Wind

3 March 2009

The wind is very much on my mind today.

I’m coming to a realization that wind is an essential part of what makes the cloud forest. Before coming, I had this illusion of still, damp, foggy conditions. But that could never produce enough condensed moisture — especially in the tropics — to support the wild life one finds here. So instead, there are — at least seasonally — these ferocious winds that lift moisture from the warm Atlantic, condense it as the air cools orographically, and then impinges the droplets on the vegetation in the forest. Amazingly, Monteverde and Santa Elena are seriously in the shadow of the ridge, located 500-1000 feet below the continental divide. And still we are getting pounded by the wind and — with it — the condensed moisture. Our rain has been much more horizontal than vertical. It is stronger at night and in the morning than midday, most likely because the sun’s heat in the afternoon warms the air on this west side of the divide and promotes more evaporation of the droplets. Still, with the strong winds today, I encountered misting conditions throughout my walk to Santa Elena and back.

Photographing the wind (or rather the visible effects of the wind) is — of course — inadequate. The experience of wind is so much more than visual: the sound, the shaking, and the physicality of being pushed around. Still, I had to try. The two photos embedded in this paragraph are from today’s walk. The photo at the top of the post is from the archives. Two weekends ago, when Ingrid and I visited the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, we hiked up to the continental divide where there is a “lookout.” Apparently, one can see both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans from that point on a clear day. Hah! We couldn’t see 50 m toward the Atlantic. The last few hundred meters of trail to the lookout were through a pygmy forest. A sign said that during the months of December through March, typical wind speeds are 80 km/h with gusts up to 150 km/h in that area. The pygmy status of the trees is a matter of shear (pun intended) survival.