Cajas National Park (in which we take epic photos)

Yeah, that’s a picture of me sitting on a rock on the edge of a cliff above an amazing landscape. It was pretty epic.

Anyways, we’ve been looking forward to Cajas National Park for quite awhile, especially since our visit to the coast when our bus drove through Cajas.

As far as background, Cajas is just outside of Cuenca and has quite high elevations. For example, the starting point for our hike was 4,154 m above sea level. That’s roughly 13,700 ft. The environment is paramo, but much of it falls into the category of superparamo, which unlike Rumi Loma is not dominated by grass. In fact, much of the hike was quite rocky, and some of it even involved walking across fairly narrow ridges. Additionally, a number of the rocky slopes were quite steep, as in only 10 degrees from vertical.

Anyways, Cajas is just beautiful, and I loved seeing the superparamo and be able to compare it to the paramo which I know. Plus, we hiked up to the second highest peak in Cajas: 4,410m (14,500 ft). I’m just glad that I didn’t get altitude sickness up there (especially considering that I had been at sea level only 5 days before). At the peak, we took tons of photos. It was just amazing.