El Yunque

This is the only tropical rainforest in the US National Forest system. Due to limitations imposed by the pandemic, as well as trails not open yet after Hurricane Maria in 2017, there was little choice for us as to what to do during our visit. Thus, we just HAD to hike up to the top of El Yunque.

In this picture, there are my favorite fern trees in the foreground, and in the distance you can see the Atlantic off the NE coast of the island. The high rises on the coast were near where we stayed in Luquillo.

I hadn’t initially planned on hiking the El Yunque Trail because I assumed it would be rated strenuous and/or be too long for these aging legs. I was happily surprised to find that on AllTrails (the hiking app I’ve used all over the world to find good trails and recent reviews of conditions) it was rated as moderate and was “only” about 5 miles long. All right then - up we go!

I took lots of pictures of plants and flowers, but I’ll try not to bore you too much…

I loved the new pink fern leaves in this grouping:

This flower (name unknown) was all over at lower elevations and really showed the moistness all around -

We started hiking about 9 am, and skies were initially clear. As we climbed higher, we became one with the clouds -

I’m not sure if you can tell from the picture above, but the grade of the trail really wasn’t that steep, it just kept going up and up and up…

This was a really neat large fern frond as it was just starting to unfurl -

Amazingly, there weren’t nearly as many waterfalls or even seeps as I would have guessed, given how much rain this area gets (240 inches a year!). We did find this cute little one tucked into a hillside -

This was the observation tower at the top of the peak (3380 ft altitude)…

…and this is what we could see from there -

We were pretty sure that there were some magnificent views hidden there, but alas, the clouds were thwarting us. As we started back down, we caught glimpses of brighter light ahead, and then yes, even some sun! Ahhh… so that’s what we had been missing -

Luckily, there was a side trail that cam out to a ridge about 500 feet lower than the peak, that gifted us with some jaw dropping views -

So our way back down was definitely much brighter (and was how our entire hike was supposed to be!).

Steve has a tracker on his phone that keeps track of all our stats for a hike. We walked a total of 5.3 miles and took 4 hrs and 20 minutes to do so, gaining 2600 ft up and down throughout. This was a snail’s pace for us, but it was a very enjoyable day.

I believe I have a thing for furled ferns.