By Tim Leffel

Venturing into the wild adventure capital of Mexico, a group of tour guides gets a lesson in what not to do with their clients.

The rafting had been good fun, but the elation quickly wore off as we stood shivering in our wet clothing. An ongoing drizzle didn’t help. Whenever any of us walked across the grass, our shoes got sucked into the mud of the saturated ground underneath. The van was supposed to be here 40 minutes ago. Our hope was fading as we stood outside a riverside shack in rural Chiapas, southern Mexico.

A hen and her chicks pecked at the ground around us. The mother living in the house pulled fingernail-sized grains of dried corn from a stalk while sitting on a crude bench. The children milled around and sat on tree branches, never taking their eyes off the shivering gringos in bright clothing.

“We need to go into the village and find someone with a pickup truck,” said Albert, one of the other members of my group. It seemed a bit extreme to me, but our so-called guide Renaldo wasn’t very encouraging. Any and all questions about why our pickup was so late got a reply of, “I don’t know.” There was no cell signal here and he had no radio. Or any kind of a Plan B.

“Do you guys know where we are?” someone asked the rafting guides in Spanish. No, they had just rafted this river for the first time yesterday. Thanks for not telling us that before we got on the water.

After an hour, we gave up and started walking. We found a pickup truck and a driver willing to let us pile in. All 16 of us. As we bounced on speed bumps and potholes through the countryside, we held onto the side panels and each other to keep from tumbling over. After about ten miles of this we arrived back at the put-in point, with no van there either. It was lost in the countryside. We were cold and wet, with no change of clothes, but at least there was a restaurant serving lunch.

The Downsides of an Organized Tour

I was here on this mangled tour with, ironically, a bunch of people who run travel tours for a living. It was before a big adventure tourism summit and this was our pre-conference excursion. So far we’d mostly seen the inside of a van. Our very first day, with most passengers having arrived from flights of between six hours to a whole day and night, we spent 10 hours riding. I was amused at the absurdity, but the experienced tour guides and itinerary planners with me were livid.

We independent travelers are often already a bit leery about organized tours. There are fears of regimented schedules, of too much time in transit to check off sites, of a lack of control over our time in the country. The good tour companies know how to get around all this. I was riding with some great ones, people with experience guiding groups through dozens of countries, often on bikes or on multi-day hiking trails. They do most everything right and their customers are thrilled.

Instead, we got these guys. Around 2:00 on the first day someone asked when we were stopping for lunch. “You want lunch?” Renaldo replied. We vetoed his suggestion of a convenience store.

When we asked about the places we were passing on the route we got answers like, “I’ve never been here before.” Half the people on the trip spoke Spanish, so we asked the indigenous guy with the long white tunic and the ponytail. No, he wasn’t from around here. We’d get to his village at the end of Day 3.

Late afternoon on that first day we arrived at our only scheduled stop: Chiflon Falls. As we set off up the trail, past the rushing river at the bottom, we noticed that the people coming down were soaking wet. Did they go swimming somewhere? “I’m not going in the water,” exclaimed one woman in our group.

She did go in the water. We all did. Or rather the water came to us. Chiflon Falls is not some pretty postcard cascade viewed from a distance. In autumn anyway, it’s a fierce explosion of water that makes it seem like Mother Nature is really angry about something. The water sprays so far and wide that anywhere close feels like a rainstorm. It’s impossible to get a photo of it from the trail because the lens gets instantly covered in droplets. The impact is so strong when the water hits the bottom that I saw boulders the size of a BMW Mini swirling around like twigs.

When we got back to the van, it looked like we’d all been swimming. Since nobody told anybody this would happen, there wasn’t anybody with anything else to wear. Out came all the carefully packed suitcases that had been fit into the back of the van like puzzle pieces. Out of those came one more item that would keep reappearing in different forms later: a bottle of tequila.

“In about three hours we will get to where we spend the night,” said Renaldo. Surprised silence in mid-tequila-shot, then a collective groan.

Chiapas in the Clouds

This was all a sad tragedy because Chiapas is a great adventure destination. This is the wildest part of Mexico, a former revolutionary hotbed that was off limits for many years. Ironically it’s now one of the safest states in the country. It has Maya ruins, unspoiled jungle, spectacular lakes, interesting crafts, and a colonial city that sucks you in and makes you start looking at real estate prices. In other words, like Guatemala but minus the crime part.

Late at night, in the blackest dark imaginable, we arrived at our lodging spot of Las Nubes (the clouds). Our relief did not last long. “There are not enough rooms for all of you to have your own,” said Renaldo. The next thing I knew, my wife and I were sharing a room with a British hiking tour company owner we had just met that day. Four of the women traveling by themselves were stuck together, despite all the cabins but ours looking to be empty. At 10:15 p.m. we had dinner, accompanied by some tequila that two people had the foresight to bring along. Las Nubes does not serve alcohol–even to those who just spent 10 hours in a van.

We slept to the sounds of the waterfall next to the camp, but some slept better than others. “There was rat shit in my bed,” said a Turkish tour company owner the next morning.

“I slept with my pillow at the foot of the bed because the ceiling was dripping on my head,” said a bike tour company guide.

After breakfast we went for a hike by the waterfall and to a panorama point about a mile away. Two people in our group stopped to take pictures and were left behind. We found them back at the camp. Renaldo had never taken a head count, so he didn’t notice they were gone.

Enter The Africans

A trip that goes wrong always makes for a better story, but even the best disaster needs a good sub-plot. Ours was supplied by The Africans.

The fate of our tour was really foreshadowed at the start by an hour of waiting for an African couple to make their way from their hotel room to the van. They had a long flight across the ocean, so we cut them some slack. But then the husband began the ride with a spiel about his tour company and a hard sell to those on board to please book business with him in the future. Odd and inappropriate, especially since we had all just met, but also because he was from a country known more for ethnic strife, fundamentalists, and corruption than any wildlife or tourism attraction. Still, we chalked it up to cultural differences and took a nap, assuming the business attire they had on was some kind of confusion over the first day’s itinerary.

The next morning, however, the strange got stranger. Mr. Okoro came to breakfast wearing wingtip dress shoes, dress slacks and a pressed shirt with a collar. Mrs. Okoro had on dressy shoes that went well with her fancy ruffled blouse. While the rest of us just looked at each other with raised eyebrows, my tagalong wife asked the mister, “Aren’t you going rafting today?”

“No, I can’t swim,” said Mr. Okoro. “And my wife is afraid of the water.”

It was quickly becoming clear that this couple had not read the itinerary of the tour they had signed up for. There were simpler choices they could have picked that involved coffee plantation lodge stays or nice nature tours that looked for butterflies and birds with binoculars. But no, the Africans signed up for the one that clearly stated there would be several steep walks, two white-water rafting runs, and a very long hike through a jungle. Were they in it for the van rides?

Each morning at breakfast, as the group rolled out decked in waterproof Gore-tex and footwear meant for water or mud, The Africans showed up looking like they were ready to man a trade show booth. At an eco-lodge on Day 3 they asked about an iron.

Continue to Page 2 – Chipas Tour

By Shelley Seale

Visiting the driest place on Earth, a writer is captivated by the alien landscape but longs to look deeper into the lives and traditions of the hardy people who inhabit it.

It is still dark when the Colque family makes its way up the volcano, climbing steadily in the early morning hours. The air is cool and arid here in the Atacama, the world’s highest and driest desert in the far northern reaches of Chile, along the Andes mountain range at the borders of Bolivia and Argentina.

The small group of indigenous Atacameños reaches the peak just before sunrise on this winter solstice, June 21—the New Year for the Atacameño people. The eldest male, the grandfather, leads the animal they have brought along to the edge of the volcanic crest. Perhaps it is a llama, perhaps a sheep or a goat. All have been used in previous years.

As the sun begins its climb over the horizon the elder pulls out a knife and, with great respect and reverence, cuts open the animal’s chest. He reaches inside and pulls out the still-beating heart.

He holds the heart up toward the rising sun, an offering to the gods and to the power of nature in this harsh, forbidding land where very little grows and some places have never seen a drop of rain in recorded history. The entire family watches intently, in silence, for however many times the heart continues to beat will reveal how much prosperity and good fortune the family will have in the coming year.

After the ceremony, which has been a part of many Atacameño for thousands of years, the Colque family returns to the valley and goes to church—a Spanish Catholic church in the village of Machuca, where they live.

“It is very, very important to do this,” says Joel Colque, one of the younger adult members of the family at 24 years old. “With it we receive blessings, and a good year.”

This blending of cultures and beliefs may seem incongruous, until you realize that in this desert region at the northern tip of Chile is home to an incredibly hardy people with a long lineage in human history. Some mummified remains in Father Le Paige’s Museum at San Pedro de Atacama are the oldest in the world, pre-dating Egyptian relics by thousands of years.

The Atacameño people were invaded by the Inca, colonized and relentlessly persecuted by the Spanish, and at times under the control of Bolivia and Peru. Their religion, culture and language have been under attack for centuries, yet somehow they have preserved a way of life that is little changed, and very welcoming to visitors.

“My people have made rituals at the top of volcanoes for 600 years before the Spanish,” Joel tells me. “We make animal sacrifices, though when the Incas came to this area they were known to make human sacrifices. Many of their constructions are still up there, in the Andes.”

The Atacama Desert presents a geography that is almost like another planet. Its otherworldly appearance and terrain have been likened to Mars; so much so that it has been the location for many movies filming Mars scenes, and NASA tests instruments for future Mars missions here. The lack of rain — an average of only .04 inches per year in the entire region—has created riverbeds that scientists believe have been dry for 120,000 years.

The immensity of the landscape is breathtaking, as you pass copper and lithium mines made famous by Che Guevara and the 2010 incident that trapped 33 miners for two months, with smoking 35 million-year-old Andes volcanoes of up to 22,000 feet looming over it all. And at six to nine thousand feet of elevation, altitude sickness is common; visitors are cautioned for the possibility of some initial lethargy, headaches or insomnia.

Into the Salt Flats

For a real look at the history of the Atacameño people, hike up the Pukara de Quitor, a fort just outside San Pedro de Atacama that was built around 900 B.C., until the Spanish overtook it centuries later. As I approach the entrance I hear guitar music; the ticket seller is sitting languidly in the corner playing music. As I pay my $2 entry fee, I attempt a conversation in very broken Spanish.

The man’s name is Luis Salva, I learn; he has worked at Pukara de Quitor for two years. He plays five instruments, and performs another song before I start my climb into the fort. “Atacama es muy bonita,” Luis says.

I must agree. The fort is dotted with signs explaining its history of invasion upon the peaceful people, in both English and Spanish, and my arrival at the top yields a magnificent view of the desert gorge below. After my exploration, I hop on a loaner bike from the Alto Atacama Desert Lodge to explore the surrounding valleys and villages.

After a traditional asado (barbeque) lunch, Joel Colque arrives to take me to the Salar de Atacama, the largest salt flat in Chile and third-largest in the world. Joel is a guide working for Alto Atacama, and he represents the straddling of two worlds that many of the region’s younger generation undertake. Until you hear the story of his family’s annual animal sacrifice, you would think he was any adrenaline-junkie adventurer in his twenties. He’s big into sandboarding, but also attempts to ride his board down the snowcapped volcanoes. Joel guides not only for the hotel but also his aunt’s adventure tour company. He’s young, cocky and brash; if he threw in a few “dudes,” he could be a California surfer.

Continue to Page 2 of Atacama Chile story

Story and photos by Laurie Gough

“I’m suspicious of any place this Shangri-La perfect. There has to be a downside,” I said to my fellow travelers on the first day of our trek in the mountains of Bhutan, the remote Himalayan kingdom which until recently has kept itself isolated from the modern world.

“It’s like they’ve all been drinking the same Kool-aid,” someone answered. “A bit too Stepford-ish maybe,” was another opinion.

Obviously we were jaded. We couldn’t believe any place in the world could be this, well, nice.

Bhutan, after all, is a country that measures its citizens’ Gross National Happiness, where no policy is enacted unless it passes the happiness filter first (cigarettes are banned since they lead to unhappiness, as do plastic bags, also banned; everyone owns land and if you somehow end up without any, the government gives you five acres and money to build a house.) Bhutanese, being Buddhist, don’t believe in harming sentient beings, so not only is stepping on bugs to be avoided, but so is cutting down trees. Mountaineering, as in technical climbing, is banned since it isn’t nice to the mountain. And as for Bhutanese behavior at archery contests, grown men perform a little song and dance when the other team scores, while pretty cheerleaders sing and dance demurely in traditional costumes their grandmothers would have worn.

This is a country that takes nice to a whole new level.

In fact, for a seasoned traveler, it’s almost unnerving. At a bank machine in the capital city of Thimphu—a small city hidden in a green valley where instead of traffic lights, they have a single traffic warden—I came across a young Bhutanese man who asked for my banking help. Apparently he’d never used an ATM and couldn’t get it to give him money. He showed me his bank booklet with his PIN which I keyed in for him. “Usually PINs have four digits,” I said. “Yours only has three.” He looked vaguely confused but thanked me politely before leaving without his cash. After I used the machine myself, I spotted him waiting around a corner outside. I smiled and kept walking until something made me turn around. I thought of the Mexican ATM scam where travelers had their accounts emptied by Mexican criminals using memory cards.

Rushing back to the ATM in Thimphu, I wondered if that brilliant young Bhutanese huckster was reading my card’s information now. I peered through the glass door of the ATM and sure enough, he was in there. What a scam artist! I opened the door and said warily, “Oh, hi, you’re trying it again?” He looked at me curiously and nodded.

In a flash, his sweet face told me everything I needed to know. Bhutan was the nicest country in the world and I was an idiot. Obviously I’d grown cynical from years of experiencing travelers’ scams. Here’s the thing about Bhutan which is peculiar: it’s entirely lacking in shady characters. It’s scoundrel-free. The only graffiti are happy faces.

Happy faces indeed. Business Week recently rated Bhutan the happiest country in Asia and the eighth-happiest in the world. Never colonized, difficult to get to, Bhutan feels like the last untouched place on earth. People really do seem happy there, but I kept wondering, are they really happier than the rest of us, and if so, will it last as they join the modern world?

Low-impact Life

Back on our first day on the Druk Path, a centuries-old five-day trek through alpine wilderness, we passed apple orchards and mountain villages where locals smiled and waved. At the end of the day, breathless from the high elevation, we reached a row of colorful prayer flags rippling in the wind near a monastery at the top of a pass. Rain began to sprinkle. Our guide Tshe Tshe turned to us excitedly, lifted his face to the sky and called out, “Blessings!” We laughed and did the same thing. What a lovely way to regard rain.

Until the 1960s, nothing about Bhutan was modern and tourists barely existed. But the third King of Bhutan, vexed by the Chinese invasion of neighboring Tibet and not wanting his country to suffer the same fate, decided to modernize Bhutan and end its policy of isolation. He’d do this, however, in a slow deliberate way, monitoring the development of other nations and avoiding the same mistakes.

Schools were introduced in the 60s and just recently a new policy sees that every child, even in remote areas, goes to school. The internet and TV were introduced in 1999, although several channels, including MTV and international wrestling, neither of which the Bhutanese feel do much for happiness, are banned. Tourists are now allowed, but the total amount they spend daily must be at least $200 (US), and they must be on organized tours with a local guide. I’m doing mine through California’s Bio Bio Expeditions, which works locally with Xplore Bhutan. “High quality, low impact,” explained Xplore Bhutan’s Ugyen Dorji on his country’s philosophy of keeping the environment pristine and not overrun with tourists and debris like in Nepal.

Indeed, one of the four pillars of happiness in Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index is care for the environment. Strict conservation laws are enforced, which is natural in a country where Buddhism permeates and mountains, trees and rivers are sacred. Seventy-two percent of Bhutan is forested, and the country absorbs three times as much carbon as it produces. Bhutan’s main source of revenue is hydroelectric power sold to India. Tshe Tshe told us that the few factories they do have are all in southern Bhutan on the Indian border, “since India is already polluted anyway,” he giggled.

OK, so they’re not entirely perfect. Nonetheless, this environmental pillar of happiness resonated strongly with me. Over the past year, my regular happiness levels have slowly depleted from fighting to save a spring, a forest and a river in my hometown of Wakefield, Quebec. Suffering burnout, I wanted an escape, and in Bhutan, a country the size of Switzerland that almost nobody has heard of, I found a place where they understood that the preservation of the natural world is a source of happiness for all. Bhutan, only newly coming into the modern age, is light years ahead of us.

Continue to Page 2 – Travel Bhutan

By Michael Buckley

After building up an image of the world’s largest fish in his mind for decades, a traveler heads below the water surface for whale shark encounters in Donsol, the Philippines

Flickr photo by Kaz2.0

Once in a while, I go hunting for monsters. It’s an oddball sport: bizarre creatures can be tracked down all over the planet, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. The one I have in my sights right now is a marine monster: the whale shark. In 15 years of diving, I have never seen one. I’ve read about them, heard tales about them—to the point where they border on the mythical, in my mind.

We’re motoring along in a banca, a modified Filipino fishing vessel with bamboo outriggers. Six whale shark watchers from Canada, Denmark, Singapore, Australia—arrayed with outfit of mask and snorkel, dangling feet with fins over the side of the boat. At Gilbert’s command, we jump off the fishing vessel. I adjust my dive-mask and peer into the murky water. Nothing, zip. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spot a huge fin languidly swishing below. It disappears into the depths. Gone. Have I seen the tail-end of a whale shark?

On the next drop, the head of the myth, not the tail. We launch into the water. Where is it? I suddenly realize that I am right on top of it, looking at a polka-dot vista below. White dots mottle the grey dorsal skin of this massive creature. It is moving slowly, a few meters down, with a swish of the powerful tail-fin propelling it effortlessly forward. It’s an adrenaline rush to be swimming close to something this big. Adrenaline because of fear: big usually means dangerous. Swimming at a fast clip, assisted by fins—and powered up on that adrenaline—I find I can keep pace with the monster below for what seems like a very long time. But is actually only ten minutes.

It’s the biggest shark in the world, the biggest fish period. Fortunately, the whale shark acts more like whale than shark: it is a docile filter feeder, mostly dining on microscopic plankton. And that is why we can sight the whale sharks. When it’s sunny, the plankton are drawn to the surface. The sharks follow the plankton, vacuuming them up.

But by the end of our three-hour sortie, we’ve encountered five of the creatures. From mythical to five sighted is a giant step for me. It’s an exhilarating experience. Myth laid to rest? Not quite. I’ve seen one whale shark open its huge mouth to ingest plankton: the tunnel-sized mouth could easily swallow a small boat. I’ve got a lot of questions for Gilbert, our BIO.

BIO stands for Butanding Interaction Officer (butanding is “whale shark” in the local dialect). Gilbert used to be a fisherman. He still goes fishing, but only in the season when the whale sharks are not around. The whale shark won’t accidentally swallow you, says Gilbert, but there have been minor injuries caused by that big tail-fin coming into contact with snorkelers. The whale sharks we’ve spotted today are around 9 meters long and probably weighing in at 15 tons. Whale sharks can grow to double that size says Gilbert, just feeding on plankton, krill, and small fish near the surface.

In the course of the next few weeks, I have many snorkel encounters with these gentle leviathans. Some folks go out for two or three days. But I’m a glutton. I want to dive for ten days, to reassure myself that these monsters are real. The boats registered for whale shark viewing take a maximum of six swimmers. I team up with other travelers to cut costs on boats. Visitors run the gamut from thrill-seekers to divers, but the oddest are two women involved in some high-powered assignment in Jakarta, taking a long weekend break in the Philippines. No slouches on the action to be covered, their first stop in the Philippines has been to a crucifixion re-enactment, as part of holy week to the north of Manila. “They were flagellating themselves—there was blood everywhere! We stepped in blood!” they tell me, enthusiastically. First crucifixion, then whale sharks. One loves what she sees and the other is scared out of her wits: she surfaces quickly after her first swim.

Continue – Swimming with Whale Sharks Page 2

Story and photos by Tony Robinson-Smith

There are three major obstacles to navigating in the Long Range Mountains: low visibility caused by cloud capping the highlands, many small streams and ponds look similar to one another and can cause confusion, and the dense tangles of spruce and fir which make walking in a straight line difficult and can easily lead hikers off course. – Parks Canada website

We’re not used to this. Clawing through dense forest, crawling on all fours under half-fallen trees, balancing on moss-swaddled logs, squeezing between shed-size boulders, branches raking our packs, thick cloud of blackflies spinning round our heads. I’m already bleary-eyed and breathing like a locomotive and we’ve only been going three hours. But it’s steep, at times very steep, and humid.

Maybe our packs are too damn heavy: food for five days, tent, stove, canisters of gas, camera, binoculars, umbrellas, bird book, water. But the real problem is there’s no trail. Or there’s a trail, then it’s gone; another trail, but, no, that’s river bed.

We keep one piece of advice from the park warden firmly in mind: “Make sure you pass to the right of the waterfall, not to the left. You won’t make it up the left side.” I say “we,” but right now I’m alone. I lost my wife half an hour ago. Last thing I said to her was “You try that path and I’ll try this one. They’ll probably join further up.” It occurs to me that splitting up wasn’t a terribly wise thing to do. She has the map and compass, half the food, and the car keys.

“NADYA?” The word echoes off the walls of the gorge.

This is our first day on the Long Range Traverse in Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland, a “wilderness backpacking experience” that the Parks Canada website says is for hikers with “good navigational skills with a map and compass.” Yesterday, we attended a briefing and had to demonstrate these skills in a written test at the visitor center to gain a backcountry permit. Having only become acquainted with the basics three weeks ago, the test took us all morning and had us sweating (Question 11: “Before adjusting for declination, take a bearing off the map from the end of Western Brook Pond to the top of the gorge. What bearing will you travel on?”).

After completing the test, we were shown a short film about the traverse. It contained a lot of unsettling vocabulary and cautionary advice: “windswept barrens,” “few landmarks,” “you are responsible for your own safety,” “once you leave the boat, you’re on your own.” But the traverse was only twenty-two miles as the crow flies and it was summer. How difficult could it be? The warden gave us an emergency transmitter before we headed out.

“TONY!! How did you get there?” I look up. Ah, there she is. Like me, she has emerged from the forest and found a way up beside the waterfall. She is now spread-eagled on bare rock face, clinging for dear life. But I was in the same spot myself twenty minutes ago. She must backtrack and take the mud path down to the shelf above the waterfall where I now stand. I yell instructions and wave my arms about extravagantly, conscious that we won’t be seeing much wildlife if I do much of this. Apparently, there are some 4800 moose in the park, herds of woodland caribou, black bear, snowshoe hare, arctic fox, lynx, and rock ptarmigan.

While I wait for Nadya, I look back at Western Brook Pond. We have climbed 1800 feet in three miles, and I now have an uninterrupted view of the gorge. The isolated dock where the park boat dropped us is a like a playing card. The near-vertical sides of the granite and gneiss tables that imprison the lake are spectacular. According to Rocks Adrift, a book I picked up in the visitor centre, the Long Range Mountains are the result of two continents colliding a billion years ago, forcing ocean crust and the earth’s mantle to the surface. Over the past two million years, glaciers have ploughed through the rock, leaving deep gorges and hanging valleys and exposing ancient strata. Gros Morne is a geologist’s and palaeontologist’s delight as it is a classic example of plate tectonics at work and fossils date back to Palaeozoic times. The gorge resembles a Norwegian fjord, but a warden on the boat told us that none of the gorges in the park qualify as fjords as they are no longer open to the sea.

Nadya and I take lunch sitting beside an insectivorous pitcher plant at the top of the gorge. From here, to return to civilization, we must head south over the “windswept barrens” to Gros Morne Mountain and descend at Ferry Gulch.

Lost in The Barrens

“I tell you, this trail ISN’T going in the right direction.”

I look down at the trail, reluctant to abandon it. It’s a nice trail, seductively indented with moose tracks and boot prints.

“Well, maybe it swings around and then winds its way up to the saddle.”

“Let’s take another bearing,” Nadya says reasonably. I stop and unfold the map. We have it in a fancy transparent case with a cord that goes over the shoulder; I’ve attached the compass to the corner by means of a shoelace so we don’t lose it. This is the third bearing we’ve taken in ten minutes.

“North is in that direction. No, wait. We have to factor in declination. Add 21 degrees.” I rotate the map. “Now, there should be a pond somewhere… over there.” I point to the east.

“There’s no pond. Why are they called ponds and not lakes?”

“I have no idea.” I think of a pond in town with model boats and a fountain. Our map is speckled with ponds, some of them with funny names like Candlestick Pond and Spike Knee Pond. Ninety percent of them don’t have names.

“Ok, I’ll take a bearing and then you take one and we’ll confer,” I say.

“We should probably go back to the corner of Marks Pond because right now we don’t know where exactly we are on the map.”

“Good idea.” We turn around and head back the way we’ve come.

Twenty-four hours have passed since we ascended the tablelands. I can understand why they call this place “the barrens.” Most of it is marshy tundra, lakes, and tuckamore. Tuckamore is a local term for dwarf balsam fir and spruce trees, arrested in growth by hard frosts and twisted into torturous shapes by the wind, akin to krummholz in the Alps. Apparently, tuckamore can be as much as six hundred years old. The going has been tough, the tablelands far hillier than we expected and the ground so saturated with water it’s like walking on a sponge. Four times porridgey peat bog has swallowed my foot to the ankle.

Continue to Page 2 of Long Range Traverse