewards too-- we all got a great look for the first time at the birder's local holy grail right along our trail, a beautiful male Quetzal in brilliant green, white, and red plumage, complete with it's two foot long tail. Pretty cool!

My other trial for the week has been the car. While it continues to run “pretty well,” at least on the surface, I managed to get a local mechanic to give it a thorough check to be sure that it will hold up over the next year. While he gave much of the car a clean bill of health (particularly some of those things you just don’t want to go wrong like brakes), it appears the engine needs new rings, which is pretty major. Fortunately, the engine and other major components of the care are under warrantee! So Russ, my car purchase broker, has helped arrange for all the repairs with the dealer, and all I need to do is drive it down and drop it off for a week in San Jose, and they’ll now (supposedly) fix all the stuff they probably should have done before I bought it. Once again, I’ve got my fingers crossed that this will all work out well!

On the home front, all goes well. We had our first house-guests this week, Jack Sullivan and his 17 year old daughter, Maggie. Jack chairs the landscape architecture program at Maryland, and this was his first time down to Monteverde. He was on more of an exploratory visit, to see how everything works, as opposed to a longer “teaching” stay like the rest of us involved with the course (in particular because of his administrative role in the LA department at Maryland). Jack arrived without any problems on Wednesday, and settled into our “guest suite” very happily, with Maggie upstairs in one of the bunk beds. He and Maggie then frequently sat in on various aspects of our studio work on Thursday and Friday, as well as doing a LOT of walking around town taking in Monteverde. We finished up the academic portion of the week Friday afternoon with a lecture from Jack on "Green Roofs and Roof Gardens," followed by a big dinner at Sophia’s (our favorite local restaurant) on Friday night, which many of the students enjoyed as the first meal in 3 weeks that did NOT feature rice and beans as the primary component. They all still seem to love rice and beans, but I think they’ve begun to loose their novelty at this stage!