Monteverde is where the golden toad went extinct. The fluorescent-orange amphibian lived on one ridge here and nowhere else on Earth, and in April 1987 a biologist counted 133 of them packed into a single pool the size of a kitchen sink. Two years later, on 15 May 1989, one male was seen. No one has found another since, and by 2004 the species was declared extinct — the first animal whose loss was widely blamed on a warming climate, its breeding pools drying out as the cloud base lifted off the mountain. Cloud is the entire mechanism of this forest. Caribbean trade winds slam into the Cordillera de Tilarán, climb, and condense right along the continental divide, so the ridge between 1,250 and 1,830 metres lives inside the weather. Water arrives sideways instead of falling, and plants give up on soil altogether: roughly 500 kinds of orchid, among 2,500 plant species, grow on other plants, padding every branch with moss and fern.
The forest is still standing because Quaker families from Alabama, who settled here in 1951 to farm and to avoid the draft, left the woods above their pastures alone to protect their water; in 1972 biologists from the Tropical Science Center turned that instinct into a reserve. You hear it before you see it — water dripping off leaves under a sky that never quite clears. A guide stops, swings a scope onto a branch, and there is a male quetzal, green as wet glass, tail streamers trailing far past his body. Climb to La Ventana, the window on the divide, and the trees shrink and bend downwind while cloud pours over the ridge past your shoulders. From March the forest also rings: the three-wattled bellbird's metallic bonk carries the better part of a kilometre.