One of a series of blog posts written during a Field Museum rapid inventory of the Kampankis mountain range in northern Peru in 2011.

"We knew that something was going on with the herpetologists when the sun set on Wednesday and they still hadn’t gotten back to base camp. Pablo and Alessandro had started up the long, steep trail to the ridgetop at camp two on Tuesday afternoon, carrying their snake hooks and headlamps, with the plan of spending that night collecting and coming back down the next day. When they failed to show up, our first instinct was to worry. It was Lucía, who had overlapped with them up on the peak, who explained what had happened. 

'They didn’t come down because they’ve gone totally bananas,' she said. 'They don’t ever want to come down – they say they’re finding incredible stuff up there….'”

Read the full post here.

Photo by Álvaro del Campo