Out across the broad, marshy, alligator-friendly waters of Banana Creek, in the wee hours of November 16, 2022, the 322-foot tall brightly-lit rocket gleamed against the launch tower. If successful, it would be the most powerful rocket ever launched. Gaseous rills of oxygen and hydrogen streamed quietly from its sides, as the public address system kept us abreast of the countdown.

As I’ll explain, it was quite an adventure just getting to that place and that moment so vividly imprinted in my head. And now, with the potential early April 2026 launch of Artemis II rapidly approaching, I’m all stirred up again recalling the experience of watching Artemis I take to the sky.

And yes, it feels a little odd writing about a rocket launch when so much crazy stuff is going on in the world, and I’m supposed to be out in the weeds reporting on trails and parks and wilderness and all that jazz. I do have wilderness covered here in an oblique sorta way (and more to come soon in the coming weeks). But with Artemis II back on the launch pad, my little story here is also ripe for liftoff.

A bit of personal history might be in order to better explain my enthusiasm. Like most kids, I suppose, I was fascinated by rockets at an early age. Bottle rockets were especially fun. Into the air, phzzzzzz-pop! Firecrackers too. Bang! Sparklers, fountains, smoke bombs, magic ash snakes. All exciting ways to spew litter and catch my uncle’s haystack on fire. Send me off with a stash of bottle rockets and I’d be half way to the Moon myself.

My big brother, Skip, got a safer-saner gift from Santa one year: a small plastic rocket that could be partly filled with water then pumped up with air before releasing it to the heavens. Do they still even make those? We’re lucky we didn’t put somebody’s eye out.

Back up a few years to my birth and infanthood, where the memories are a little hazier, and you’ll find there were countless rockets blazing all around me. I was born into that world at the base infirmary of the China Lake Naval Weapons Testing Station in the Mojave Desert. My dad was a Navy airplane mechanic, taking care of flying war machines, mostly Lockheed P2V Neptunes which he’d flown in the Mediterranean just after WWII.

At the base in the 1950s, missile prototypes were launched and evaluated by the thousands. One of the most famous was the Sidewinder, the world’s first successful heat-seeking missile. China Lake, known outside the gates as the “Secret City,” also hosted aspects of the Manhattan Project, including design of detonators and the outer casing for “Fat Man,” the 10,800-pound atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945. But The Bomb was a little before my time, and several years before my dad was stationed there to look after airplanes.

Also in my kidly years, I lived for a time near Santa Barbara, California, where we watched from a distance the white trails of rockets launched from Vandenberg Air Force (now Space Force) Base, about 50 miles to the northwest. Cold War tensions had been building after WWII, and with the Soviets’ successful launch of Sputnik in 1957, the space race was on, and Vandenberg became another major beating heart of missile testing on the Pacific Coast.

I vaguely remember the TV news people going on about John Glenn orbiting the Earth and Kennedy saying a rocket is going to take a man to the Moon. I couldn’t make any sense of it. So a big rocket is going to blast off to the Moon and then what? An astronaut is going to jump out with a parachute? How would he come back? The grainy footage of early Apollo rockets taking off from Florida was nevertheless pretty cool to watch.

Apollo, the protector, healer, lover of all things poetic and musical, was the twin brother of Artemis. She is the huntress, traveler of the mountains and wilderness, and like her brother a healer and master of archery. They sound like my kinda people. Or non-people. These two children of Zeus have also been associated with the Sun and the Moon, and surely possessed the wherewithal to launch their arrows to the latter, if not the former.

In July 1969, a gaggle of my siblings and parents gathered around a smallish black-and-white TV at a family friend’s house to watched in disbelief as two fuzzy Apollo 11 spacemen stepped off the Eagle lunar lander. “Two small steps for man,” one said, followed by one giant “My goodness,” from Mom.

I was captivated by the early Space Shuttle launches on a somewhat larger TV, but had to turn away in 1986 when the STS Challenger exploded about a minute after liftoff. When the Columbia shuttle disintegrated on reentry in 2003, an acquaintance who worked for NASA lamented his first thought when they knew something had gone really wrong. “We just killed seven more astronauts,” he said. Fortunately, NASA’s safety record has fared much better over the intervening decades.

The Shuttle program ended in 2011 after 135 missions. In April 2012, I was in Washington, D.C., when the Space Shuttle Discovery flew over the capital, piggybacked on top of a Boeing 747. It was on its final journey from Florida to the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center next to Dulles Airport, which is also where the Enola Gay, dropper of The Bomb, is on permanent display.

The news reports in D.C. said to look up between 10:00 and 10:30 am. I happened to be downtown and walked outside at 10:00, looked up and there it was! Everyone on the streets put their work day on hold to stare at the thing in the sky. I wandered toward the White House and caught a crude snapshot with my flip phone.

In place of the Shuttle and its LEO (low Earth orbit) domain, “Artemis” emerged as the new and improved technology that would return us to the Moon after a half-century hiatus. Following a sluggish start, development accelerated toward actual design and construction of the Space Launch System, or SLS, that would hurl Orion and the astronauts into space a half century after Apollo.

Artemis I would be unmanned, a first real-world test for the new launch system and Orion capsule. If all went according to plan, a rocket weighing nearly six million pounds would send a spacecraft about the weight of a loaded dump truck twice around the Moon and back to Earth. Though 40 feet shorter than the ginormous Saturn V that lifted Apollo to the Moon, the SLS would produce 15 percent more thrust. If it ever got off the ground it would be the most powerful rocket ever launched, and exciting as hell for the ten-year-old part of me.

The 2022 launch schedule had been delayed for months by a series of what some might call predictable annoyances associated with something this new and big. The SLS rocket had never flown before. To date, the Saturn V that sent astronauts to the Moon was the only thing comparable to what NASA was about to light up.

Continue to Part 2.

When the 32-story beast finally rolled out of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), things were looking pretty serious. So yes, I was going to the Kennedy Space Center. I invited a friend and fellow space enthusiast, Tom, to join me. He declined, insisting the launch would likely be scrubbed. It’s new technology. Delays are inevitable, he said. It won’t fly for months at least. Besides, he’d already watched several shuttle launches. I hadn’t. I was going regardless, and I wanted the best public view available—the bleachers at the Apollo/Saturn V Center.

The moment the launch viewing tickets were released online, I clicked the buy button. There was a pause, then a pop-up window. It said I was in the queue. Soon I was next in line. Click to the next page, it said, which is when everything froze. I waited 10 minutes. Nothing happened. Nothing else to click on. What do I do? I finally opened a fresh page and when I clicked on the ticket button again I apparently lost my place in the queue! Jeepers! Except I didn’t say jeepers.

I called the customer service line and left a message. Amazingly, I got a call back in 20 minutes. They’d had a computer meltdown with the huge demand for tickets. They saw I was in the queue. I’d get my ticket. Hallelujah.

Rob, a friend and NASA retiree, offered a spare room for me in Titusville near the Space Center. I flew to Orlando, snagged a rental car, and settled in for an enjoyable evening meeting some other NASA folks. They advised me to go early, traffic will be crazy. By 4:00 am the next morning, I was in the line of cars outside the Kennedy Space Center waiting for the gates to open. When they did, I was in and parked in a flash. I hustled over to the shuttle busses for the short ride to the Apollo/Saturn V Center.

Though I’d made it a point to be early, the bleachers were already full when my bus unloaded. So I sat on the grass. To the northeast across Banana Creek, the rocket stood under bright lights at Launch Pad 39B, 3.5 miles away. We were treated to a colorful sunrise as we waited for the big event.

Blastoff was scheduled for around 8:30 am. The NASA guy on the public address system had a perfect voice for the job and kept us well apprised. The hydrogen and oxygen tanks were being filled and all was on track. And then it wasn’t. A valve was leaking hydrogen. Only a small amount, but enough to hold things up. A similar leak had cropped up during various tests over the preceding months. We waited and twiddled. Then the news came that the leak was too much. The launch was being scrubbed. Tom was right.

A subset of NASA rocket scientists who majored in leaky valves would investigate the issue and try again in five days. Our tickets would still be honored. In the meantime, I toured the Apollo/Saturn V Center, picking my jaw up off the floor when I saw the full length Saturn V rocket mounted horizontally inside the building. Wowser. The thing is ginormous, and mind boggling to imagine them standing it upright, let alone sending it into space.

I frittered away the next few days with Rob and his friends, getting acquainted with lovely Titusville, hearing NASA stories, and touring some of the local sights, beaches and wildlife areas from there to Cocoa Beach. We checked out a cute herd of manatees, and I took a walk along a beauteous wetland and waterway with herons, egrets, plenty of alligator habitat, and a first for me, golden silk spiders. At up to six inches across, they’re the largest in Florida. Eek.

When the new launch day arrived, I headed to Kennedy early again, although liftoff was set for mid-afternoon. I returned to the viewing area well in advance and toured the Apollo/Saturn V Center again, this time pausing to absorb more of the amazing displays, exhibits and historic artifacts from the Apollo program. As the launch time came closer, I was back outside watching and waiting. The fuel tanks were being filled again and . . . oh no! Another hydrogen leak, and even worse this time.

Later, I read a few crack comments online that accompanied a livestream of the event:

Try rubbing the leak with a bar of soap . . . How about duct tape . . . I’ll give them five bucks for it . . . Have they tried turning it off and on again? . . . Hire a plumber!

Soon, the deal was up and the second launch attempt of Artemis I was scrubbed. The rocket needed a bigger fix. This meant no more launch attempts anytime soon. I spent the rest of the day frolicking like a ten-year-old exploring the Kennedy Space Center’s many displays and amusements, including a simulated flight to Mars. It was so much fun I did it three times.

I caught my return flight home, unsure when there might be another launch attempt. But within a couple of weeks, NASA was confident the problem had been solved. They set a new date, September 27th. My ticket was still good and I debated whether to fly out there again. I heard Tom’s voice in my head, It could be delayed for months. So I dilly-dallied.

As it happened, a tropical storm near Jamaica was building toward a full-blown hurricane tracking toward Florida. NASA was fidgeting over whether to roll the SLS back to the VAB or leave it on the pad. Moving the thing around is risky business. But so is a hurricane. Exposed on the pad, the rocket could withstand wind gusts of 70 mph, but not continuous high winds. When the hurricane forecast upticked to a Level 2 OMG, the launch was called off and the SLS was moved PDQ back to the VAB.

The storm intensified into Hurricane Ian, a Category 5 storm that would end up being the deadliest to hit Florida in over 80 years. The destruction was widespread, especially along the Gulf Coast. The storm also passed over the Kennedy Space Center with wind speeds aloft over 100 mph, though much less at ground level. Fortunately, the VAB was bombproof, and NASA reported minimal damage at the pad.

As for the next new launch date, some guessed October, others November. At this point I was dubious about flying to Florida again for another uncertain rocket launch. However, a couple of weeks after the storm, I’d noticed an ad looking for people to assist FEMA with home inspections to survey damages from the hurricane and assist Florida residents with recovery. It was certainly a worthy cause. I had some down time, so I signed up.

I was sent to Texas for a few days of training, then on to Orlando to get to work. Maybe I’d get lucky and be there for an October launch date as well? As it turned out, I entered the FEMA system near the end of the deployment and would not be inspecting any homes. (My assignments turned out to be, as best I could tell, some of the attempted frauds by mysterious persons who thought they could fake an address and cheat the system.) Then the news came that the launch was being pushed to November. Again, I returned home with no rocket launches to brag about.

NASA finally announced they would try again for a nighttime launch on November 16th. The Kennedy Space Center promised it would continue to honor the tickets purchased way back in August. Rob said his spare room was still available. Summer was long over in Bellingham and it was flowered-shorts weather in Florida. So against my better judgement, I booked another flight to Orlando and was back there again on the 15th. Would a third time be the charm? It’s a big deal to roll a 300-foot rocket in and out of the VAB, so one would think they’d have the problem totally resolved by now.

I was inside the gates at Kennedy by 7:30 pm. The launch window would open just after 1:00 am. I returned to the Apollo/Saturn V Center in the dark and wandered out to the edge of the grass at a break in the shrubbery where I had a clear view of the rocket. People were still arriving, many carrying cameras with tripods and expensive lenses. I had my cell phone, though I didn’t plan to record the launch. I wanted to experience it fully and not be distracted. There would certainly be high quality video of the event online after the launch, far better than anything I could possibly capture.

As we waited, I noticed the red glow of Mars levitating high above Launch Pad 39B. How perfect is that? The Artemis program was designed to first take humanity to the Moon, then perhaps by the mid-2030s on to Mars. That humans might pull this off is pretty historic stuff. In three weeks it will have been 50 years since Gene Cernan became the last man to set foot on the Moon in 1972, the same year the Mariner 9 spacecraft photographed 85 percent of the surface of Mars. One still marvels at the nuts-and-bolts technology that powered those majorly ambitious missions to success.

And now, on a pleasant Florida evening, if the sight of Mars high above Artemis wasn’t enough, right around midnight a third-quarter Moon began to rise brightly above both Artemis and the Atlantic. They could not have choreographed it any better.

By 1:00 am, there had been a few more hiccups that put the countdown on hold, but apparently nothing major this time, or so we hoped. I stood at the fence, afraid to move at the risk of losing my front-row patch of grass. I figured the odds for a launch were now pushing 50-50, so for all of us, there was no choice but to wait and see. If this launch too was scrubbed, I don’t know that I’d make the trip again. The back-and-forth to Orlando was getting to be a bit much, even with the bargain airfares I’d tracked down.

The crowd awaited the final countdown. Lit up by flood lights, the SLS glowed quietly in the distance. Either it was going to fizzle again at this iconic place or it was about to make history. Apollo 10 and the ill-fated Challenger Shuttle had launched from the same pad, 39B. (Apollo 11 and the final Columbia Shuttle launched from the nearby Pad 39A.)

By 1:30 am, anticipation was riding high and we were all glued to the voice on the public address system. A cheer went up when we learned that leaks were no longer an issue. Everything was a “go.” The clock ticked down the final 15 minutes, and the humans soon handed off control of the rocket to the computers. Is it finally happening? The countdown clock seemed a little confused in the final minutes and the crowd was left guessing how close we were to T-minus 10. People were eager to yell out the traditional “10, 9, 8 . . .” Then finally there it was, and a thousand voices screamed 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 as a very bright flame burst from the engines. Liftoff!

The rocket, however, was utterly silent.

Two minutes before, I’d decided to hit record on my phone and just held it up in front of me, balanced on the fence so I might at least catch the audio and not have to look at it. What hadn’t occurred to me was that the sound would take a full 15 seconds to reach us. But when it came, wow.

The short video (below) turned out better than expected, good enough for an amateur and a memory, but I’ll let you judge. I highly recommend ear buds or a quality sound system cranked up a bit, to enjoy more fully the thundering roar that I experienced.

The cheering just before the end of the video is in response to the rocket passing through the Max Q threshold, where maximum dynamic forces of speed and air pressure let you know whether you hired the right engineers to keep your rocket from disintegrating. Artemis I passed this early test at over 1,000 mph at T+1:10.

Here’s my imperfect video of the Artemis launch.

Barely two minutes into the flight, the SLS was already traveling over 3,000 mph when the solid rocket boosters, recycled from the Space Shuttle program, separated from the core stage. Each had burned more than 1.2 million pounds of propellant in those two minutes. For lay people like me, that’s about one tanker truck full of fuel going up in smoke every second, times two. Not smoke exactly since the fuel is based on oxygen and hydrogen, not carbon fuels like methane. (Yes, these buggers do contribute to climate change, but the impact of Artemis by itself, I’m told, is relatively minor. However, the increasing rate of chemical rocket launches by SpaceX and others has elevated the concern.)

At 8.5 minutes, the core stage shut down and separated from the rest. After an hour and a half, the precious chunk still flying and carrying the Orion capsule lit up for a translunar injection, meaning it was on its way to an orbit around the Moon. For the next 24 days, the mission would entail a variety of tests, wide orbits of the Moon, the return to Earth and splashdown. Artemis I completed its journey and was widely regarded as a resounding success, despite the several false starts.

Now comes Artemis II, almost three and half years later. This time with four astronauts aboard, thus raising the stakes considerably. There are worries of course, even some disagreement over the integrity of the heat shield when Orion reenters the atmosphere 10 days after launch. But NASA insists all is well, that concerns were addressed and safety protocols have been met.

The 10-day mission will carry the first woman, first person of color and first non-U.S. citizen to the Moon and back. An actual landing on the Moon is reserved for a future mission. As of now (late March), the launch of Artemis II is set for no earlier than 6:24 p.m. on April 1st. I’ll be watching, but also giving it a 50-50 chance of at least a brief delay.

If it’s as successful as Artemis I, I’ll be pulling out my map of Mars again—not to imagine some billionaire’s mad dream of building cities on the red planet, but rather to plan my first backpacking adventure in the next red-rock paradise. Speaking of which, I’ll be off to Southern Utah soon and I’d better start packing!

For now, here’s a snippet I just wrote up remembering a climb in Yosemite National Park about 20 years ago. I’ll post a few more teasers and further details on the book as I get closer to publication. And on a totally opposite trajectory, I’ll have a new piece inspired by the upcoming Artemis II launch to the Moon ready to post soon.

Yosemite: A Duffer Grunts Up a Big Wall

I don’t think I was even 20 yet when I first drove a car into Yosemite Valley, wowed by the massive granite walls in all directions. From El Capitan to Half Dome, and from towering pillars to roaring waterfalls, the scene was more than spectacular. I hiked to several of the falls like a good tourist, and strolled around the valley with an ice cream and a kink in my neck, before driving up to Glacier Point for the gazillion-dollar view there. I knew I’d be back.

Perhaps a decade later, I fulfilled that pledge and made it a point to hike up the cables at Half Dome. I was new to rock climbing by then and given the considerable exposure, I almost wanted a rope for the steep trek up the cables. I lunched and gazed on the summit, but didn’t linger since this was meant as a 16-mile round-trip day hike with nearly 5,000 feet of elevation gain.

On the way down, I passed a family of four heading up, including two young girls carrying backpacks and tethered to mom and dad. They were doing fine, but I had to wonder how it’s possible there aren’t more fatal accidents here—typically one occurs every few years. At the same time, I’m glad this kind of experience is available to those who can adventure responsibly, which in this instance also means avoiding the place if there’s any risk of wet or icy weather. Back in the valley and looking up, I felt an itch to climb Half Dome’s famed Northwest Face. Although I think it would have been well within my ability, it was a fleeting fancy never realized.

Years later, in October, Keith and I visited a friend who was working at Yosemite. Our goal was to climb the Royal Arches route above the village. It’s the only multi-pitch, big wall route I’d ever done, even if it’s also known as a “duffer route.” Fourteen pitches of fun with all sorts of moderate rock-climbing challenges: cracks, dihedrals, a pendulum to a finger-sized ledge, a cool granite flake you could hug with both hands, an unprotected nubbin face, and finally a steep slab to traverse at the top that would prove to be, for me at least, the scariest part of the climb—notwithstanding the football-sized rock, i.e., missile, that whizzed past us on the lower face.

I nearly embarrassed myself at the first obstacle, an awkward leaning chimney at ground level. In fact, the first ten feet of the route would prove to be the most challenging part of the climb. I couldn’t seem to get into it correctly. It’s a popular route and I was holding up others who were standing around on that cold autumn morning waiting and muttering for the duffer to figure it out. Finally, I did and we were on our way.

The next dozen pitches or so went smoothly and the fun factor grew rapidly as the day warmed and the view became fully awesome-ized. I’d been hesitant about swinging like a pendulum across a smooth rock face, but the task proved easier than expected. At the final pitch, the steep slab, Keith set me up with a belay. I had just begun to lead out when he hollered at me to stop—and something about a snake. Huh? Whatever it was, it was urgent. I scrambled back to see what was up. A colorful banded snake had suddenly appeared next to Keith’s leg and nearly crawled up on his lap before slithering off. We had to look it up later. It turned out to be a harmless king snake, but it had us both going for a moment.

Before I could step back onto the slab, a solo German tourist sauntered by unroped as if he was out for a picnic. He pointed across the slab inquiring if that was the route. We nodded. He proceeded to strut across, utterly fearless. I guess that’s a thing for a certain subset of immortal Yosemite climbers.

At around 100 feet across, the slab was rated just 5.4, or moderately easy in climber-speak, but exposed with 1,400 feet of vertical air below one’s booties. Scattered pine needles offered an added thrill. I was happy to be across and standing on a comfortable ledge looking back at Keith. As I belayed him over, he took a short slip near the end but quickly recovered and all was well.

We’d burned up the day, and with evening approaching, decided to rope ourselves in to a tree and just lounge there on the brink. Our ledge abutted a steep band of forest where the cliff reclined to a more moderate slope. It was unlikely we’d find anywhere better in the woods so we stayed put on our ledge. Being a mile above sea level in October, we were in for a coldish night. It helped that an energetic and entertaining ringtail flittered through the tree branches, welcoming us to the dark forest.

Overall, ‘twas not a bad day for a couple of middling mountain duffers. By morning we were off to find the trail quite a distance above that would lead us to Yosemite Falls and a gorgeous hike down.

A few years after that experience, Kris and I made a trip to Yosemite and had some interesting bear encounters both on the trail and in the valley, including being bluff-charged by a sow with a cub. You can read about that wee bit o’ fun here.

It was too cold to stop walking and too cold to camp at 8,000 feet. Our sleeping bags were slightly damp from the night before, the fresh snow having leaked into our bags while we slept. We kept walking the road into the night, gradually descending and presuming that we would eventually reach some kind of park shelter, or at least lower ground and less frigid temperatures. The road did not agree, however, and began to lead us up and over a pass. Hours passed and the walking seemed endless, my ankle back to swollen and throbbing.

Sometime in the wee hours we arrived at a collection of small buildings, the apparent park headquarters, though closed for the winter. We poked around, looking in windows with our headlamps, and found a one-room cabin with a bunk and wool blankets. We carefully removed the window with an ice axe, crawled in and shared the skinny bed for the duration of the night. Neither of us bothered removing our jackets, hats or gloves. Compared to the previous two nights, we’d scored a deluxe accommodation.

We awoke mid-morning to find a machete under the pillow, glad we hadn’t disturbed its rightful (or frightful) owner in the dark. We hung our sleeping bags on a clothesline. For breakfast, Dennis spotted a frozen can of soup on a shelf and thawed it over a small fire. We had a cupful of pancake mix and some honey left, but our stores were otherwise exhausted. We tidied up the cabin and blankets, replaced the window and were soon on our way.

Happily, the road led downward this time, down and down and out of the snow. Then down some more and out of the forest. When we rounded a bend with a fabulous view of the western foothills and desert country below, the rest we knew would be a splendid, welcome stroll, notwithstanding the ankle thing. By now, the throbbing was paired with the sting of an ugly blister. The air warmed rapidly and we soon stripped down to T-shirts. Dennis trotted ahead, leaving me limping along and catching up later.

Something shiny along the road edge caught my eye, breaking my rhythm as I turned to look. It was a small metal spatula with a burnt plastic handle. I picked it up as an kooky souvenir to remember our trek.

At twilight, after twenty more miles, we reached Rancho Meling. We walked to the front gate, and I turned to Dennis. “Well, dude, I got us out of the mountains. You find us a bunk for the night.”

That was a bit of a stretch. Yes, I’d done most of the navigating since the summit of Blue Bottle, though Dennis could have managed it just as well. All I’d really done is point the compass and follow it.

Dennis walked up to the front porch of the old ranch house. It was brightly lit and we could see people milling around through the windows, as if some kind of party was underway. He knocked. A mustachioed fellow answered the door with a broad smile and immediately motioned us in. We dropped our packs on the porch and stepped inside. We’d lost track of the days, but looking around at all the happy faces and decor, I quickly understood the festivity. It was Christmas Eve.

A number of ranch hands and the owners’ extended family were celebrating with an enormous feast and an array of desserts and spirits spread across several rooms. We were nearly starving and here was more food than we could imagine piled to the rafters. The aromas were dizzying. We were introduced to Aida, the matriarch as well as her aunt, daughter and granddaughter—four generations of Norwegian resolve that had kept the ranch going since Aida took it over from her parents in 1955.

Rancho Meling was both a guest ranch and working cattle ranch spread across ten thousand acres of desert and the foothills of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir. No one seemed particularly interested in our trek over the mountains, but we were warmly welcomed to join in the felicidad. Although most seemed to have eaten already, they were quick to point us to the mountains of food that remained, and we devoured more than our share.

Miraculously, we were offered a room for the night. There would be no hot water and no heat, since the ranch did not normally accept guests over the holidays and the utilities were turned off for the season. But who needed heat when there was enough hospitality flowing through the place to melt an igloo.

The next morning, we were invited to sit at a long community table and again gobbled up a huge breakfast with the clan. Afterward, Aida offered us a brief tour of the main house. She’d been very quiet toward us, both at breakfast and the evening before. On the way over to the house, she politely scolded us for being crazy enough to cross the Sierra in winter.

“I wasn’t too happy with you when you came to the door last night,” she said. “You know, people die up there.” She noted that search and rescue helicopters typically stage their operations at the ranch.

“They usually bring out bodies this time of year.”

She’d made her point and let it go.

We learned from Aida that movie stars, governors and presidents had stayed here. The ranch also contained a gold mine up in the Sierra. Following a shoot-out with some of Poncho Villa’s gang in 1911, the same year as the first known ascent of El Diablo, the former ranch house was burned to the ground.

“There’s a lot of history here,” she said, pointing to a bookshelf full of stories from Rancho Meling and the northern Baja.

I scanned the bookshelf and looked around the room, imagining Poncho Villa napping in a rocker with a rifle across his lap. Then as quickly as it began, the tour was over.

“You’ll be leaving this morning,” said Aida. 

She walked us back outside. Of course, we would have enjoyed a longer stay, but this was Christmas and the family’s well-earned down-time at Rancho Meling. We offered to pay something for the room and meals provided, but she declined. I promised to return one day as a bonafide paying guest.

Repacked and re-watered, we hit the dusty road around noon, hoping we could eventually hitch a ride to Highway 1, 30 miles to the west. My swollen left foot and ankle had screamed when I put my boot back on and I hobbled for a few minutes adjusting to the pain, before reclaiming my clumsy, rhythmic gait. Dennis exhibited great patience sauntering ahead a mile or two, sitting to nap, and waiting while I caught up. Tortoise and hare all the way.

We walked until dusk without seeing a vehicle. I feared I would be dragging myself down all 30 miles to the highway. We probably covered half the distance that day. We carried no food for lunch, but were doing well enough, thanks to that hearty breakfast. Our water lasted, as the day was just comfortably warm. As long as I could keep walking, we’d be fine. We could be hungry for a day, subsisting on visions of slurping tacos and Margaritas on the beach.

After a long jaunt alone, I spotted the tiny figure of Dennis a half-mile ahead. He’d selected a spot for our final camp for the night. From his pack, he pulled out the last of our food: the pancake mix and honey. He stirred it with splash of water in a small pot and placed it over a wood fire. The trick was to cook it slowly so that the upper regions of the pancake were somewhat cooked before the bottom turned to charcoal. I retrieved my fabulous souvenir, the mini-spatula I’d picked up on our way out of the San Pedro Mártir. I brandished it like a weapon, ready to stab the half-burnt pancake in the mess pot. We took turns scraping the mess from the pan. And so we enjoyed a most memorable Christmas dinner, the expedition’s last supper, as the sun sunk below the horizon.

The adventure ended the next day, our ninth since departing San Felipe. After a few miles of early morning walking, a pick-up truck from Rancho Meleng approached. The gentleman behind the wheel was kind enough to offer us a lift the last few miles to the highway. He said we could flag down a bus from there and be on our way.

Then there it was, the Pacific Ocean. With a measly five more miles of walking, we could have splashed our weary feet in the surf. But we’d salvaged a fairly respectable adventure and felt no need to prove anything by mushing more sand between our toes. We’d do it right next time, I thought, sea to shining sea.

A minute later, a bus appeared over the horizon, rolled to a stop and gathered us up for the next coveted stop on our journey: a return to the Sea of Cortez and the beautiful sand beaches of Mulegé.

I originally wrote a story of this adventure about 40 years ago, which is the main reason I was able to recall so many details. My writing has hopefully improved a little since then. The mangled ankle eventually healed up, and I still love hiking up hills.

Reliving the experience has given me the bug to zip down there and do it all over again, from sea to shining sea, of course. Maybe go early fall this time, and with a lighter pack to better the odds of making it up El Picacho. By the way, I still have that mini-spatula, so I’ll definitely have to carry it along. But might just leave the mask and snorkel at home next time.

Morning dawned gloriously with shards of sunshine lighting up the higher rock walls above. We continued up the canyon through narrows and more open areas, before negotiating a slightly difficult waterfall that invited brief use of the rope. Randall Henderson’s account of their March 1934 unsuccessful attempt on the mountain, also from the eastern slope, is contained in Desert Magazine, a publication he founded in 1937. He described conditions similar to what we found: slick rock, pools, falls, agave, manzanita. But the climbers were met with a serious rainstorm, falling as snow high above, and decided to retreat. He wrote:

Rubber on wet rocks is treacherous footing. Our feet were cold and our soggy [tennis] shoes began to disintegrate.

They returned a year later in perfect weather and reached a subsidiary summit late in the day, separated from the true summit by a chasm six-hundred feet deep. Again, they were forced to retreat. Two years later, in 1937, the third try was a success. Although the climbers ascended more directly from the desert, Henderson had this to say about the lovely canyon they viewed from above:

Diablo Canyon is a tremendous gash in the range … I’m sure Diablo has some gorgeous vistas for the photographer whose heart and legs are stout enough to pack his equipment up this great canyon.

The great gash passed under our boot soles and my bad ankle one slow mile at a time. With no camera and minimal down time to scribble any sketches for posterity, we’d just have to file away all this gorgeous scenery in our heads.

I pulled out the map to keep track of our position, based on the bends in the stream and the forms of larger gullies and buttresses. I noticed early on that our map was mislabeled, the canyons misnamed. Nevertheless, we were confident that we were scrambling up the correct canyon, not only because of the initial waterfall, but also the fact that it was indeed trending south to north.

The map called our canyon of the Devil something else, labeling the next canyon as Diablo. The names seemed to have shifted one canyon over, which introduced some doubt as to whether the higher peaks and other features were correctly labeled. But because Picacho del Diablo was the highest, we would have no trouble confirming whether we’d found the correct summit. Assuming fair weather, of course.

After lunch, the ground steepened again and by evening we guessed we were near an area known as Campo Noche. We probably skipped by the best campsite and ended up on a ledge under a large tree where we cooked up another pot of starch and goo that we heartily gulped down. I think Dennis noticed first that we were eating more than expected. We finished off all the pasta and wondered if we ought to ration what was left. With the hardest going still ahead, we were probably a good three days from civilization on the west side of the mountains.

The air cooled much more than during the previous night due to the substantial elevation we had gained over three days of rambling. Looking up the dark canyon walls, stars filled the gaping void above as noisy spoons scraped the bottoms of pots. Then a strange beam of light moved slowly across the easterly rim, as if a giant spotlight was being shone from the west.

The light faded after a minute or two and we invented various theories to explain it. Perhaps the fire boss near Rancho Santa Clara found out we were in the canyon and called on the Devil who went looking for us with his ghoulish flashlight from hell. Or maybe it was the observatory opening its doors with the lights on. But observatories are usually kept dark, and it was the absence of light pollution in the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir that had originally brought the observatory and a 2.1-meter telescope here in the 1970s.

I later theorized that a crescent moon, now approaching first quarter, may have been shining through a gap in the ridge, lighting up the far wall, not unlike the stone gaps in a Mayan temple where a solstice ray of sun among the shadows announces the arrival of winter. Oddly enough, the winter solstice occurred later that evening.

The night was cold so we began moving early the next morning to get the blood flowing. We passed a fork in the canyon above 6,000 feet, and the first snow. We were at the place where we would have to leave the canyon depths and begin heading up the steep, rock slopes and ledges of Picacho del Diablo. We strained to get a look at the route above, but the view upward was obstructed by trees and rock.

We could see much more snow on the mountain than we’d anticipated. Much ice had glazed over the shady places, which suggested there could be an abundance of it higher up. We had ice axes with us, but no crampons and only a short rope. I was concerned about my ankle and we debated whether to head up or not. We presumed we could manage the climb with the gear we had, but lacking crampons for our boots, the going could be slow and tenuous. The conditions would certainly become more challenging as we ascended, and we were still 4,000 feet below the summit.

We were young and strong and could probably manage an exposed, cold night up high. But this was not some corporate-sponsored expedition in which the two unwavering protagonists risk life and limb gathering film footage for the perverse joy of others. Rather, we were just two average climber-dudes scampering across the Baja on an extended Christmas vacation. Our trek with the Devil would not be followed by a news conference (we hoped), but by an appropriate sojourn on the beach.

The smart decision would be to head back down the canyon to the welcoming warmth of the Sonora. But we had come too far to give it all up, plus we'd already had our fill of lovely San Felipe. We compromised and decided to climb 9,600-foot Blue Bottle instead. We would descend from there to the national park, as planned, and continue west 20 miles more to another historic ranch, Rancho Meling.

Mildly disappointed, we kept to the right and climbed more steeply as the snow cover deepened. After another 2,000 feet of elevation gain, we found ourselves wallowing in deep powder, sometimes up to our thighs. The sunshine overhead had long since left us and temperatures dropped well below freezing, though we were in a beautiful place and trudged on.

Grinding upward in loose snow meant slow progress and we took turns breaking trail. We dearly wanted to get to the top and down the other side before dark. Not knowing the terrain or where we might pop out on the crest, we just kept climbing, reassuring ourselves that easier ground was not far above.

Not a minute too soon, the grade moderated and we could finally pick up the pace. Powered by the notion that the hardest part of the trek was nearly over, we quickly trudged through the last of the deep snow and reached the windy crest at sunset, probably around 9,500 feet. The presumed summit of Cerro Botella Azul, or Blue Bottle, was close by and we scurried upward to bag our hard-earned peak, just a few hundred feet lower than Picacho del Diablo.

To the west, a spectacular collusion of brilliant orange and red haze filled a third of the sky above the horizon. We could just make out the line of the Pacific Ocean. The moon above was hiding among scattered clouds.

To the east, the summit of Pichacho del Diablo glowed golden in the receding light and I sincerely regretted not bringing the camera. Bright orangey-pink slabs of granite ran at diagonals across the entire west face. Neither words nor pencils could adequately capture the moment.

With a bone-jarring wind blowing over the ridge and threatening to rip the threads from our jackets, we savored the visual feast almost without stopping and lunged over the crest.

We moved quickly downslope on firmer snow to gentler ground below, then rightward into the protective cover of coniferous forest. Once in the woods, in the last bit of twilight, exhausted, we called it a day. We stuffed down what we could muster from our dwindling food supply and stomped out hollows in the angled snow for our sleeping bags. We nevertheless had to curl around trees all night to keep from sliding down the slope.

As the fifth morning dawned since leaving San Felipe, we shook a centimeter of fresh snow off our sleeping bags, finished off whatever snack food was left, and cinched up our packs. It was easy going for a few hours. At one point we were gliding along the smooth, slick surface of a frozen creek as if on skates, yelping like teenagers. The creek drew us along with ease, but as it curved westward, we decided it would be safer to follow a northerly compass bearing to ensure we found the road between the national park and the observatory. That meant a modest climb up and over a ridge, which contradicted our innate sense of direction.

The calculation paid off. By nightfall, after countless miles of trailless hiking, we reached the snowy, trackless mountain road we’d been hoping for. Our headlamps shone along the silent white ribbon, and we agreed that if nobody else was going to the observatory at the start of winter, then neither were we.

We headed left, into the night.

Next up: Final Part 7—Done With the Devil, and a Ho-Ho-Ho!

The Baja’s Sonoran Desert is a large place. Our little piece of it included minor rolls, bumps and dips between the flatter planes, and many shapes and colors to catch the eye, but nothing so striking as the desert as a whole. I felt completely unleashed from Western Civilization, for a while at least.

We crossed rutted wheel tracks several times, wondering if these might be evidence of the infamous Baja 1000, the mega-race among hundreds of contestants bounding across the desert like migrating arthropods. Beyond the car tracks, the landscape was nearly pristine again.

The hike droned on as the coolness of the morning was displaced by the warmth of spreading sunlight. My ankle was doing well, I thought. Maybe we should have started at the beach after all, sea to shining sea or bust. The mountains moved closer and grew larger and more formidable with every hour. We could see canyons, but they blended into the escarpment, making them difficult to fully identify. Cañon del Diablo could be especially challenging to distinguish from a distance.

Most canyons, according to the topographical maps I carried, poured off to the east, as any good canyon should in a north-south trending mountain range. The Canyon of the Devil, as noted, had ulterior motives, flowing south to north, parallel to the escarpment, which also left it largely hidden from view. Descending fifteen miles from the high col between Picacho del Diablo and Botella Azul, Cañon del Diablo necessarily cut a deep trough between dramatic granite walls.

By mid-morning, we could see clumps of trees and the ranch dead ahead. We reached the gate and let ourselves through. An old, baked-and-broiled farmer was at work among the buildings and corrals and looked up to see us coming. He wore overalls and a gray sombrero with a medium brim and carried a steel tool in his hand. As quickly as we could say Buenas tardes, he motioned us toward the well.

“Agua” was all he said.

“Gracias.”

We walked past a few chickens clucking their suspicions at our waddling emu forms and resupplied our water jugs. We left our gallon-sized empties as token gifts, then ambled back to visit with the old man. Though cordial, he seemed uninterested in our purposes. I guessed he’d encountered other strange visitors before us and anticipated the routine: water, directions, maybe some eggs. We explained where we were off to and he showed us the start of a rough road that would take us near the mouth of our canyon. We thanked him and he went back to his business.

Not far along the road, we encountered a newer white pick-up truck coming down from above. Once again two young men stopped to greet us, impressed by the loads we were carrying. One noticed my heavy mountaineering boots.

“Son alpinistas?” he asked.

“Si.”

For a moment I thought these fellows might know something about the place we were headed to. They said they were forestry workers. A crew was working several kilometers away putting out the last embers of a wildfire.

“No pasen,” they said. If the forest supervisor saw us, he would make us leave. “No se puede subir.” We were not allowed to go up there, nor into the canyon.

“Muy peligroso.” It was too dangerous, the other said.

“El fuego.” The fire.

They were fairly convincing that we were not going to get past the fire boss. I suspected Dennis was thinking the same thing I was. We were going to try regardless.

“Espera.” Wait, they said. They would show us a way. They were headed for the well at Rancho Santa Clara to fill several large buckets with drinking water and would return shortly.

“Espera,” they repeated and drove off.

We sat quietly on our packs and looked out over the desert, visually retracing our steps. When the truck returned, we lifted our packs aboard and climbed in the back. They turned onto a rough narrow track and the driver explained this would get us around the fire crew without anyone noticing. When we reached a dry wash he pointed upslope to the mouth of what seemed to be a smallish canyon.

“Cañon del Diablo,” he said with a nod and a grin.

We hoped he was right, of course, and were grateful and excited to be standing at the start of another leg of our long-imagined journey. I handed them our last two beers and waved farewell. We hustled upward to the protective cover of the canyon, not only to remain undetected, but to escape some of the modest heat and glare.

The canyon walls quickly narrowed and began to tower above us—like the gates of hell, I supposed. As we departed one world and entered the next, we held no premonitions or devilish fear about the place. Heavenly or enchanted seemed a more apt description. Easy walking led around a bend, and to our great delight, the waterfall. It plunged gently into an inviting pool. Though there wasn’t much water coming over the brink, the scene was sublime.

The sketchy report I’d read noted that we would likely find a rope attached to a rock wall left of the waterfall. We spotted a skimpy frayed cord hanging over the rounded slab. I dropped my pack and gave it a tug. Surprisingly, it held as I clambered up the rock to a place I could secure our own short rope and haul up the packs. They were more manageable now without all the extra water and beer.

Dennis hooted while I reeled him up the slab. I kept the belay going as he tiptoed down the other side of the rock to the stream’s edge. I lowered the packs then unclipped the rope and let it go, also tossing the frayed cord back to where we found it. I began to scoot down the slab, and quickly lost my footing. What started as a controlled butt-slide turned into an oh-shit tumble as I flopped into the shallow creek flat on my back, my head just above the brink. To have gone over and plopped into the pool may have been more annoying than hazardous, although I’m glad the thrilling part stopped where it did. We both laughed as I picked myself up and shook the water from my ears.

We found a perfect little sand bar upstream where I could dry my shirt and shorts. It was such a lovely spot we decided to camp there and devour an early supper. The night was pleasantly cool as we gazed at the band of stars embraced by the walls of the canyon.

The next day, the gorge led more steeply through multiple small ledges and falls, though with plenty of room to maneuver. We gained a lot of elevation, but sensed there was still much more canyon above than below. The rough ground was taking a toll on my injured ankle and I fell behind as Dennis scouted for another camp. We probably made eight miles that day. We staked our third night’s camp in a brushier place and lit a small fire to cook over.

Out of nowhere, a gust of wind gathered a cloud of dust and debris and blew the embers of our fire up-canyon. We nearly torched the place when a small shrub burst into flames. Dennis raced over to beat it down with his shirt, while I threw dirt on it till it was doused. We were camped in a virtual tinderbox, though being December, I think we failed to fully grasp the risk. The fire boss we'd evaded surely would have groaned at our folly.

After a few minutes of dead calm, we were blasted by a second strong gust that almost sparked another wildfire. I guessed it was turbulence—cooling mountain air barreling down the steeper canyons of the escarpment, perhaps siphoning warmer air up through our own less precipitous gorge. Then a third sudden gust sent another wave of dust and leaves flying up the canyon. Once the calm returned, not a wisp of a breeze was detected the rest of the night.

Next up: Part 6—Mountain Moonlight

The highway angled northward out of town, desert-flat with hardly a curve. It was only twenty miles to the pass, which took us a little off course, but nearer our destination.

Gazing out at Mexico through the dirty bus window, I thought about the great fun that lay ahead. We would be sleeping on the desert floor without a tent. We omitted them to save weight. Instead, we each brought a bivy sack, a rainproof shell that slips over a sleeping bag. We would have to find the ranch at Santa Clara, then water, as well as the hidden entrance to the canyon.

The sparse description in the old guidebook said there would be a small waterfall a quarter-mile up the canyon, with possibly a short rope on the left. It would provide confirmation we were in the right place. We would ascend the gorge to Campo Noche and look for the way up Picacho del Diablo.

Despite our heavy loads, we brought only a short rope and ice axes, but no crampons for our boots, hoping we could manage without. We planned to cross the escarpment near a peak called Botella de Azul, or Blue Bottle, then cruise down the other side of the mountains, like squealing kids on toboggans if things went well. None of it should be particularly difficult or technical, we thought, but the potential for adventure, particularly at the start of winter, was quite enticing.

I tuned out the noisy stillness of the bus ride, though there was hardly time to work up a good yawn before the driver let his foot off the throttle and rolled the coach to a stop. I was looking out a half-open window when I noticed the driver looking at us in the mirror.

“Aqui?” I asked. Were we there already?

“Si. Esto. El paso.”

The desert seemed almost as flat and open as before, as if we’d hardly gained any elevation on our bus ride. Looking at the map and the mountains and the road ahead, the driver seemed to have it right. We relieved the bus of our heavy gear and watched it whisk away in the bright afternoon sunshine. I imagined the driver glancing to his side mirror . . . crazy gringos.

The bus driver had been thoughtful enough to drop us at the start of a two-track dirt road that trailed leftward, more or less in the direction we were going. We had barely begun walking when two young men in a pick-up truck appeared out of nowhere and pulled up behind us.

“Que pasan?” They were curious what the blazes we were up to.

“Somos alpinistas,” I repeated. “Vamos a la sierra.”

They thought that was pretty funny—that we would walk there and not drive, or at least take a horse.

“Muy lejos!”

“Si.”

Dennis knew about as much Spanish as I did and together we cobbled up a short conversation. The men laughed and insisted we hop in the back. They’d drive us the first couple of miles. We jumped in. There was no need to be overly purist now about walking across the desert. We’d let go of our sea-to-sea thing, so the main quest now was just navigating a dozen miles of desert and getting ourselves up the canyon and over the mountains, a considerable adventure in itself. We’ll come back again and do it right, I pledged.

The rough ride in the truck ended not soon enough. To our new campesino friends we donated two warm beers for their return trip. The truck receded into the dust and all was quiet again.

It seemed we’d finally reached the true point of departure. Moments like these sometimes pass unnoticed, until much later when you realize they actually meant something. So on December 18th, 1982, we commenced our trekking across the Sonoran Desert, or at least the dozen or so miles of it that still lay ahead.

We strolled among prickly pear, creosote bush and my own favorite, the ocotillo. O-ko-TEE-yo. It was a fun word to pronounce and I enjoyed uttering something fluently in Spanish besides “Where’s the speedy toilet?” or “How much for the naked chicken?” which surely approximates some of the phrases I mumbled during our conversations with the locals. In any event, the ocotillo’s tall spreading wands of desert glory were fascinating to behold, like little bombs a-bursting and celebrating our trek.

Well into dusk, we stopped at a broad patch of smooth gravel, the start of the dry lake perhaps, and laid out our bedrolls. Dinner would have been cheese and bread. Laying there in the cloudless desert, twenty miles or more from the nearest city lights of San Felipe, not a human artifact was in sight, other than our own bodily intrusion into this arid wilderness. We ogled the desert stars and I said to Dennis that I could not see one sign of humanity in this remote place, not a single light on the horizon other than a rising star—at which point a satellite, a single speck of faint light, sailed across the universe like a particle of space litter. Several more orbital intruders sailed past before I drifted off to sleep.

Having grown up, for a few years anyway, in the boondocks of Utah’s South Salt Lake Valley, I often slept out under the stars. I was usually in the company of my older brother, Skip. He would be the one to chase away anything threatening (though nothing ever threatened us) and I learned not to be afraid of sleeping out under the cosmos. Whatever it was that was out there in the shadows or among the stars had no interest in us, and even if it did and moved menacingly toward us, my big brother would smash it to bits. The protective veil of my brother imparted a kind of fearlessness of the dark. We weren’t like other kids whose parents made them stay inside most nights. We had free rein to sleep out whenever we liked, so long as it wasn't too stormy. I should have thanked my parents for that.

Sometimes we took a little too much free rein and snuck away from our usual bedding place to engineer a bit of havoc in the neighborhood. I think it was the Myric’s place that introduced me to the business of midnight home-decorating. I believe it took two rolls.

I once spit, inexplicably, on a distant cousin’s kitchen window and I thought she was going to pound me. I had to clean it up. She was the first girl I ever kissed. I think I was eleven, so I’m not sure it counts. She and my brother and I were riding in the back of my parents’ slate-blue VW pick-up truck, Dad driving, Mom also up front sipping a Coors. I think we were headed for a camp-out.

Before I leave you with the impression that my folks were habitual drivin’ drunkards, it was really more of an occasional thing on the road, back in the day when your own social circle was slightly more tolerant of bad behavior than most of us are today. Mom had also been a heavy smoker much of her adult life. We all remember the day she went cold turkey, giving up beer and cigarettes on the same day. She never looked back. Pretty awesome.

In the looser times of the mid-Sixties, however, the beer cooler was in the back of the VW with us. Mom or Dad would motion for a beer through the back window and we’d open the cooler, grab one and hand it through the passenger side door. Once we grabbed two. It would have been my older brother’s doing, of course. As the greasy-haired, high-school football star of the family, he was much better than I at getting away with mischief. We slunk down below the cab window and shared the can of beer three ways. It tasted like crap, of course. But with this girl there squished up against me, the peer pressure was thermonuclear.

Out of the blue, my brother insisted that I needed to kiss her. We both roundly rejected that gross idea. He may have compared us to the caged chickens we were sharing the truck with because we soon relented. Somehow, after a third of a beer, I drew up the unfathomable courage to look at her face, move a little closer, and trying not to think about how this girl who was slightly older than me, say twelve or so, but way taller, and who liked to wrestle me to the ground, sit on me and tickle me in the ribs till I turned green (like the time in my step-uncle’s haystack where she shoved me down between bales of hay and groped my ribs with her curly thin fingers, while her silky hair rained down on me, almost hiding her giggling pretty face, which a year earlier would have been completely unkissable), and now that same silky hair and pretty face were in the back of a VW pick-up truck daring me to try. So I did. It lasted for about two nanoseconds and I thought I was going to die from some weird form of electric shock. Whoa!

“How was it?” my brother asked.

“Ah, it was okay,” I said.

Dennis and I rose early in the morning and joked about the rattlesnakes, tarantulas, gila monsters and rabid coyotes that must have checked us out during the night. They probably ran off terrified after getting a whiff of the two sweaty larvae in their nylon cocoons.

We picked up our bulging packs and continued the walk across the desert. El Diablo and the San Pedro Mártir looked far more imposing now, lit up nicely in the low-angled sun.

Next up: Part 5—Cañon del Diablo

Waking up at our beach camp—let’s call it Camp Pelican—in San Felipe, we repacked and wandered about town in search of cheese, bread, pancake mix, cookies, fruit, pasta, rice, sauces for meals, instant oatmeal and the like. We packed seven days’ worth, expecting to complete the entire desert-mountain crossing in less than a week. There would be water in the mountains and wood for cooking, so we did not carry a camp stove nor the extra burden of liquid fuel.

We asked around about the old road to Rancho Santa Clara. A half-dozen denizens pointed us in a half-dozen directions. A local police officer looked at us strangely when we explained our intentions, then raised an arm and sighted down his finger.

“Allí," he said. “A la derecha.” He told us where to turn. “Muy lejos." Far away.

“Si señor. Somos alpinistas.”

We explained that we were experienced mountaineers and that we were well prepared—not to worry. By the lift in his eyebrows, I think we provided the day’s entertainment for the young officer.

Provisions secured, we returned to our base camp at the seaside park. An older Mexican fellow wandered in to greet us, eager to sell us some of his clams. We declined, but gave him a few pesos for a bumper sticker he was carrying. It read Happiness is a warm clam, his marketing slogan. I watched the last of the pelicans pluck late-night snacks from the Sea of Cortez, and crawled into the sack. I slept well that night, drifting off with thoughts of scrambling on granite.

In a small Mexican town like San Felipe in the early-1980s, one might expect to encounter a kennel’s worth of dogs milling about in the night, scavengers looking to raise some innocent hell with a pair of unfamiliar gringos like ourselves. Instead, we were met by feral cats. Too many to count. We hung our food bags from nearby posts, just in case.

As we snoozed blissfully, like poor-boy sandwiches snug in our cellophane wrappers, the cats invaded our food supplies. These kitties were sly, as we slept through the whole affair. We arose at dawn to tantalizing views of the mountains and the sea—and a scattered food crisis that displaced any notion of goo-gah serenity.

Clawed bags and wrappers were strewn everywhere. Nuts and chocolate were intermingled with rice and noodles. Much of the wonderful fresh bread we had acquired the day before had been ripped open and gnawed on. Worse still was the tragic loss of about four pounds of fresh cheese. Despite our misfortune, we had to admit that the mess was not nearly as disturbing as it was hilarious. We spent the morning picking up the evidence and reconstituting our shopping list.

We were still just a few days out of Bellingham, yet we had passed through another traveler’s time warp that made me feel like we’d been in Mexico for a week. What that also meant was we were anxious to get the hell out of town. It was time to make our way into the wild side of the Sonoran Desert and the San Pedro Mártir.

Repacked for adventure, I’d have been jumping up and down with glee, if not for one other minor distraction. The day before leaving Bellingham, I'd tripped down some stairs at the university and badly turned an ankle. In San Felipe, I was still limping along, my ankle throbbing and swollen.

The clepto-kitty incident presented a handy excuse for delay, and since we’d already burned up a good part of the day restocking, I suggested we spend one more night in town for some extra ankle recovery. We’d head out early the next morning. Once again, we suspended the food bags, this time hanging freely from taught lines instead of posts. We made it through the night unburgled by the roving herd of outlaw cats.

Early the next morning, after dipping our toes in the Sea of Cortez, we slid into our boots, loaded the overstuffed packs onto our backs, and marched westward. Or rather southward, as the officer had pointed, until we found the right turn that would aim us toward the mountains. With so much food and water to carry, along with street clothes, warm stuff, rain gear, ice axe, and my all-important mask and snorkel for a later swim at Cabo San Lucas, my pack, needless to say, was seriously overloaded. I carried my bedroll separately, slung over my neck and shoulder Kung-Fu-style. At least I’d be ready for any napping emergency that might arise. We walked and limped silently toward the ruffled horizon.

Two hours into the trek, a line of dust formed ahead of us, and a farm truck materialized in the haze. The old farmer braked to investigate the two-legged mules with backpacks slogging along the road.

“Buenas tardes, señor," I said. "Vamos a Rancho Santa Clara. Conoce usted?”

A little stunned, he said, “Rancho Santa Clara!?”

“Si.”

“Rancho Santa Clara!?” he repeated, louder this time. His face was as burnt brown as the desert was burnt gray. The lines of disbelief appeared well worn into his forehead and the sides of his eyes.

“Esta muy lejos!” he said.

“Si, pero somos alpinistas,” I said. “Vamos a la sierra.”

“Muy lejos.” Very far.

“Si.”

He proceeded to tell us we were on the wrong track if we truly were headed to Rancho Santa Clara. I didn’t understand the directions he offered, but I did gather that he was telling us to return to San Felipe to find the correct road. Good grief. We motioned to the back of his truck and he flicked his hand, as if to say, “Of course.”

Back in beautiful San Felipe, we asked around again for directions, beginning to feel a little silly, like two lost Gumbies in search of the claymaster.

For trip planning, all we possessed was a general road map of the Baja and two topographical maps of the mountains that my good friend Janet had copied for us at the university’s map library in Bellingham. The details were coarse and did not extend to the desert, nor to San Felipe. I was confident, however, that we could navigate through the mountains, if we could just find the correct place to start.

Having blown a couple of extra days already, thanks to my sad ankle and some wily cats, we were eager as ever to get on with it. We waddled over to the bus terminal. I showed the ticket person our road map and asked about the possibility of getting dropped off near a pass to the north that was labeled on the road map. It appeared that we could shorten the desert walk to about half the distance, maybe 15 miles at most, if we started there and followed a compass bearing to Santa Clara. The ranch was marked by a tiny black dot on the map, though it was anyone’s guess if the dot was in the right place.

Dennis agreed to the new plan, though I detected a sardonic look in his eye. The bus ride meant letting go of the great feat of walking across the Baja from sea to sea. But it also meant reclaiming one of the two days we had already lost, as well as one less day of ankle torture. The mountains were the main prize, so we weren’t by any stretch giving that up.

“No problema.” We could get dropped anywhere we liked. Crazy gringos.

We had some time yet before the bus would leave, so we relaxed over a beer at a local cantina. I ordered a cold Tecate. I’d had them at home, but now for strict research purposes, wished to see how they tasted in Mexico. Spectacular.

We soon met the mid-day bus. The driver’s eyes bulged when he tossed our backpacks and four gallons of water into the baggage bay underneath. I planned to drink the first half gallon as quickly as possible to keep hydrated and lighten the load. To compensate for the guilt I felt for abandoning our original plan, I’d also lashed a six-pack of Dos Equis to the top of my pack. If we were going to the Canyon of the Devil, we might as well imbibe.

We stepped aboard, onward to the Sierra once again.

Next up: Part 4—Desert Stars

The bus ride to San Felipe was somewhat less eventful. Rural Mexico sailed past the big side windows of the bus, and I frowned at my decision to not bring a camera. Instead, I carried a sketch book and pencils, intending to apply my nonexistent drawing skills to paper to record the best memories. It was wishful thinking and something I would totally fail at.

In any case, this was to be my longest, most remote vacation ever. Five weeks’ worth. I was feeling giddy to be swapping the cold December rains of Bellingham for the sunny beaches and arid mountains of Mexico. Dennis would also enjoy a nice break from his biz. Unlike me, though, he was a seasoned traveler, including prior forays into the deeper parts of real Mexico. He was quite at ease traipsing about foreign lands—notwithstanding the occasional rogue taxi ride. As a late-Sixties refugee from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, he was a rebel-pessimist on many things civil and political. Personable and well educated, Dennis knew both how to travel and how to live.

For my part, I’d never gotten past the border towns, including a two-hour visit once to Puerto Peñasco in 1971, when my high-school buddy, Bob, and I toured America in his dad’s sparkling new Datsun 510. We also poked around Juarez, across from El Paso, where a guy on a bicycle rode alongside the car trying to sell us cigarettes, marijuana, and ultimately his sister, before giving us up for nerds. On the way back into the U.S., we were asked at Customs to step out of the car, while two border agents scoured it inside and out for contraband. To our great relief, they found nothing of interest.

Our bus rolled through the desert offering a glimpse of the abrupt escarpment of the San Pedro Mártir, a formidable looking barrier we’d need to cross. We presumed a higher bump on the distant skyline was the darkening silhouette of our stony objective, Picacho del Diablo.

We arrived in San Felipe early in the evening, gathered our packs from the belly of the bus, and explored some options for dinner. At a quiet city park on the beach we established our camp, vaguely wondering if we might be breaking any rules. The stars were glittering when we settled into our bags, the soft sound of the waves lulling us to sleep. No elephants tooted, and we weren’t evicted.

We awoke in the morning to prolific brown pelicans diving sideways into the sea and lifting off with wriggling fishes in their oversized beaks. The day was spent wandering the quaint coastal town, shopping for goods, and packing for the big foot-stomp across the Baja. There didn’t seem to be many people out and about, and I guessed the population of the surrounding area might be a few thousand.

The region between the Sea of Cortez and the crest of the San Pedro Mártir was originally inhabited by the Kiliwa Indians. The Kiliwa hunted and gathered from the mountains to the sea. They managed to thwart non-native invaders for more than two centuries following Hernan Cortez’s defeat of the Aztec empire in 1521. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sporadic settlement nevertheless moved in, and fish camps were established at San Felipe Bay. The community would ultimately grow and prosper as a busy port for fish, cargo and eventually tourists. Electricity arrived less than twenty years before Dennis and I did.

San Felipe was then, and still is, a key focus of some of the most famous off-road desert races in the world, the Baja 250, 500 and 1000. Hundreds of competitors in souped-up cars, buggies and motorcycles race in long, meandering loops or across great expanses of the Baja. Major events are typically held in the spring or fall. Anyway, we hoped that was the case, preferring not to end up in the midst of some mega-dust cloud during our placid December hike.

To reach the escarpment, we would have to cross 25 miles of the Sonoran Desert, partly along dirt roads, partly across a dry lake bed called Laguna Diablo (or Laguna Santa Clara). I wondered if anyone other than the Kiliwa had made such a trek before. Explorers, settlers, hunters, prospectors, marauders or others had surely made their way through the desert and/or the Sierra at one time or another. But had they done it in mountain boots? Dipped their toes in both seas? Had they climbed the highest peak along the way?

The Sonoran Desert is named for the Mexican state of Sonora, possibly a twist on the spanish word for woman, señora. It’s the hottest desert in North America. It envelops the northern portion of the Sea of Cortez and extends north into southwestern Arizona and southeastern California, and south perhaps 60 miles beyond San Felipe. Mean daily high temperatures exceed 100 degrees F. from June through September. December usually tops out in the 70s.

As for the mountains, the Sierra San Pedro Mártir is something of a little brother to California’s Sierra Nevada. The range spans about 60 miles north to south, ten miles east to west, and rises to almost two miles above sea level at the summit of Picacho Diablo. Our access to the peak: Cañon del Diablo. The deep gorge trends west at first, then thumbs its nose at all the other canyons by bending sharply to the south for about six miles, sometimes over 4,000 feet deep, before reaching the base of Picacho Diablo.

At the foot of this wall of mountains, we hoped to find Rancho Santa Clara where we might replenish our water and perhaps gain some useful tips for finding our way. I was unconcerned about the desert crossing, since it would be easy hiking and not so hot in December. Still, we agreed we should each carry two gallons of water to be reasonably safe. The desert romp would likely consume most of two days with only modest elevation gain. Once across, we’d need to find the correct canyon to begin our ascent. We understood there should be water flowing from the canyon.

Picacho del Diablo, the Devil’s Mountain, was first climbed in 1911 from the west, which has remained the favored approach. The first ascent from the east, the San Felipe side, was by Randall Henderson and Norman Clyde in April 1937. They made a direct and difficult ascent from the desert floor below the peak. Dennis I planned to follow the longer, more moderate route up Cañon del Diablo, an alternative I’d read about in an old guidebook to the area.

The towering granite peak is also known as Cerro de la Encantada, The Enchanted Peak, giving it a kind of schizophrenic nomenclature that makes you think again about going up it. It has also been called La Providencia, or sometimes just El Picacho or El Diablo. Devil’s Mountain also works.

By 1982, the mountain had been climbed many times, but if anyone had summited during a traverse of the Baja from sea to sea, we were not aware of it. Rarely, had it been climbed in December, due to the prospects for snow and ice high on the peak. It was comparable in height to the Koma Kulshan (Mount Baker) volcano near our home town of Bellingham. It too rises about two miles above sea level, but being 1,000 miles farther from the equator, it’s encased in glacial ice on all sides.

The Sierra de San Pedro Mártir was not only wilder than California’s Sierra Nevada, but in 1982, much less visited. A national park was established for a part of the range in 1947. Roads and facilities were constructed west of the crest, offering easier access to El Diablo. However, by going in that way we would completely miss the desert and the canyon we very much wanted to see. The romance of a Baja crossing from the east seemed far more tantalizing.

The San Pedro Mártir rises gradually from the west to a high, rolling, forested plateau, then falls precipitously to the desert on the east. Steep canyons lead down the face of the escarpment, one of which, Cañon del Diablo, would take us to our peak and to the crest of the range. Once over the top, facilities at the national park suggested supplies and at least some degree of creature comfort, as well as a road we could follow down and out of the mountains. The same road continued north a few miles to an astronomical observatory located high in the range on what is still acclaimed as one of the darkest and finest observatory sites in the world. It was out of our way to go there, though we contemplated doing so.

Given the distances and topography, a number of days would pass before we got our first good look at El Diablo.

Up next: Part 3—Camp Pelican

From Sea to Shining Sea

In late 1982, a hiking buddy and I, temporarily unemployed and eager to travel, seized on the big idea of a week-long trek across the 80-mile wide Baja peninsula in Mexico. Dennis and I would hike from the Sea of Cortez on the east shore, then march west to the Pacific Ocean. The walk would include a 30-mile crossing of the Sonoran Desert and a multi-day traverse of the mountains of the Sierra San Pedro Mártir. Our plan called for summiting, en route, the highest hunk of rock in the Baja, 10,157-foot Picacho del Diablo, the Devil’s Mountain. And we would do it in December.

So, an enchanted holiday with the Devil. What could be more fun than that?

We obviously anticipated a fine adventure. What I did not expect was one of the most memorable Christmas Eves I’ve ever experienced.

We would begin our trek on a beach in the quiet, somewhat isolated fishing town of San Felipe, cozy on a bay of the same name on the Sea of Cortez. The town lies about 120 miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border. After ceremoniously dipping our toes there, we hoped to end within a week with a splash on some magical Pacific shore well to the south of Ensenada.

We estimated our actual hiking distance to be a bit over 100 miles. Despite heavy packs, uncertain desert roads and no trail through these rugged mountains, we guessed we could average 15 to 20 miles per day for six days. We prepared for seven. We could go hungry for a couple days if the trek lagged much longer than that.

I don’t know where I got my climate data from, but I had it in my head that the beach and the desert would be warm, but not too hot since we’d be there late fall, which was more or less correct. And the mountains? Mild, we figured, with maybe some cold nights and a little snow at elevation. It had not occurred to me that we might run into a glaze of ice above 6,000 feet. Nor did I foresee hours of upward wallowing in thigh-deep powder snow.

Also not part of the plan were delays due to bad directions, a bad ankle sprain and a herd of thieving cats. Had we considered the comical abundance of twists and turns we’d experience along our journey? Uh, no. Or the potential danger we could face had some little thing gone awry? Vaguely. Did we run out of food? Well, yes and no.

Nevertheless, we were mountaineers. We were tough. We could do this.

Spoiler alert: We survived.

Dennis and I were packed and ready to fly in early December. We landed at LAX and bussed to San Diego to spend the night before crossing into Mexico. With large mountaineering backpacks slung over our shoulders, we waddled around the city looking for a place to camp. Dennis carried a good-sized pack, full yet reasonable given our intentions. My pack, on the other hand, was hopelessly overstuffed. If I admitted that I’d tossed in a mask and snorkel for some beach time later, you’d get the general idea.

Somehow, our duck-walking around San Diego led us to the zoo late in the day. We probably fit right in, perhaps mistaken for a couple of wild emus on the loose. We poked around for an inconspicuous hidey-hole where we might camp for the night, preferably out of the reach of lions, tigers and bears. We spotted a semi-secluded grassy place just outside the zoo's walls and fences, conveniently lacking a fee station or a ranger to check in with. It was just dark enough to slink in unnoticed, scarf some dinner, and crash.

We were in for a lively evening. Honking elephants and scolding primates seemed to be lobbing vulgarities at one another over the fences. This against a backdrop of squeals, squeeks and grunts from near and far. The ruckus eventually quieted to allow us some sleep. Early the next morning, however, the zoological chatter resumed, as we slithered from our bags and repacked to avoid detection.

We scrambled up breakfast and soon reemerged nonchalant onto the street. Waddling around again to find the zoo entrance, we checked our giant backpacks at the gate and took a look around inside. After a couple of hours winking at our new zoo friends, it was time to make our way to Mexico.

By early afternoon, Dennis and I stepped off the border trolley and passed through Customs and Immigration into Tijuana. In 1982, a stroll across the border into Mexico was a non-event, at least in any bureaucratic sense. An agent scribbled something on a slip of paper, stamped the date with a smile, and we were on our way. Bienvenidos!

Stepping into Mexico, our sense of place was immediately transformed, as if we’d squeezed through a kind of time-space warp that sucked away all that was familiar. Borders should not be so stark, I thought.

Our first impression of Tijuana was, admittedly, a stereotypical one: clean and littered, new and old, paved and dirt streets, kids in empty spaces, cars from every decade, all  seemingly under a veil of economic uncertainty. Perhaps to instill some confidence in a brighter future, Tijuana developers had just completed construction of the city’s Los Torres, the twin towers of the Grand Hotel. At 28 stories, they were the tallest buildings in the Baja.

A populace of a half-million scratched out a living here, while their neighbors to the north, meaning us, were about to emerge from an economic recession. In fact, due to the recession, I’d been laid off that fall from my permitting job with the county. Supposedly temporary, it squelched my income, meager as it was, but freed me up for adventure. Dennis put his landscaping business on hold. Together we had enough coins in our purses to enjoy a low-cost holiday to Mexico. In December 1982, such a thing was still possible.

My dad had lived on a boat in San Diego back in the Sixties and insisted that the border towns were not the real Mexico. For that, he and my stepmom would sail their hand-built schooner down the Baja and along the mainland as far south as Acapulco and beyond. That was the real Mexico, he said. After a brief look around at 1982 Tijuana, Dennis and I were primed for a southbound bus ride into “real” Mexico.

“Where the hell’s the bus station?” Dennis asked.

It seemed so easy looking at a map back in Bellingham. 1. Go to Tijuana. 2. Catch bus. 3. Get off at San Felipe. 4. Walk across desert. 5. Climb mountain. 6. March to Pacific.

We saw no busses, only a grazing herd of taxis. We noticed a driver standing outside his car, and walked over to him.

“How much to the bus station?” I asked, in my recently reconstituted high-school Spanish.

“Vamos a San Felipe,” Dennis added for clarity.

“Si, no problema. Vamos," the man answered, waving us into his car. “Muy rapido!”

We shoved our beastly burdens into the trunk and climbed in. When the driver said “Muy rapido,” he wasn’t kidding. We lurched forward and zoomed around a corner with the radio blaring. Our driver spoke loudly. He was curious about we two gringos with the big packs. He tried to engage us in conversation, but neither of us understood much of what he said. We grunted courteously.

After a minute or two doing the Tijuana Gran Prix, our driver suddenly nose-dived the car through a break in a fence, and we plunged down the steep side of a concrete-lined canal. A streamlet of water—the Tijuana River—flowed at the bottom. I'm thinking, Whoa, this guy can drive! Dennis sensed we were about to be mugged.

“Alto! Alto!” he yelled, insisting that the driver halt the car and let us out.

To me, the man seemed good-natured, so I assumed, or at least hoped, that he was taking us on a shortcut to the bus station. I’ve been known to have an excessively optimistic outlook in the face of, well, cars diving into canals. We dodged pools, dogs, kids and debris, before the man swung the car around and gunned it up another sidewall. We popped out of the canal and onto the street, screeching to a stop at the bus terminal.

Up next: Part 2—To San Felipe

EasyJet flew us
And the view did cue us
Soaring up the Dalmation coast
To Geneva or bust
The Alps are a must
So it's on to Chamonix
Bernard there did greet us
Showed us our room
Tiny and tidy
We'll spend one nighty
And stare at the mighty
Aiguille du Midi
A ride to the top
To see what I see
Mount Blanc is quite a sight
Of fright and delight
Winks over my way
And says try me?
Maybe next year with a peer
Kris needs a down day
And I need more up
So up to Brevant I ride
For the steep hike down
I dare not frown
A perfect way to eat up a day

Then off to the city of Vevey
A stroll through the old
To good pizza we're told
While eating our pizza
A couple we meetsa
Says there's music that's free
And a bus with no fee
Really just minutes away
We heed the advice
For the Montreux Jazz Fest
Is now underway
More party than jazz
Much razzmatazz
Then the woman from Ireland
Belts out her tunes
It's enough to encase a memory

Next we are off to Murren
Just up the cliff
From Lauterbrunnen
At the Eiger Guesthouse we stay
For three fabulous days
Beneath great peaks in a row
The Eiger, the Monch, the Jungfrau
I try not to druel
Like some climbing fool
When we ride to the glacier by train
The hike down is glorious
And I'll sure need some morious
So day three I go up to the Birg
By a long circuitous route
Enjoyably high
Sharp at the prow
A wee bit airy
And sufficiently merry
Even in meadows with cows

After all that
We aim for Zermatt
At a fine hotel we land
Quiet and quaint
And just off the bustle
But up we must hustle
To see the Matterhorn
All stately and grand
Surreal and unreal
What an incredible peak
A summit I'd seek
If not for the cost of a guide

Day two is the cable
As high as we're able
Twelve thousand feet and more
The views stupendous
Ice sculptures tremendous
Inside the glacier tunnel
Ourselves we funnel
Above the frozen cold
Where a thousand skiers
Are carving turns like it ain't July
Near the Italian border
Another hike is in order
So I arrange to meet Kris below
And walk like I'm walking on Mars
Barren and rocky
No place for hockey
The Matterhorn towering high
I collect a small stone to
Carry back home
With the memory burned in my skull

Then it's time to move on
But I've got one more song
To sing up the via ferrata
I'll keep it quick
I say to the spouse
And sprint like a mouse
Above the last house
Put on the gear
Pocket my fear
And head up the rungs and ladders
Not a soul in sight
The cliff sunny and bright
I finish part A in a jiffy
They say part B might be iffy
But by the bells in the city
There's still time for this ditty
So up I commit to the next
The worst comes first
A loosey-goose ladder
A serious matter
But narry a strain or pain
In a minute I'm through
So the rest I can do
And I score Zermatt's finest ferrata

The train takes us back
On a familiar track
This time to the city of Basel
We explore it a bit
Eat kabobs while we sit
And prepare for our last night in Paris
Then home we will fly
To our favorite blue sky
Where friends we have missed
Will be waiting
For stories to share
And clean underwear
As our journey of the leg
Leaves nothing to beg
But home

Return to part 1 of 6--Vancouver to London

Ah, the wolves
Ahooga!
But we'll get to that later
After we skin the cat
Unravel our travel
Update the state
Of where we been
These past weeks

In a bus we landed
In old Rovinj
Walk a few blocks
We're all checked in
Cozy little place
Salty cool air
A swinging chair
A skip to the beach
A scenic reach
Of a fine old town
We amble-ramble down
The cobblestone
Testing our Croatian hellos

The architecture's sweet
The skinny streets
No parking, no cars
In the heart of the city
Why can't we do this at home
Flowers and art
A seashell collage
Adorn the doors and stairs
While over there
A harbor full of boats
Then a peach of a beach
Where I dunk like a lunk
In the blue Adriatic
But something's erratic
Oh, oh
There's a cell phone
In my pocket
Oops

Two days in
It's time to move
To get in the groove
Of Dalmatia
So off we go
To drive the Istrian coast
A stop in Opatija
Where a walk on the water
To some murals we dodder
Celebs who've been to this place
Einstein, Joyce, Lumiere
And Douglas (Kirk)
And Deniro (Robert)
Well, well, well

Thence we follow the shore
To make our way
Around the bay
Over the mountains
And on to the fountains
Of Plitvice National Park
Splendid blue lakes
Where all it takes
Is one spilling into the other
Mahvelous
A good long hike
To a vertical cave
A natural nave
And falling water everywhere

Then on to Sibenik
Cuz a try we givin' it
To ogle it, we google it
And Goog leads the way
Over the hills
Around the bend
To grandmother's house and more
But another hill, another bend
And another?
Where the hell are we?
Somewhere in the boonies
We're the loneliest loonies
Out in Nowhere's middle
Cuz the dot on the map
It ain't the right Sibenik
We're not sure why
The Goog took us awry
Nevertheless, we aim for the coast
Still it's beauteous out there
And our mistake we repair
And aim for the correct Sibenik

The sun heading low
Another hill, a bend, a row
A flash of a dash
We see with our eyes
What the heck is that?
Just ahead, on a rise in the road
Two large animals
Deer? Lions? Wild boar?
They move in unison
Left to right
Whoa, they look like dogs!
Wild, huge, muscular dogs
The shape of shephards
But larger than any we've seen
Wolves!
Not the lanky kind
With the skinny behind
No, these guys are are buff
Graceful and sprightly
More regal than frightly 
Later we find
That wolves are making a comeback
In conservation-conscious Croatia
A few ranging packs
In the Velebik outbacks
About where we saw them
T'was quite a sight
Just before night
For a lost pair of gringos
So savor we do
The wolves of Croatia, yahoo!
With thanks to the goof of the Goog

Sibenik rocks
I can wash my socks
But first we must find our digs
Minus a cell phone
And no luck with wifi
We park in a lot
Tied up in a knot
But saved by the attendant
Who offers to call
Our amiable host
For directions
A jibber, a jabber
He soon points the way
To the place where we'll stay
A smiling Jurica meets us half way
Splendid, walkable, old and tidy
A treat to our feet
With good things to eat
A night on the town
Up alleys and down
We like the vibe
Of this Croatian tribe
Next time we gotta stay longer

Now onto Split
For a visit too quick
Not enough time for the park
But omelets they serve
With coffee and verve
Ere we strut to the ferry for Korcula
And wow, what a place
Kris lights up her face
Breathes in the air
Never leaving, she swears
Old and glorious
And somewhat notorious
For the vibe that's hard to describe
We stroll atop the wall
Overlooking it all
And a welcome and warm blue sea
In a scant few minutes
Our room we are in it
The balcony looks down
To a sliver of beach
That's well within reach

Three nights we stay
Transfixed each day
Could easily stay here a month
Gelato's my new best friend
The swimming is fab
With shoes not too shab
So ya don't be lurchin' for urchins
The rest of the brine
Entirely benign
I can float like a cork on a slab
To Kris I soon prattle
We must do a paddle
A skosh down the island
At sunset no less
With a guide who's the best
More history and zest
Than I can possibly digest
But the gist of it all
Are the olives in fall
We must return to help with the pick

Sadly we leave
Though we don't really grieve
Cuz we're itching to get
To Dubrovnik
A two hour ferry
Chugs fifty miles
And we're met by our host and a smile
He drives us a mile
With nary a rattle
To his comfy hillside home
Debriefed and desaddled
We descend to the depths
Down 200 steps
Just me and my mate
To the guarded gate
Of this grand legend of a city
Surrounded by walls
The architecture enthralls
We're stunned by the scale of it all
So much to explore
Stonework galore
The fascinating doors
Alleys in a maze
You can spend days
Fountains to fill your bottles
Church bells, spires
Baked goods and buyers
Cuddly cats keeping watch
Over thousands of tourists
No worse than us I suppose
We get off the main street
To inspire our feet
The stairs they steepen
And up we be creepin'
The crowds much thinner up here
For two more days we'll be here
The stones are speaking their prose
As we imagine this world long ago

We explore the cliffs
See ferries and skiffs
More stuff we be seein'
At the Maritime Museum
Making friends over lunch
We've experienced a bunch
At night with a light
We find our way
To an enchanted evening concert
Then early we rise
Under more blue skies
To walk the great walls of Dubrovnik
Three hours it takes
For the memories we make
And the photos we'll share back home
Signs of a war we all abhor
Wishing peace forevermore
It's hot by now
We're a little bit pooped
After hiking our loop
Nothing a gelato can't fix
Then I hike to the summit
And try not to plummet
The old city now far below
Then down, down, down
I return to the town
To get ready to leave
For tomorrow we fly to Genev-a
For our next Swiss journey of the leg

Next and final stop: Swiss Alps to Paris

After a night of suspiciously timed thunderstorms, I brewed a morning mocha on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. Maybe it was the oat milk. Perhaps the stevia. Or even the chocolate syrup. But I was quickly instilled with a buzzy kind of confidence, unfazed by the risk of alien abduction on the Extraterrestrial Highway. I’ll just call it the Ex Highway to save some letters.

By 8:00 am, I reached the northern end of the Ex Highway at the Warm Springs intersection. A large, weathered sign welcomed me to the infamous desert road. It was an eery-seeming place. A tumbleweed would have rolled silently across the highway here, had there been tumbleweeds. Had there been a breeze, the sign would have wobbled and creaked. Above, clouds were wafting, since clouds are known to waft on cloudy days.

I read the sign carefully, then looked around to see if reality was still real. It was. I got a good grip on my nerves and, of course, the steering wheel. I was doing this.

I pledged to make it a normal drive across the desert in my rented Outlander. Keep it under Warp 7. I knew it would be pink-knuckle driving all the way, but I was ready. I pointed the Mitsubishi to Crystal Springs and floored it. After slowly accelerating, of course.

The solitude and the miles themselves I could handle. I was less certain about making it past Area 51, the Air Force’s top secret testing range for experimental aircraft. Dare I ask, is the Air Force truly responsible for all the UFO sightings along this remote Nevada corridor over the years? Did they build the first flying saucers? Are they at it still? Or is it all a ruse? A cover for what’s really going on? Like, say, high-tech, super-secret alien engagement? Deep down, I think we all know the answer.

I should note that right behind the Ex Highway sign was a yellow sign, made to look like a normal road sign. I saw others too with blinking lights. They each contained a spooky image that I believe was intended to replicate a cow. But this was no common cow. It looked wild, intimidating, even alien. Horns up. Tail up. Ready to charge. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that it was just a sign. I continued on.

I looked out across the lonely desert plain, but saw nothing. Just loneliness, and a desert plain. And some bushes. However, I now had a clue. Cows must have something to do with the great mystery of the Ex Highway. Perhaps even Area 51. Yet I saw no actual cows. Not even a lizard. Very strange.

That ominous yellow sign had burned itself into my memory. Below the fearsome bovine image were the words “OPEN RANGE.” Surely it meant something, but what?

Moments later, I had another clue, another sign of what might lie ahead. This one contained no image at all, only the words “LOW FLYING AIRCRAFT.” I knew it! What I knew exactly I was still sorting out. But I know I knew it, whatever “it” was. I could just feel it. Cows and aircraft. A perfect pair, at least if you’re trying to obscure things from the public. Especially from those of us who ask too many questions. We know this is what the Air Force is prone to do.

Up ahead, were some darkish looking things on either side of the Ex Highway—not the clouds since they were darkish too—but these lumpy things were roughly the size of cows. As I closed in, I realized they were . . . actually . . . cows! They even looked like real cows. Brown with white faces. Herefords, I surmised. Nothing alien about them. It was quite unbelievable. It had to be a cover. This is the Ex Highway after all.

The alien cow image was still in my head and these were no alien cows. I’m not sure if random travelers like me are supposed to notice the difference. But I did because I’m quite observant when it comes to such things. For example, I can look at two glasses of water and tell you which one is hot and which one is cold. Provided, the hot one is still steaming. It’s uncanny.

I sped along, unfazed as before. I was not about to be fooled by any real cows. Instead, I was in the hunt for alien cows. Horns up, tail up. Spooky.

I passed more cows. Real ones again. Then I did a double take. Standing aside the others was one “cow” in particular that demanded my attention. She, I presume she was a she because I’m not sure why, had odd markings. Brown polkadots dotted her long, broad, white-ish face. And her left horn was crooked! Misattached at the lab perhaps? But alien for sure!

I slowed to a stop as she stared at me with a look that said, “You might want to move on, buster.” She did not even moo. It was very intimidating. I mooved on.

I was feeling quite perplexed now. Had I just seen a real-live alien? How could I know for sure? The answer reached me in a flash. Up ahead, a portable sign had been placed mysteriously along the road shoulder. Out here, in the Middle of Nowhere, as you may recall. It flashed the words, “DELAYS POSSIBLE.” I took it as a direct threat. From the alien cow.

That cow had looked me in the eye like an AI robot. I think she knew what I was thinking. It was enough to turn my pink knuckles pinker. The same exact sign then flashed the words, “ROAD WORK NEXT 45 MILES.” Another ruse, surely. Could it be code for 45 lightyears? Aliens could plausibly travel that far in a souped-up spaceship, though it would be a pretty long haul for a Mitsubishi. Nevertheless, this was getting serious. Then I remembered that I was unfazed. I stepped on the throttle and contemplated going to Warp 7.

No sooner than I’d gained a safe distance from the alien cow, my peripheral vision detected something overhead. Low-flying aircraft! There it was! It was a rather impressive contraption, all black, with mysterious flapping wings, one on each side. It totally resembled a raven flying down the center of the highway. Clearly, it was a drone. More AI. I was being watched.

The “bird” kept on a strict course, right down the centerline, acting as though it was searching for roadkill. But I wasn’t fooled. This phony raven was tracking my movement across the desert. Perhaps I already knew too much. Would the “bird” call for support? Was I myself about to be abducted? Plucked by the menacing claws of an artificial creature from another world? I nibbled some chips to calm myself.

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At least it confirmed that I’m still in Nevada. I resolved that, even if Alayn was the cosmic headquarters for all the stamped and certified UFOs in Nevada, I was not going down that dirt road. Not because I was chicken. But because I was a human. Earthling. Allegedly.

At the same location, there was an apparent “STOP” sign as well. But who’s to say it wasn’t “POTS” spelled backwards? Pots? What the hell could that mean? I began to feel confused. As my foot hit the throttle, the theme to Twilight Zone began to play and replay in my head, over and over, again and again, and several times after that, then once more, before repeating.

Next I sped past a tall, steel transmitting tower. Once again, in the Middle of Nowhere! I kept the radio on just in case I picked up an alien conversation. If so, I could triangulate the position of the tower, the alien cow, and trajectory of the space rays, and determine where the aliens had most likely parked their saucers. I hoped it wasn’t in ADAVEN. However, they must be close, since I next passed a solitary porta-potty sitting on a trailer with little wheels and no one around for miles. What are the odds of that? There’s no way I was stopping now. Not even to pee.

As I closed in on the alleged, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town of Rachel, en route to Crystal Springs, I passed a sign with the numerals “42” boldly emblazoned on both sides. Since everyone already knows what that means, I’ll just leave it alone for now. Again, the signs were everywhere, and this unconvincing “42” just added to the heap.

Now that I was well past the turnoff to NYALA (yeah, right), I began to relax a little, though getting anxious to be done with the Ex Highway. The drive had been moderately harrowing and I was ready for a break. But the aliens were not done with me.

Another sign. This one read “QUEEN CITY SUMMIT 5960.” Now, where in the world is Queen City? Certainly not in the Middle of Nowhere. Wherever it is, are they holding a summit there? And who is this queen? It sounded like someone who could be in charge. And what could 5960 mean? Have they come from the year 5960? I had a sinking feeling I may never know.

Soon, I whizzed by another deranged looking alien cow sign and another supposed low-flying aircraft sign. But by now I was growing numb to it all. Despite the potential horrors, I’d made it this far and was feeling more optimistic that I was not going to be abducted. They easily could have snatched me away already had their AI and their space rays deemed me a real threat.

But just then, I received a visual warning in the form of an alien face painted next to the words “Area 51” on the north side of the highway. Green with huge, dark eyes and a dour look. I think it was giving me the finger. It might have been some special alien appendage. Or on another world, a friendly greeting. I should ask the Air Force. They know. But do you think they’ll tell us? Correct.

A moment later, I came upon a sign with the symbol for a telephone. Very funny. It was probably a phony phone. Do they not even know we no longer use telephones? They think we still use landlines? Maybe the military still uses them. The rest of us just tweet, of course. Or I guess we X now. Or at least the diehards do. Even if I still X-ed, there was no way I was going to X on the Ex Highway. Think Twilight Zone. Not happening. I’d use a hardwired telephone before I’d do that.

OMG! That’s it! The famed blue tweety bird has been subsumed into a phony black raven. For a moment, I clearly felt a moment of clarity. In other words, Elon Musk has been abducted! Or at least biomechanically modified by aliens, or perhaps Herefords, into a right-winged AI robot. Given recent behavioral observations, I would guess the left wing is now missing altogether. But it explains everything! Except the 42, of course.

I collected my wits from the dashboard, flexed my knuckles and kept driving. For whatever reason, I decided I should look more closely at my knuckles. They seemed like they were more white than pink now. Not good.

Suddenly, there were more cow signs. I don’t mean signs in the sense of actual cow pies, which are often a dead giveaway, but rather road signs with cow-like caricatures. This time, they were the normal looking variety, tail down, at peace with the world. Perhaps I’d entered a new realm? Had I made it through? I wanted to feel elated, even just a little upbeat, but that would be premature.

However, there were now even Joshua trees growing close to the highway. They looked very calm and collected. It gave them a gentle disposition. Like they cared. At a pullout, I read some interpretive signs about the two kinds of Joshua trees and the two kinds of moths that pollinate them. Moths? Sure, whatever. More low-flying aircraft if you ask me. And wouldn’t you know it, the next sign I passed? LOW FLYING AIRCRAFT!!

I didn’t realize it at first, but the main mystery was about to be resolved. That being the irrefutable connection between Area 51 and aliens! Because on the left-hand side of the Ex Highway, the authorities, i.e., the Deep State (as we all know them, even though they think they’re being sneaky), had established a facility called the Area 51 Research Center. It was written in large bold letters in a very professional way, so you could tell it was real. There was even a 20-foot tall, potentially fake alien standing out front of the building. At least I think it was fake. It doesn’t matter that it was fake, because, fake or not, the connection was already made. Area 51 and aliens. It was like hand and glove.

Feeling brave again and full of Joshua tree solace, I stopped in to look around. I expected to see cows. But there were none, real or otherwise. That was the most mind-bending thing about the place. Yet there was incredible evidence of aliens on every shelf, every wall. T-shirts, magnets, posters, doodads, cold drinks.

And little mini-aliens with a foreign kind of skin that looked and felt like plastic. No offense. I’m just sayin’. I’ll admit I picked one up, but in a nice way. It wasn’t moving, so it had probably died, poor thing. Sheepishly, I abducted him/her/it, although the person at the checkout counter insisted I pay the five dollar ransom to take him/her/it away. Well, after all I’d been through on my moderately harrowing drive, how could I not?

I departed the Area 51 Resource Center feeling like a true survivor. And I’d learned many important things, most of which I could not even write about here. Like the really good stuff on Area 51 that will remain with me forever. My lips are sealed, as they say.

There was one more sign between there and Crystal Springs. It read “WATERCRAFT INSPECTION.” I think we all now know what that means. Right. I wouldn’t have known it before.

At Crystal Springs, the adventure was over. A sense of real satisfaction flowed through me. Like steam through a roadside mocha before it goes cold. And I still had my wits, though I did find a couple later that were stuck in that crease in the dashboard that eats your credit cards.

So, in the final analysis, the Extraterrestrial Highway, should you dare to travel that way on some quiet September morning, you may find that things are not always as they appear. Even in the rear view mirror of a Mitsubishi. But if I could do it, well, you can too. Just go.

And by all means, don’t forget to look up on occasion. The “raven” may be following you to be sure you’re harmless. So be harmless. But if you’re really lucky, you might even get a glimpse of this:

Or maybe even this:

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Our trusty train to Florence
Stops in Montecatini
Montecatini Terme
As they call this terra firme
Old as salt upon the hilltop
Cosmopolitan below
Famous for its thermal baths
Timeworn villas in rose
But not so much our simple abode
On the sleepy side of the road
Conveniently above the kabobs

Back on the train
We dash to Firenze
And 400-some stairs
Up the great Duomo
Up to the frescos
Naked and sprawling
Mildly appalling
Glorious and gorious
Possibly demented
Depending on your point of view 

Then to the crows nest
To spy an endless city
Then down we go
For another stroll
To the most famous buns in the world
Soon we're aside the naked man
The unabashed statue of David
Confident as a giant
Humble as a pie
With a glint in his eye
One hell of a rock chop, Mickie

Then it's back to Montecatini
Craving that panini
A walk across town
To the woody funiculare
To look back down in the dark
Streets still warm
Cafes swarmed
And all are fresh out of pasta
Not even a pizza
To stave us offsta
A 1,300-year-old church
Still claims the summit
But then we must plummet
To some late evening chow below
Where a kind fellow
Hails us a taxi
But oh, no
I forgot the address
But no need for sobs
He knows the kabobs
And safely we're back
In the nick of a knack
For some benissimo bobs
Crafted and served
By brothers of a clan
From Pakistan

In the morning we scoot
Back into Florence
Gallery Uffuzi awaits
But our train to the north
To the great Dolomiti
Keeps our stay quite short
We sail like the wind
To Bologna and Verona
Wander the cobble streets
We see the arena
A grand coliseum
As Roman as roamin' in Rome
A gelato later
We're back on the train
Scorching the rails to Bolzano

A quick look around
A bus out of town
We're off to Castelrotto
In the South Tyrolean Alps
A spotless town
Where nobody frowns
Beneath the craggy heights
Not like the bloody war
That ended all wars
When the Italians won over this place

We awake like cicadas
For a hike to Seceda
Marvelous, magical spires
Lunch at a hut
All smiles and glut
With our fellow hungry hikers
And a snooping, pooping cow
Bread, cheese and meat
Reinvigorate our feet
And down through the meadows
We roam

On day number two
All I wanted to do
Was a little via ferrata
But a threat of rain
Could make that a pain
So I thought maybe not I oughtta
I instead cabled high
On Sassolungo the massif
The long trek down
Made an excellent consolation
A worthy destination 

On day three it rained indeed
So we hiked on up to the Jimmy Hut
A Maryland pair joined our kerfuffle
With wine and cocoa in the mist
Day four was no bore
And sunny galore
We hiked halfway 'round the 'Lungo
Yes, it wasn't to be
Via ferrata and me
So I must return for another go

Back to Bolzano
To explore the old city
And sneak a quick peek
At Otzi
A man of the ice
I'm sure he was nice
When he was killed
3,000 years ago
A splendid museum
Allows you to see him
And the intricate gear he was toting
A solo traveler perhaps
Shot in the back
Who fell to the snow
Where it snowed and snowed
And snowed some more
And the man who'd entice
Became buried in ice
So long, long, long ago

And we're off once more
A slow train to Venice
And a ferry to send us
Along the Grand Canal
Check into our digs
Rooftop view is amazin'
But no time for lazin'
So we lose ourselves
In the maze of crooked streets
And lesser canals
To find ourselves
In the piazza of San Marco
Later in the dark
Our fellow lostees
All staring like us
At our Google maps
Our heads going numb
From the digital crumbs
Showing us every way but home

Another day
Lost in the maze
But we find our way
To the palace
A worthwhile start
Then a museum of art
The hours wither
Hither and thither
Before we meet a couple
From Georgia
And share a private gondola
Our esteemed gondoleer
Finds the way clear
He's fifth generation
So nothing's amiss
We're floating in bliss
A tour of the world of Venice

In the morning we ferry
With no time to tarry
And aim our train to Trieste
With two hours to wander
More history to ponder
Then a bus to Rovinj, Croatia
A fabulous seaside facia
Then it's on to awesome Dalmatia
For the next fine journey of the leg

Nest Stop: Croatia

Having conquered, allegedly, two summits earlier that day at Hualapai Mountain Park (nobody actually conquers mountains), I hustled over to Flagstaff to catch the fun at Lowell. Fortunately, the facility stays open late almost every night, and there's much to see and do.

The kind woman at the desk was very reassuring that, yes, I could see everything, despite arriving around 5:00 pm. She summed up an itinerary that led me first to Percival's own, the Clark telescope. The wood-framed dome that surrounds it rotates on car tires and wheels, which I found as fascinating as the legendary star-and-planet-gazer itself. Later in the evening, a staff member pointed it to the Wild Duck star cluster and we all got to take a look.

Lowell was especially enamored with Mars (as am I). He hoped to use powerful telescopes to analyze the red planet for signs of intelligent life, which he was pretty well convinced could exist there. He'd been inspired by the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli who had observed linear features on Mars. When Lowell looked, he saw canals. That got the public excited about the potential for Martian life, though astronomers generally thought his grand assumptions were, in a nutshell, a buncha bunk.

Of course, Lowell did not find any little green men staring back at him in his 24-inch Clark refractor telescope. But he had a lovely time mapping out the details he could see, and writing extensively about it all. Those blurred linear features, he conjectured, could indeed infer civilization!

He also theorized the existence of a ninth Planet X, but could not locate it, hard as he tried. When a letter and drawings arrived from a young Clyde Tombaugh from Kansas, who'd built his own telescope from Buick parts and farm equipment, the observatory hired him. Within a year, in February 1930, Tombaugh found Pluto--a tiny dot among thousands of stars that had obviously moved when he compared the photographic plates.

I checked out Tombaugh’s work, then the displays and artifacts at the museum, which included Clyde's homemade telescope, plus a nice exhibit on astronomer Elizabeth Roemer. Roemer began observing sunspots when she was ten (she's worth Googling). Someone offered a cool presentation on the motion of the cosmos, while others had telescopes set up outside and pointed to everything from Saturn to the Andromeda Galaxy.

If you like stars and northern Arizona is on your agenda, do check out the observatory. Flagstaff is a dark-sky city so the stargazing can be quite excellent, even in town.

At Monterosso we step off the train
We're done with the main
And now for the local
An ear to the ground
We're Manarola bound
Where a long tunnel walk
Leads to our block
And the birthplace of Cinque Terre
A kind woman from Greece
Shows us our room
Cozy and sweet
A view that looms
From a perfect veranda
We see the sea and da
Rumpled wings of da town

Four days, three nights
So much to explore
Nothing a good hike can't fix
To the vineyards above
We gaze far below
Where the Ligurian Sea
Is running off to Corsica
Then down we saunter
To the craggy shore
Where the seabirds soar
A fabulous swimming hole
With jumping-off rocks
And boats at their docks
The cafes all bustle
So dinner we hustle
And gelato, two scoops!

In the morning a ride
To Volastra up high
For a hike above town
Hills terraced in stone walls
Hundreds of miles worth
Hundreds of years worth
All planted with grapes
Perfect paths across the steeps
Then down, down, down
All the way to Corniglia
Gravity I feel ya
What a beauteous place
To wrinkle your face
With a cool lemon soda
On a very warm day

A hilltop town
Where the skinny streets
And teetering houses
Seem lost in steps and cobblestone
Perhaps some of it laid
Seven centuries ago 
Alleys, archways, stairways of rock
Much fun to explore, to ramble
To wear out your socks

The kittens and cats
We notice at once
Are always channeling Fuji
(Our cat)
A man in the trees
Weakens my knees
Playing his accordion
Accordionly
The trail back home
Is blocked by a rock slide
So back on the train we ride
To the veranda of Manarola

Then it's Friday
A train workers strike!
But a busy boat departs
For the port of Vernazza
Where there's even more to see
Stones and brick
Alleys and stairs
Can't see it all
But we try with a flare
And plenty of time
Narrow streets like climbing vines
Sprouting houses upwardly up

The trail to Manarola
Again is blocked
By a slide of rock
But I climb as high as I can go
For a view of Corniglia
Parched, craving a drink
The smarter trailster
Would turn back I think
But there's a house up ahead
And now Corniglia below
And crazily amazingly
They're serving lemon slushies!
Then it's back down to the town
And the train is running
So quickly back to Manarola
For a touristy eve and a cola
Then it's on to Montecatini
Where I'll crave a panini
On our next journey of the leg

Next stop: Florence and the Dolomites

Smooth and easy now
Like jelly through a straw
Breakfast in our craw
I’ll tell you what we saw
As we oozed ourselves
Over the border
To the grand land o' Canada
And a parking spot
At the airport lot
To leave our truck alone
As a lonely stone
For a five-week scoot to Europe 

In the Skytrain we squeeze
Then it’s your documents please
Hand 'em over, man
So they scan and rescan
Under the light
To get it right
Till our jet plane rockets
Into the night
I snooze and awake
Out the window a lake 
Somewhere over Greenland
An ominous blue
Could it be a clue?
The color of melting glaciers?

Then just like that
We're above the clouds
Now below the clouds 
But wait!
We're over the green mosaic
Of Ireland
And the Isle of Great Britain
The place we been gettin’
Where the long flight ends
With a thump 
London!

A train awaits
We push on south
Through the city gate
We make our escape
To the old, ornate
Yet bright and alive
Where the people thrive
With Britishness 
We walk the streets
With impatient feet
Cuz wherever we are
Go wrong-way cars
And double-decker busses
With selfies and views
We march on through
To South Kensington

All checked in
It’s off to the Thames
To watch it ooze on by
With ripples and riffles
And nobody sniffles
As ships and ferries
And floating homes
Resist the temptation
To ride along
As a snail resists the rain
Or like the buried names
At Westminster
After a longish walk
Among walkable blocks
To a snakey tube
That's underground
And easily found
Down with a flap
We mind the gap!
And ooze our way back home

Morning breaks with a subtlety
Of distant slamming dumpsters
(If they even call them that)
And of little trucks
With squealy brakes
No time it takes
And scooters motoring
Around sharp corners
With Little Jack Horner
And breakfast cargoes
In warming bins
Securely attached 
To their rear ends
Steps away we find
A temptress of a bakery
It ain't no fakery
Disguised as a coffee joint
A cappuccino, an Americano
Guzzled slow
To wash down the croissants

We punch our code
To release the bikes
From whence they're stowed
And ride merrily on
Through Hyde Park we roll
Past the Royal Albert Hall
Then bikeless on we go
On foot some mo'
To Buckingham Palace
I forgot my chalice
To sip with the Bard
But we catch by accident
A Changing of the Guard
We spoke not a word
Yet the queen demurred
As we waited in vain
For our post-Jubilee welcome

A few blocks away
In the midst o' the day
Westminister Abbey 
Showed us her bones
And the name Wilcock
A name I should know
Is etched in the floor
Immediately below
The Coronation Chair
With much grace and care
Where indeed I did read
That the queen did sit
Seven decades ago
Can you believe it
And many before her we know
And who is this Anne Wilcock anyway?
We entered the room
Fortelling the doom?
Of a couple of Henrys
Settling a score or two?

Then into the sunshine
A glance at Big Ben
Shining brightly on high
At Mr. Churchill close by
Then it’s on to a sea
Of wildflowers
A super bloom
At London Tower
Then a wisp of a walk
To the Tower Bridge
And along the cobblestone
To Trafalgar
And Soho to Piccadilly
With fish and chips for supper
How could we not?
What an affable British Pub!

St. James Park at dusk
But return we must
To the tube again
Pointing us home
Like jelly in a straw
With joy in our craw
And a good night's sleep
On Fulham Road
Where in eight hours hence
We'd up ourselves early
For the next inspiring
Leg of our journey

Next stop: Milan, Italy

I vaguely remember a few childhood forays into Death Valley when it was “hotter than hell,” which to a kid meant exactly that. I did not want to go to Hell, especially if I had to stay there. Passing through quickly was semi-okay.

As a young adult, it occurred to me that the place of my birth was almost exactly 100 kilometers from Badwater Basin, below sea level and the lowest point this side of south Argentina. Coincidentally, my “bunker” was also just over 100 kilometers from Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the Lower 48. I’ve been to Death Valley many times, so it was extra special to finally reach the summit of Whitney with my little brother several years ago.

In the chilly days of late winter three years back and again last year, a few buddies and I ditched the Northwest’s rain and the cold for about five days of camping and hiking in Death Valley. It was not hell, nor was it Hell. In fact, it was wonderful. Both trips coincided, quite by accident, with the Dark Sky Festival. We took advantage by attending talks, browsing exhibits, tagging along on field trips and stargazing at night with those who brought along, and happily shared, their fancy-schmancy telescopes. This year’s festival begins as I write this, the weekend of February 10-12. If you’ve missed it, keep an eye out for next year. It’s a fun, family-friendly kind of thing to do. But do take a warm coat.

We also went to the Valley to hike, explore new terrain, and enjoy a hit of spring-like weather, warm enough for shorts. The nights were still near freezing and we were tent camping, so the knit hat and extra layers were essential. By day, we were on our feet and on the trail, except when we weren’t. There are tons of worthy places to visit across this very large national park, some along well maintained trails, others on open ground or tracing broad washes or narrow canyons. But rather than regurgitate it all here, I’ll refer you to the countless sources of information online, at the park, and in the many fine guidebooks that expound on details and directions.

Nevertheless, if it’s helpful, here’s a short list of the places we rambled: Golden Canyon from Zabriskie Point to Manley Beacon, or all the way to the bottom if you can manage the logistics. Badwater Basin, of course. Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes were more fun than expected. The one-way drive down Titus Canyon is pretty special, but park and walk a bit, and check conditions in advance (high clearance is pretty much mandatory). The narrows at Marble Canyon are very nice, but a tough road to get there, probably four-wheel-drive, so always inquire in advance. Conditions can change dramatically. Fall Canyon is shorter, almost as good, and much easier to get to. And not surprisingly, Sidewinder Canyon gave me a little pitter-patter.

There’s plenty more to see and do, but if you trust some stranger who did the research, that short list might give you a bit of a kickstart. Alternatively, there’s no shame in visiting Death Valley with a lawn chair, sunhat and a good book. But at least check out the drive-bys, nature walks, and the visitor center at Furnace Creek.