Category: Adventure

The adventure category includes trips and hikes to fantastic places around the world and in nature. It also includes trips and hikes looking for new perspectives on everyday things.

Adventure

Hazards of International Travel in the Post-COVID Age

| thetembo
Reading Time: 6 minutes

Did I take the red pill or the blue pill? I can’t remember. Am I capable of dodging the bullets, or is my exhausted body about to be flushed into the sewer system of the Matrix with all the other discards?
I check in at the Asiana counter at 8 p.m for international check-in, three hours before a flight as recommended. I hand over my passport to the airline passenger service assistant. The job title has too many words, and assistant is a misleading label as if they work for me instead of the airlines. The yellow fluorescent safety vest guy behind the counter pulls my 43-pound luggage over to the baggage belt. He must be called the airline passenger service assistant assistant, but I will leave his label as “the guy in the yellow fluorescent safety vest” for this story.
The airline passenger service assistant says, “Sir, you need a Visa.”
“I show her my Visa to Vietnam.”
“Are you entering Korea when you arrive?”
“Yes, I have four days there.”
“Sir, you need a Visa.”
The agent has fired the first shot—the bullet whistles toward the head of my would-be trip in that matrixy vortex way. She writes down the address of the K-ETA website to apply for a visa and tells me the counter closes at ten. The guy in the yellow fluorescent safety vest retrieves my 43-pound luggage and returns it to me. I have two hours to figure it out.
I find the website and fill out the form. I get stuck because it won’t upload my selfie picture. I violated the 80kb file size restriction. I find an app to resize it, but when I get it to the correct size, the App wants to charge me to download a pdf. I don’t think K-ETA will take a pdf, and I don’t want to pay. I use the photo editor to shrink my picture to the correct size and upload it. Now it doesn’t like the dimensions. The dimensions have to be 700 x 700. Back to the photo editor to f**k around the dimensions. By the time I get that all squared away, it is 8:20, an hour and forty minutes left.
Next, K-ETA wants the zip code of the place I’m staying when I arrive in Korea. I find the address of the hotel on the reservation. A number at the end of the string looks like a zip code in a 3-3 format. K-ETA responds with “Enter 5 Digit Zipcode.”
I try googling for a zip code for the place. Nothing found. No clue. I try random five-digit numbers. “Enter 5 Digit Zipcode.” Apparently, the App is smart enough to identify legitimate Korean zip codes but not kind enough to give it to me. It’s 8:30 p.m, ninety minutes left.
It’s no time to encounter an enigma shrouded in mystery. A young Korean woman is standing nearby, waiting. I ask for her help. She takes my phone and figures out how to activate the search field. I paste in the address of the hotel. K-ETA says, “Search Results 0.” I screw around with the formatting removing punctuation that might not be necessary. “Search Results 0.”
The young lady’s boyfriend returns. I don’t know why I think boyfriend and girlfriend rather than husband and wife, maybe because they are young, not because of anything I’ve observed. The two work side-by-side, he on his Korean language phone and her on mine, while I peer over their shoulders. They finally get the search results field to populate with about 50 choices. The guy finds the hotel address on his Seoul map with the correct zip code, and K-ETA is satisfied. I thank them profusely.
The airline passenger service assistant walks over to assist the couple with their problem. She recognizes me and asks if I have applied for the VISA. I ask her how long it takes to process. She says about two hours. By the time I pay for the VISA, it is 8:50. Only seventy minutes left.
Now all I have to do is fume at K-ETA for being so problematic, plot out all the scenarios of finding a nearby hotel or going home, and pray for South Korean efficiency. At 9:10, I receive an email notification that the application is under review. Only fifty minutes left.
In the Matrix, my knees buckle, and my shoulder twists in agonizingly slow motion to avoid the bullet. Am I quick enough to evade the agent’s shot? It’s a Sunday night in Korea. Is that to my advantage because of a light workload or not because there isn’t any imagined bureaucrat processing my form some six-thousand miles away? Later, Max would tell me that the first time (of two) he moved his trip back was because he hadn’t applied for a Visa. On my last visit before the pandemic, I remember getting a Visa as I entered the country, not before. Experience has worked against me.
At 9:40, with just twenty minutes left, the application status changes to approved. The first bullet whizzes by my ear just out of range. I thank Korean efficiency and head to the now passenger-free check-in counter.

The flight is mostly an exercise in discomfort, even with the empty middle seat. I try to watch The Matrix Resurrections, the latest incarnation of the Matrix. The hum of engine noises so muffle the sound in the headset, I imagine them filming the movie on the wing of the flying jet. The only subtitles are in Korean and Chinese. So I half-watch a Korean film with English subtitles set in the Joseon period about an educated Korean man that gets exiled to an island where he has to deal with an uneducated fisherman.

The second bullet leaves the gun near the end of the flight, but I don’t know it yet. I have to fill out a yellow health form asking if I have Covid or have had it. I perjure myself under the penalty of the law by declaring no, but having just overcome Covid two weeks ago, the last thing I want is them singling me out for possible Covid. I have five days in Korea and didn’t give myself two extra days for a seven-day quarantine.
When we finally arrive and after face-shielded greeters in full-length medical gowns take my form, I discover that all visitors have to take a PCR test before leaving the airport. I had just read that PCR tests detect Covid for weeks and even months after you’ve had it. The second bullet ripples toward the center of my trip’s forehead. I f**ked up again, and I’m going to jail. I interpreted the “you don’t have to have a negative PCR test before departure to enter the country” to mean you don’t have to take the PCR test. I never read the fine print, maybe because it was in Korean.
I am standing at the testing station at 5 in the Inchon morning with, at best, two hours of disturbed in-flight sleep, contemplating the seven-day quarantine. I am mentally rearranging the trip, wondering if I can catch up to the rest on the second leg of my journey in Vietnam, and canceling my flight to Jeju. As a medical assistant jabs a white swap deep into my nose from behind an acrylic shield with rubber gloves like she is handling plutonium, I contemplate my impending prison sentence.
The test results won’t be available until eleven in the morning. So I take the train, get lost in the subway (as did Google maps), and argue with the hotel clerk, asking why she wants to charge me three hundred dollars a night when my booking says less than a hundred.
On the upside, I must thank a few people who helped me at the subway station. Lugging around a 43-pound suitcase, referred to as the beast, and probably looking every bit like a deranged homeless person with bloodshot eyes and wild hair, they still took the time to answer a question or look something up on their cell phones. In particular, I thank the guy that walked me to the number nine train at the Dongjak station.
At the Seoul station, google tells me to get on the 421, which I think is a bus but might refer to a stop on line four. A woman tells me to get on the number nine train, but the map shows the number four with a transfer to the number nine. I think she means that, but her two-word “number nine” explanation was missing a lot of information.
A train pulls up with the number nine printed on the door, so I get in. As we approach the Dongjak station, an electronic sign inside flashes its message that a transfer to the number nine is possible at the next station, so that is when I asked for help in the form of confirmation. The man, as mentioned above, confirms that this is the number four, and I have to transfer to the nine. I have no idea what the number 9 painted outside the car of the train was for. At Dongjak station, he walks me to the platform to catch the actual number 9 train. He tells me the express train would be too full to get on with the beast, but I try anyway. (I wish I had a picture of that, me standing at the open door with the beast contemplating how to squeeze in while the closing train doors nearly clip the noses of the people stuffed into the completely packed car.) The local stop train comes by shortly after. At the hotel, the clerk asks for my PCR test and makes me sign a form saying if I have Covid, I could not quarantine at this hotel. I tell her they would send me the results at eleven, which she accepts.
Korea hasn’t learned that President Biden ended the pandemic. Korea still requires PCR tests for travel and hotel stays. Everyone wears a mask, and I mean they wear a quality mask pulled over their noses, not a pulled-up shirt or a face mask only covering their chins.
At eleven, the email informs me that I tested negative—the bullet whizzes by, tickling my neck hairs. While this bullet was entirely in my head, in the Matrix, everything is entirely in your head. The fear is just as real. That is what the Matrix is.

Adventure, Writing

The Frozen Vegetable Test

| thetembo
Reading Time: 9 minutes

“Why go to sea under sail at all if you’re so concerned with security? Why not go as a tourist, as a kind of frozen vegetable buying your way across the world surrounded by hot running water, epicurean cuisine, swimming pools, … – designed for your delectation and designed to quarantine you from the contagion of elemental wonder and awe known only to simple living?” 

“To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse. … Voyaging belongs to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in.”

  • Sterling Hayden, Wanderer

Sterling,

How long a voyage? How unplanned a trip? Are pools, hot water, and decent meals forgivable? What does it take to pass the frozen vegetable test?

Siargao is remote, at least to this American. Not into the wild remote, but far removed from anything resembling the securities and amenities of a big city. The airport only supports small prop planes, and you won’t find anything resembling a chain store, not even a Jollibee, to my knowledge. My weather app, which I can connect to the server using the resort’s wifi, lists the General Luna area as 8419. On my scooter ride around the island, people on the beach at the Magpupungko Rock Pools near Pilar requested pictures with me for their phones. As was our experience in India, where the locals took pics of the tall, very white Americans, I was an oddity. My map for the scooter ride was a pic of villages on a pillar in the dining room. When I headed out, I passed men using oxen to plow flooded rice fields. I think you will agree that I was not on any docent-led, canned trip watching from behind the safety of the tinted tour bus glass. 

I consider this trip a voyage, long in distance but short in time. I was moved. I mean this in a literal sense but also in a figurative one, which I will come back to. My car moved me to the parking lot at an airport, and a shuttle carried me to the terminal. An escalator took me up its stairs to security, and a moving walkway ambulated me to the departure gate. A jet took me from one airport to another and then yet another. A taxi took me to my hotel, and an elevator elevated me to my room’s floor. The process was repeated on a domestic flight. Once at the destination, I rented a scooter to take me around the island and a canoe to take me up a quiet, rainforest creek. I joined a tour that started with a morning bus ride to the pier and boated to a remote island, only to get on a smaller boat. The whole trip uncoiled like an unwound tape measure to that point where I swam with the stingerless jellyfish and then recoiled back with a spring-loaded pop. 

Sometimes, it felt not like a voyage, so passive, like when sitting on a HEPA filtered, dimly lit jet in the same seat for ten straight hours staring at a TV screen. At least on the outbound flight, I sat next to a friendly, talkative lady who markets AI. Sometimes, when the sitting was sensory-rich, it felt like a voyage. Like when I rode shotgun on a wave-crashing bangka with the wind whipping in my face, the motor sounding like my head was on the inside of a lawn mower, holding on to rails for balance, warm salty water spraying into my face alternating with a burning sun.

Even the threats were generally passive, albeit real to me. Not physical threats so much as stress, like when trying to figure out what documentation you need in a sea of predatory providers, misinformation, changing rules, location-specific rules, and poorly designed apps. Failure to produce the right piece of paper at the right time could turn the trip very ugly. Missing a Covid test or failing it would be a disaster. Lose your phone, passport, or credit card, and then what? The immunization card is just a little piece of cardboard that looks like any other receipt or junk piece of paper. I have no idea what happens if you lose it. Would the phone pic suffice?

On the consideration of amenities, I generally had hot water even though the resort had a third-world combined shower and shitter. My meals hardly qualified as Epicurean though I had no complaints and, more importantly, no intestinal disorders. I drank San Miguel Pilsener for alcohol, more on the level of a poor man’s Bud Light if that is even possible. Most breakfasts consisted of black coffee, rice, a sausage, and an egg. Dinners consisted of random seafood orders. My food expenses for the whole trip were under sixty dollars. I enjoyed it all, but I certainly wouldn’t consider it lavish.

There is plenty of financial unrest, but not so much of my own. I met USAID workers still helping with the reconstruction after the super typhoon Odette struck in December of 2021. I missed a photo op of two men sitting in chairs drinking beers on the second floor of the concrete skeleton of a building exuding its rebar fibers. I can’t imagine how people rode out that typhoon in a shanty with a corrugated roof. The Cloud Nine pier that carried surfers a quarter-mile over the inner, waveless inner reef was reduced from a landmark tower to a few wooden palettes stuck on wooden posts. Cleanup and reconstruction were in the air. Many of the coconut trees were on the ground.

On my canoe ride up the creek, I was paired with two beautiful lovely young women, one of the treasures of the Philippines, to serve as my guides. The first question out of their mouths after they asked for my name, which apparently is Mr. Mike, is if I am single. As best I could make out, their names were Rose Bee and Honey Bee though I am sure I hopelessly botched the pronunciation into something familiar. Both are single moms looking for a unicorn: a loyal, handsome, compassionate, devoted, caring, loving, and financially solvent man who will sweep them off their feet and whisk them off to some exotic foreign land. The unicorn is my word; the rest are theirs. I ask them why they don’t have a Filipino boyfriend and they just shake their heads. I imagine it rather tough to raise a daughter on an income of two dollars a day in a world where nothing is free. They walked me from the canoe to my scooter and invited me later to the after-dark firefly attraction, but I didn’t want to drive at night on the scooter back to the river crossing in the middle of the island.

It’s hard to see how things will improve with the recent election. I won’t delve into politics here, but all I have to say is post-truth is alive and well in the Philippines, and that shit works.

On the consideration of being moved more figuratively, there were a few bright spots and one incredible tour. The scooter ride, for starters, included the Maasin River tour with Rose Bee and Honey Bee. The river ride up in the canoe wasn’t much, but I enjoyed the scenery of my company more than the scenery. At a sari-sari store with outdoor seating on the beach at the Magpupungko Rock Pools mentioned above, I asked a group of locals and workers if I could sit down and pointed to an empty chair at their table. They started to vacate, so I quickly clarified that I meant with them still sitting there. Re-mi, who introduced himself as “Re-Mi, as in Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do,” has relations in the States, including his mom. He asked me about the places I had been to. I butchered the pronunciation of Siargao and Boracay. The kids got a kick out of it and had fun imitating me mispronouncing the words. The island is one big palm tree forest broken up by a few shanty villages here and there. I enjoyed the adventure of circumnavigating the Siargao on the bike.

The island tour to Sohoton Cove was the highlight. I can’t imagine doing the things we did there in any park here. After passing by the cupcake-shaped islands coming into the cove, we had to switch to low clearance boats to duck under the stalactite-studed low clearance archway entrance, which might have inspired a hidden valley of dinosaurs scene in a movie. I don’t even know how the natives found this place. We stopped at a cave with an underwater access. Our guide shoved each of the three women I was with by the neck to propel them beneath the submerged wall through the cave entrance, but I snorkeled in under my own power. 

After the cave, we motored over to the jellyfish sanctuary. I’ve been stung before. It’s unnatural holding a live jellyfish in your hand, even knowing it is stingerless. It’s downright freaky to snorkel amid a large school of them. The pulsating brown bells move in Brownian motion bumping chaotically into you as you swim around the lagoon. Yes, Hayden, I bought my way onto the tour but didn’t feel like some kind of frozen vegetable doing it. Instead, I felt the contagion of elemental wonder and awe. The jellyfish swim was the highlight of the highlights. 

At the next attraction, led by a guide, the two customer service girls from Manilla and I swam into another cave with a water entrance. Inside, we came into a small chamber, climbed up the wall of the rocky interior about twenty-five feet to an exit over the lagoon, walked down onto a wooden platform ten feet above the water, and dove back into the lagoon to get to the boat.

Our group returned to where we transitioned from the larger boat to the smaller one. My traveling companions, all young, six from Manilla or nearby, and one from Cebu included: a lady doctor traveling by herself to escape the twenty-four-hour shifts of family practice at a clinic, a teacher mutually followed on Instagram, an exuberant and extraverted young lady, another young man that I never really talked to, and three customer service girls already mentioned that shared the small boat in the jellyfish sanctuary. We ate a Filipino barbecue of rice, pork, chicken, and steak with sides of mango and pineapple. The extrovert told everyone to talk in English, but they didn’t. I was definitely the odd, older, foreign man out. Sometime after the meal, they expressed interest in knowing about me. “Sir, where are you from? Sir, where have you been in the Philippines? Sir.” Who the hell is this “Sir” guy? I guess I was destined to be an outsider on this one. The getting to know me chat was cut short when ironically, the doctor fell off a water swing before swinging out into the water and started to bleed out through her cut foot. A bandage was cleverly improvised from a Covid mask, and she was okay once the bleeding was under control. 

The tour finished with an on-land, dry cave tour with some excellent features and bats flitting about our heads, trying to start a new wave of Covid. How unfrozen is all that?

So, Sterling, my voyage was only a week-long, and because I stayed in Manilla a night coming and going, sacrificing two days to the Covid gods of regulation, it was only five days. My only financial unrest was the cost of transportation and dog care. I was a tourist but at least an outlier lying out on a remote island in the times of Covid and post-Odette. It may have been a short, paid-for voyage, but I hope I at least passed the frozen vegetable test.

Adventure, Photography

A Man’s Got To Know His Limitations

| thetembo
Reading Time: 9 minutes

We backpacked forty miles in four days, with an elevation gain of five-thousand-five-hundred feet, and in many ways, I consider it a failure, or at least more of an ordeal than an adventure. I suffered dehydration, hit the wall, and failed to complete the originally planned Rae lake loop trail.

We drove up the day before to Sheep Creek campground, listening to Kim Stanley Robinson’s (KSR) “The High Sierra: A Love Story” to pass the time and set the mood. One thing I know for sure, the title of this article will not include the words “A Love Story.”


The following day began discovering that a bear had violated my Prius. I heard something loud in the early night that woke me. I cowboy camped the whole trip, so I glanced over to look in the car’s direction, but a bear container obstructed my line of sight. I chalked it up to something at one of the other campsites in the distance. In the morning, the trunk was open. The doors were opened. The heavy battery charger was on the road, and the access to the spare tire was strewn about. But my expensive camera and my buddy’s cell phone and wallet were unmolested. I was lying in the open just twenty feet away. I’m curious what I would have done if I had seen a bear sniffing around in the trunk of my car. We reported the bear incident to Morgan, the Park Ranger that checked us in at Road’s End. She told us to act big and yell, “Bear Away!” They are trying to condition the bears to recognize the word bear as a warning. Although we heard reports of a bear on the trail on the last stretch just below Mist Falls, we never had a sighting of a bear.


The first-day hike began at 5000 feet altitude and ended nine hours and ten miles later at 7000 feet. Mist Falls put on a great show at the four-mile marker, with mist drifting down the river for hundreds of yards raining on everything in its path. During the last visit, another buddy reclined dry and comfortably on a stone in front of the falls. With significantly more volume in June than in late August, the rock was barely visible through the volume of water and spray.


KSR introduced us to psycho-geology as a way to explain the love of backpacking. KSR informed us that the Sierras are written in the language of glaciers. The whole valley is the remnants of glacial action. Aside from all the problems mentioned below, there is something special about looking down a glacier-carved canyon surrounded by spires three thousand feet over your head. One of the prominent features in the main valley is the horns left by a melted glacier.


The hike above Mist Falls is a stair-climbing and exposed grind. I stopped to talk with a girl and two guys sitting on a rock on the way up because that is what you do when you are getting your ass kicked by the hike. She complained about her short legs and climbing over the two-foot stone stairs. I told her I would trade my old body for her short legs. She asked about our backpacking experience. When my buddy mentioned this was his first one, she told us it was a hell of a hike on which to pop your backpacking cherry. Indeed.


By the time we reached Upper Paradise Valley, my ass was officially kicked. The heat wave had something to do with my dehydration, but so did the thirty-five-pound backpack, the exposed trail, the 2000 feet of elevation gain, old age, and the simple failure to drink enough. By the time we reached Upper Paradise Valley camp at the end of the day, my red shirt was stained with white salt streaks, and I hadn’t pissed since I left the campground and experienced mild cramping in my feet while trying to sleep. I wasn’t the only victim. Later, one of the guys of the cherry-popping trio, an experienced backpacker we were told, was puking but still made it all the way to Woods Creek. A couple of women hikers told me they lost a buddy to the heat and wasted most of the day waiting to figure out if their friend would make the hike or not. On the flip side, we passed by an older lady with more wrinkles than the canyon itself, covered from head to toe in clothing, making her way up to Woods Creek. Either she was more dehydrated than a raisin, or one tough old cookie. I am humbled.


I had already dug a deep hole for the rest of my trip, not the kind you take a crap in. I didn’t expect eighty-degree heat in the June mountains, but dehydration was mainly on me. After that first day, I forced myself to drink more, even when drinking water became almost repulsive.


The second day started with a river crossing. I watched Amanda cross with her backpack, poles, and swimsuit. While my buddy explored for a dry crossing downstream, I stripped to my skivvies, donned my water shoes, and followed her lead. Even at the widest point, the current was strong and the water cold, but I prevailed. When he saw me on the other side, he flipped the bird at me but found his dry log bridge.


After, we hiked the fifteen-hundred-foot climb from the Upper Paradise campground to the dully named Woods Creek, most of the ascent occurring in the first three miles. We trekked through pure KSR psycho-geology swallowed in the immenseness of the canyon. Vertical rivers cascaded down the sheer sides of mountains. A spire towered over, reminiscent of the Matterhorn. The distant mountains had a hazy view as if from an airplane window.


At about the end of the three miles, I hit the wall for the first time. If I were hiking solo, I would have turned back at this point, but my buddy said he wouldn’t make the decision for me. So stubbornness trumped common sense, and I pushed on. I wasn’t eating enough. In retrospect, my meal planning was downright foolish. I figured on two packs of dehydrated food daily and some snack bars. My total (un)planned packed calorie count was about fifteen hundred calories. I didn’t really do the math until after the fact. In reality, I should have planned on something like four-thousand calories for each day of the ascent. I don’t offer a defense for my abysmal planning, but those packets of dehydrated food are essentially worthless. They pack five hundred or so calories per meal. The containers claim to contain two servings. That joke is on me.


Two packets a day is only a thousand and some calories. Using those numbers, I should have packed eight packets per day for the ascent and four packages per day for the descent. I stuffed my bear canister full with only six meals and eight energy bars. If I had packed appropriately, at ten dollars a pop, I would have paid two-hundred and forty dollars for a four-day outing. On previous one or two-night backpacking trips, a couple of meals per day worked out fine, considering that I started the one-day uphills on a big-bought breakfast, spent the next day at location, and the last day coming down. My novice was showing, and it was embarrassing. The lack of proper food planning was entirely on me.


I suspect another downside of the heat was a mosquito and gnat bloom. I choked down a handful of gnats that got caught on deep inhales. On the upside, I’ve never seen so many bugs. Butterflies alighted two, three, and four to a flowerhead. Bees, flies, and bee flies buzzed about. Lizards sunned themselves on rocks and the trail, narrowly avoiding the tips of poles. If there is a psycho-geology, there ought to be a psycho-biology brought about by immersion in the wildflowers, insects, pine-scented trees, and animals. I was fortunate to spot deer, marmots, grouse, and a pika.


Having made it to Woods Creek at 5.1 miles and eighty-five-hundred feet elevation and eating a meal, I decided to shoot for Dollar Lake, a mere (haha) four miles and two-thousand-foot climb. My buddy took on my bear canister to lighten my load. Embarrassing.

On a four-foot creek crossing, I managed to step on a log that gave way and I ended up soaking my right leg. About a mile and a half up, I hit the wall again. For the first mile and a half, I would take a hundred steps and then stop to check my heart rate and take a second to get my breathing back to a normal rhythm. For the last two-and-a-half miles, I would take about twenty-five steps before being forced to stop to catch my breath. The air became thinner. The pauses became longer and the sit-downs more frequent. We passed a sign that said no fires above ten thousand feet. Near the top, when my buddy disappeared out of sight, I took a full-on, sprawled-out lay down on the rocks, entirely spent. My buddy reappeared a few minutes later without his backpack, bearing the good news that I was only a few minutes from Dollar Lake. He carried my backpack the rest of the way. Double embarrassing. The four miles from Woods Creek to Dollar Lake took five hours.


We made camp at the trout-leaping and beautiful but mosquito-infested lake donning the netting and Deet to ward off the blood-sucking brutes that wanted to drain what little energy I had left. Strangely, I had to force myself to eat my chicken and rice packet, the tastiest meal in my grocery bag of dehydrated food.


This brings me to my original mistake. I should have planned on a five-day trip instead of four. I overestimated the value of my training. I was routinely hiking eight to ten miles a weekend in my peak-a-week training hikes but at sea level and with a light ten to fifteen-pound pack. Of course, I expected the backpacking trip at altitude would be more difficult, but I did not expect it to push me beyond my limits. Given that I corrected my other mistakes, a five-day trip with one major climb per day might have been manageable for me. A good trip would be from Road’s End to Middle Paradise Valley on day one, from Middle Paradise Valley to Woods Creek on day two, and finally from Wood Creek to Rae Lakes on day three. Each segment is about seven miles and includes one major climb per day, leaving two days of ten miles downhill each.


In the morning, my buddy wanted to go back the way we came. Thank god. Just squatting to take an outdoor crap left me breathless. I don’t see how I would have survived the one-thousand-plus feet ascent over Glen’s Pass. If I did manage it, it would have taken me four or five hours to make the two miles with another seventeen miles of travel. Extending the trip to five days was out of the question because I would be out of food and out of TP.


We packed up and headed down the way we came. We met the two healthy members of the cherry-popping trio headed up as we were headed down. They left their puking buddy down at Woods Creek while they made a long day hike with light packs to Rae Lakes. She told me the whole point was to see the beauty of the lakes. Thanks. Yes, I have a regret. It was a disappointment to not make the round trip and see the lakes, but it was the right decision.


As it was, we made the trek back to Woods Creek in just over three hours, down to Upper Paradise Valley in another four, and to Middle Paradise Valley in less than two for a total downhill distance of thirteen miles in yet another nine-hour day. On the last day, we hiked out the remaining 6.8 miles in less than four hours, stopping briefly again at Mist Falls, powered by the self-promise of a Diet Coke at Grant Grove Market and a burrito in Visalia.


Of course, downhill was much easier than up, but it was not without pain beyond mere fatigue for me. During my training hikes, I suffered from sprains and foot issues. On one hike, in particular, I experienced a knife-cutting pain in my right knee. I wore a double layer of socks, a knee brace, and ankle supports to combat these mechanical problems. I had no issues at all, possibly owing to my countermeasures. But on the ups and downs, I experienced burning pain in my hips. I tried to counter this with an Ibuprofen diet starting at two pills a day and increasing to six. Even though I had the energy and stamina to make it out, I still found myself frequently breaking to let the burning subside, to make the walking bearable, if only for a short distance.


We finally made it out. My buddy’s backpacking cherry was popped, and my backpacking naivete was exposed. Grant Grove Market didn’t have a Diet Coke, so I settled on a quart of Gatorade, which I made short work of. It turns out I hate plain water as a drink. Visalia came through with the best burrito. And I ended up at home, back to wearing my comfortable blue jeans, which KSR says are absolutely worthless. And loving it.

Adventure, Photography

Pura Vida

| thetembo
Reading Time: 6 minutes

Pura Vida: being happy where you are at in the present moment and finding life as precious for precisely what it has served you. 

Author’s Note: I don’t entirely agree with the definition. Read the Im-Pura Vida entry. But I would go along with appreciating the bright spots no matter how bright or dark the times.

Pura Vida is…

… riding with flashlights on a golf cart for an improvised night tour of the resort property led by Andresen. It is photographing the coveted red-eyed tree frog, an armadillo, a sleeping bird perched on one leg in a tree, and a dozen other frogs in the ponds and creek.

… walking five kilometers in the misty shadow of the volcano on the El Cabo trail in the Parque Nacional Volcan Arenal to the overlook of Lake Arenal from the top of a lava flow. It is poking your head over the extended roots of a 400-year-old ceiba tree looking for velociraptors. It is finding pixels of color in the flowers of the otherwise dark and gloomy canopy. It is an orange butterfly and a red-striped butterfly sipping nectar with their nose straws from red berry-like flowers. It is hearing howler monkeys barking in distant trees. It is seeing my brother get insufferably pleased with himself when we walk by the re-parked car, letting us think it is still parked in its original spot at the end of a long lot. It is seeing cautionary crocodile signs of Peligro at the terminus of the Los Miradores trail on the shores of Lake Arenal.

… walking the five hundred steps down the side of a canyon wall to see La Fortuna falls. It is admiring the falls from a distance, then the mid-distance, and again right in our faces. It is swimming in the mildly chilly pool with falling water pounding its way to the bottom. It is spotting a school of fish stationery in the current hovering in the crystal clear water of the river. It is climbing back up the five-hundred stairs counting each one along the way.

… sitting under the roof of an outdoor patio listening to the rain change the notes from isolated drops to the orchestra of a downpour.

… drinking hot-pressed Costa Rican coffee for breakfast and eating fried ripe plantains.

… trying to figure out how to answer my niece’s poignant questions like, “When are you going to die?” and “Do you have any friends?”

… finding a moss-covered sloth up close instead of a distant clump of brown high up in the canopy.

Perisosa moves so slow an entire algal ecosystem grows on it.

… sitting in hot springs with the family drinking Imperials under cover of night.

… seeing the bright yellow flower foliage of the “Cortez Amarillo” dot the hillside on the frustratingly sluggish descent down the Pan-American Highway from San Ramone to the coast.

… driving up the twenty-five percent grade to get to the Casa Latte. It is talking to the two housekeepers in broken Spanish. It is checking out the incredible view overlooking the Pacific Ocean, watching yellow-billed black-bodied toucans fly from tree to tree, and once even right over our heads while stretched out on lounge chairs.  

… swimming in the Nauyaca waterfall-created pool after a treacherously steep and hot descent on a slippery dusty road booby-trapped with marble-sized rocks. It is admiring the two-tiered waterfalls from the steeply-cascaded lower tier. It is watching cliff divers flip into the lower pool without maiming themselves. It is about not making lethal choices at a river crossing on Google Map’s proposed shorter route to get back to the main road.

… returning to the property each night to watch and photograph an incredible sunset replete with dramatic clouds and horizon-banded sunset bows.

A Horizon Bow at Sunset.

… taking an hour and a half ride from Uvita to the beaches of Corcovado on a boat with two outboard 200 horsepower engines, stopping along the way to see white-spotted dolphins, squid-catching boobies, and leaping rays. 

Boobie with a Squid Catch

… satisfying my niece’s ambition to see monkeys as we watch spider monkeys migrate through the canopy in quest of mangoes even though one of the pits hit me in the head (aimed or dropped?) It is watching an anteater swing from limb to limb with its prehensile tail negotiating the canopy almost like it was a monkey. It is watching macaws chatter back and forth in a tree at the edge of the rain forest overlooking the rocky beach. It is seeing two Jurassic Park compies scampering on their two hind legs. It is sitting in a pool downstream of the waterfall, getting a nice back massage from a small cascade while admiring bottomless bikinis.

Find a Mango Tree, You’ll Find a Monkey

… leaving Corcovado as two Macaws fly wing tip to wing tip over the sandy beach to the backdrop of palm trees in the near distance and cloud-shrouded mountains in the far distance.

… walking out onto the sand and rock fluke of a whale at low tide for a swim in the salty, warm water of Parque Nacional Marino Ballena. Oh yes, and to surreptitiously look at bottomless bikinis.

Fluke of the Imagination

… imbibing a 750 ml bottle of Imperial at Las Delicias Bar Y Restaurante.

… seeing the other three kinds of New World monkeys at Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio: white-faced, howler, and squirrel monkeys. It is listening to a white-faced monkey crunching on the bones of an identified and unfortunate rodent. It is watching brazen white-faced monkeys put on a show close up in the shade of Manuel Antonio Beach. It is observing an iguana sunning itself in the sand, a helmeted basilisk clinging to the trunk of a tree, leaf-cutter ants marching in line waving their green flags, and a tree frog peering out of a knot in a tree. Let’s not forget to mention surreptitiously looking at bottomless bikinis.

… watching the lights of Alajuela from our patio at the Xandari Hotel while finishing off the second bottle of wine.

Leaving Costa Rica through the Worm Hole

… having the good fortune to break down in front of the Casa Antigua Hotel, where Henri and his Chinese partner (woman) helped us get ahold of the rental car agency, held onto the key until the repair truck arrived so we could get to the airport before our flights departed, and called a taxi to take us for the airport. It is returning later after a missed flight to get served a late-night dinner and beer after the kitchen was closed. It is sitting around a scenic outdoor garden and pool instead of in a stuffy airport with no access to a restaurant or bar. It is finding a ray of light in an otherwise miserable couple of days.

http://www.casaantiguahotelcr.com/

… reading the entire “Ice Crash: Antarctica” novel while stuck in airports in two different countries. It is chatting with Jeany who chose to return to LAX by way of Panama City instead of Aeromexico.

Adventure

Im-Pura Vida

| thetembo
Reading Time: 8 minutes

Author’s Note:

Half the reason to travel is to relax or have a great adventure. The other half is to show off what a wonderful and rich life you have. This piece is the opposite. It is a gripe piece. Feel free to skip to the good part of the trip (coming soon). 

In the grand scheme of things, these events don’t compare to getting bombed out of your home by Russians or falling victim to Covid. But maybe this piece will make some would-be travelers feel good about their decision to stay home. Perhaps it will help some avoid some of the challenges I faced.

Time: Zero.

You walk up to the agent, ready to board your flight. You hand her your phone so that she can scan the QR code for the ticket. 

She says, “I need to see your Covid test certificate.” 

You take the phone back and open up the picture of the certified lab result of a negative antigen covid test taken within the last 24 hours.

She says, “We don’t accept this test.”

You counter, “What are you talking about? This is a lab certified antigen test taken within the last 24 hours.”

You protest and argue. The agent tells you to stand by the podium with the other five victims. The rest of the passengers board the plane. The plane pulls away from the jetway and then the terminal.

She escorts three other victims and yourself to the security checkpoint. The other two left behind are two older women, and one requires a wheelchair.

At the immigration checkpoint, an immigration officer checks the passports. He says, “You have to leave the terminal. You do not have valid tickets anymore.” He hands you back your passport.

That’s it. Good-bye. You learn that Aeromexico doesn’t have a ticket booth to complain to or make a reservation in the terminal. You are standing outside the immigration entry point. You are not on a plane, without a reservation, without a Covid test, and without a place to stay.

Time: One day before.

You are driving to San Jose to stay close to the airport to catch your noon flights out of Costa Rica to mitigate the risk of a long car ride on the same day as the trip. Your niece is sick, and it’s not just car sickness. Her mom records her temperature at 100.2. When your niece starts covering her mouth, you tell your brother he better pull over. As he does, your niece unleashes into a plastic bag. Her mom dumps the mess in a drainage ditch.

As you continue the journey, your niece cries because she doesn’t want to get stuck in CR for another ten days if she doesn’t pass the Covid test. Her mom tries to talk her down.

When you arrive at the resort, the guard unexpectedly takes temperatures to screen for Covid. Miraculously, she doesn’t register a temperature with the guard’s scanner. Her fever has already passed, or the scanner is a piece of junk. Either way, you all have dodged a bullet.

Time: Less than 24 hours before.

Your sister-in-law hands you the test kit. You and your four relatives are setting up for the video observation of the Azova antigen covid test purchased back in the states. It made perfect sense at the time. The test is certified and only takes 15 minutes, according to the Azova marketing literature. 

You try to log on to the app on your iPhone. Nothing happens. You try to log in to the web page on the laptop. The browser rewards you with an ssh certificate dump claiming that this is an invalid site. You try another browser with the same result. It could be a bad wifi connection, but other apps are loading. It could be a proxy issue. You don’t know, so you call support. Your brother goes to the main office to try the connection there. The support guy has never heard of this problem before. Your brother calls back to say he was able to log in on the wifi network at the main office. So you all head up to the office. The wifi is better, but it is still sketchy. 

The Azova App user interface is confusing. The user interface doesn’t list the dependents under their mom’s account. You make another call to support. With lousy hearing, the thick accent of the customer representative, and all the noise in the lobby of the office, you can barely understand the rep. Another issue arises, so you make another call to support. You hand the phone over to your sister-in-law, who still has good hearing. And then another problem arises. And another. Finally, you take the test. The instructions tell you that you will receive the results in fifteen minutes. The observer has already left. An hour later, you still don’t have the results. You call again. When all is said and done, and you have the certificate in an email, the entire process takes nine customer support calls and over four hours.

Time: 3 hours before.

Your brother pulls the car into a gas station to fill the gas tank of the rental before returning it. CR gas stations have attendants, and your brother requests diesel. 

A mile before the drop-off, the car sputters and stalls in traffic. After a few WTFs and trying to turn the engine over, your brother realizes it probably wasn’t diesel.

You jump out of the car to push it to the side of the road. Someone in the truck stuck in traffic behind you jumps out and helps with the push. You dial all the provided numbers to the rental agency on your phone, but none of them go through.

“Ayudame. Ayudame,” you say to a man. The man takes you into the Casa Antigua Hotel to meet the English-speaking partner/owners, one of the few breaks you all catch during this whole ordeal. These decent, helpful people connect you to the rental agency. Your brother arranges for the rental agency to pick up the stricken vehicle. He leaves the keys with the owners, and the owners arrange a taxi to take you all to the airport.

Time: 3 hours after.

You’ve been to the lab and passed the same antigen Covid test a second time. It would have been a no-brainer if you knew how awful the Azova test was and how easy the lab was. You’ve rebooked the flight for 1:55 a.m. to Mexico City and 7:00 a.m. to LAX through Aeromexico customer service on the phone. It only cost you fifty dollars to change.

You chat with Jeany and her boyfriend, two of the other victims. You tell them to call Aeromexico to rebook, which they try but fail. So she takes another airline to Panama City and then to LAX with a twelve-hour layover. You feel bad for her. She won’t make it to LAX until 8 p.m. of the next day.

You chat with your brother and sister-in-law. They barely made it to their flight on time, but Delta didn’t even bother to check for a Covid test. 

Time: 8 hours after.

You decided to return to the Casa Antigua Hotel. It beats hanging around in the airport for fourteen straight hours, and you want to eat dinner. When you arrive, the restaurant is already closed. But Henri, the owner, sets you up with a two-course dinner and a beer. He lets you hang around in the open-air courtyard on a perfect night. When you leave, Henri won’t accept any money. He tells you to pay it forward. Maybe these words will help pay his kindness backward a little bit.

You take a taxi back to the airport. The driver asks you about your trip speaking English, not so great but good enough. When he pulls into the airport, he shows you the fee, about 4000 Colon. You only have a twenty, which translates into about 12000 Colon. He hands you back 3000 Colon. You know the rate and tell him he should give you 3000 more back. That would be 6000 colon or ten dollars for a six dollar, one kilometer, five-minute ride.

All of a sudden, his English isn’t so good. He doesn’t offer and continues to pretend like he doesn’t understand. He understands perfectly. You argue for a bit, but he doesn’t budge.

Time: 11 hours after.

A family from Vancouver walks up to the agent as she is setting up the counter for the Aeromexico flight. You catch the part of the conversation where she says the Covid certification is no good. You intervene and tell the father that they can get the lab done within an hour, and if they don’t, they will get bumped from their flight. They have time. It is still three hours from takeoff. They don’t realize, and you don’t yet at the time, but you probably saved them at least four thousand dollars. 

You see them later on the plane. The family took the same Azova test and tell you they had the same bad experience with it. The father tells you it took them five hours to take the test instead of the advertised fifteen minutes, but you take small comfort in confirming the poor user experience. They thank you for the advice at the counter.

Time: 11:15 after.

When you hand your passport to the agent at the check-in counter for the rebooked flight, she says, “Your ticket is invalid because you booked it under the same reservation as before.”

That doesn’t mean anything to you. You counter, “I didn’t book anything, your customer agent booked this.”

You argue back and forth. The agent hands you your passport back as if this is the end of the conversation.

You say, “Your agent booked this flight.” You show her the email with the new reservation on it. You go back and forth some more. She fiddles with the monitor and talks to her companions. She hands you back your passport again.

You show her the receipt in the email for the fifty dollars they charged you for the difference in price with the original ticket. 

The agent is back to the keyboard and terminal and chatting with supervisors and other agents. She tries to sell you a ticket in business class for six thousand dollars. 

You refuse. “I know there are available seats, because I have a reservation for them.” 

At the end of the day, she finds a ticket for a thousand dollars, but because the 1:55 a.m. flight is delayed, she can only put you on the 7 p.m. flight out of Mexico City. She’s already tried to hand you back your passport three times. You take the ticket. 

You think about all the times you’ve spent in line glaring at some loser that takes five or ten minutes to get through because he doesn’t have his shit together. You argued and negotiated with the agent for ninety minutes. Ninety minutes. You commend her on staying with it but chastise her company’s poor customer service.

Time: 14 hours after.

As you are boarding the 1:55 a.m. flight, a young man in front of you is called out of line and informed that his test is no good. The agent says, “That is why we tell you to check in at the front desk.”

Really? You know what he is going through. You are sure that he had confidently secured his Covid certification, and he checked in through his phone, which told him his check-in was complete. 

He says, “What am I supposed to do now?”

You know the answer to that question, too. He is screwed. Despite your empathy, you aren’t going to miss this flight.

Time: 24 hours after.

You are in the Aeropuerto Internacional Benito Juárez camped out in a hidden corner, trying to catch some sleep despite the continual blaring of repeated messages over the loudspeaker. 

You WhatsApp’d Jeany. You tell her, “just thought i’d text and make you feel good about your decision. the flight to mexico city is delayed and i am going to miss the connection. the next flight out to LAX is 6 pm so i am going to be stuck in mexico city for a day”

Surprisingly, she responds, “Yeah, I’m in a corner of at a lounge in Panama till my flight in the morning Oh man that sounds awful I’m so sorry for the fiasco!”

“yeah you made the right move…”. And so on.

Time: 42 hours after.

You finally make it home. You are a thousand and fifty-one dollars poorer, not even counting the extra parking and dog care expenses. You’ve read an entire novel, Ice Crash: Antarctica and are lucky you didn’t die of sleep deprivation on the drive home. 

Jeany texts, “Happy to grab drinks sometime when this is all a funny memory.”

You’ll give her a call in a couple of years when you’ve put this behind you.

Adventure

Desert Storm

| thetembo
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Soundless lightning flashed unseen in the distance while stars blinked placidly directly overhead. Andromeda floated overhead off the foot of Pegasus in her wispy dress. I looked for the galaxy of the same name but did not see it.

The desert had heated up to a hundred degrees in the afternoon and the hot air hung over the evening. I wanted to cowboy camp but heeded warnings that there was a chance for thunderstorms late at night by setting up my bivy to sleep on with the idea that should rain come to pass, I could jump inside for shelter. In case you’ve never seen one, a bivy is more body bag than tent.

Listening to an audiobook to pass the time in the early evening, I watched the stars disappear behind unseen clouds. The sky continued to flash with increasing brightness and regularity to the west of us, up Palm Canyon and into the mountains. It was only nine in the evening when the winds first gusted while raindrops pelted the ground. Brooke and Arturo scrambled to put the rain fly on their tent. I tucked myself into the bivy but the rain barely lasted more than a minute.

The rain stopped but the wind didn’t. The wind rippled over the tent and the bivy in gusting waves. I went back to cowboy camping because the body bag was too hot. The wind continued to intensify. Arturo and Brooke’s tent trapezoided into a nearly flat position. Brooke and Arturo moved the tent inside the Ramada, the stone wall structure with a slotted board roof that enclosed picnic tables and a stone fireplace. I quickly followed their lead placing the bivy and my body just inside the wall next to the entrance.

Lightning flashed growing brighter and close enough to echo in the canyon. Sprinkles of rain came and went. I retreated inside the bivy occasionally resurfacing to cool off. Blowing sand attempted to use my head as the foundation for a new sand dune. The lightning-thunder gap closed from ten seconds to five seconds to three seconds to two seconds. I wondered if I should be in the car riding out the storm awake but alive. I pictured Brooke’s and Arturo’s faces flashing in the lightning while pounding on the windshield to let them in but me shaking my head no because there wasn’t enough room for them and all the gear. (That’s a haha).

The gusting storm cooled off the air enough to seal the bivy without breaking into a sweat. The lightning passed and the sprinkles went their way. For the rest of the night, wind ripped at the bivy flapping the material like you might see on a tent during a blizzard on an Everest expedition. Somehow, during all of that, I fell asleep.

When I woke up, the air was calm. The remnants of a storm cloud made for dramatic horizon fronting the morning sun. You could be none the wiser for the night of terror. Later reports informed me that this was one of the worst lightning storms ever experienced in San Diego county at some 4000 strikes during the night. I for one was glad to not make the bivy body bag my final resting place.

Adventure

A Ride on the Road

| thetembo
Reading Time: 12 minutes

Covid Compromises

The original plan, the dream, was to motorcycle all the way to Prudhoe Bay and back, a ten thousand mile, six week, round trip to the top of the world highlighted by travel on the infamously dangerous Dalton Highway of ice road truckers. Of course, the elephant in the room, or maybe the bull in the china shop, is Covid, which is still a long way from releasing its grasp on the course of events of the world. Covid washed out efforts to ride last year but this year we remained hopeful all the way up until June 21st waiting for and expecting Canada to open its borders. But Canada faltered, I think perhaps their low-budget wall to keep us lower 48 Americans out. You are dead to me Canada! Until our trip to Jaspar and Banff anyway.

Some trip had to be made and it had to be made this year because I am no spring chicken and because I had the housesitter arranged and the vacation time approved. So after flailing around with alternate trip ideas, Hetal convinced us (and rightly so) that the heart of the original trip was to stand at the top of the world and travel the Dalton Highway to get there. We met some people that made the trip through Canada on the Alaskan Highway. It required either a work permit or a house in Alaska, a rigid itinerary that didn’t even allow for a visit to Whitehorse just a few miles off the main highway, and typically an interrogation by Canadien border personnel.

So the compromise trip was to ride motorcycles to Seattle, fly to Alaska, and drive a ruggedized rental car to Prudhoe from Fairbanks, then sightsee in the rest of Alaska for a bit, fly back to Seattle, and then finish the trip with a ride inland hopefully to Jaspar and Banff to visit the Canadian highlights of the originally planned trip. Of course, the Jaspar and Banff piece didn’t pan out either as Canada still hasn’t opened its borders as of this writing. Oh, Canada. You are nothing but an ocean to fly over to me.

Another casualty of Covid is car rentals, the agencies having sold off most of their covid-idled stock. But Hetal made it happen and we planned our trip around rental car availability. Of the few motorcyclists we met, one rider made his trip by shipping his bike to Anchorage, a five thousand dollar proposition at best. It would have almost made sense to buy one for those costs.

Masks are still required in airports and on planes. Mask requirements were lifted in Oregon and Washington only a few days before we arrived. Many people still wear them now out of habit, something unimaginable just a year and a half ago although some Americans are kicking and screaming the whole way down. As one woman who refuses to give in to the demands of Covid with either mask or vaccination put it, I hope I don’t get Covid but if I do get it, I hope it is mild, and if it kills me, then it is just my time. Maybe she could just substitute the idea of not getting a vaccine with the idea of standing on the traffic lane of an expressway. Maybe she should think about the people she might give it to.

And so on July 1, 2021, some three years after conception and significantly compromised due to world events, three travelers left San Diego in a caravan of two motorcycles and an SUV.

The Caravan

The caravan has a daily rhythm. Ride the ride. Find a place to stay. Set up camp. Do whatever the place affords. Sleep. Morning coffee. Tear down. And on your way. Never a night in the same place. (On only two occasions did we stay in the same place, Denali and Oakland.) Each day has a different feel and each night is a new setting and a new cast of characters.

  • A trafficked ride through LA and a meandering ride through Ojai with hints of the heat and cold to come. Pizza and wine on the square at Paso Robles.
  • The winding roads of the PCH1 stopping to see elephant seals. An austere house in Hayward and brutal Covid stories of a respiratory therapist.
  • A time costly trip to Pt. Reyes National Seashore to see a lighthouse and fortuitously, a pod of humpback whales. A walk-in campground at the mouth of the Russian River.
  • More time on the PCH1 through red wood forests not stopping to see them to make up lost time. Fourth of July in a Crescent City in a warm Air BnB after searching for a camping spot on a crowded holiday and a cold, cold shore.
  • Slow travel up the crowded roads of Oregon. A night in a hotel under the impressive bridge at Astoria.
  • Weaving through the tree farms and clear cuts of Washington and hiking to a waterfall in Olympic National Park. A night staring at the forbidden shores of Canada across the Staits of Juan de Fuca.
  • Ride to the airport with a backdrop of Mt Ranier and flight to Fairbanks. A night at Salty’s talking about the challenges of travel through Canada.
  • Ride to Coldfoot in the spotty rain through spartan spruce forests each tree ever diminishing in size as we travel north. Dinner on a pull out just outside of town in a barracks hotel.
  • Ride over the Atigun Pass in the Brooke’s range and through the tundra. A trip to the Arctic ocean and through the oil works at Prudhoe.
  • Return to Coldfoot on a much drier day driving over the Atigun Pass. A night in the farthest North bar in Alaska drinking canned beer with the locals.
  • Return to Fairbanks stopping at the Yukon river for a roadside lunch and a hike to the scrotal finger. A night in the Musk Ox house finding Musk Ox in the morning.
  • A short drive south to Denali for two nights of camping at Savage River campground hiking Mountain View and the Savage River loop. Attacked by an Alfred Hitchcock gull and sleeping in the rain.
  • Ride down to Knik stopping for a plane ride over the Anchorage glaciers. A night with an overly friendly dog on a horse farm in Knik.
  • A day in Anchorage hiking the Knik arm from Earthquake park to downtown for beer and reindeer sausage pizza. Drive back to Fairbanks for a quick night in a small apartment with an all-night TV.
  • Transfer to the Bridgewater. Walk ten miles covering the entirety of Fairbanks including an Indian lunch and a flock of sandhill cranes. Lousy company at an overcrowded bar.
  • Fly back to Seattle to recover bicycles and a night in a crappy basement Air BnB for Chris’s birthday.
  • A morning brunch in East Lake with Chris’s people and a ride through the cascades stopping for a river float. A night in Pateros sleeping on the road next to the bike.
  • A smokey ride to Sandpoint, Idaho stopping at the Coulee Dam. Dominoes pizza and craft beer at a pub.
  • A smokey ride to Westchester, Idaho through the unbelievable scenic Hell’s Canyon National Park. A night fishing and sleeping on a dock holding a woman’s hand while she unloads and cries about all her family issues.
  • A smokey ride through the unbelievably scenic stretch of the Snake River with the road just feet above the dam lake and a night ride with a near death experience. Night camping at a BLM site in the middle of no where.
  • Another amazing stretch of scenic highway with a not so dry lake of water and salt and various shades of algae. A night in the pine forest of Lassen national forest.
  • Various stops in a very smokey Lassen national park followed by a fifty degree temperature change from the mountains to the valleys. A pizza party at Brooke’s new house.
  • A long ride home more cold than hot.

Each moment is structured to be free within the matrix of destination, camaraderie, and equipment. The reward is the experience of ups, downs, and in-betweens while the regret is the unchosen and the left behind.

Here it is in pictures: https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1t1iTJmhaAUycbphfRdvGRz2NCZO0pNQd&usp=sharing

Highlights

In general, the highlights are the unexpected moments of turning a corner and running into stunning scenery.

  • Turning onto the PCH1 to see a white wave washing over a black rock in a green ocean. (Actually, pretty much everything on the PCH1 if it weren’t so damn cold.)
  • Seeing the sixteen percent grade of the Dalton Highway ascend up the side of a mountain into a cloud bank.
  • The entire valley of the Atigun pass surrounded by snow-patched black mountains with green bases and interesting rock formations overlooking a river road, the pipeline, and the soon to be ubiquituos tundra of the North slopes.
  • Big sky country stretching to the horizon under puffy cloud shadows throughout central Alaska.
  • Driving through Hell’s Canyon, a river gorge in Idaho deeper than the Grand Canyon.
  • Driving along the Snake River at near surface level for twenty or thirty miles on a road selected off a map for its gray line and off-the-beaten-path route.
  • A near dry lake stretching for miles in Northern CA on the 395.
  • Glaciers on the small plane ride over the Knik glaciers outside of Anchorage. You can’t ask for a better view though we were somewhat worried about that co-pilot.
  • The view from the mountain view trail in Denali.

Traveling within the Arctic Circle was certainly interesting. The midnight sun messes with your head as much as your circadian rhythms. Time has no meaning during the two-month day at the 70th parallel. The sun never sets playing havoc with your sense of time and normalcy. Every day has a second noon: a high noon and a low noon and what business does the sun have being to the North of you in the northern hemisphere anyway? Why do stores close? What do owls do? Would you dare to pull an all-nighter in the winter? It broke my weather app which showed a 3 PM sunrise at Prudhoe. We started a three-hour hike at seven in the evening and never worried about hiking in the dark. We came out of the farthest North bar in Alaska in Coldfoot at midnight in the middle of the day. Or maybe it was towards the end of the day, the day not ready to end until sometime at the end of July.

Wildlife viewing is always a highlight for me. A day of travel in Alaska is measured by the number of moose seen. Our best day was a four-moose day. In total, we saw one bear from the safety of a plane, more than a half dozen moose, deer, elk, a lynx, an angry fox chasing after shorebirds, a golden eagle taking a crap at the top of a pine tree, a flock of sandhill cranes, caribou, a pod of humpback whales off the point at the lighthouse at Pt. Reyes, and myriads of small critters. As side notes: Caribou and muskox live off lichen and moss under the snow during the dark winter of the tundra, my definition of heroic. In the western hemisphere, reindeer are simply seasonally employed caribou.

Flower-blooming flora, though generally more overlooked than fauna, was on full display. Large patches of fireweed added reddish-pink hues to the landscape. Alternating yellow, violet, white, green, and purples lined the roads.

Of course, it was great to see and even stay with the relations. We thank them for their support.

Lowlights

In general, the lowlights were the temperature extremes and swings. Ironically, I nearly froze my ass off riding on the trip North where we hugged the coast in the perpetual fifty-degree chill with Mark Twain’s astute observation gliding across the ice in my hypothermic head, “The coldest winter I’ve ever experienced was a summer in San Francisco.” But on the inland trip ride home, we fought the heat much of the way experiencing the remnant of the heat dome over the Pacific Northwest. Forced out of the mountains by a fire in Lassen National Forest on the stretch of highway from Chico to Fairfield, we rode in a dehydrating 105 to 110-degree heat. On that particular day, the temperature swing went from 50 in the pines of a Lassen campground to 110 on the I-5 heading south and then back into the low 60s as we headed into Oakland. Note to self, need to lobby for flexible roads in that narrow band of about five miles between the freezing coast and the burning inland empire. Maybe put Elon Musk on the job.

It’s hard not to mention another elephant in the room, or on the ride… Global Warming was in our faces during much of the trip. Alaska has interior warming of 7 degrees. The spruce beetle population is exploding resulting in the devastation of spruce forests around Anchorage and beyond. As one Alaskan put it, “You don’t have to prove global warming to an Alaskan. All an Alaskan has to do is look out the window.” There is nothing subtle about the direct cause or the results. The spruce forests are patchworks of green and dead trees. Back in the mainland, we dodged forest fires in Washington, Idaho, and California. In California near Lassen, we had to double back due to road closures or drive all the way to Reno to go around. The re-route briefly took us back into an ominous, sun-obscuring, red-orange smoke cloud on a road lined with green fire trucks and firefighters in their yellow suits.

Mosquitos were inevitable and anticipated. In fact, they were not nearly as bad as I anticipated. In Denali, I spent two nights under the stars (ok, under the twilight) without once fainting from blood loss.

An Alfred Hitchcock moment when I was forced to wave off an angry seagull with a stick because I had inadvertently entered a nesting area. Warnings were posted at the side near the road but we came in from the opposite side. Birds make people happy, particularly if those people are the ones watching you get accosted by an irate nesting bird.

And one near-death experience, when a jackass decided to pass the SUV and me on a blind curve and had to cut me off to narrowly avoid a head-on collision with a car coming at it from the other direction. If I wasn’t on the right side of the lane or if the oncoming car was going just a couple of miles an hour faster, it would have been ugly for a lot of people. F**king jackass.

Midlights

Driving over the Atigun Pass was actually a highlight tempered only by the confabulation of what it would have been like if we had attempted the thirty or so miles of slippery road on a motorcycle on the trip up. Slippery mud from light rains looked manageable on the mostly hard-packed road but slippery mud is a tricky thing on a steep grade. On the much dryer return trip, it looked easy, at least in my confabulation of the ride. But we will never know.

Standing in the Arctic Ocean was an emotional highlight. it represented the pinnacle of the trip and the purpose of the mission but it’s not a particularly pretty sight, rocky and barren with a backdrop of oil-pumping plants in the background. You have to pay for a tour for the few miles across the privately held oil lands to actually get from Deadhorse to the Arctic Ocean. I always have mixed feelings about the canned patter and the false camaraderie of people working the trade. But in this case, it was useful learning about all the inner workings of the oil pumping process at Prudhoe and tires that under a million pounds of drilling equipment burst into flames from overheating if they move too fast.

My favorite met person was a bi-polar, elderly lady working an information kiosk in Fairbanks. She is bi-polar only in the sense that she has been both to the Arctic and the Antarctic. She worked out of Point Barrow providing medical care to nearby villages for many years and then participated in expeditions to the Antarctic to teach high school children about the environment depriving them of their electronic connections during the journey. We should all be bi-polar! After our conversation, I drifted over to the exhibits. The bi-polar woman shamed me as I walked past her again asking me in a good-natured spirit, “What did I learn?” I muttered something about the Ididerot race but I hadn’t really read anything, just looked at a relief map of Alaska. So she called me out on a wasted opportunity.

The weirdest encounter was with a forty-six-year-old, single woman proprietor of a flower shop on a yearly gathering with her family. She poured out all of her family issues and tragedies on a dock in a state park to three complete strangers. At one point when she was crying, I offered my hand for her to hold. I felt kind of awkward because I didn’t know how long she needed it for but I didn’t have any immediate use for it, anyway.

Other interesting encounters included a dance in Sandpoint saloon with a decent band, an itinerant worker in Coldfoot who skied tree-barren mountains in Alaska by driving up in a snowmobile then letting it self-drive to the bottom while he skied down to meet it, and all the people Hetal introduced herself to, particularly in bars. The names and stories of the others have already faded. But that is the way of the caravan.

There is a certain glamor in motorcycle riding but the reality is isolation in a space capsule helmet with earplugs and the discomfort of riding in more or less the same position for hours on end despite alleviation from bike yoga stretching routines. Of course, hiking is pretty much the same way in the sense of isolation and discomfort. Both are long periods of repetition punctuated by a few moments of interest justified by the sense of accomplishment at the completion.

Pulling off-road to cook a meal is a great alternative to paying for every meal at a restaurant, especially if you are on a road like the Dalton Highway that doesn’t have them for stretches of a couple of hundred miles at a time. On more than one occasion, we cooked with the stove in the car on account of inclement weather. Sitting down at a restaurant on occasion is nice too; different food to try and different folk to interact with. We never succumbed to convenience food at the many gas stations we frequented though I did pick up a couple of bottles of convenience wine as gifts for Brooke so we didn’t come in empty-handed.

I spent five nights sleeping under the stars without using a tent, once under a shrubby tree in Woodland Hills, twice in Denali, once in a parking lot in Pateros, and once on a dock in Westchester State park. Actually, it’s pretty comfortable but for some reason, haha, I tend to awaken at sunrise. In Denali, on the second night, I retreated into the bivy for an hour or two when it started raining at 7:30 in the morning. Not all city folk need a roof over the head, Mr. Muir.

Rant all you want about being online and connected, we relied heavily on the devices to navigate and find places at night. On every day during the trip, we were connected at some point. And I still took satisfaction in providing my trophy pictures to the world through Instagram completing my mission of a daily post for one year.

All of our equipment never gave us any serious trouble. The motorcycles and the truck fired up each morning and started promptly after sitting for ten days at a Seattle motel doubling as an airport parking lot. Given how rarely equipment actually does what it is supposed to do, I might consider this a highlight, too.

Postpartem

So now it is over and while I am quite happy that my motorcycle performed and I performed on the motorcycle, its future is definitely uncertain even though I am much more confident of my riding ability. I am staring at four walls and have a ceiling permanently over my head. I don’t think I will miss sleeping literally on the road but, damn, a couple of weeks ago I was standing knee-deep in the Arctic Ocean at the top of the world having traversed the Dalton Highway. Even though I conceived of the idea, I would have certainly failed to execute without the determination and persistence of Hetal and Chris. A proverb echoes in my head, “If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far, go together.” I might change that a little, “If you want to back out, tell no one, if you want to go far, go together.” Damn it, motorcycle or not, we did the Dalton Highway. We went far. To the ends of the Earth far.

Adventure, Photography

Muskoxen

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

From my youth, I remember the photos of snow-bearded muskox huddled together in an outward-facing circle to protect one another from the arctic blizzards. They are to the cow as the wooly mammoth is to the elephant, a stringy-haired relic of the ice age that didn’t get the memo to go extinct. They only live in the tundra of the far north latitudes surviving on lichen and moss during the harsh long winters.  

One of my ambitions was to watch and photograph these beasts in their native habitat on our trip to Deadhorse, Alaska.  From our ship container(-ish) hotel room, the hotel manager told me that they were on the river’s edge earlier in the day before we arrived. He peered out the window across the road and toward the river but didn’t see any. He said they might come back later in the day, although that might have been a trick answer because the day in the Arctic summer is two months long. So I checked every couple of hours through the course of the nightless day during our twelve-hour stay and on the trip in and out, but the ice age creatures failed to reveal themselves.

Two days later, back at Fairbanks, we overnighted in an Air BNB place that was interestingly called the Musk Ox house. In the morning, looking out the back window onto a field behind the house, I saw a large black mass of fur which I guessed to be a grizzly bear. So I bravely or foolishly grabbed my camera and ran out to capture a photo trophy. You have probably guessed already that the grizzly bear was in fact a muskox. It turns out one of the few herds of captive muskox live at the U of Alaska Fairbanks Large Animal Research Station which just happened to be in the backyard of the overnight rental.

So I saw muskoxen although not really on my terms. Which now that I think about it, might actually be the underlying theme of our trip. Hashtag on #prudhoe for more on the trip, if you are interested.

Author’s note: subsequent research tells me that muskoxen are more closely related to goats and sheep than cows. (https://uaf.edu/lars/animals/muskox.php)

Adventure, Photography

Photo Finish

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The two racing rocks rush towards the finish, nose-to-nose, bump-to-bump, head-to-head, toe-to-toe, or whatever feature one ascribes to bowling ball size rocks engaged in a heated race over a temporarily undry, ice-glazed lake. All that we spectators get to see is the final moment frozen in time in the wind-eroded tracks in the rehardened and now dried mud, stretching back to the starting point seemingly out of nowhere. Not every rock at the race track is hell-bent on winning. Some have an artistic bent painting lazy loops or perhaps engaging in the calligraphy of secret rock words.

The excitement of the events takes place largely in my mind, which is in stark contrast to the rest of the sights of Death Valley. The ruggedness of the mountains expresses itself in folded contours of chocolate brown, rust red, sandy tans, lava blacks, and bruised purples. The ruggedness of the valley expresses itself in a snowfield of salt flats, a lone creosote bush defying every effort to squelch its life, a naked caldera reminding us that Death Valley can add injury to insult at its whim and ever-shifting sand dunes that quickly erase all traces of its visitors.

A man tells me the racetrack is the most overrated attraction in the park, hardly worth the sixty-mile off-road trip (on motorcycles battling loose scree and dehydrating ninety-degree temps. I added that last part.) Barely visible rock tracks might not have the glamor of the artist palette, or the excitement of finding pupfish in a spring-fed stream, or the challenge of summitting a dune, or the admiration for carpets of defiant flowers, but the racetrack has the challenge of the trip, the rocks have the mystery of their movement even knowing the explanation, and it doesn’t hurt to indulge your imagination in a place that absolutely inspires it.

Adventure

Cedar Creek Falls

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

Cedar Creek Falls is a well-known hike in San Diego, having one of the few waterfalls in the county. I’ve made several visits over the years and decided, with a permit as now required, to visit. It was hard to see nature through all the distant memories, distant memories over three decades old. My memories include people I don’t see anymore, from days when my hiking was a social activity as much as an experience of nature. About two decades ago, the social aspect of hiking mostly ceased. Maybe somebody was trying to tell me something, but whatever that message might have been, I missed it, and I replaced my missing hiking buddies with a Nikon camera. On this latest visit, I approached the falls from the Ramona access to the west of the falls. On either approach, you drop about a thousand feet to the San Diego River valley to reach the falls before turning around and having to climb a thousand feet to escape.

On all our previous approaches, we came in via the Eagle Creek Road access from the North. Eagle Creek Road was never much of a road from what I remember. On one of those previous hikes, I recall seeing a caterpillar on every plant that had a flower on it so it must have been late spring. Breezely, a college friend, was on that hike but I don’t remember who else, probably because he was the fastest walker and always in front of me while everyone else was behind.

The Ramona access today is the preferred entrance. There is a parking lot, a gate, and a Ranger checking permits. The trail itself is marked every quarter of a mile, has a few benches, and wooden structures for shade. It wasn’t blazing hot today but it was much warmer than the prolonged winter of the past few weeks.

On a mountain bike camping trip with a number of memorable moments, we ended up riding in from the Eagle Creek access and unintentionally out on the Ramona access. Bill, the lead on this particular adventure, recruited a couple of newbies for the ride. As we were riding toward the falls, we kept hearing buzzing noises and couldn’t figure out what it was. At a stop, we realized it was coming from a pannier on one of the bikes and investigated. The guy had brought his electric razor on the trip and it had somehow managed to turn itself on.
Our game plan was to ride down a trail to the south and exit at the San Vincente Reservoir. As it turns out, the path cuts across an Indian Reservation. When we reached a fence that blocked the trail, a man whose sole purpose was to keep people like us off the reservation came out to stop us from going further. He spoke the immortal words, “Turn around and go back past those 17 no trespassing signs you just rode by and find another way out.”
“Oh, we must have missed those.”
Having delivered the bad news, he was a little bit chummier. I remember him telling us that he had lost a couple of his Dobermans to a mountain lion hanging out in the area.
So we headed back and ended up camping out in the bushes near the falls where we had just come from. Sitting around a campfire at night, (recall this predates CA burning down every other summer or so by at least a decade), we teased the inexperienced campers about mountain lions and wolves and grizzlies. When a bat flew overhead, we added that to the list but one, not seeing the bat flitting about our heads in the darkness, rejected the possibility of our only true sighting saying, “Now I know you are teasing me,” and seemed to relax.
In the morning, one of Bill’s friends who carried a sheathed 13-inch knife found a thick rattlesnake on the trail and gave it a tug on the tail. I thought he was an idiot, but then again, the Alligator Hunter and Bear Grylls were still years in the future, so maybe he was just ahead of his time.

On the present-day hike, I was about five feet from a rattlesnake before it came into my awareness, which I announced to the world with an “Oh, Sh*t!” The rattlesnake took offense and coiled up into an attack pose, but I wasn’t within striking distance. Hissing and rattling, he backed slowly off still facing me and when he felt safe enough, he made a run for it diving into the safety of a bush. So now I know how fast a motivated rattlesnake can slither.

One of my favorite memories was a February hike. Bill jumped into that frigid pool of water while I hedged. As I contemplated whether I wanted to jump in, I asked him as he swam toward the other side, “Is it cold?” He turned back and the lie spewed out of his mouth along with a fog of breath you see coming from people’s mouths on a cold day in winter, “Not at all.” For the record, I jumped in anyway and the water was as cold as his lie. No visit was complete without jumping or diving into the bowl of water from one of the rocks to the side of the pool. On one trip when we had the pool to ourselves, I remember jumping in, in my most natural state.

Today, no diving signs and no access signs are posted all over the rocks and the trail. The permit threatens a heavy fine and jail time should you think yourself better. Somebody got tired of extracting injured and dead bodies from diving accidents and exhaustion, and from cleaning up after drunken parties.

The management of the trail has changed and I have changed (unwillingly) over the years, but the one constant is the waterfall. It still looks as amazing and inviting as the first time I saw it. It’s nice to have at least one constant in the universe or at least one little corner of it.

Snow still visible on Cuayamaca Peak