Thousand Foot Falls

Thousand Foot Falls is a waterfall in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, south of San Ignacio, that drops roughly 1,600 feet off a ridge into a forested gorge. The name undersells it. You see it from an overlook across the valley, reached by a long dirt road through the reserve. Unlike the lowland jungle around San Ignacio, the Pine Ridge is high, dry, and covered in pine trees, and it's looked after by a small NGO.

Our stop

We drove up after Xunantunich. At about 2,400 feet the air was dry and maybe 80 degrees, and in the shade it felt genuinely pleasant. It looks more like California than the jungle we'd been in that morning. The only other person up there was the local caretaker on staff. No crowds, no vendors, just the overlook and the falls.

There are endangered falcons that nest in the cliffs. We stood there for a while doing the math on what land like that would be worth back home, and being glad it's a preserve instead. The car, by this point, was coated in a full layer of red dust.