Where It Started.
This was our very first canyoneering trip as a family, the one that started all of it. My youngest was barely walking at the time, so he stayed home with grandma, but my wife and my two oldest were ready to go. We went up into a rainforest in Puerto Rico called El Yunque, and here is the thing nobody tells you: Puerto Rico has a rainforest, and it is stunning. You hear Puerto Rico and you think beaches, you think the music, you think that island energy. You do not think about the wall of green mountains in the east where the rain almost never stops. But that is where El Yunque sits, and walking into it changed how I see the whole island.
El Yunque.
It is worth saying the name and saying it right, because El Yunque is not just any forest. It is the only tropical rainforest in the entire United States National Forest System, almost twenty-eight thousand acres of it draped across the Sierra de Luquillo in the east of the island. The Taíno, who lived here long before anyone else, held this place sacred and gave it its name, tying it to their highest spirit. Inside its boundaries grow more than two hundred and forty species of plants, and most of them are endemic, meaning they exist here and nowhere else on earth. Once you understand that, the whole forest changes in front of you. This is not a canyoneering trip about technique or science. It is about moving smart through terrain that turns slick and serious the second it rains, which in El Yunque is most of the time. The outfitter we went with knew that, and they geared us up properly before we took a single step, because without the right footing and the right kit, this forest will humble you fast.
The land gives back to the people.
On the drive in, before we even reached the trailhead, I saw something I have never forgotten. Families pulled off on the side of the road, coolers packed full, a boombox going, everybody waist-deep in the river cooking up a storm and just being together. El Yunque had handed them everything they needed for the day, running water, trees for shade and shelter, and enough green all around to make it feel like the most natural party on earth. The land gives back to the people, and the people give back to the land by taking care of it. Seeing that on the way in told me exactly what kind of place we were about to enter.
What the forest shows you.
And El Yunque does not let you just walk through it. It keeps stopping you. We kept getting pulled off course by the plants, by colors I have never seen on a leaf or a flower, reds and purples and greens so loud they would yank your attention away from your own feet, and our guides would tell us, that one only grows here, you will not find it anywhere else in the world. Then there is the rock. Centuries of rushing water have polished the volcanic stone in the riverbeds until it is smooth as glass, and the forest has basically built itself a set of natural waterslides. We could not help ourselves. We were up there sliding around on the rock, moonwalking like Michael Jackson on the slickest parts, laughing until we nearly went down on purpose. And the water, the water is freezing. Genuinely cold, in the middle of the Caribbean, and we kept asking why. The answer is the mountains. El Yunque catches some of the heaviest rainfall anywhere in the region, and all of it comes pouring down off the high peaks cold, so the rivers run icy even when the island around them is hot. The forest keeps its own temperature, the same way it keeps its own plants.
Climb, and then jump.
It was just my family and two guides, and it was less of a lesson than an adventure. We went to see how far we could push ourselves. We climbed the rock, we hauled ourselves up by the vines and roots the forest handed us, higher and higher, and then we reached the kind of ledge where the only way forward is down. If you had the guts for it, you jumped, twenty meters, about sixty-five feet, straight down into the water below. My kids did not take that one. I did. And I will be honest with you, I was not timid for a second. I was excited, ready to go. I love a thrill like this, the adventure of it, and there is no better way to chase one than in the water with my family. Standing on the lip of a twenty-meter drop, looking down between narrow walls of rock at the water that far below, I was ready to jump, and honestly it was not that big of a jump. I want to work my way up from here, to thirty meters and then forty, though I know to get there I need to put in some extra jumps and learn to dive into the water the right way. I jumped, and I came up wanting the next one bigger.
The hydro pump and my daughter.
The part I will never let her forget is the hydro pump. You slide down a chute of smooth rock into a churning pool, and the current at the bottom is so strong it pulls you straight under and then spits you back up to the surface. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. My daughter, who was seven at the time, did not agree. She was crying before she ever got near it, and when she came up out of the water all you could see was the tears in her eyes. I was right there to grab her, and we laughed about it later, but here is what I want on the record: she made the attempt. Seven years old, terrified, and she did it anyway. That tells you everything about who she is.
The graduation.
And then, at the very end, El Yunque gives you your graduation. You climb up about twenty feet to a ledge, and hanging there off a huge branch of one of these massive old trees is a single rope. You take it in both arms, you hug it, and you run off the edge, swinging out over a wide pool of deep water, and at the top of the arc you let go. You drop, you flip if you have it in you, you do whatever you want on the way down, and you hit the water to a whole crowd of people cheering you on. That is exactly what it feels like, a graduation, the moment the forest signs off on you, the reward for everything it just put you through. Every single one of us did it, and coming up out of that pool with the canopy roaring above us, I do not think any of us had ever felt more like a family.
Rainforest in the morning, beach by the afternoon.
That is the magic of Puerto Rico, and of this corner of it especially. We climbed out of El Yunque soaked and spent, and then drove a few minutes down to the coast and got the other half of the island, the beaches we had come in thinking about. Luquillo sits right at the foot of the forest, and we ended the day over mofongo, the dish Puerto Rico is known for, sitting in the sand and letting it all settle on us. Cold rainforest in the morning, warm beach by the afternoon, the whole family worn out and happy. That was the day my family fell in love with this, the day all the others grew out of. It started right here, in the green heart of El Yunque.