Butterflies and altitude sickness

We are in Mexico during the Monarch butterfly migration. I (Gordon) thought this would be really neat to see and we made it a birthday excursion for me. After a lot of deliberation we decided to stay in a hotel near the three major butterfly colonies and ended up going to the El Rosario area to the one there.

We had a lot of things in mind when we drove through Michoacán getting there… it’s not exact known for being a peaceful state. But it ended up being uneventful and we stayed near the Mexico state side on our journey.

There are two ways to head up to see the colony… hiking on foot, or by horse. Of course we chose to try the horses! Little did we know that the people who guided us up would be walking with the horses on a tether… I had assumed they would ride ahead of us like a wagon train. It’s amazing they walked so damn fast up really steep hills at high altitude. They definitely earned the 180 pesos for the trip.

The horses got us 3/4 of the way up the hill. For the rest we followed a guide, that we didn’t really need, and tipped her not nearly enough at the end and felt bad because we ran out of money at the top. She even offered us an herb to smell to help with the thin air. It seemed to open up the sinuses so you can breathe deeper.

The butterflies hang in clumps on the trees when it’s cool in the morning and wake up as the sun starts coming up. It was fun to watch them spring to life and fill the sky over the several hours we watched them.

One even got caught in Megan’s hair. She saved it from curly doom of course.

We decided to walk the entire way down the hill, watching the butterflies darting through the forest, after we had our fill and camera worth of photos. It was definitely worth the excursion.

So what about altitude sickness? Well, the colony is at about 11,000 feet, and our hotel was at about 9,000. Spending several nights at that latitude really hit me hard. I felt nauseous and sick to the stomach for part of the trip and thought I had gotten another bout with a stomach bug… but I think it was the altitude. It took several days to get back to normal at a lower altitude. Unfortunately, a huge portion of Mexico is at around 7,000 feet. Who knew.