By Max Cunningham
June 10, 2014
Mike, Colin and I made meticulous plans for exploring Mount Chirripó before we left New York, but on the way to the summit Mike and I saw something that made us change direction: at about 9,500 feet, a mysterious grassland beckoned beneath jagged peaks. With just one day to go before our trip back to the Cloudbridge Reserve to refuel, we decided to make an early morning trek to this unusual valley to investigate why it is so flat and devoid of vegetation.
Over the course of a beautiful, sunny day Mike and I trekked over the rugged terrain from Crestones Base Camp before reaching a sudden transition from forest to grassland. A few things struck us. First, a thin river snakes through this entire shallow valley. Around bends in the river we noticed sharply cut banks where the stream has become more powerful and eroded away the banks.
Second, we were surprised to find the stream bed completely dry. From a distance, we had expected to find a powerful body of water. In another test of our geomorphology knowledge we discovered that this dry stream bed is paved mostly in cobble-sized rocks, the type you might find on a cobblestone street except these cobbles are sharp and angular instead of smooth and rounded. Mike and I spent the morning walking the Sabena de Leones valley and the more we looked, the more baffled we remained by the processes that shaped this landscape. Why is the river bed dry and its sediment load so large and angular? We hope to find more clues in the coming week.
In the early afternoon, Mike and I stumbled on a small marker along the river channel in Spanish dated 1956. Combining our Spanish skills, Mike and I deduced that the sign commemorated the unfortunate death of a man by mountain lion, and then I realized that Sabana de los Leones translates to “Savannah of the Lions.” That’s all we needed to know before skedaddling back to the Talari Valley and the security of the Crestones Base Camp.
