Rivets, Dean 2008 Journal July 24 Las Calañas, north of La Trinidad, Reserva de la Biosfera Sierra de las Minas, Depto. El Progreso, Guatemala After taking a long time to organize everyone in San Agustin and pack our things we started our trip to the Sierra de las Minas! We drove up to La Trinidad and loaded all of our gear onto 8 mules. We hiked up in groups - I started with about half the group but ended up with only Nancy and our 2 policemen, who we were required to take. Nancy, Kandi, Bianca, Rita and I started opening bromeliads as soon as we got to good pine forest, about 0.5km from La Trinidad. We found an adult snake B. helminchi in a large bromeliad almost immediately, but nothing else. As we got to the top of the pine forest, it started to rain hard and we stopped searching in bromeliads and walked up to the top. One of the policemen found a B. morio on the way up, close to the cabins. We got set up, made dinner while it rained heavily, and then went out with lights after dinner. We walked a loop on the trail from the cabins down to the road and then up the road back. Craig and Ted went together and found 4 Graugators, 2 of which were very small. Carlos, Jacob, Nancy and I found many Graugators, and collected 7 of at least 3 species, including C. brocchi. I found a Botitoglossa meliana crawling up a tree trunk ~2m off the ground in the cloud forest - it is absolutely black. We also found 3 B. morio on ferns along the road. It was not raining while we were out but was still very wet in the forest, so conditions were perfect for amphibians. We searched for about 2 hours.