Bicycling with Butterflies

Arriving
at the Start

Months before Day 1 / January

The idea to bike from Mexico to Canada and back with the migrating monarch butterflies arose from a simple wish to visit them. In 2013, crossing Mexico by bike for the first time, a friend and I entertained the idea of visiting the monarchs at their overwintering sites. Because it was April and the monarchs had already begun migrating north, we decided to forego the side trip.

I spent the next few years idly daydreaming about returning. Over time, my plan morphed and grew—until I no longer wanted to just visit the migrants, but to accompany them by bicycle on their great migration. In 2016, I stopped daydreaming and picked a start date for my journey: spring of 2017. My idea was now a plan, and I had a year to work out all the details.

As with every adventure, planning was part of the fun. For a year I immersed myself in emails, web design, press releases, and business cards. I talked with scientists, clicked through websites, pored over maps, questioned my plan, and traced the vague outline of a route.

Eventually, there was nothing left to do but start. In January 2017, I braved a fifty-two-hour bus ride from my hometown outside Kansas City, Kansas, followed by a two-day bike ride, to arrive at the parking lot of the El Rosario monarch sanctuary in Michoacán, Mexico.

Including El Rosario, Mexico shelters between seven and eighteen known overwintering monarch colonies every winter. The number varies because smaller colonies are not consistently occupied and new colonies are still being discovered. Four of the colonies are open to the public: Piedra Herrada and Cerro Pelón in the State of Mexico, and Sierra Chincua and El Rosario in the neighboring state of Michoacán. Though the designations of “colony” and “sanctuary” are often used interchangeably, the listed public sites, aside from El Rosario, are technically the names of sanctuaries containing specific monarch colonies. El Rosario, on the other hand, is technically the name of a colony, found in the sanctuary Sierra Campanario. If such nuances of nomenclature confuse you, don’t worry. I too was confused. Plotting my route prior to my arrival, I found just locating these sites, with their different names, difficult. Yet once in Mexico, there was always a local to help point me in the right direction.

Call them sanctuaries or colonies, I was able to visit the resting monarchs at all four public locations, and note their differences. El Rosario was the most built up, with multiple parking lots, many souvenir stands, and a paved trail to start (including 600 cement stairs). Along with Piedra Herrada, El Rosario also had the largest crowds of people, especially on the weekends. Cerro Pelón, on the other hand, felt the most like wilderness, with a long, steep slog to the colony. I found Cerro Pelón’s trail to be the most difficult and Sierra Chincua’s single track, with its mellow grades that dipped up and down, the easiest to negotiate. The subtle variations of each colony’s forest composition yielded dozens more distinctions, from the ratio of pines to firs, to the openness of the flowering understory. Each colony was part of the whole, yet each was unique. Each felt different. Everyone who visits develops a favorite.

Arriving in Mexico in January, I chose El Rosario for my first visit not only because it consistently has the most monarchs, but because it is the most accessible. I arrived at the parking lot, walked under the arched entrance, bought an entrance ticket for fifty pesos (US $2.50), and met my guide, Brianda Cruz Gonzáles. Together, we began walking up the trail.

Had it been an option, I would have opted to go alone up the mountain. But one of the rules at the overwinter sites is that visitors must be accompanied by a local guide. Most days at El Rosario there were around seventy guides waiting to lead hikers up the mountain, and forty more waiting to take people up on horseback. Besides keeping a watchful eye on both tourists and monarchs, such work provides local economic opportunities and reduces the pressure on the mountains and forest to provide logging, mining, and cultivation jobs. The guides are a mix of young and old, men and women; it was my good chance to have been paired with Brianda. She was twenty-six and lived with her family at the outskirts of town, where there were more fields than houses.

I didn’t know it on that first visit, but soon I would come to see Brianda as a sister and her house as my own. I would come to learn that among friends, she had a perennial smile, a hearty laugh, and a strength that, despite our different worlds, I saw in myself. As I walked with Brianda that first morning, in the company of towering oyamel firs (Abies religiosa) and leggy, smooth-barked Mexican pines, she was just my guide. She patiently led me down a dusty trail, forgave me for my crummy Spanish, and courteously laughed at my attempted jokes. “Respiro profundamente solo porque quiero,” I explained. We both chuckled despite the fact that my joke, “I’m only breathing hard because I want to,” wasn’t that funny. I was simply acknowledging, with a bit of self-deprecation, two truths. One: I was out of shape and breathing hard. At 10,000 feet above sea level, my Midwestern lungs craved the missing oxygen. Two: I wanted to breathe hard. I wanted to feel my body striving upward through the forest. I liked that to seek out the monarchs, one had to struggle a bit. Beautiful sights are made more beautiful by the challenge of getting there.

As if on cue, a hummingbird rocketed through the understory to investigate the long, red flowers bent toward the hazy sun. The forest was bathed in salvias: both the large, trumpet-shaped, red stalks and the smaller purple flowers. I paused to catch my breath and turned my gaze upward. I was still unsure of what millions of monarchs clustered together really looked like. All I knew was that treasures were not easy to find, and that winter’s beauty was guarded by vast space, steep mountains, and the echoes of a long-standing forest.

That forest, the last remnants of Mexico’s expansive, ancient ecosystem, caps twelve isolated massifs clustered in a volcanic mountain chain in central Mexico. After the last ice age, as temperatures increased, the oyamel fir forest that had once covered much of southern Mexico was forced to retreat to the cool, humid refuge of the mountains’ higher elevations. The oyamel firs of today are the witnesses of yesterday. Looking up at their branches—a net to catch the sky—I understood why they were also known as the sacred fir. Their branches did seem to splay out like many crosses, and their soft, short needles looked like fingers folded together in prayer. A church of trees, contracting with time. They were a reminder that as the planet changes, nothing is forever.

Once sprawling, the high-elevation oyamel holdouts now occupy less than 0.5 percent (approximately 100,000 to 124,000 acres) of Mexico. In comparison, the 2010 United States Census put Kansas City at 201,568 acres. Despite the limited area, the monarchs arrive each winter, and the oyamel fir forest absorbs nearly every monarch born between the Rocky Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. It is a concentration of monarchs that saturates the trees and transforms the forest into the focal point of the range, an orange gem strung on a volcanic necklace.

An hour after we started hiking, Brianda signaled toward hive-like nests dangling in the branches. I stood puzzled. Then, like a stereogram image, the bundles began to define themselves. The monarchs came into focus. Their collective weight bent each branch into an archway. I stepped forward, but did not enter. Instead, I craned my neck upward to contemplate each tree shrouded in monarchs, while the monarchs, like monks, contemplated winter.

Their weight fell onto my eyes until I shut them. I had arrived at the start of my trip, the start of my dream: to follow the monarchs by bicycle and give voice to their alarming decline. Now I had six weeks to wait for spring to bloom and the cold grasp of winter to loosen. Even in Mexico, it had a hold.

Despite Mexico’s reputation for deserts and heat, in the high-elevation forest lit by a cloud-tangled sun, freezing storms and cold temperatures still bully the monarchs each winter. It is thanks to the protective scaffolding of the forest that the monarchs find literal and figurative sanctuary. The canopy, with its weave of branches, moderates temperatures (like a blanket) and shields precipitation (like an umbrella). The tree trunks absorb even mild heat each day, acting like warm water bottles that the monarchs can snuggle against in moments of extreme cold. At night, trunks tend to be an average of two and a half degrees Fahrenheit (F) warmer than the surrounding ambient night temperature.

These butterflies occupy a sliver of habitat speckled with microhabitats, seemingly scripted for their survival.

It is a balance steadied by Earth’s many layers, and a balance tipped by humanity.

Each time a tree falls in the monarchs’ overwintering forest, a hole is torn in their blanket and punched through their umbrella. These disturbances—logging, disease, windstorms, fire—allow heat to escape and moisture to enter, creating a dangerous combination.

Careful with my steps, I knelt to watch a winter-battling monarch crawl toward me. I knew he was a male because of his thin, black veins and the two small, black dots (scent glands) on his hind wings. I knew he was cold, because as he crawled, he shivered.

Monarchs are ectothermic (cold-blooded) animals. Their body temperature matches that of their environment. The colder the temperature, the colder monarchs get, and the more inactive they become. For much of the winter, being cold is an energetic advantage, yet, if monarchs get too cold they risk freezing. They must employ strategies to limit exposure to the coldest extremes. For this reason, monarchs tend to occupy the sunnier, south-facing slopes of the forest, and they form clusters under the forest canopy. In such clusters, they are protected by both the trees and the butterfly bodies that make up the outer edges of each mass (a bit like penguins).

The challenges of the cold are most acute for ground-stranded monarchs. As temperatures drop, ectothermic monarchs become unable to move and can’t seek out microclimates, such as tree trunks. Monarchs must be at least 41 degrees F to crawl and 55 degrees F to fly (known as their flight threshold).

The monarch at my feet was just warm enough to crawl; he was shivering to warm his muscles to make an escape possible. Though slow, if he could climb even one foot off the ground, he could greatly increase his chances of survival. The ground held the coldest microclimates and the possibility of dew, plus the ever-present danger of black-eared mice (Peromyscus melanotis). It was a risky place for a monarch to pass the night.

Avoiding the coldest, wettest conditions is of the utmost importance for monarchs, as their nightmare scenario occurs when the two conditions overlap. Cold, dry monarchs at least stand a chance. Cold, wet monarchs are in real danger. Monarchs get wet when they are exposed to precipitation or dew. Clustering monarchs in a healthy forest are protected from storms, but as trees are removed, monarchs are left exposed. Monarchs on the outer edge of the clusters, especially those on the windward sides, can become coated in moisture. Monarchs that are blown off the clusters or those already on the ground when temperatures drop are even more at risk. Not only are they exposed to the coldest microclimates, but they can become coated in dew that forms most nights. Such moisture can then freeze on the surface of wet monarchs, creating ice crystals. As these ice crystals radiate out, they can spread not just across but inside the monarch, through the holes (called spiracles) they use to breathe. Freezing from the outside in is the deadly process known as inoculative freezing. In a field lab, wet monarchs exposed to declining temperatures all died by the time the temperature had fallen to 18 degrees F. At the same temperature, only 50 percent of the dry monarchs died.

The monarch at my feet shivered, but at least he was moving. I cheered him on, wishing I could offer him a cup of hot tea or a jacket. Instead, I settled on guarding him from oblivious tourists. In pantomime, I caught the attention of a group looking up, their footsteps unguarded, and reminded them to tread slower, more deliberately. Brianda, in the meantime, had found a stick, which she offered to the monarch as one might offer a hand to a dance partner. The monarch accepted. He gripped the stick, still shivering, and Brianda moved him off the trail.

For all the danger the cold entails, it is also a saving grace. Low temperatures keep the monarchs inactive. Instead of flying around and burning lots of calories, when cold, they can dangle from the trees, use very little energy, and conserve their fat reserves for their remigration north in the spring. Like nearly frozen statues, monarchs wait out winter in a hibernation-like slumber.

As an endothermic (warm-blooded) human, my temperature needed to remain stable despite the cold outside temperatures. Watching the millions of monarchs sleep, the cold nestled against my skin and I shivered. Shivering, like diverting blood from extremities and increasing metabolism, helps endothermic animals maintain a warmer temperature in the cold. My body confirmed the science. I zipped up my jacket, amazed that the monarchs had found this perfectly chilled forest.

I was not alone with the cold and the monarchs. Around me, other visitors huddled together. Since disturbances could send the monarchs into flight, and use their precious energy, there were a few rules: no touching the butterflies, no flash photography, and no talking. The nearly wordless crowd gave the forest the air of a church instead of a zoo. The forest felt like a temple made by trees and worshipped by a congregation of wings folded in prayer. What they prayed for I could only guess: tailwinds, milkweed, or the peace that exists in quietness. I joined them, praying in my own way for the strength to be part of the migration and battle the many miles ahead.

How many miles, I wasn’t exactly sure. I figured I would need to bicycle around 10,000 miles if I wanted to go from the overwintering grounds in Mexico to Canada and back. If I left in March, I could get to Canada by summertime and be back in Mexico by November, just like the monarchs. That translated to a very plausible 1200 miles a month.

In the hushed forest with hushed monarchs, I tried to hush my doubt. I reminded myself that ever since I had been biking, even as a child making laps around the block, I had been proving to myself that I could go the distance. Laps around the block, then the neighborhood, then the city, trained me for my first bicycle tour when I was seventeen. That tour, a month of forty-mile days up the East Coast, taught me a useful truth: a long trip is nothing more than a collection of miles. If I could bike one mile, then I could bike two. If I could bike two, then I could bike 10,000.

Knowing I could cover the miles was not the same as thinking they would be easy. I knew that I would struggle, that some miles would hurt, that there would be moments of many extremes, and that the scope of it all could overwhelm me. It was not the 10,000 miles that I braced myself for, but the doubt that lurked in the vague outline of those distant miles.

For the monarchs, their very survival was in doubt. Yet, as their population staggered toward extinction, and uncertainty prodded my brain, the monarchs above me seemed peaceful, unburdened. They had been proving themselves, year after year, for thousands of years. I assumed they didn’t appreciate this, nor could they comprehend the significance of their uncertain future. Yet it brought me comfort to imagine that they hung peacefully because they understood the bigger picture: that their job was to migrate across a continent—battle storms, predators, disease, human development, busy roads, and pesticides—until it wasn’t. I took a deep breath, trying to put the present into the context of history. Surely if a butterfly with nothing more than instinct and orange wings could navigate three countries and the chaos of humanity, then I, with my stubborn will and a continent’s worth of hospitality, could too.

It was only January. The future would come, as would each mile. In the meantime, I turned my attention back to the branches. There was little room to worry in a forest painted with monarchs.

The Monarchs’
Winter Neighbors

Days before Day 1 / January–March

On a cool morning in March, a few days before I began heading north, I paused to take in my surroundings. I had been in Mexico for nearly two months, and although my journey had yet to commence, the adventure was already underway. Squinting from the sun, I gazed out.

Above me was a monoculture pine forest planted for fuel and lumber. Such farm-like forests were common in this area, on the Michoacán–Mexico state border. Though not exactly like the native forest, the rows of pines were a profitable crop that prevented landslides and took the pressure off the forest higher up the mountain. Below me, on a spread of undulating hills, lay a distorted checkerboard of tilled fields still used for subsistence planting. Cement houses sat pastured. Lines of clothes dried in the sun and painted each house a dozen swaying colors. The main road extended like a dusty river downward. Its tributaries of footpaths reached every corner. Brianda’s house, where I was staying, was close enough that I could see the family dog, Dobber, lounging in the sun. The neighbor’s entitled turkeys cast clucking shadows en route to stealing seedlings from the family garden.

After my first visit to El Rosario, I had asked Brianda if she knew of any volunteer opportunities. I knew then that I had several weeks until the monarchs began flying north, and I wanted to help in whatever way was useful. Trail maintenance, monarch education, English lessons? She eagerly accepted my offer to teach English. Not only that, I was invited to stay at her house.

Now I was in a field that clung like a postage stamp to the steep hillside above her house. Like methodical ants wearing team jerseys made from dust, her family and I paced their field. With each step, we slowly filled the fresh furrows with next year’s beans and corn. In just a few weeks, the family alongside me had become an extension of my own. Brianda had become my hermanita.

I let the beauty of the moment follow me as we continued our work. The sweaty horses, driven by Brianda’s dad, Israel, quivered from their burden. Brianda’s mom, Leticia, followed the fresh scar of the plow’s wake, leaving three corn kernels in each of her wide-spaced footprints. I clumsily placed one of the multicolored beans between each pile of corn. Brianda’s sister, Diana, covered the seeds with soil; her brother, Ivan, added some fertilizer; and their cousin tucked the seeds in with a final blanket of dirt. Our work lay hidden, waiting for the rains to come.

The monarchs were like a calendar. In April, after the monarchs left for the north, the beans and corn would begin to grow, taking advantage of the remaining humidity trapped in the soil. In late May, the rains would start, and the well-established crops could embrace the deluge. In November, when the monarchs returned, the crops would be ready to harvest. By reading the monarchs, one could read the rain and the growing cycle.

It was the intimacy of that moment that struck me most, of being part of the less glamorous rituals of life. I took the opportunity to soak up the gift they had given me: the gift of ordinariness, a window through which to see their unguarded lives.

As the waves of dirt spilled into the grassy edges of the field and the dust camouflaged our bodies, we continued our labor. In strict concentration, I raced to keep up and accurately place the beans. Every few minutes I would reflexively say “oops,” as a rogue bean slipped from my hands and planted itself by disappearing into the soil.

“Ustedes saben que significa ‘oops’?” I asked, wondering if oops meant the same thing in Spanish as it did in English.

“Si,” they laughed, confirming that they knew exactly how bad I was at planting beans. Their laughter was acceptance. My smile translated my feelings of good fortune.

From tourist to blundering bean farmer, my journey so far had been one of luck—the kind of luck I aimed for by having only the vaguest of plans and a bare-bones schedule. I preferred the details—such as where I would sleep or buy food or shower—to be revealed only as needed (and conveniently, I could go days without needing a shower). There was a joyful freedom in not having much of a plan. I was free to eat when I was hungry, rest when I was tired, and camp when I deemed each day done. The details were unnecessary. For me, it was enough to know that I would end up somewhere.

This wing-it philosophy has been both a blessing and a curse throughout my travels. There have been days when not planning meant eating nothing but crackers and ketchup, biking miles of road unfit for cyclists, and camping in make-do sites. These challenging moments were likely avoidable, but the truth was, I did not want to avoid them. I wanted to invite them, and by not overplanning, I did just that. I tried to give space to that which I couldn’t yet imagine, to encourage just enough discomfort for an adventure to unfold.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of my figure-it-out-as-I-go strategy was being able to say yes when opportunities presented themselves. It was because I had time to spare and only a vague plan that I was able to accept Brianda’s invitation to stay with her family—an invitation that allowed me to not only plant a field with beans, but to become Brianda’s shadow and learn what it was like to be a guide at El Rosario.

Six days a week during my stay, Brianda would rush out the door to greet the frigid dawn as well as her neighbor and coworker, Priscilla. Down the dusty dirt road we headed. They would fill the distance with jokes I didn’t get and stories told faster and faster in Spanish as the plots thickened. Not a morning person, I let the Spanish float by untranslated. We would walk until transportation arrived. Five-passenger cars fit ten, and as the car’s belly scraped at each speed bump, we would joke about losing weight. Trucks fit many more, and no one was too old or too young to hop in or out of the bed.

Arriving at El Rosario before the crowds, most of the guides would take a knee before the small shrine at the parking lot’s far corner, then veer uphill to the main entrance. After going from guide to guide with a handshake and a “Buenos dias,” I would set up shop in the cafeteria. There, as we huddled over cups of steaming café de olla, atole, or instant coffee, I would chat with the guides before pulling out the poster board of English phrases and launching into practice. Mostly, the guides rotated in and out, and I would be there to catch them in a moment of bravery to help them learn a new phrase. “My name is …” “Thank you.” “Do you want to ride a horse?”

Most afternoons I would charge up the hill, half for exercise, half to say hi to the monarchs. Each year the butterflies are in a slightly different clump of forest. For most of the 2016–17 winter they were past the undulating forest trail that spilled into the Meadow of the Rabbits, El Llano de los Conejos. On my first visit we veered right, about ten minutes from the meadow. On subsequent visits, they had moved down a trail twenty minutes beyond El Llano. I could cover the four-hour (for most visitors) trip in forty minutes when the clouds were out and I didn’t have to worry about trampling monarchs. On sunny days, I would linger to watch the delirious melding of orange wings and blue sky. On weekends, when the trails were overrun by thousands of weekend warriors, I would meander on side trails, skid trails, horse trails, cow trails, and through trailless meadows. On the days it rained or hailed, I would wait anxiously with the guides at the entrance, willing the monarchs to be safe and the storms merciful. I hoped 2002 would not be repeated.

January 11–16, 2002, a severe winter storm struck the monarch colonies. The first blow was forty-eight hours of rain. The second blow was a prolonged period of freezing temperatures. The deadly wet-cold combination was realized. An estimated 200 to 275 million monarchs, or 75 percent of the population at El Rosario and Sierra Chincua, were killed. On the ground, dead butterflies formed a mass grave. At some places the monarchs measured thirteen inches thick, and survivors, insulated by the dead, were unable to crawl out. The historic storm had been brewing for many years. The climate was changing, and trees that had insulated the forest and protected the monarchs from precipitation had been cut down. When the cold front came, the monarchs were exposed, and all but the most protected in the densest clusters fell victim.

That year, Estela Romero, a local woman from Angangueo who had been captivated by the monarchs since she was a little girl, traveled to several of the sanctuaries and collected hundreds of dead monarchs in the storm’s aftermath. She placed the monarchs in a clay urn and took it to the community cemetery. On a visit to Angangueo, I wound my way through the cemetery’s labyrinth of cement headstones and flower tributes to the far back corner, where a wall had begun to crumble. With respectful steps I located the marker I had come to see. Kneeling to brush away the pine needle duff, I read aloud, first in Spanish, then in English, then in French, the engraved tribute. “In remembrance of the millions of monarchs that froze to death in the great storm of January 2002.”

The words settled around me, and when silence returned, I was alone with the memory of millions. I bawled. It was the first time I had gone to a cemetery and felt more than awkwardness. I brushed away more pine needles, desperate to convey with action my sorrow for such loss. It was cathartic to have a place to mourn for the planet. As the world continues to erode, we need places to say we’re sorry. Places to remember what we have lost.