Cusuco National Forest: The adventurous way to get there from San Pedro Sula
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| Image 0. What could be your best adventure this year. |
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| Image 1. Begin at Colonia Altamira. |
If you want to get from San Pedro Sula to Cusuco National Forest, most people will recommend you a) find a tour guide and just let them take you there or b) take the highway to Cofradia and go up that way. While I did attempt to find a tour guide before my trip last February (2019), spending a few hours on Google Earth convinced me that taking a 4x4 truck over the mountains directly to the west of SPS would be a lot more fun. This post will explain exactly how you can get to Cusuco from SPS in less than an hour (assuming you don't miss a turn), breathing fresh mountain air and snapping pictures of jaw-dropping views.
First off, you will need a few things to do this. It is absolutely essential that you take a four-wheel drive vehicle. I rented a diesel 4x4 Nissan Frontier with a manual gearbox. The roads you will be taking are all dirt. There are occasional potholes, and a little rain will turn the roads into mud pits. The roads are also steep. It is also entirely possible that you will take a wrong turn down one of the numerous side roads in the mountains as I did. I ended up on one logging road which would have destroyed anything but a serious off-roader. The roadbed was composed of razor-sharp mountain rock which had apparently been sheered away from the mountainside by a bulldozer. At some points I would estimate the grade approached 30-40 degrees. Do not attempt this in a vehicle that wasn't designed for it. Oh, and be sure you have a full tank of fuel... don't expect to find a gas station in the mountains.
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| Image 2. I rented a Nissan Frontier for this trip. Mine was actually red. |
Some other items to consider: Bring plenty of food and water for the day. You will pass through a couple villages in the mountains but you may or may not be able to find an open pulperia. A first aid kit could be handy. Cusuco is very much a preserved wilderness. More on that later. A machete will be very helpful as the trails can be overgrown in spots. Worse comes to worst, a flare gun could be nice if you can get one. If you are an experienced hiker, you may think you don't need a guide. If you are a smart hiker, you may at least consider trying to find one. Cusuco is no joke. Even if you don't have a guide, I can't recommend strongly enough that you not go alone. Last year a Honduran reporter died while hiking and camping there alone. He broke his leg falling down a ravine and no one was there to help him get out.
Once you have a good vehicle and are prepared, begin by finding Colonia Altamira and/or the Angeli Gardens restaurant in the southwest corner of San Pedro Sula. Once you're in that area, you may naturally find the road going up the mountain by observing the increasing grade or you may need to (as I did) ask some of the locals how to get to it. Be careful not to be misdirected. Some locals will assume you are trying to get to the Coca-Cola sign, a much more popular tourist destination. The road to that is a few miles to the north of the road you are looking for. Some may know how to help you if you ask how to get to Corrientes. I just kept asking how to "subir la montaña" until I found it.
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| Image 3. The dirt road up the mountain is steep, has several blind curves and a surprising amount of traffic. Be careful! |
The road from the towers to the turnoff for Cusuco is pretty easy to follow. If you are ever unsure, just ask the locals. Many of them will be shocked to see a foreigner in such a remote area. I was actually very lucky and found some government workers (at the plant nursery) who accompanied me all the way from there to Cusuco my first time. The next day I took a friend the entire route, with no guide but my memory, and reached the turnoff for Cusuco from SPS (Altamira) in well under an hour. Just don't drive too fast; there are plenty of dropoffs.
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| Image 4. Route from the cell towers (3rd white circle from right) to turnoff for Cusuco (2nd white circle from left). The far left circle is the actual entrance to the campground at Cusuco. |
The turnoff for Cusuco is located on the edge of a small village (see second circle from the left on Image 3). There is sign pointing you in the right direction. The turnoff is roughly 7 miles from the cell towers. Again, if you get lost, just ask one of the locals to point you toward Cusuco. If you start descending into the valley on the south side of the mountains, you've either gone too far or you took a left turn where you should have gone straight. Just remember, this route is designed to take you along the ridge of the mountains all the way from SPS to Cusuco. If you begin to descend into a valley on either the south or north slopes, you are not going in the right direction. From the towers you should be zigzagging your way west and then southwest, using the peak of Cerro Jilinco as your guiding star.
You will take a sharp turn back to your right (the road you've been on keeps going south toward Cofradia, you need to go west) at the turnoff to Cusuco. Cusuco means "armadillo" in some Mayan dialect and the sign has a picture of one on it. You cannot see the road from the turnoff to the main campground on Google Maps or Google Earth. You will have entered the cloud rainforest at this point and the dense canopy covers the road from satellite imagery. That said, the road is extremely easy to follow and relatively well-maintained. Less than a mile in the air will feel cooler and more humid. All the ferns and prehistoric-looking vegetation reminded me of Jurassic Park.
After 2-3 miles you will arrive at a guardpost with some Honduran military guys stationed there. You can park your car there. When I was there the road from the guardhouse to the lodge was tore up and no vehicles could pass. It's not a bad idea to let the guards know what your plans are in Cusuco and when you expect to be back, just in case something happens. If I had thought of it, I might have asked one of them to accompany me, but whether they would be able to or have the desire to is unlikely. Still, couldn't hurt.
Once you walk down to the lodge you will see a couple different trailheads. I took one which was supposed to go to a waterfall. Anticipating a fairly brief and easy hike, I wore shorts and sandals and carried nothing but a half-empty bag of chips and a bottle of water. As I think back on this I realize how foolish it was. You really should consider wearing long pants and definitely wear hiking boots. I would also urge you to carry a full bag of supplies including food, a rain poncho, an emergency kit, a machete and possibly a can of spray paint.
Perhaps I can be partially forgiven for my state of ill-preparedness because we had only a day or two before visited Parque Nacional Cerro Azul Meambar, which was very much designed for the general public and had nicely maintained gravel trails with clear signage every few hundred yards. Cusuco is the complete opposite of that. Most people in San Pedro Sula do not even know of Cusuco's existence and it is hardly visited by anyone but foreign biologists. The trails are sometimes indistinguishable from the rest of the rugged landscape and you can be led astray (as I was) by markers left by forest workers or biologists that are separate from the trails.
I will relate the following story in the hopes that it prevents someone else from having a similar experience. I followed the trail I took for a mile or two before it faded into nothing. I could faintly hear water though and was determined to find the waterfall I anticipated seeing at the end of the trail. At one point I brushed against some plant and immediately began to feel a burning sensation on my forearm. As the hike went on I experienced localized inflamation and swelling. It left a mark on my arm for a week or two (a local later told me the plant was likely what they refer to as 'Pica pica'). As I hiked along a narrow ridge through the dense wood, a series of pink tape markers wrapped around trees began to lead me down a steep slope. I could tell I was getting closer to the waterfall but had no idea how steep the slope was about to become. After a few hundred feet the tape markers stopped and I was doing less "hiking" and more controlled sliding from tree to tree. The sound of the waterfall beckoned me on, through spiderwebs, loose ground, gullies and the rest. Eventually I arrived at a creek, thanking God all the while I was finally off that terrible slope. Since I wore sandals I walked in the creek bed until I reached the waterfall. It was fairly tall, maybe 40 feet, and certainly beautiful. After a few minutes of relaxation and enjoyment, alone there in my little slice of heaven, I began to consider how to return to the truck. Looking back up the slope I had slid down, it was apparent I would not be able to return that way. I knew I could walk in the creek bed back to the beginning of the trail (I had crossed the same creek about 200 yards from the trailhead), but that would have been very slow. So, I decided to do something very stupid and climb the waterfall. If I could get halfway up, there was a spot on the left side that appeared to provide a path back up the mountain. With much prayer, and moving slower than a sloth, I managed to reach that spot, not without losing my water bottle in the process. Unfortunately once I reached that spot and looked up the slope, I realized it was still going to be an incredibly difficult climb. I held onto plants and roots with a death grip, only to have them pull right out of the loose soil. I slid numerous times and cursed myself for being so stupid. It took at least a half hour of extremely difficult climbing on hands and knees to move a few hundred yards. After a few minutes of it I had resorted to shoving my hands as deeply as possible into the soil, hugging the ground and shuffling my way up a foot at a time. I am so thankful no snake or spider made the climb any more unpleasant than it already was. Thoroughly exhausted, I sat down for several minutes, trying to catch my breath and wondering how in the world I would get back to the trail, begging God to help his wayward servant. Thinking the lodge might be visible from higher ground, I decided to climb still higher up the mountain ( I believe this was a shoulder, if not the main peak of Cerro Jilinco). After several minutes I was again disappointed to realize the vegetation was so dense near the summit I would never be able to see anything from there. I would have to just go by sense of direction. I knew the trail lay somewhere to my right as I faced away from the slope, so after another break I, with some trepidation, began to move in that direction. It only took another 10-15 minutes to find the trail. If memory serves me, I thanked God profusely. I was back at the lodge in 30 minutes or less as I half-ran back to civilization. I had been gone less than 3 hours but it had felt like an eternity.
Did I mention that you should be well-prepared if you go to Cusuco? Can you see why you may want to think about hiring a guide, at least the first time?
In closing, here are a few thoughts. You may have wondered why I didn't include any pictures from the ground. That is because my phone died. I had no way to take pictures. But there was also something about this trip that made me thankful I couldn't take pictures. There's almost no reason to go to any tourist destination now because you can see a thousand photos of the place online. You can watch videos, maybe even get a birds-eye view from drone footage. But if you follow this route and if you hike in Cusuco, you will see things no one has posted online yet. You will stand on mountains that are thousands of feet above the tourists at the Coca-Cola sign. You will see chili and coffee farmers working in the cool elevation. You will drive through villages and see vistas that will never be mentioned on TripAdvisor. You will have a real experience that is uniquely yours. Taking pictures and posting them online would only have served to cheapen the thing.
If you are interested in going to Cusuco, feel free to drop me a message (info at kephali dot com). I'd be happy to help you avoid some of the pitfalls I encountered along the way. But, maybe if it hadn't been for those experiences I wouldn't have felt so alive once I came down off the mountain.
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