Reserva Los Cedros  is a place of hidden beauty, starting with it’s location. Although only 60km from Quito, it takes a full day, about four modes of transportation, and a bit of very muddy hiking to get there. There reserve just feels distinctly…hidden. It can be reached only by a ~2 hour hike on a smally, unmarked trail, and from its center you can’t see past the nearest hillside. The rest of the surrounding landscape is hidden by forest and clouds. Even from Google Earth it’s invisible ( 0.308390°, -78.779466°).

Los Cedros has good reason to hide.

It is surrounded by a landscape of agriculture driven by deforestation. The reserve was created in response to attempts to deforest and colonize the area, and it has since faced more illegal invasion attempts. With Ecuador’s past colonization policy of requiring colonists to deforest their land in order to receive land entitlement, a culture of exploitation was quickly established in the mid twentieth century. Common practice in the region is to clear cut a forest, sell the valuable lumber (almost always at a price that totally rips off the local farmer), plant short-term crops, quickly exhaust the land, and repeat. This context was quickly presented when I arrived as a line of burros emerged from the forest carrying heavy slabs of dark wood. Here, there are no rules when it comes to deforestation. Without Los Cedros, this forest would surely be long gone, reduced to sterile eroding slopes.

Los Cedros is officially a Bosque Protector, Protected Forest. And boy does it protect a lot. There are an estimated 240 bird species, 190 identified orchid species, felines from Jaguars to Jaguarundis, three monkeys including the extremely rare Brown-headed Spider Monkey, Andean Bear, and God knows how many insects. In my short time there (interrupted by the worst sickness I’ve had in Latin America yet), I was hard pressed to find and photograph even a fraction of its incredible diversity. Nonethless, my photos that best show the forest’s elusive, mist-shrouded beauty can be seen here.