Boots Across the Baja

2. To San Felipe

This is the second of a seven-part series about a December 1982 trek across the Baja—enjoy! Will post Part 3 tomorrow. Part 1 is here. —Ken

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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.