My daughter and I really enjoyed our visit to El Imposible in January 2023 and we had a really good hike here. We were driven up the same terrible access road that Els described, and I think we went to the same ranger station/mirador for the start of our hike. However, we hiked all the way down to the bottom of the gorge to the confluence of two rivers. After some fun exploration along the boulders and streams and swimming in the little pools there to cool off, we of course had to hike back up, about 7 miles round trip. A sign at the top says you're at 780 meters above sea level, so it was maybe 500 meters elevation change? The forest was enjoyable and we had a good local guide for the interpretive plant trail that was pretty interesting. But it is far from virgin forest as most of the area where we hiked used to be a coffee plantation, we were told. This seemed to be a pretty standard tour for El Imposible, but I was disappointed that our tour didn't even include the "impossible" bridge that the park is named after. I think there are many other hikes you could do, and I think there might be adrenaline sport activities inside the park boundaries in other spots. I don't think the part of the park that we saw was really WHS worthy, but maybe other parts are better. Our tour guide (who we'd used for a tour of Maya sites of El Salvador) suggested that we'd enjoy a hike through El Salvador's Montecristo cloud forest better. In any case, it was nice to explore a part of the country that most people don't visit.
Since it was such a long drive from Santa Ana as a day trip, I couldn't convince our driver/guide to make a detour to the Cara Sucia ruins site, unfortunately, and he couldn't even determine that they were actually open to the public. Also, on the terrible access road, on the way down, a pickup truck was broken down in the middle of the road, and we were just *barely* able to squeeze by on one side to get around him. I would not have wanted to be the one driving that road!