Site Report: Cachote

Visits

• 2014-01-23: Our next stop was a forest on the eastern side of the Sierra Bahoruco. We heard that the road was bad, so we left quite awhile before sunrise. And, we found the road almost right away, things were looking positive. In general, I look down my nose at 4x4 vehicles. People spend all this extra money, when the reality is that there is very rarely a road that calls for four wheel drive. I used to drive a 1979 Toyota Corolla hatchback with 13 inch wheels on all kinds of "four wheel drive roads". The only time I ever got stuck was this one time when I drove onto a beach in the dark and got trapped in the sand. The road to Cachote required a four wheel drive. After making several river crossings, we arrived at a very steep hill, and the two wheel drive did not do the trick. This is the first time that I ever had to use it. Anyway, there were about one million roads on the top of the hill, and we did not make it to the cloud forest by sunrise as we had hoped. Then, I spent a hour looking for a frog that sounded just like it could have been the Eastern Chat-tanager. We finally did make it to the cloud forest, and the trees were nice along with some excellent hiking. I wish that we could have spent the night up there.

Species Seen

Lifelists

• North America
• World

Trips

• Dominican Republic