September is Costa Rica´s patriotic month in which Costa Rica celebrates its independence from Spain in 1821. Though this proclamation was made on September 15th, it took over a month for this news to travel over land from Guatemala to Costa Rica, and every year on September 14th Costa Ricans celebrate the traditions of the torch and the “faroles” (artistic renditions of torches made by schoolchildren). This year, in honor of the 50th anniversary of Chirripó National Park, for the first time a torch has been brought to the top of Mt. Chirripó representing a collaborative effort of many many people. It was an honor for Cloudbridge´s staff member Casey McConnell to run with the torch within the National Park, between kilometers 11 and 12 of the main trail. In the main image, Cloudbridge friend and local boxing trainer Paola Castro is shown running with the torch on the first kilometers of the Chirripó trail, outside of the park´s boundaries.
Though unfortunately there are no pictures of Casey running with the torch, she did take these lovely images of the landscape, reminding us why Chirripó is such a unique and special place. Another event in which we have recently participated is a workshop with other neighbors of Chirripó National Park to bring community participation into the proposal of an UNESCO Global GeoPark centered on Chirripó and the surrounding communities. This designation gives international recognition for sites that promote the importance and significance of protecting the Earth’s geodiversity through actively engaging with the local communities
Princeton University offers students an opportunity to take a gap year with an internship abroad, and in Costa Rica this is coordinated through the organization Amigos de las Americas. It was a pleasure to receive the current generation of students, along with their Costa Rican peers, for an educational tour of the reserve. If you would like to know more about what you could expect from a visit of this sort, we invite you to read this post from a 2024-25 participant of the gap year program. Please reach out if would like to learn more about the possibility of bringing a group to the reserve for an educational visit!
We are so grateful at Cloudbridge to consistently have a great group of researchers and volunteers. Our on-site program offers participants the opportunity to live in a comfortable field station with a welcoming international community, and go out into the field on a daily basis to support scientific research and other maintenance tasks. In this image, current participants kindly helped clean up an old trash dump that was found off of the El Jilguero trail, a reminder that the trash that we produce will not easily break down in the environment.
