I spent the summer of 2018 hiking the overgrown and wild trails that lie hidden deep inside Monteverde’s Cloud Forest Reserve, guided by a pair of rangers and carrying a camera on my shoulder, looking for the Golden Toad. When it disappeared almost thirty years ago, the Golden Toad was an emblem of Monteverde, Costa Rica, found nowhere else in the world. The rangers and long-time locals told me stories of days that they would hike up to the elfin forest to find dozens, sometimes hundreds, of the iconic amphibians fighting for a mate in the shallow waters of ephemeral breeding pools hidden in the gnarled roots of trees. Glowing orange sparked inside pools of forest shadows. Now, thirty years after the last sighting of a Golden Toad occurred high on these wind-battered ridge-lines, the only glimpse of orange lies in the mushrooms that grow out of decaying logs; they are the humble monuments to a species that might — or might not — be gone forever.