In 2004 I returned to the Galapagos with a team funded by MIT and the University of Arizona. My Ecuadorian colleague, friend, and sometime student (now Professor) Dr. Miriam Kannan called on friends and family in Ecuador for vital local help, and I went.

Alan Tye, the British botanist in residence at Charles Darwin Station, told me that the wild population of P. colinvauxii on Santa Cruz had a good year and is thriving in its natural habitat; the mid-elevations of the south face of Santa Cruz Island. This is the only island where it is known.

I spent almost all of two weeks on San Cristobal, ostensibly 'leading' the MIT team effort to recore El Junco. This was the lake I discovered and named in 1966, drilling a 15.35 m core of its sediments to bedrock. This produced what was then, and is still now, the longest continuous climate history of the eastern Pacific. The real driving force of the Galapagos Project was to duplicate my old cores so that they could be subjected at MIT to the latest techniques of analysis, immeasurably more powerful than anything I could do nearly forty years ago. El Junco, unknown to geography in 1966, has turned into a tourist celebrity. A road leads to the base of the great volcanic cone, a trail, complete with staircase up the steepest part of the ascent, goes to the top of the crater, and a noticeboard (above) announces that it is the property of the park service and gives the rules of access.

Furthermore in the new Catholic church built to serve the the expanding population of the island is a great mural of El Junco, describing it as a sacred lake. No one on the island has any idea that I had ever had anything to do with it, not even the Governor of the Province with whom I had a longish meeting. There was a good deal of time-warp in my emotions.

We did succeed in getting the new cores and they are beautiful, I have seen them opened at MIT. But I had little to do with it, except as guide to where to core and advisor on use of the coring equipment, which was my design.

Dr Paul Colinvaux  © 2004