Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Panama Travelog #19
El Valle, Panama - Wed, 25 Dec 2024. 10pm.

Merry Christmas! We're in Panama in the small remote town of El Valle. How small and remote is it? Well, the town calls itself the most populated volcano in the world. That's a clue how small it is. Actually there's probably a few thousand people in the area. It's a big volcano. 🤣

We're taking it easy after our gonzo hike to La Dormida, the sleeping Indian girl, yesterday. I got wrecked from hot-footing it down a steep mountain trail to get out of the rain and thunder. My leg muscles are still sore. I'm walking with a pronounced limp. Thus we're taking it easy around the hotel this morning instead of going hiking. Plus, it's drizzling anyway. After yesterday I am fucking done with hiking in the rain. For at least a day or two, anyway.

So, what's it like around our hotel? I haven't shared much about that, focusing instead on all the other things we're doing besides staying.



The Hotel Campestre is a modest two-floor hotel with stucco walls, an aluminum roof, and exterior corridors. We're on the upstairs level where there are nice chairs to sit out in under the wide brim of the roof.



At the end of the upstairs walkway, just before descending the stairs, is a nice view south across the valley. I believe that mountain in the distance is called the iguana. I don't know why, but I'd guess it's because somebody back in the day when graffiti was sacred and not a misdemeanor thought it looked like an iguana. There really aren't iguanas around here, which is probably why that person thought a mountain looked like one. But the stupid name aside, it's a pretty view.

Each morning we've headed downstairs for breakfast in the hotel's restaurant. Today I wobbled down the stairs. I'm on rubbery legs because of my strained muscles. Just going down the stairs once this morning I think I almost fell twice.



I forgot to take a picture of breakfast until after we'd eaten most of it. So far we've both been ordering pancakes and chorizo (sausage) from the small breakfast menu. Each breakfast also comes with a plate of several fresh fruit slices, muesli, yogurt, and bread. The window next to our table overlooks the fountain and the mountains in the distance (see previous photo). BTW, this is the free breakfast Hawk negotiated for us after the hotel's room bait-and-switch.

After breakfast today I joined Hawk for a walk around the extended hotel grounds. It turns out there is a swimming pool! It's behind a stand of trees, where you really can't see if from the hotel building.



Except it's not really a swimming pool. It's more like a duck pond with a stone wall. The water's murky, the bottom's muddy, and there's duck shit all around. I'd be pissed about the hotel having been so misleading about stating its amenities include a swimming pool but I've decided there are so many things that have been wrong this trip— literally all the hotels, the car, the weather, and every hike—that I'm just done being pissed. I'm pissed out of being pissed off. And my legs are so achy I just want to lie down again.

Two weekends ago we explored Pluto's Cave on the north flank of Mt. Shasta in California. This was part of the weekend trip spent evading smoke from a huge wildfire. ...Wait, did I say a wildfire? There was more than one! Smoke from other fires choked us out of our Sunday plans to hike in the Trinity Alps even though we were fine there just a day earlier when we hiked to East Boulder Lake. We weren't just going to go home, though, with no hiking on Sunday. We picked two shorter hikes in areas not badly impacted by smoke. The first of these was Pluto's Cave.

Pluto's Cave is lava tube. It's collapsed in several places. Some of the cave-ins form entrances you can get down into (and back up & out!) with just a bit of scrambling. The entries are about 1/2 mile across volcanic desert from a trailhead that's about 1/2 mile in from a paved road on a dirt 4x4 route. We explored 4 parts of the cave. I edited together this video of our adventure:



One small note.... In the video I mention that some of the graffiti underground is historical graffiti. Although it's more than 100 years old it's still considered graffiti, not history. Even though it's dated 1917. If it were 11 years older it'd be protected as history by the Antiquities Act of 1906.

5 Days in the Desert travelog #15
Cima, CA - Sun, 25 Dec 2022, 5pm

I left off in my last blog entry with us descending into the bowels of the earth after an hour+ long drive to the remote lava tubes in Mojave National Preserve. I decided that after all that effort I would not be deterred by having to crawl on my hands and knees a bit, so in I went.



Well, I didn't have to crawl right away. The entryway (above) was tall enough that I could pretty much stand and walk as I carefully lowered myself down the jagged rocks. Not far inside, though....



The ceiling dropped low, not much more than 3 feet high. "Is this the end?" we wondered.

Hawk delved deeper as she was able to navigate under the low ceiling merely by bending over and squatting. It opened up again after 10 feet or so.

"C'mon," she said. "It's worth it!"



On the other side of the low ceiling was this fairly sizable chamber. Overhead are three windows to the outside. Two are obvious at the top of the picture (above), split by a small arch. The third is at the far end of the chamber, where you can see an orange light filtering down. We'd seen the split window along the trail on the surface as we walked to the tube entrance but not the smaller window.

Good new/bad news: While this chamber was a great find, the lava tube definitely ended here. And the other direction from the ladder ended in about 15' with nothing but a pile of rubble from a collapsed roof. Oh, but there was one other thing on the way out....



This rock struck me as looking something like a geode. Well, not a geode because those aren't crystals hanging down from the topside. It's a volcanic rock shell with some smoother minerals on the underside.

Speaking of underside, it was time to leave the underside of the earth and get back to its surface.

We returned to the car and picked our way carefully down the lava 4x4 trail. Back at the Subaru parking area we met another pair of visitors arriving— in a Subaru— and chatted with them about road conditions. We'd seen them arriving from the opposite direction and wanted to know how passable routes other than the Mojave Road (link to my YouTube video) are.

It turned out to be a two-way exchange of information... like the best 4x4 backcountry conversations are. Our new acquaintances were Chinese visitors who spoke limited English. But their English was better than my extremely limited Chinese.

I unfolded a paper map and used that to help frame our halting conversation. They'd come from the north on different roads than we took from the east. Their route was obviously passable, though they warned they had to drive slowly, like 5mph in some difficult parts, and never faster tha 15mph in the best parts. I cast a side eye toward their Subaru and figured that we'd do better than that. In exchange, I explained for them how to drive the Mojave Road. They were using only Google Maps on a phone... and there really wasn't any signal out here, miles from the nearest paved road.

We parted ways; they went toward the cave while we started north.



Right away the road was smoother than the Mojave Road. It was graded dirt and did not have those whoop-de-doos (YouTube video link) that had forced us to keep our speed down— otherwise we'd have been looking like stunt drivers from The Dukes of Hazzard!

There was one tough part about a mile out where we climbed a rocky hill navigating past a mostly defunct mine. Our capable 4x4 walked it. After that it was smooth sailing. We picked up a route following along utility lines (pic above). That confirmed we were headed the right way. If in doubt, follow the telephone lines back to civilization!

5 Days in the Desert travelog #6
Amboy, CA - Say, 24 Dec 2022, 12:30pm

In my previous blog I wrote about driving to Amboy Crater in the Mojave Desert. ...Well, driving there and then hiking the first mile or so up to its base. From there it was up, up, up to the top.



That's all volcanic rock on the slope. Most of it is pumice so it's surprisingly light when you pick up a piece... but it's also sharp so you don't want to fool around with it too much. Or trip and fall on it.



The trail enters the side of the crater where it's kind of open. From here paths diverge and you can go into the middle or up around either side of the rim. We decided to loop the rim, taking the left branch first.



Climbing to the ridge was more up, up, up. Not a huge elevation change; remember it's only a few hundred feet vertical from the base to the highest point on the rim. But with this Martian landscape distances seem off.



Once atop the ridge it's still beautiful... in a Martian landscape kind of way.

At places the rim is very narrow, barely 2 feet wide with steep— and sharp— dropoffs on both sides.



Here's a panoramic picture from the top that shows the whole crater. Click the link to expand the picture if it's cropped or low-res on your screen.

In the last pic above you can see lower ridges inside the crater. The volcano here has erupted at least 4 times. The concentric ridges are subsequent eruptions. THe most recent was about 10,000 years ago.

After looping the ridge we headed back down the side— carefully!— and then a mile back across the desert plane to the parking area.

On our drive to our next adventure for the day we passed the town of Amboy. Yes, there is a town called Amboy. It's about a mile east of the crater. And it's a proverbial one-horse town. There are a handful of nondescript buildings around a gas station with two pumps... and the gas is an eye-watering $7.85/gallon. For context, that's more than double what we paid in Barstow ($3.79/gallon) last night.

Pacific Northwest September Travelog #10
Mount St. Helens National Monument - Sun, 4 Sep 2022, 5:15pm

"What else should we do in the park after hiking Johnston Ridge to Devil's Point?" I asked a ranger at the visitors center.

"I always like seeing Coldwater Lake," she said. "It's so pretty. And my favorite trail in the park is the Hummocks Trail. You get to see the geologic features up close and personal."

So that's what we did after our main hike.



Forty years ago Coldwater Lake was Coldwater Creek. Debris flow from the Mount St. Helens eruption several miles away formed a natural dam blocking the stream's flow. Within a year the valley filled with water to a depth of 200'. The near end is shallow, though. A delta of volcanic ash is present here. The kids playing in the water were all exclaiming how weird the ground feels under their feet. Yeah, kids, that's not sand!

After the 1/4 mile or so nature walk we did at Coldwater Lake we laced up our boots for a longer hike on the Hummocks Trail. Well, I laced up my boots. Hawk went in hiking sandals. It would be a bit over 2.5 miles.



A hummock is a small hill that's actually a broken off piece of the mountain. Hummocks were deposited miles away in the debris flow that followed the volcanic eruption. In the photo above you can see Mount St. Helens in the distance. In the near- and mid ground are many of these hummocks. Geologists know they're broken-off bits of the mountain because the rocks types match.



The most interesting views of hummocks, IMO, are where the North Fork Toutle River nearby has cut away the volcanic ash around them. This valley was covered up to 200' deep under ash and mud. The river is gradually carving a channel through it.

Pacific Northwest September Travelog #11
Vancouver, WA - Sun, 4 Sep 2022, 9:30pm

Day 2 of our three-day weekend trip to Washington has been another tiring day, much like Day 1. Today we visited Mount St. Helens National Monument. Yes, we were at Mount St. Helens on our previous trip just four weeks ago. But that was at Windy Ridge, on the east side. Today we visited the west side. Mount St. Helens is one of those awesome parks where there are multiple entrances and the only way between them is to hike. (I can only think of two others in the US like that, Pinnacles National Park and the Grand Canyon.)

Our main event at Mount St. Helens was hiking the ridge trail from the Johnston RIdge Observatory around to Devil's Point. It was 4+ miles of nonstop 360° views, including of the volcano's ravaged north face. After that we two-fer'ed the trip with a visit to Coldwater Lake, a large lake that was created 42 years ago when debris from the volcanic explosion dammed a creek. Then we three-fer'ed it with a hike on the Hummocks Trail, winding around small hills that are actually pieces of the volcano transported several miles away during the explosion.

We wrapped up our time at the park at 5:30. With the drive home and a stop for dinner en route we returned to our hotel a bit after 8pm. We'll likely be in bed by 10 (at least I will likely be in bed by 10, Hawk might be later) making it easier to rise early tomorrow morning for a busy Day 3 before we have to fly home in the evening.

Updates: added links

I said I would do it and I meant it. I am catching up on pictures— and video— from hiking back in June. Recall we took a three-day weekend in mid-June and drove out to the eastern Sierra. That was an adventure in itself, including a literal midnight drive through Yosemite and road construction at 9,000'.

Our first hike that weekend was at Black Point near Mono Lake. Black Point is a dark gray (ha! It's not really black) volcanic dome just north of the lake. Often it's completely ignored by people looking for the iconic tufa structures. ...That's been us, BTW. We've visited the tufa a few times but didn't think to investigate other places around the lake until we were planning this trip.



Black Point is remote. It's a few miles off of paved roads. Dirt trails were no obstacle to our Nissan Xterra 4x4, though. We even explored a little-used side trail and found a way in around the back side of the rocks. We parked about 1/4 mile below the ridge and hoofed it up to the top, an ascent of about 100'. Finding this back way in was nice because it was much less climbing, and less distance, to cover on foot versus coming in from the main parking area.

In the photo above we're looking west-ish toward the crest of the Sierra Nevada. Part of Mono Lake is laid out below us.

The point of this visit isn't to climb atop the rocks and look into the distance. I mean, that part's fun. But what's really unique here is to climb down into the rocks and investigate the narrow crevices.



I captured a number of short videos on my iPhone while I was exploring the narrows. I stitched them together in the video above. Watch it for amazing views and my narrative on what your seeing and how this place was created.

In beauty I walk.

On Friday afternoon (a week ago now) we visited Mount St. Helens. It's a volcano in the US state of Washington that erupted in 1980. It was the most destructive eruption in US history, killing 57 people and flattening everything for miles. Likely the death toll would have been higher except that a series of small eruptions occurred from March that year. With two months warning all but scientists and fools evacuated.

Today Mount St. Helens is a national monument, a designation given by the president in 1982. And the volcano is still active, though at only a fraction of the energy level of 1980. We drove into the area from the northeast side, driving one of the park roads to its terminus at Windy Ridge, about 5 miles from the crater.



As we drove along mountain ridges to this point we saw the devastation wrought 42 years ago. Huge trees, easily 6' diameter and originally 200' tall, were stripped to their trunks and snapped like toothpicks. The land for miles around was scoured bare. To the extent you see natural growth in the photo above, it's all new growth. The land was scraped bare 8 miles out to the north of the volcano (it exploded on its north side) by rocks and hot gases traveling at hundreds of miles an hour. Significant damage extended out to 23 miles.

Windy Ridge is not the visitor-friendly side of the park. Over on the northwest side there's the Johnston Ridge Observatory, with a visitors center and all. Windy Ridge is out in booger country and all that's here is... well, Windy Ridge.



What's Windy Ridge? It's the mountain behind you when you look at Mount St. Helens in the first picture. Climb that ridge, the proposition goes, and you'll have an amazing view of not just the volcano but 360° around. There are even stairs to the top of the ridge. It's easy!

...Well, it's not easy, but I'm going up. I didn't fly and drive all the way out here not to climb the damn stairs. Stay tuned for more.

Update: 439. It is 439 stairs to to the top. I know because I climbed them (and counted). Click the link to keep reading!

Hawaii April Travelog #33
Hapuna Beach - Sat, 16 Apr, 2022, 7pm

Leave it to us to go to a beach and say, "Let's go for a hike!" That's exactly what we did late this afternoon at Hapuna Beach. First we kicked off our sandals to walk through the sand and surf at Hapuna Beach, then we laced up our proverbial boots— actually we just put our sandals back on as we have hiking sandals— to hike the Ala Kahakai Trail.



Before we got to the trail, though, we crossed to the north end of Hapuna Beach where the Mauna Kea Resort overlooks the water. Seeing these attractive buildings so near the water, with a great soft-sand beach just steps away, made me frustrated all over again about our accommodation a mile inland. Next to a golf course nobody uses. Where instead of water traps there are lava traps. ...How's that for The Floor Is Lava!?

I might have been happier staying at this property. One of the buildings is a Westin hotel. Maybe I could have used some of my 600,000+ Marriott points. It's the building in the back, though; the one with the beige walls, not the blue windows. But still, walk to the beach. And it probably has a restaurant with more than a kids menu. That's probably open past 6pm. 😣



Once on the Ala Kahakai Trail I left the hotels and condos behind. Up here the sandy beach gives way to rough, lava-rock bluffs. There are private homes up here; they're out of the frame in the picture above. Some of them, it's obvious, are worth well into the 8 figures. And they're empty. Because people who can afford homes that spendy can afford 2 or more of them.



The trail crosses over some rough terrain. It's not so evident in the picture above but more so in the next one. I'm glad my sandals are hiking sandals. Some of the other folks walking the trail were wearing thongs. I could tell them were not happy.

The trail leads up to another beach, almost a mile north. I stopped just short of that beach because it was getting late. Hawk had already turned around, wanting to spend time in the surf back at Hapuna Beach before it got dark. I turned around, too, about 10 minutes after her.



This trail was interesting for its feeling of being remote and in the natural wilderness yet at the same time next to civilization. Next to empty $10 million house civilization, that is. In beauty I walk. For free.

Hawaii April Travelog #19
Waikoloa, HI - Tue, 12 Apr, 2022, 2:30pm

From moments before we landed on the Island of Hawaii one big thing struck me: The floor is lava! At most airports the runway is surrounded by close cropped grass. At Kona it's surrounded by lava. You're landing on pavement over a lava field.

"Lava, everywhere" described the drive from Kona up to Waikoloa Village, too. Whereas a drive through a rural area in most other places would mean driving past miles of farms or maybe just weeds, here it was miles and miles of lava flows. Basically the only place where the floor is not lava is where modern humans scraped some of it away and built something on top of it.