Pico da Caledonia: A Locked Gate in the Clouds

After Pão de Açúcar, the next morning presented a different problem: how to fit a mountain into a day that also needed a long drive. We wanted some walking, but not an all-day hike. Petter suggested Pico da Caledonia. At 2,257.7 metres with 1,138 metres of prominence, it was a substantial summit, but our route started high and mostly followed a road. It sounded like exactly the compromise we needed.

We had breakfast, made a roadside stop for coffee and a snack, and continued towards the mountain. The cafe had one wall so densely covered in stickers that it deserved a photograph of its own.

Rob, Dave and I drove up to the park entrance, where Petter, Lihua and Michael were already waiting. We changed quickly and started walking. Light rain began almost immediately. I did not mind it much. In this part of the Atlantic Forest, being inside the cloud felt more like a bonus than a problem.

One roadside bonus was a dusky-legged guan (Penelope obscura) sitting in the vegetation. It was close enough for a decent photograph before we carried on uphill. The species occurs in the mountains of Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere in southeastern and southern Brazil.

A very locked gate

I had moved a few hundred metres ahead of the others when the road produced a less scenic surprise: a solid gate, very thoroughly locked. There was no obvious way around it, and I had little enthusiasm for inventing a shortcut through the vegetation. For a minute I began to suspect that the day had chosen bad luck instead of a summit.

The others caught up and we were discussing what to do when we heard movement from a nearby house. Two park rangers came out, welcomed us, opened the gate and asked us to register. Problem solved with considerably less drama than the gate had suggested. Pico da Caledonia lies inside Parque Estadual dos Três Picos, and for our visit the upper route was controlled at this guard post.

Soon the road ended and the staircase began: 632 steps to the summit. They were steep, damp and, in places, slippery. The rock slabs reminded me of Serra Namuli in Mozambique. There we had deliberately chosen a dry day, so the moss was not wet, but the steep moss-covered slabs were slippery enough even then. Here at least somebody had installed handrails.

Two summit bumps in the whiteout

Once on the ridge we reached buildings and a split in the route. The left side looked partly closed, while the right side was open. We went left first, crossed a metal bridge and, a few minutes later, arrived at a summit-like high point. With everything in cloud, there was no useful visual clue as to whether it was the actual high point.

Rob measured it, and then we returned towards the signed summit and measured that as well. Our readings made the official summit look slightly higher. In any case, we had visited both, which was a satisfactory solution to a problem that the weather had made unnecessarily mysterious.

The summit area was a mixture of exposed rock and low high-altitude vegetation. Pico da Caledonia is one of the highest summits of the Serra do Mar, but on our visit the cloud removed the long-distance views completely.

We took a group selfie and started down. The staircase was wet, but descending it was efficient enough if we paid attention to our footing.

Back at the gate we signed out, and another ten or twenty minutes brought us to the car. The full track was 5.8 kilometres with 623 metres of ascent, taking two hours. That was what we had wanted: a real mountain without sacrificing the rest of the day.

First Brazilian peak done. So far, so good. We still had a long drive ahead towards the next mountains.