North to Alaska

After a year of playing around in various parts of the world we have settled in Homer, AK. We arrived here on Dec. 2nd after driving the Alcan/Cassiar highway. As it turns out it is hard to drive that highway without experiencing some adventure. Here is how it broke down.
Day 1: Mostly uneventful. Highlight = unreal scenery on the Sea to Summit Hwy.
Day 2: Roads covered in snow and ice all day. Highlight = glare ice corner that put the car in the ditch
Day 3: 18" snow storm, chains, and slow going. The next morning Lou had to shovel us out of the hotel room. Then we had to uncover the car and shovel a path to the gas pump. Day 4: Temperatures bottoming out at -30 F. The car started in the morning, wahoo! It was a battle to keep the windows clear of ice, even with the heater on high. We found an abandoned set of golf clubs on the road. Seemed a perfect time to hit a few. Notice the long shadows, this was about three in the afternoon near the town of Tok, AK. The sun isn't getting very high here this time of year.
Day 5: Arrive in Homer! Our new home.

For the time being we are living the Jasmine's parents. True to form Lou enjoys the short commute to work each morning. We will be getting our own place eventually and everyone has an open invitation to come and visit. It would be great to see you. The first week home was a good kind of busy. Lou is making wine and learning all aspects of the business. Jasmine got certified as a xc-ski coach and is practicing with the Women's Nordic team as well as prepping for classes.
It is shaping up to be another wonderful winter.
It is unlikely that we'll get around to posting about our trip on the Grand Canyon, but check out Josh's Blog (Dec. 2 post) for great photos and narrative on that trip.

Wild Turkey Dinner

Lou went out turkey hunting between our summer of hiking and rafting the Grand Canyon. This year he decided not to use his bow since he didn't have any time to practice with it. Day two hunting in Southern Oregon with Jake he got one, a nice sized hen. Woohoo, wild turkey for Thanksgiving! When the boys returned to Jake's house we gathered round to weigh it, 6 pounds. It is impressive how much of their size is just their feathers.Putting the bird into the oven. Joan also got a Foster Farm turkey breast to be sure we had enough meat for the feast. The two birds were very different in their relative proportions and taste. Looking at the raised bird it was difficult to image how it was able to move with its over-sized breast muscles.
Lou's wild bird was oh so yummy! All in attendance decided they preferred the wild turkey over the Foster Farm turkey. After the day of feasting we packed up the car, again, for our last adventure in a year of adventuring.
For those of you that noticed Lou's very full beard he has been growing since June, about three weeks into our hike. It is so long I can grab two full hands of beard. It is his longest beard to date.

Colorado

First steps on the CDT. We started at Crazy Cook, the border is just a few feet behind us. We were so excited to get started the heat didn't bother us too much the first day. This was a 15 mile day..
Lou hiking through a "forest" of blooming desert plants one of the first days on the trail. There really wasn't a trail, just a combination of CDT blazes, cairns, and large posts to mark the way.


We have seen a great many horny toads on this trek, and they are just as cute now as this first one we saw in southern NM.

Although we were in the desert, hot, dry and without shade for many days there were still a lot of flowers to look at. The southern desert of NM was actually more enjoyable and interesting than the middle of the state. In part because of the blooming cactus in the south and in part because we weren't walking on roads in the south. Road walking is no fun at all!YEAH, a functioning windmill! Windmills have taken on a whole new meaning for us, they mean water and in most of NM water is a very valuable resource. Our whole hiking day was based on where water was, how many miles to the next water, and how much water we could carry.The temperatures would reach over 90 degrees during our first two weeks on the trail. To stay healthy and sane we took long afternoon breaks in the best shade we could find between 1 and 5pm. The photo above is of one of the not so shady spots we stopped at. Jaz is hiding from the sun under our silk sleeping bag liner.This is one of several types of snakes we have seen hiking through NM. We got pretty familiar with the reptilian daily cycle. We didn't see any in the morning when we started but by 11am they were charged up and moving around. By 1pm the reptiles were all super charged and racing to and fro across the trail/roads.Our first break from the desert was Gila National Forest. We had been told about homemade ice cream at this little store along the trail by Rawlings and Mickey (incredibly kind & fun folks we stayed with in Silver City). The last 10 trail miles coming getting to the store were filled with much talk of ice cream and imagining what flavors there might be. To our very big disappointment we arrived at the store 30 minutes after it closed. No ice cream! our hearts sank. Lou looked longingly in the window and to our surprise a man came to the door. He asked what we wanted and Lou told him ice cream. He responded with a stern "We are closed". Bummer. Two minutes later he opened the door again "Has to be cash" he said, we nodded "OK, what flavor?" We picked three, all very yummy. We reached the Gila river two hours before the sun set. Here Lou is crossing the Gila for the first time. By the time we left the Gila River we had crossed it nearly 100 times.

The Gila is in a deep canyon with beautiful rocky spires on both sides. It was a wonderful place to hike.

Lots of cool pilars along the Gila.

Sometimes getting back and forth across the river was a little less than straight forward. Here Lou is scaling some low rocks between river crossings.

For this trip Lou made our tarp tent, and Joan sewed the bug net (THANKS JOAN!) Here it is set up at one of our camp sites along the Gila. It is very versatile, and spacious AND it only weighs two pounds. We really love this new shelter.

Found some very large tadpoles in the slow moving side streams and eddies all along the Gila.

Jaz is making a face here because the river water is not so warm at 8 in the morning. In the afternoons crossing the river was a wonderful relief from the heat.

This is a banded lizard we saw during our walk across the Malpais on the Zuni-Acoma trail. The trail we walked on was used by natives hundreds of years ago. Some of the cairns that mark the trail are the same ones they used way back when.

In New Mexico we often had to scatter cattle along the trail or when we arrived at a water source. This time they were really pushy and gathered around as we turned on the water to fill up our bottles.
There are many many more stories and photos to share from New Mexico. I wasn't able to get up any photos of all the wonderful people we stayed with along the trail, and they were a large part of our New Mexico memories, so those will come another time.
We are almost 1,000 miles into this trek of ours and still having a wonderful time. It was really exciting to walk across the border of New Mexico into Colorado. At that point we felt like we had completed the beginning of the adventure, we are really doing this thing.
We love Colorado so far, and we have had visitors too. Alison and Trinity spent 4th of July weekend with us. They showered us with incredible trail gifts, a watermelon and wine! Marie and Christopher left us today after 6 days on in the San Juan over the 4th of July as well. It was great to share our summer home with all of them, photos later. I know I keep saying that, but I really mean it. Keith met up with us yesterday and will spend the weekend on the trail. Emily joined us 6 days ago as well and has another three weeks with us. Colorado is full of trail guests so there will be a lot more stories to share as we trek north from here. I hope to be able to share some of them on the blog in the near future.

Animals of Patagonia

We are now back from our travels in Chile and Argentina, but there are still a few more stories to tell about that trip. I am not sure if we will get to it before we get on the trail mid-month, but we do have some animal pics to share. Lou and I love seeing animals and spend a great deal of time looking for them whenever we are out and about. This trip was great for animal viewing. We didn't get pics of all of them, you all know wildlife encounters are unpredictable, but we do have a few good ones.
Starting off in Torres. We saw condors here and guanaco's and Nandu (or Rhea) which are all awesome but hard to photograph. We did capture some parrots hanging out just below a windy pass. We did not expect to see these colorful birds this far south. They were very chatty and loud about it.
This bumble bee was not in the best shape. We did see loads of healthy ones buzzing around flowers. The orange color was brilliant.
Lou was always finding new catepillars on him or his backpack. He found several of this kind. Hard to tell it is an insect and not a stick until it moves.

Now to Parque nacional los glaciares. The bird in the tree is called a Cara cara. They have red faces and really flat heads. They were all over the place.
Our last day of hiking in the park was a little drizzly but it brought out the amphibians. This sapo was hoping across the trail as we passed a set of lakes, real cute.
I adore frogs and toads. If this whole marine biology thing doesnt work out maybe I'll open up a store and call it EL SAPO MAS GUAPO. It is a fun phrase to say.
This catepillar had a lot of attitude, and was very curious about the camera. Every time I got close to take his picture he lifted up his front half to investigate.
In Torres we saw female Magellanic wood peckers in some nasty weather. In Glacier we got to see a lot more of them. They are pretty big and the males are easy to pick out because of their bright red heads. They have a distictive call that allowed us to distinguish them from other birds even when we couldn't see them. The yellow eye is also diagnostic.


Loco Parque Tantauco. Sorry to say we did not photograph the leeches for those of you that were hoping for that one. First the most famous critter we caught on film is the Rana de Darwin. We looked for many days for this one and were shoked when we saw our first and discovered it was about 1/5 the size we had been looking for. In the many swamps we crossed we started to notice gazzilions of small tadpoles too. The plants in the photo below with red fringes are carnivorous. There is one in the top right of the photo and a few jsut to the left of the frogs front leg. Also check out the nose on this rana, very pointy.

We saw every major animal group in Tantauco, fish, mammals, loads of birds, insects, amphibians, and reptiles! This lizard was quite colorful. We also saw the pudu in Tantauco, no photos due to their flighty nature. The trail was covered in their footprints as well as sign from both the fox and wild cat that live in Souther Chiloe. Before we could get any good photos of the many birds we saw in the park the camera battery died, which was unfortunate because one of the species was curious to a falt and more than once hopped up on our shoes.
Last, and the biggest, the Andean Condor. We saw our fair share of these birds at pretty close range during our last hike in Aconcagua park (more on that trip later). When you hike up to altitude in the Andeas the Condors are right there to greet you. I tried to get a better photo, we definately saw many much closer than this, but somehow they managed to sneak up on us over and over again. Carried by the thermals they are constantly moving. We were continually impressed with how long we could watch them and never see them flap their wings. In fact, I don't remember seeing any of the many condors we saw flap their wings once.
We went by the coast while we were visiting my Chilean family. We made a stop to buy some shellfish empanadas and sitting in front of the store was this line of pelicans. Pelicans might be my most favorite bird. They are goofy and awkward, but when they take flight over the water incredible elegant, I love that.
So, now we are back in the states and in the Portland until mid-monthish. We are going over maps and fine tuning a few gear items after our experiences in Patagonia. I will do my best to keep the blog updated as we hike across the divide. We are excited to get on the trail and looking forward to having some of our friends join us during the journey.

Loco Parque Tantauco

Well jasmine and I finally have a crazy travel story of our own. Most of our trip so far has been predictable. I don´t want to down play it. It has been awesome with great people, great hikes, and fun traveling but there has not been to much that took major mental adjusting. We just got back from an 8 day adventure in the woods of isla chiloe. The trip started by gathering information on the park we intended to enter and realizing that it was going to be an extended trip and cost some mula. To solve the mula problem we decided to tack another day and a half on the trip and hike to the park from a cross roads that we could catch a taxi to instead of pay for 4x4 transportation. Let me tell you what, 8 days of food is no insignificant thing and once again we gained a lot of good experience for the upcoming summer on the cdt. Our packs were plenty heavy and certainly did not have too much food.

After an entire day of planning, buying food, and packing we were off. The taxi had to stop 4 kilometers short of our intended drop off point because of the quality of the road. We were not impressed with the taxi guy because we felt sure that a taxi driver in some of the other countries we have traveled in would have certainly tried to navigate the large ditch that stopped us and we certainly felt as though the Jetta in its hay day would have rallied right through. Regardless being left in the middle of a road made us excited because the remoteness was obvious but not so excited since it was already 5pm and we had 6 km to go to camp. Owell, off we go. We found camp just as the sun was setting the jasmine managed to get rather freaked because of a spooky cow call as the last rays of sunlight slipped away coupled with the discovery of a gargantuan cricket on her arm. Seriously, I have never heard a cow make the noise we heard and the cricket was the size of a mouse.

Here is a picture of the first vaca salvaje that I have ever witnessed. Jasmine was skeptical but I felt aboslutley sure that this was in fact truely a wild cow. The ominous call heard later that night only strengthened these feelings.

This was one of the main reasons that we went on this trek. To spot the shy and endangered pudu. The worlds smallest deer. This is one of the bigger tracks that we found next to jasmine´s shoe for scale. We did have the luck of running across one later in the day which was very exciting. They weigh around 35 pounds, the size of a miniature australian shepard.

The next day we hiked the remaining 18km to the park and were lucky enough to spot a pudu, the worlds smallest deer. We had great weather, made good time, enjoyed phenomenol camp facilities and did an extra 5k loop. We expected the 5k loop to take about an hour but it actually took 2. Little did we know what it was forshadowing the days to come. The next 6 days of hiking were filled with the most demanding trails we have ever done that did not inlude a summit of any kind. We were repeatedly shocked when confronted with slippery log bridges over 20 ft drainages, mud walls with ropes to aid in climbing or sometimes just roots to grab onto, flooded bogs that left no choice but to trudge through them, and jungle gym type root and tree walking over rivers. Some days it poored rain and others were full of brilliant blue skies.

This is a picture from our first day of hiking on single track in the park and was nothing compared to what was to come although we did not know that and marvalled at the craziness of the trail.

The trail did indeed get crazier as you can see here and in the following pictures. We could not figure out if this was the old trail that had flooded or if it was the intention of the trail builders that you scamble through trees and roots on the side while hanging over the water.


This was one of the easier obstacles that we came across. It is a natural bridge across a large creek and had surprisingly firm footing with solid holds for the hands.


On one of the more sunny days of our trip we came across one of our most challenging puddles. There was no way around and very limited solid ground on either side which forced me to adopt this splits technique. Good thing I have been working on my flexibility.

We came across this wild combo of slick log followed by unclimbable wall without the aid of a rope on our wettest day of hiking. The picture does not do it justice unfortunatley but from our experience the trails generally provided the absolute minimum to aid backpack laiden people in passage and the rope was definatley a necessity.

This was another close to verticle section of trail that we had to navigate. We were thankful for the trees and roots.

Can you see the trail. Be assured that there is a trail marker in this picture on the far side of the bog and I am standing on the trail on the other side as I take this picture. This was the worst obstacle we were presented with. After many minutes of searching for reasonable passage through this bog we realized there was none. I opted for the "run as fast as you can through it" approach and made it with out falling but was not pleased to discover that I sank nearly up to my knees. Jasmine can be seen to the far right of the picture sensibly staying out of the mud but not the water. We concluded that this was where we contracted the majority of the leaches we got making the return trip through the bog less fun.

Everywhere we went it was wet, wet, wet. Water came from the sky. water came from the plants. water came from the ground. Tent style camping in such conditions would have been uncomfortable to say the least. The saving grace of the park are the lavish wood refugios stationed throughout the park that are stocked with wood. The highlights of the week included lots of bird species, a rare frog sighting, Lou got 4 leaches (it was not a fun thing to realize that leaches were living in the mud that we were slogging through every day), extra food left behind by other hikers, and cozy nights by the fire.
The awesome rufugios built by the park that allowed us to dry everything in the evening and enjoy a warm fire and comfortable, dry sleeping.

Our metabolizms really got roaring durring this week and we did not have a crumb of food left when we rolled into the small fishing village of 100 people on the other side of the park. The only access to the village is by boat and it exists with no tethers to the national utility grid of water, electricity, or phone. We soon discovered upon arrival that our ferry was delayed by at least one day which sent us into a worried search for food. The local store (barely a shack) did not really having anything to offer. The people were very nice though and a plendid local couple provided us with a hearty dinner and upon touring the parks horticultural buildings we recieved two heads of lettuce and two tomotoes. Fresh produce, talk about a treat!

We were pleased to see the ferry arrive the next afternoon and even more pleased to hear that it would be leaving at 3 for the 6 hour trip back to Quellon instead of waiting until morning. The ferry ride passed quickly as Lou played cards and was soon noticed by some enthusiastic locals who wanted to learn how to play pocker. I had serious difficulty even figuring out that the excited fellow wanted to learn pocker let alone teach him how but, as usual, jasmine was able to facilitate and we taught them both 5 card stud and texas holdem. Once we arrived in quellon we b-lined it for a pizzeria. When the pizza arrived jasmine and I agreed that it was smaller than advertised and after finishing it proceeded to the next dinner for a second dinner. Our bellies full, we enjoyed a good nights rest and the next day continued to restore our fat supplies by splitting a liter of ice cream, a bag of doritos, crab dinner, and lots and lots of bread.

We are off for our final two weeks in chile and who knows what is in store. Wine country is still to come.