Belize: 20 June 2011

By Connor Hedges

This morning, after a night of booming thunder and torrential rain, we awoke to a flooded La Milpa campus. The flooded walkways ensured that our feet were already soaked by the time we ate breakfast. The constant rain over the past few days had filled up what was an empty pond when we first arrived, and also awakened an anticipated resident of La Milpa…a crocodile! Our morning work consisted of continuing our work inserting fence posts surrounding the medicinal garden as well as painting a first coat of “Golden Brown” on our plant identification signs. With the added help our new Belizean amigo, Victor, digging holes in rocky terrain went a lot faster.

Following lunch, Charley, Graham, and I began our project on mapping the various trails surrounding La Milpa that wandered deep into the rainforest. Our goal, with the assistance of a GPS device, was to map two of the trails and find some sites on the trail that would be of interest to a visitor of the La Milpa Ecolodge. This was the first time that we were able to strap on our snakebite-proof gators. As silly as they looked we were happy to have them on when we began walking down a rainforest trail that we quite overgrown in areas and appeared to be perfect snake habitat. Within the first ten feet of the “Medicinal Trail” we came across a Speckled Racer, a colorful but harmless snake. Along the trails we also encountered a large leaf-cutter ant colony and Mayan ruins that were being excavated by some archeologists.

Upon our return to the cabanas, we went to work on our computers. Charley and Graham began writing short paragraphs that described the trails as well as points of interest along the trails. Our hope was that these short descriptions could be used in a pamphlet or map that is given to guests of La Milpa. Eager to see the data that our GPS had gathered, I went to work on uploading the data and displaying it on a GIS program. We were all very satisfied to see that our first day with this new project had been successful and were excited to continue the work over the next 10 days. As always, we capped off the day with a couple hard fought games of HORSE on the basketball court.