Every year Bosque la Primavera organizes at least one long trek across the forest. This year it was a sixteen-kilometer hike on March 24, starting at the western edge of the Protected Area, crossing the famed Río Caliente and ending at the little town of La Primavera, which lies 15 kilometers due west of Guadalajara, alongside the highway to Tepic and Nogales.
Although it sounded like a long haul, I signed up for the experience, suspecting that the highly knowledgeable Rangers leading the trek would show me things I had never seen before. I was not at all disappointed.
The least used of the three “official” entrances to the forest is at a pueblito called Ejido Emiliano Zapata, located 2.8 kilometers along the highway to Ameca. Here the eighteen would-be trekkers were gathered together by Ranger Ezequiel Garcia, who explained the rules in vigor inside the Protected Area. We could have guessed that campfires were not allowed, but I’m sure some visitors to this woods don’t realize that dogs, ATVs and alcoholic drinks are also forbidden and that no one is allowed to leave the Bosque with plants, rocks or anything else but the dust on the soles of their shoes.
Next, the hikers introduced themselves. It turned out to be quite an international gathering: a German, a Frenchman, six Americans (all either active or former Peace Corps Volunteers) and ten Mexicans of various ages and walks of life.
We started out by walking three kilometers to a newly opened Ecotourism Camp called Agua Dulce. This is a delightful, woodsy place with wide, flat areas for camping. It gets its name (meaning Sweet Water) from a spring of delicious, cool water which gushes out of the ground here, forming a pond and a river you can swim in. The owners have taken advantage of this and created a fish farm. Visitors can catch their own fish and a cook will prepare them for eating, right on the spot. They also have pony rides and a zipline and, best of all, the manager, named Tonatiu, says they normally have no clients at all on weekdays (yes, they are open) and only about thirty on weekends. “And we don’t allow loud music here,” he added. Overnight camping at Agua Dulce costs 150 pesos per person and their Tel is 331-341-5347. I’m looking forward to checking this place out more thoroughly in the near future.
Next we followed a well-marked bicycle trail for another three kilometers. This took us past “The Shaman’s House” where we could see, on the hillside, a man-made cave which houses a rather unusual “indoor” temazcal (sweat lodge). In this area we passed good examples of Tala Tuff, weirdly shaped rhyolite rocks which were apparently formed by gases bubbling upward through great layers of volcanic ash. Some of these rocks are in the form of long, vertical cylinders known as fossil fumaroles.
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