Our Family Time Out: El Cajas

We got up early this morning for one last jaunt in the mountains of El Cajas (see last trip report here) before leaving Cuenca. This time, we went to an area of the park closer to Cuenca, at much lower elevation (around 3100m or 10,000 feet vs last time when we were at 13,000+ feet). The landscape was quite different, cloud forest instead of paramo, or grassland. The conditions were much more forgiving, with higher temperatures and no real impact of the altitude on our breathing.

We took a taxi from our front door about 25 minutes up to Laguna de Llaviuco (or sometimes, Llaviucu), at the lower reaches of El Cajas. The first 15 minutes of the car ride was on the main foad up to Cajas, and then on to Guayaquil. The last 10 minutes were along a steep narrow road paved with huge stones, that wound steeply down, and then up a stream bed to the parking area for the Laguna. From there, we set off on a flat 3 hour hike past the Laguna, which sits in a valley between two steep mountains, and then into the valley as it narrowed past the lake, the well-marked trail following the cascading stream that feeds the lake. We made it up to the end of the valley, and then returned along the developed trail on the other side of the lake.

The cloud forest and the mountains were unbelievable. The trail alternated between closed-in cloud forest where orchids seemed to grow from every other tree, to wide open wetland, with stunning views up the near-vertical mountains close on either side. I feel like it's very difficult (at least for me) to capture the grandeur of mountains with photography. Some photos below, but they don't really do it justice...