Climbing Cerro Negro (active volcano)

Today was awesome. How many people can say they climbed to the top of an active volcano and then ran down the side of it. Awesome.

We had breakfast at our hotel and left at 7:30 to go climb Cerro Negro. Cerro Negro is the most recent of four very young cinder cones and it's most recent eruption was August of 1998. The drive there was over an hour, even though it wasn't very far away, due to poor road conditions. I'm pretty impressed that we didn't get stuck or tip over. As soon as the volcano came into closer view I said, "There's no way we're climbing to the top in and hour" which was what was on our schedule but we did. The volcano is almost all black lava rock and there is no vegetation; we followed a trail through the volcanic rock ashes. Most of the climb wasn't too bad but there were parts that you had to use your hands to climb and you had to watch for rocks that weren't stable. By the time we got to the top I was covered in sweat and exhausted, but it was worth it. In the crater of the volcano (which we hiked through) you could see sulfur coming out in many places and in some places you could see crystallized patches of it. From the top you could see almost 20 miles and we saw the city of Leon, other volcanoes, and the Pacific ocean.

The hike down was much, much easier than the hike up. We basically just walk/ran/slid down the opposite side we had climbed up. By the end I was covered in volcanic ash and I had a ton of rock in each shoe.

On the way back to Leon I saw an oriel fly in front of the van and asked Eduardo about it. This set off a long birding expedition on the way back. We stopped a couple of times trying to get a picture of an oriel but they flew away before we got there. Twice we got out of the van and walked a little trying to spot something without the noise of the engine. At one point they had us duck under a barbed wire fence to check out a tree with fruit that birds like to eat. We got really lucky there because we saw a blue-crowned motmot (the national bird), a Yigürro (aka gray thrush, National bird of Costa Rica) and a torgon.

Then we drove back to the city so we could take a quick shower and wash all of the sweat and ash off. After we cleaned up we had lunch at the same place we had dinner last night. Then more time in the van (not my favorite part) as we drove to Granada which was about 3 hours away. I spent most of the drive sleeping since I was exhausted from climbing the volcano. We checked in at the hotel and then wandered around central park and had dinner. We went to bed fairly early looking forward to the next day of adventures.