Four seasons on the JMT

I  didn't start backpacking in the wilderness until I was an adult. My first trip was organized by friends of friends, and we were a group of six women with varying amounts of backcountry experience. I still wince thinking about the slip-on leather shoes that gave me blisters within a half an hour and the hip belt-less pack I carried, but I'll always remember scrambling to a natural rock pool and skinny-dipping in the 90-degree afternoon heat.

I started backpacking by myself a few years ago, mostly because I couldn't find anyone game for longer hikes. Before setting out the first time, I geeked out overpreparing myself. I borrowed library books on wilderness first aid, lurked around online backpacking forums for gear pointers and read up on the most effective bear hazing techniques. My bicycle suffered benign neglect as I walked everywhere for weeks, loading up my backpack to hike home with big grocery shops or ambling miles over San Francisco hills and back to meet friends. I also read Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods and thought: if those jokers can take a stab at the Appalachian Trail, I can plod along a well-marked footpath without requiring a search and rescue team.

So after four summers, I recently finished section-hiking the John Muir Trail. Hurrah! If not for the snow-packed Sierra Nevada passes last summer, it would have been three seasons, but no sense dwelling on that.

After logging all those miles on the trail, one sticky issue keeps swirling through my brain: where are all the girls? I hiked alongside a dozen Boy Scout troops and scores of father-son duos, but encountered only one group of girls (a Girl Scout group from SoCal) during that entire time. Besides the ubiquitous Boy Scouts, most of my fellow hikers were men going solo (beard mandatory), groups of male friends (duuude!) or men with their female partners. And so few women hike alone that almost everyone I met assumed I was there with someone else.

So why aren't more girls trekking the trails? It bugs me that it's such a boys-only (and mostly white) rite of passage. If no one takes them into the wilderness, how are girls going to learn the self-reliance and camaraderie found there, or a deeper respect for the natural world? I'm committed to change those statistics as best I can, and I hope that other folks will do the same. 

If you're wondering why it's worth slogging over mountains with a heavy pack and digging catholes every day, I'm posting a few photos from the southernmost section of the JMT (accessed via Onion Valley) below.

Kearsarge Lakes

Forester Pass facing east

Bighorn Plateau

Guitar Lake basin

Sunrise over ridges west of Whitney

View from Mt Whitney

Venezuela in photos

Blame it on the road, but I've been too exhausted to do much more than hit the pillow every night. Here are a few photos to narrate my trajectory over the last few weeks.

In Caracas, and soon to open as the new resting place for Simón Bolívar. Some have derided it as overpriced ski slope architecture, but it does mirror the upward slope of El Ávila behind it.

Flying in over Gran Roque, the main settlement in Los Roques. Most of the houses on the island are on the righthand side, next to the lagoon.

An astillero, or boat-building yard, along the northwest coast of Isla Margarita. I think it looks like the skeleton of a whale.

A worker preparing tobacco leaves in a cigar factory in Cumaná.

I noticed this store in Puerto Ordaz during my first visit to Venezuela back in 2006. When I asked them about the name, the folks working there had no idea where it came from.

One of my biggest disappointments was just missing the arrival of presidential candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski at the airport in Ciudad Bolívar, but my plane was leaving for Canaima. Hundreds of flag-waving supporters mobbed the airport- a true rockstar moment.

Dusk at Playa Medina, along the northeast coast near Rio Caribe. I hired a taxi to drive me to remote beaches along the coast all day, and this was the last one. We drove back in the dark along a road that had more holes than pavement. Wish I could have stayed here instead. 

Bus . . . or boudoir? One of my many experiences with unusual interior decorating on public conveyances. 

Touchdown in the land of Bolívar

A friend described arrival in Venezuela as akin to getting your sea legs. To me it feels more like running a gauntlet. It's certainly not like flying into any other place I know.

First of all, the embassy travel reports hyperventilate about crime at the Caracas airport. Don't arrive after dark. Don't catch rides with unofficial taxis. Be wary of strangers, who could be drug smugglers (putting things in your bags), or run-of-the-mill thieves (removing things from those bags).  Other warnings include nightmares like "express kidnappings" en route to town and extortion by police authorities.

Because of an artificially pegged currency situation, local currency withdrawn from ATMs means you’re essentially paying double for everything- unless you change money on a dodgy black market.

And the merciless airport touts know you need bolívares and transportation, with every other person trying to herd you into a makeshift taxi or whisper “change money” as they stroll by.

It's enough to make you completely paranoid.

goodbye tropics

Don't be a pig

It was finally time to head home, pile down comforters on the bed and take a few deep breaths before checking if all my research notes were legible. So here are a few belated highlights as I whip this Puerto Rico assignment into shape and indulge in a little flashback procrastination:

Culebra
Wow. As I've hinted at a number of times, this pale scribe is no lotion-bearing beach bunny, but the white sand and dreamy coastline of Flamenco Beach lived up to the hype. After biking there to cross it off my to-do list, I had to return the following day and indulge in the full sensory experience (and get body slapped by a sneaky wave). On the drive over, I swear I saw a road construction flagger teasing a tarantula with the end of a pole. Or was that long-legged thing a crab? Shows how tired I must have been.

Fajardo
Got caught driving through a succession of downpour curtains blanketing the highway, and had to slalom through the resulting water parks on the pavement. Same thing at night, plus a few thunderbolts thrown in for good measure. In the countryside just south of town, the hills sprang to life after dusk, with frogs that chirped like rusty swing sets and fist-sized toads lurking outside my door.

El Yunque
At a deserted ecolodge on the south side of the park, the coquis really did eat all the mosquitoes, and a chartreuse 5-inch-long lizard stared at me from the wall across the room. Snails with shells the size of golf balls slurped up the exterior walls, and I could see a waterfall from my bed when the clouds cleared away. I hiked a bit up Rte 191, which crossed the park until closed by landslides years ago. Traipsing along through warm rain, I watched the road devolve from rutted pavement to jungle-reclaimed rivulet, turning back when the water crested over my sneakers and the route demanded a sharp machete.

Western mountains
You know you're driving a true back road when a half dozen dogs snoozing in the middle of a hairpin turn raise their heads up to look at your car but don't bother to move. That and the sight of basketball nets set up in the road. At this point, you also realize that you are very lost.

temblorcito

Lago Caonillas

Pinch me please. Did I really journey over 3000 miles from earthquake central to feel the damn ground jostle me awake last night?! Note to universe: I can get that nonsense at home. Thankfully, the quake didn't achieve enough vigor to rouse me from the suddenly squirmy bed of my rural mountainside ecolodge. Half-asleep, I probably remembered that the windows above me were just screens and metal shutters, not glass. So after a groggy time check I snuggled back under my guava bubble gum-scented covers and forgot about the whole experience until dinnertime.

The last week or so has been the usual crazy pace of road travel- meeting people, getting a crash course on their lives and eccentricities, then shuffling in new personalities and geographic locations. I'm losing track of the many guesthouses I've stayed at where the owners foster and adopt out stray cats and dogs. The evening serenade of coquis is a given, louder in some places (El Yunque rainforest) than others (surf town of Luquillo). And the quest for tasty well-priced vegetarian food never makes sense. A mini-mart on tiny Culebra island carries tofu, but I've been stumped to find more than one decent meat-free restaurant in San Juan.

vieques untamed

Vieques bunker

Another swoon-worthy visit to Vieques. Though blowing the place to bits wouldn't have been my first, second or third choice for a lazy day activity, it's no wonder the Navy didn't want to leave. Wild horses graze by the side of the island's twisting one-lane roads, depositing squishy brown souvenirs on the pavement. Teenage boys ride bareback, their bays pacing a quick yet restrained gait like hip-swiveling speed walkers. Two-foot-long iguanas feast in the bough of tall trees, and weaselly mongeese dash across overgrown stretches of pavement lined with sealed concrete bunkers. Miles of solitary sand beaches buffer aquamarine sea, reached by rough dirt tracks that end in "no trespassing - dangerous explosives" signs.

I took a second excursion to the island's ethereal bioluminescent bay, this time in a completely clear kayak, like Wonder Woman on the water. Crossing the darkened bay to our tie-up spot, fish careened just under the surface, leaving silver trails like never-ending sword marks of Zorro. Dinoflagellates, microscopic marine plankton that glow when disturbed, flickered like ghostly bubbles as the boat slid through the water under a moonless sky. Jumping into the water, I watched the fairy dust trails from my limbs until the tour guide made us climb back in.

On Halloween night, the local cops set up a checkpoint in Esperanza. A half dozen guys stood around, loaded up in bulky flack jackets and bearing rifles. They stopped all cars going past, but since not many people were out, they mostly just hung around and chatted amongst themselves, looking puffed up and unnecessary. A stray dog was trotting down the street, and I had to laugh when I saw it stop to piss on a patrol car's tire.

 

natural disasters & other big surprises

Esperanza on Halloweeen

A few years back while researching in Chiapas, I recall the look of horror from someone when I mentioned that I was heading on to Tabasco soon. But . . . they've had lots of rain, he stammered. I hadn't read the regional news for a few days, and when I checked it that night it just so happened that the entire state was bathing in the largesse of its overflowing rivers. Without a hydroplane, a visit was impossible, so I took a literal rain check.

Fast forward a few years. Last night I was poking around the tiny Puerto Rican island of Vieques, noticing that waves at the usually placid malecon were cresting and showering passing cars. Stopping to gawk, I commented to a passerby about the spirited Caribbean waters, and he dropped a tidbit about Hurricane Tomas lurking a few hundred miles offshore. You'd think I'd pay attention to these salient details by now. Little kids in Halloween costumes hung over the side of the boardwalk, screaming with mock fear when the whitewater crashed and spritzed them.

After dinner tonight, I stopped by one of the local bars to gather their details for the book. As a reggae cover band droned on, the World Series played without sound, and a handful of rapt patrons texted as they watched the 8th inning of the game. I'm not a sports fan, but I was a San Franciscan far from home without anything better to do, so I pulled up a stool and quickly made friends with an SF couple at the end of the counter. As the bottom of the ninth inning sped up, the spectacle drew me in and I teetered on the edge of my chair. At three balls and two strikes, conversation stopped near the television and eyes leveled without blinking. As the batter struck out, we exhaled to cheer, and the bartender lined up free chichaito shots for his three San Francisco patrons. ¡Salud!