Camping in El Chico

To begin, here's a map that has some of the places from the last couple entries.....

Off on another weekend trip, this weekend I went back to the state of Hidalgo to the national park “El Chico”. One of the other vols works in the park, so Janet, Corey (the vol that works there), and I met up early on Sat morning in Pachuca to head to El Chico for some hiking before some other vols in the area came in for a regional meeting that we were having that night. After dropping our stuff at the camp site, we went on a guided hike with one of the people that works in the park down into a canyon and then up along the ridge. El Chico is at about 9,000 feet and has some amazing rock formations and waterfalls. The one downfall of the park is the lack of marked trails (which is why it was great that Corey´s coworker took us around, allowing us to see a lot more things than if we had just wandered around solo).

By the time we finished the hike and headed back to the campground, the rest of the group had arrived and the temps were starting to drop. Last week had been extremely hot and we’re still in the middle of the dry season, but that definitely changed on Saturday night. We walked into a near by town (Mineral del Chico), a cute old mining town that covers about 5 blocks, for dinner and the fog and clouds began to roll in. Once back at the camp site we were able to get a camp fire going for a while, but then it started to pour, luckily my tent managed to stay completely dry.
Unfortunately it never really stopped raining. So the next morning the forest and everything was wrapped in a dense fog that kept getting thicker and wetter as the day went on. While the rest of the group headed home, Janet and I decided to go to another mining town called Real del Monte.

We took a combi from the park and got dropped off at an intersection in the highway to wait for another combi or a bus. Normally this would have been pretty easy, however with the fog as bad as it was, we were a little hard to spot on the side of the road. We finally did get a bus to stop and arrived at Real del Monte. As I said this was another small mining town and was actually founded by Cornish miners, so there is a fair amount of British influence in some of the streets and the food in the area. In stark contrast to the blazing 90s we´d seen the week before, it was a wet and chilly 45 or 50, making coffee and kaluha an essential accessory for exploring the town and for the wait again on the side of the highway to flag down a bus.

Trying to catch a combi in the fog and rain