New Job and Utah!

So I'm now living out in Southern Utah, working with a therapeutic wilderness program for troubled teens. The program is called RedCliff Ascent. In my off shifts, I hang out in Saint George, which is about 40 minutes west of Zion National Park and shares the epic scenery and warm weather. Saint George is also home to more climbing than I have ever seen in my life. While it lacks the central hangout for nomadic climbers that you can find in Red River Gorge or Hueco Tanks, the area boast about 250 climbing routes within a 15 minute drive from downtown. My field/work area is located about two hours north though, up at 6500'. The elevation means the red rocks are replaced by sprawling juniper and pinyon pine forest and that we got six inches of before the end of October.
The people seem great. The work will definitely be interesting. And the area will be a lot of fun.

A couple of worthwhile reads...

* An extremely well put together article on health care reform... explains that we already have government bureaucrats determining the value of a life and other 'rationing' of health care with our current policies.

* Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman's take on how the Blue Dog Democrats could screw up health care, their party as a whole, and even the Obama presidency.



and then if you're still bored:

* An article about Francis Collins (former head of The Human Genome Project, and newly appointed director of the NIH) and some of Collins' religious belief that could present a conflict of interest for the man controlling a $30 billion research budget.

Saturday's Lunch

Turkey Burger with New York white cheddar, caramelized onions, roasted red peppers, and red lettuce on a toasted whole wheat English muffin.

Prep time: 15 minutes
Costs:
~ $0.60 - 1/3lb ground turkey (1.99/lb)
~ 0.30 - cheddar (5.99/lb)
~ 0.20 - pepper (2.99/lb)
~ 0.10 - vadalia onion (0.99/lb)
~ 0.10 - red lettuce (1.50 each)
~ 0.60 - muffin (2.00 for 6)
~ 0.05 - spices (thyme, rosemary, coriander, tumeric, cinnamon, salt, black pepper)
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~ $1.95

Jump!

SO, I've left NZ. Jon and I parted ways in the Christchurch airport and flew back to our respective homes on June 10th. I had 26 hrs at home between returning from NZ and flying out with the fam to Switzerland, where I've been for the last 10 days. Well not exactly Switzerland...
The Family is hiking the 'Tour du Mont Blanc.' It's a 105-mile, 10 day, backpacking trip through Switzerland, France, & Italy. We carry all of our own gear, but get breakfast, dinner, and a bunk at a refuge or hostel each night. It's actually surprisingly similar to the lifestyle that Jon and I had enjoyed for our last few weeks in NZ. The hikes are hard. As in 1400m (4500ft) of ascent and descent on many days.
I've been silly on this trip and traded my extra set of clothes for my netbook, so I've been able to slowly plug away at editing the thousands of photos from the last few months. Oddly enough, I found a wifi signal here in Trient, Switzerland (pop. 133). We have two days of hiking left to go and will finish up on Wednesday in Chamonix, France. On Thursday, I'm heading to Laussane to meet up with Bill Ference, who is magically coincidentally in Switzerland on holiday for a week.

more photos up soon.

South Island 1

Well... the trip's winding down now.

At the moment I'm hanging out in the Wellington Airport. After five months of living basically within arms-reach of each other, Jon and I are finally parting ways. His flight through Aukland and San Francisco to Chicago departs two hours before my flight through Aukland and LAX to Pittsburgh. We're sad for the trip to come to a close, but both excited about what's coming up next. Jon will have a few months at home before starting med school at Einstein in The Bronx, NY. I will be spending a few weeks with the fam in Switzerland before buckling down and studying for the MCAT. We're both excited to settle down a bit and gain some structure to our lives though I'll still have a few months to wait. I'm looking forward to finding a real job and putting down some roots, hopefully in September/October and hopefully somewhere out west. This last year has been an almost frantic dash from one place to another, and while it's been a blast, it will be very nice to quit decimating my savings account, to stash the backpack in a closet, and especially, to see some familiar faces.

Jon and I left Mt. Bruce, our 'home' on the North Island, 22 days ago. In the past three weeks we've done a big tour of the South Island, swinging south along the west coast and back north along the east coast. Our first major activity on the South Island was the Abel Tasman Great Walk, located on the northwest coast. Despite being NZ's smallest national park, Abel Tasman still receives more visitors than any other park. The park's ~50 miles of coastline encompass 98 beaches, and about half the parks visitors traverse the park via sea-kayak. Whether hiked or paddled the track is traditionally traveled in one direction facilitated by a water-taxi pick-up or drop-off. On recommendation from the Dept. of Conservation (DOC), Jon and I took the taxi to the northern most drop-off point, spent our first day hiking further out the trail to the final and least visited hut, and spent the next three days hiking back to the car. The beaches were golden, the waters verdant and clear, and the track empty. Traveling NZ in late May and June meant that Jon and I had completely missed the peak and even the shoulder tourist seasons, and in most places Winter hours were already in effect. According to the water-taxi skipper, on a peak day his company alone will transport up to 800 passengers and 200 kayaks. Jon and I had the track basically to ourselves and shared the 40-person capacity huts with only 4-8 others. Two other really interesting things about Abel Tasman ... One, if you're willing to shell out a little more money, the water-taxi can pick you up and drop you off at any of a half-dozen locations, which makes the track accessible for day hikers or single night trips as well. And two, the hiking track has a few long tidal crossings only passable within a few hours of low tide (if you look through my photos you'll see a few of Jon crossing a giant soggy plain barefoot). We had some great weather and made fanastic time along the track since it was graded and extremely well-maintained.

Traveling when you are around the winter solstice (southern hemisphere here!) means that you only have so many hours of daylight to cram with activities. So try as we might Jon and I have been pretty well rested on this trip—there really isn't much to do after dark! We also don't want to miss a mile of the spectacular scenery around here so we generally pull over, and cook dinner and pitch the tent in a campground or rest area. We'd normally wake up around 6:30am but the sky isn't light until around 7:15 and the sun doesn't rise until after 7:40. The south island is located from roughly 41° to 46° latitude (the western US-Canadian border is 52°40' and the Mason-Dixon line is ~40° for reference), so we're pretty far south, but not quite as far as we were in parts in Patagonia or even Montana.

The day after Abel Tasman, Jon and I woke up in pull-off in the middle of no-where, packed up and had a breakfast of yogurt and home-made mueslix for breakfast, explored a goofy little park in an historic mining area at sunrise, and visited the famous “Pancake rocks” tourist trap national park all before 9am. By 9:30 we were decked out in safety goggles and gloves and were using a blast furnace to forge steel into the proper shape to make a knife. With a bit of help for the tricky parts from the folks at Barrytown Knifemaking, Jon and I had each handcrafted our own forged carbon steel knife. It was awesome. After the hammer and anvil we used large belt-sanders hone and shape the blade, and even cut our own wooden handles and pounded the brass pins through the tang. The knives look sweet and are damn sharp too – Jon performed surgery with his on it's first time out, neatly slicing off the end of his thumb while dicing an onion. That night we watched a spectacular sunset over some small rocky islands and made it down to Greymouth for the Monteith's Brewery tour (a great tasting Radler and a summer Ginger beer and the tour ends with a help-yourself to the taps session). A long, long, glorious day.

Down the coast we visited the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers. They were nice, but Jon and I both now have low tolerances for standing at a distance staring at ice after our sad, wet, cold experience with the tourist trap that is the Perito Merino Glacier in Argentina. The nearby Lake Matthius was, however, really sweet. It's a small lake/big pond with a mirror lake surface. The following day was yet another beautiful drive, but now cutting south through the mountains. We stopped into the perplexing but pretty little village of Arrowtown – it somehow melds New England fall, chincy Colorado ghost town, ubiquitous ski village, and English/Scottish agriculture in one tiny package. That afternoon we passed through some of the Central Otago wine country and arrived in Queenstown, New Zealand's well-promoted “adventure capital.” The big storms that had squashed our travels on the North Island left all the mountains on the South Island with a healthy dumping of snow, and we had some truly spectacular views.

Okay, well that was a big update, but covers all the time behind all the photos I have ready to post. So please checkout my shutterfly site for my photos and look forward to more photos and updates soon.

Whew! Only 3 days left in NZ!

Jon and I have just done a whirlwind tour of the South Island, including 2.5 of the famous Great Walks and will soon be cracking the 4000km mark on our rental car (pretty good considering we've only actually driven it 11 of the last 20 days). We spent the last few days having a mini Williams Reunion with Dave Rogawski in Dunedin -- it was a blast.

Just posted a few photos from the end of our stay at Mt Bruce. http://mackbrickley.shutterfly.com

more new photos from the South Island soon.

New Zealand

H'Okay, so...

It's been about forever since I've blogged – my apologies. As you probably read on Jon's blog, we are now safely settled in New Zealand. In fact, we are nearly done with our 'safely settled' phase of the trip. Three and a half weeks down, we leave Mount Bruce in one week. We've secured a 22-day car rental for pretty cheap ($20/day). Since New Zealand is 'developed' rather than 'developing,' they have the same shamefully poor public transportation found in the US – cars are absolutely necessary to see anything other than major cities. Fortunately though, the entire south island is only 600 miles long, so you don't actually have all that much ground to cover during our three week tour.

But, onto my life of late...

I'm volunteering at Mt Bruce National Wildlife Centre for a month. We provide labor in exchange for housing, but are still responsible for paying for our groceries. Every day with at least decent weather (really quite low standards), Jon and I get an assignment from our boss, load up our backpacks with eggs and rabbit jerky, and head out into the woods. Out in the woods we have a grand treasure hunt – remarkably similar to large swaths of my childhood memories – except this time our treasure is decaying rats and poison.

160 million years ago, New Zealand was part of the super-continent Gondwallaland along with Australia, Antarctica, South America, Africa, and India. 60 million years ago, New Zealand pushed off and has had its own isolated environment ever since. In this special little test-tube, evolution cooked up a unique ecosystem dominated by birds rather than mammals – the only native mammals here are three species of bats. Humans arrived only 800 or 1000 years ago from Polynesia – the same people who established populations as far away as Hawaii and Easter Island (off the coast of Chile) about 1200 years ago. These first arrivals brought their culture and animals with them, and initiated the decline of endemic bird populations.

Mount Bruce's 8100 acres are home to the NZ captive breeding program and some of the largest populations of reintroduced species on the mainland, including ~150 kaka, ~40 kokako, and 23 adult kiwi. Jon and I have also been continually impressed at how nearly every New Zealander we talk to has been to or at least knows of Mt Bruce. It is the public face of the Department of Conservation's wildlife program and has a state-of-the-art visitors center with interactive displays that rival anything I've ever seen.

While other reserves use predator-proof fences to insulate their bird populations, Mt Bruce's size necessitates another approach: the entire reserve is covered in predator traps and poison bait stations. Some 100 miles of tracks line the hills, each roughly maintaining elevation, and in total producing something like a crudely-drawn topo-map. Tracks are rugged passageways hacked through the forest or bush with a poison bait station every 100m and a trap every 200m along the line.

When our boss first arrived here, six years ago, they could catch 100 Australian possums in a day and you could hear the rats scurrying toward the bait stations as you walked away. These days, they no longer catch possums, and Jon and I only find rats in about one in four traps – so the system is actually working quite well. In our three weeks, Jon and I have cleaned out ~50 rats, one feral cat, five ferrets, and one stoat. I would say 'caught,' but most of the animals we see have begun the process of decay weeks before we get there – yummy.

But as long as it's not raining the job really is pretty fun. And recently Jon and I have doubled back over tracks that have already had the poison removed – these tracks are closest to the highway and also contain kiwi nest sites so they are trapped every two weeks. We've become pretty calloused to dead animals and not having to deal with poison means we can move faster, which feels good.

Anyway, long post already... so, quickly now... pictures are from Mount Bruce, or one of our weekend trips around the North Island. On our first trip, Jon, Diane and I shot up north to Tauranga then cut over to Gisborne spent the afternoon driving down the coast, visiting wineries. Last weekend, Diane was awesome and let us borrow her car, and Jon and I drove south along the coast and then visited Wellington. We spent the morning in the national museum, and in the afternoon we attended a huge food show with 180+ booths giving out samples of wines, cheese, meats, and prepared foods – awesome.

Please check out some of my photos at http://mackbrickley.shutterfly.com/ . It currently only has photos from New Zealand, but South American pics will slowly find their way there too.

Oh boy. so much Ecuador, and so few blog updates...



So last time I wrote, all four of our intrepid adventurers were battling the Inca two-step... as Justin´s cynical travel doctor told him "your chances of getting travelers´ diarrhea on a trip like this... are about 100%". A week later, we´re all back up to speed and have thankfully regained our abilities to control our bowel movements.



Buses:


A whole new beast in Ecuador. In Chile, we were all extremely impressed by the low costs, efficiency, timeliness, and cleanliness of all the buses we took. Hell, Justin and I took a 12 hour overnight bus with Semi-bed seats and a provided snack for $35 each. When we arrived in Ecuador, we were all first excited about all prices being in US dollars (Ecuador officially switched to USD in the early 2000s), and then were all excited by the even cheaper costs -- you can figure on buses costing about $1/hour. Our first week of travel along the Ecuadorian coast set us back only about $12 a piece for roughly 12 hours of buses.

Things got a little more down to reality on our overnight bus from Guayquil to Loja when we were waylaid for 2 hours by a landslide. But we got stuck around sunrise (6:30am, everday) so the time was easy enough to pass while sleeping. During our next short bus ride (normally an hour) we ran into the other classic Ecuadorian bus experience -- a breakdown. This time it was actually a flat tire, which the driver and his assistant were deftly able to switch out in about 40 minutes. While down in Vilcabamba, however, a giant landslide actually cut all the town´s ties to the outside world for 12 hours. Rains washed a 30´tall pile of mud across 150´of the only road into the town, which also knocked out power for Vilcabamba and the other small villages further down the valley. So on our way out of town we had to take a taxi up to the landslide and then walk across the mud between two giant back-hoes in order to catch a bus on the far side. The road above the landslide was hardly better, though paved, the road was full of nature-made speed bumps, sinkholes, and small landslides -- one of each flavor every 100 yards or so for about 15 miles.

After a few days at Chris´s site, the four of us headed north up to the provincial capital of Zamora, where we were able to access the giant rainforest of Podocarpus National Park. We had a surprisingly bright and sunny day to wander around some of the park´s trails as its only visitors for the day. We had a classic Ecuadorian lunch of Pap y Pollo (Pappy Po-yo), french fries and fried chicken, before catching our evening bus back down to Guayzimi. As the bus arrived, Chris advised us to hold our ground and use our bodies to defend our spot at the front of the line to board the bus. A couple hipchecks to small children, elderly women, and a few teenagers later, we scrambled aboard the bus but still found no open seats. While this might pose a problem in the US or even Chile, here it´s merely an inconvenience. Us four Gringos stood along with about a dozen Ecuadorians in the bus´s aisle. This is totally normal on a subway or even a city bus, but our bus ride was a solid 3 hours. Luckily the driver decided to stop halfway so he could eat dinner for 45 minutes. Chris, Jon, and I took a new angle when we reboarded this time and decided to be the last people onto the bus before the assistant. It worked out great -- a little reshuffling of passengers and Chris and I got to actually sit down and even see out a window while crouching in the wheel well. haha. Oh well... according to Chris other Peace Corps kids had witnessed standing passengers for full overnight buses, which sure makes our couple hours of standing look weak.


---------


More updates to come...

Justin is currently on an 8 day boat-tour of the Galapagos Islands.

Jon and I now heading off to the airport, leaving south america. We have a flight tonight from Guayaquil, Ecuador to Lima, Peru to Los Angeles, California. Jon and I will each get picked up by an Uncle in LA, and spend the next 3.5 days visiting with our extended families (Jon´s mom and my parents are also flying in) and regearing for winter. Justin escaped the cold, but Jon and I are headed back to the Southern Hemisphere for another two months in New Zealand. Our beards can´t wait, but it will be sad trade our shorts and sandals for fleece and insulation.

We are currently in Vilcabomba, EC. They bill themselves as the fountain of youth here based on some National Geographic article from the 1950s that found people to live extremely long here due to the perfect weather. It does have perfect weather, but subsequent research found that people had lied about their ages and that somewhere else must be the valley of youth. Plus there is no fountan here -- bummer.
The hostel where we stayed the last three nights made a good case though - we rented a private cabaña for $11/person/night and that included a delicious breakfast of fresh fruit, yogurt, bread, and a crepe or eggs. They also had a restaurant with a gorgeous panoramic view of the town and surrounding valleys and a spa with cheap-ish masages.
Unfortunately though Jon started feeling sick the day we left the beach to head here. So Chris took Justin and I on this amazing hike along a knife-edge ridge. Dad you would not have been able to finish it -- the computers here are too slow to send pictures though, so I guess I'll just ahve to post them later. That afternoon, Chris, Justin, and I went for lunch at a local counter and had a Ecuadorian special -- cows intestines in a kind of peanut sauce. After getting over the idea of it, it tasted really pretty good (flavorless, like chicken basically). However that evening I got violently ill ... out both ends... I have never been so sick in my life. It seemed like it was just food poisoning from lunch though, so I dont think that I will be eating intestine again any time soon. Chris came down with a milder version yesterday, while I spent the day lying around feeling okay, but not good. At 5 am this morning we were all woken by the sound of Justin emptying the contents of his stomache in the bathroom. In the dark room, chris asked "who is that" and Jon and I answered before we all burst out laughing. We were now 4 for 4. We were such a sad sight that Chris's peace corp friend who came to visit us ended up leaving after only 24 hours ... I mean who wouldnt want to hang out with a bunch of puking and shitting guys lying around a bedroom?!

Chris took the bus back to his site today so that his hosts wouldnt worry about him, while Jon, Justin, and I are hanging out for another day, waiting for Justin (who just got sick this morning) to recover a bit before the 7 hours of bus rides. We will hang out at Chris's site for a week before Jon and I head back to Guayaquil to catch our flight up to LA.

Torres del Paine National Park

Day 1 ... entered the park and hiked up to the free campground at Los Guardas.

The Mirador (viewpoint) on Lago Grey overlooking Glaciar Grey.


Glaciar Grey

Day 2... Day-hike up the flank of Glaciar Grey, then grabbed our bags and hiked back down to the pay-campground by Refugio Paine Grande (Lago Pehoe).

A rickety lashed-together steel ladder descending into a giant wash carved by spring meltwater.


Strange things happen in the woods... This is probably the most startling photo that I´ll ever post - Jonthan A. Stone eating a chocolate bar. Considering the fact that even two weeks previous, Jon wouldn´t even touch brown (albeit obviously-labled Vanilla) cookies for fear that chocolate might contaminate his delicate skin, his move to eating almond chocolate bars is nothing less than earth-shattering.



Day 3... Stormy night´s rest beside Lago Pehoe, complete with an extremely rare thunder clap on a nearby peak that woke the entire camp at 3am. The clouds momentarily broke at sunrise providing Justin and I with a gorgeous view of the Cuernos (the more photographed duo-toned rock monoliths) while Jon groaned from his sleeping bag. The rain of course returned within a few minutes and we ate a nice breakfast of oatmeal and even some eggs that we had purchased from the Refugio. The glorious part of paying to camp was that we had a glassed-in pavilion in which to cook and hang out. The unfortunate part was that 70 other campers also had the same, small, glass pavilion. Breakfast was the definite highlight of the day, though as we shouldered our packs and crushed through a 4 hour day in 40degree pouring rain. We dried off in the Los Cuernos refugio for the afternoon. But when we headed back to the tent for bed, we found the tent pancaked to a tree. Apparently the 100+ mph wind gusts (not exaggerating) were enough to yank the tent stakes, snap the guy-lines, bend all the poles, and send a snapped and jagged aluminum pole through the fly, creating a 4 ft long tear in the fabric. awesome.
Oddly enough, despite being 3 days into a hike in a national park, we were able to rent a tent from the Refugio and hit the hay dry if not terribly enthused.


Day 4... Left all the gear in the rented tent and did a day hike up the pretty and windy Valle Fracés. Came back and bought dinner from the Refugio. It was a nice meal considering we had been hiking for 4 days, but left each of us sadly hungry when it was over.




Day 5 ... Nothing too exciting, which was kind of nice. A long hike. Mostly rolling hills in the morning over terrain very similar to the Estancia, then a long dehydrated uphill climb to the free-campground near the base of Las Torres. Apparently didn´t take any exciting pictures. It was a relatively simple, relaxing day. Ohhh, and when we were still hungry after finishing the last of our packaged pasta bags for dinner, other hikers came to the rescue with unused supplies, so we went to bed actually full for the first time in a few days.

Day 6 ... 5 The newly patched together tent kept us nice and dry during the overnight pouring rain. But when we awoke at 5am to go watch sunrise on the Torres of Paine, snow had started to fall. So we had a nice hour-long hike up, with 2-3 inches of snow on the ground. We were damn excited for the snow too, because if it were only 5 degrees warmer we would have been hiking up in the pouring rain. At the top, we pulled out our sleeping pads, I crawled inside my sleepingbag, and we cooked some soup as we waited for the clouds to part. Though the iconic blazing red photo eluded us, we had a nice time in the snow and snagged some decent shots a little after sunrise. After an hour or so of sitting by the towers, we headed back down, broke camp and had a short hike out to the bus back to Puerto Natales.







g

A human size suspension bridge - cool!

iHosterria Las Torres - the giant Vail, CO hotel that somehow sprang forth from the East entrance to the W trail.

heading into Torres del Paine

Okay here's the itinerary ... you can follow along if you can find a map online...

day 1 - Puerto Natales hospedaje to bus to park to catamaran to The (famous) 'W' trail. Two hours of hiking to "the second best view of Glaciar Grey from the park" then two more to camp by the Lago Grey refugio.
day 2 - long day trip north to "the best view of the southern icefield" at John Garner Pass then back down to our already set-up camp.
day 3 - Long hike (8hrs) from Lago Grey to Los Cuernos refugio.
day 4 - long day trip up the Valle del Frances, home to "the best views in the park" despite the park being named after the towers
day 5 - rolling hills turning into a long steep uphill to Los Torres refugio
day 6 - 4:30 wake-up to hike to the mirador (viewpoint) to watch the sun rise on the iconic Torres. Hike back down to catch a mini-bus to the bus back to Puerto Natales.

We'll spend that sunday night here in Puerto Natales. On Monday we'll probably catch a bus even further south to Ushauia (sp?), located in Argentina's half of Tierre de Feugo before bouncing back up to Punta Arenas to catch a flight to Santiago on Wednesday. We depart Chile for the final time on Friday, March 27, bound for Chris Beeler and Guayaquil, Ecuador.

more updates and photos to come...

Boarding the ferry at the end of the road.


The quick and dirty...
The Carreterra Austal, Chile´s southern road, ends in Villa O´Higgins. Arriving there on a 7 hour bus ride from Cochrane (the town nearest the Estancia) we quickly learned that the nearest ATM was unfortunately a 7 hour bus ride away, back in Cochrane. After a mad-scramble to find our last bits and pieces of cash, we booked our ferry passage in a combination of Chilean Pesos and US Dollars -- setting in place the craziest travel day of our lives.

Due to the previous week´s rain the giant lake had flooded, so we took a zodiac to board the ship while a local hauled the bags through the shin deep water. The four hour ferry took us through some gorgeous landscapes with giant gushing waterfalls on every slope. When we arrived on the far shore, we handed our luggage to a man with a horse set off for the Argentine border carrying only our daypacks and a lunch. Six hours and 22 km later we arrived at the Argentine customs building on the shore of another lake. On a whim, we hopped the departing ferry, which fortunately dropped us directly onto the bus to El Chalten. We staggered off the bus and directly into the dirtiest hostel any of us had ever seen, arriving dirty, tired, and a day or two earlier than we had planned -- marvelous.

... more to come later.

View from the Ferry.

Crossing the border on foot.

Mt. Fitzroy at sunrise. Otherworldly. But frigid. About 25 degrees and gusts of 80mph that made it near impossible to even stand in one place.

Mt. Fitzroy with some of the locals.

In a fit of laziness (and the realization that I could start applying for jobs) I haven´t done a real update of my blog yet - as you can tell. I hope that I´ll be bored enough later today or maybe at some point in the near future and will tell you all about the exciting last week. But reading Jon´s blog and Justin´s blog should get you plenty clued in and will have more pictures of me.
... more to come later...

fotos from the hike

heyo
I´m still alive. Back from a week near the Argentine border. We lived in a house. It was weird. I´m so used to living from my tent, the house seemed foreign. Shared rooms also meant that what little privacy we´ve had vanished. Also, the two girls we did have left on Tuesday, so it was a house of 6-9 guys, which if you hadn´t guessed, is a total mess and smells terrible. Jon played mama for the house a lot. He´s still such a good JA.
We rode in a wagon pulled by a tractor for 2 hours to get back to the base camp today--very cold, but cool views. We just raided the pantry here and are heading out for a 6 day backpacking trip. We´re heading into Valle Hermoso (Beautiful Valley) in Jenimeni National Reserve. There are a few lingering gaucho trails left over from the 150 years of pastoral use, but for the most part we´ll be off trail, navigating by map and compass. A friend here is lending us a GPS just in case. According to Christian (the head biologist here) only about 300 people visit the reserve in any year. So the three of us will be a full 1% of this year´s visitors. That´s cool. He also told us to use the GPS to get the location of any interesting prints we see (Huemel deer, puma) or any other interesting critters -- apparently a new species of frog was discovered there only last year. Anyway, I´ll have more to update on in a week.
love mack

Week 5

We´ve just returned from our fourth week here in the Estancia Chacabucco. The last two weeks have been somewhat frustrating work-wise. We´ve just been terribly unproductive. It´s really not our fault -- it has rained nearly every day for the past ten days (while the first three weeks I was in Chile it rained once). The rain kept us stuck at the base camp for a few days last week before we went to Cochrane for the annual festival. The festival was interesting, but since Cochrane is a town of only 3000, the scale was such that you had pretty much experienced everything (a couple times over) within an hour or two. But we were there for two days -- hahah. They had a little rodeo along with the festival, but Jon Justin and I missed the main attraction (bull riding) on Saturday night because went to go get food and the events ran 2 hours ahead of schedule. It was interesting to compare the Patagonian style to the Montana style that I´m used to. They can´t rope here (lasso) -- I mean they do it, just poorly. I realized though that the cowboys I saw at the two rodeos in Montana were all semi-professional/professional while everyone involved here has yet to quit their day jobs. So it was fun. We had lots of bbq and wine and slept in Conservacion Patagonica´s office on the concrete floor.

Our latest location was awesome. For the first time we were stationed in Patagonian instead of New Hampshire. We were camping based out of shack along the eponymous Chacabucco River in the Valle Guanacco. It was gorgeous. When it wasn´t raining.

We returned from Cochrane on Sunday and packed up our tents in the rain on Monday morning. Breaking camp in the rain was terribly uncomfortable and not very well planned out. But it was so refreshing to finally get away from the Estancia (base camp). Internet access is nice, but that´s not why I´m here. It was a decent enough day, when we finally arrived at the new camp and the tents dried out within an hour of set up.

Jon Justin and I forded the river and explored a canyon on the other side that afternoon. It was awesome. I love not having any sort of paths to follow.

Wilderness isn´t wild if you´re stuck on a well marked path.

This place will definitely lose something if (when?) it does become a park, but the Chilean national park style seems to be far more laid back than the US if for no other reason than it´s underutilized. So I think most of the off trail character will remain intact.

Alright. My photos have uploaded (after about 45 minutes) so I need to quit hogging the internet access.

I think we´ll be here for two more weeks then head south.

Oh, and haha, up to 6 months since my last hair cut and 2 months without shaving. Liz will be excited to hear that, but I think she´s the probably only one.

week 2-3

Wow, so it´s now day 27 of ´traveling´ for me. It doesn´t really seem like I´ve been away for very long at all - life has just been moving so super fast since graduation. Justin and I have been here in Valle Chacabucco for two and half weeks. We´ve spent nights in three remote locations and the Estancia, assembled/disassembled our tents 12 times. We´re able to leave some of our gear back here, and even then we don´t really have to hike any distance with our bags - trucks drop us off at each location. Well, Justin and I thought that the group of 11 was a bit unwieldy and oppressive. We´ve since been punished for our hubris by a group of 21 for the last week. More will be leaving this weekend, but that crowd unfortunately includes our much-loved Brits, Jey and Amy. I plan to make our paths cross again in the future - they would be a really fun couple to travel with or even just visit. As the group has become larger, the relative difficulty has decreased or at least become more sporadic. We can now cover nearly two miles of fence in a single day (last Saturday, for instance), so we get to have more half days and days off. The most significant downside is the food. While there was plenty of quantity if not variety with the group of 5-6, cooking for 25 mouths (realistically at least 50-60 servings) is a herculean task on a two burner Coleman camp stove and maybe (if we´re really lucky) a cast iron oven. I really love the ovens. We arrived at our second camp to find a hand hewn rough frame of a shack. Obviously no cast iron oven, and only lake water to drink (turned out just fine for all but Amy and Monica), and horrendously bumpy stumps of bunch-grass covering the entire site (which made for creative if not comfortable sleeping positions). Our third camp had two shacks and a cast iron oven - a veritable shangra la.
The work has been almost entirely removing fences. So that actually means, using little hammer/plier mutants called Pico de Lotos (Parrots beaks) and larger bolt-cutters to pull out staples (humorously called Grampas en Español), while another team rolls the wire and wood post fences. The fences have 5-6 wires strung through about ten little posts between the big posts. The big posts are about 10 inches in diameter, weigh 60-90 pounds, and are sunk 3 feet into the ground. After the staples are removed from the big posts, and the wire and post fence is rolled, another team comes through with big steel pikes and pries the big posts from the ground with a combination of leverage and manpower. Pulling staples is the resting position. Pulling posts is hardest, but comes with long periods of rest between posts and lets all of the teenagers feel like real men in front of the one to two girls who are volunteering. Rolling fences is the least favorite job, since it requires lots of continuous forearm and upper body strength, tons of patience, and really taxes your lower back, and it really doesn´t get any rest periods - there is always more fence. Rolling has become significantly easier over the past two weeks however. Technique has improved slightly, but the body and especially the forearms have really just woken up.
The day-in, day-out of volunteering here isn´t really very exciting. Lots of manual labor, you´re tired and hungry, the scenery doesn´t really matter much when you´re staring at the ground rolling fences for hours on end. But the experience on a bigger level is really amazing. I mean I got to ride a horse (mostly out of control) through the Patagonian backcountry; I´ve eaten sheep slow roasted over a large open pit fire in the traditional style; Jon, Justin, and I rode in the caged-in bed of a pickup across an almost otherworldly landscape on the way back to the Estancia yesterday; I´m quickly learning a foreign language and even beginning to think in Spanish despite my measly vocabulary; and I´ve learned tons about other countries and cultures scattered across the globe (UK, NZ, Switzerland, and Holland).

I started reading a book for pleasure on one of our travel days this last week. I´m reading Lifelines by Stephen Rose - it´s dense theoretical biology with an English vocabulary that often leaves even 3 college-graduate native-English speakers using context clues to deduce meaning. It´s sooo... luxorious. I have barely beat an intellectual eyelash since graduation, but reading this book just leaves me nearly intoxicated with thought. It has probably been the best test so far for my noggin following my explosive bicycle accident in June - I´ve been somewhat anxiously awaiting the moment I find out that some crucial bit of knowledge was dislodged upon impact with the asphault - but it seems like my biology, at least, is still hanging in there. Similarly, I´m not sure I had mentioned before how amazing it is to listen to your own selection of music on an ipod after having not heard music for a week. I didn´t listen to any music my first two weeks down here, but the ipod has slowly crept back into nearly daily use as a general relaxer now. Who needs Chilean wine, when you have music. And on that note, even the terrible boxed wine is good down here. $13 bottles in the states sell for under $2 here. We haven´t caught a whiff of civilization since hopping off the bus at the unmarked intersection of two dirt roads two and half weeks ago though. So don´t get your hopes up about us having a merry old time on local beverage down here. This weekend though the the big festival for the nearest town, Cochrane. One of the staffers who spend the most time with the volunteers is supposedly going to be in the rodeo-ish-thing, so we´re all going to pile into some vans to get down there on Saturday. It´ll be exciting to even see a grocery store or gas station. Exciting like it was on the bike trip, in the middle of South Dakota, 90 miles from the last gas station and 25 miles since you last had any water to drink. The American national urge to ´consume shit´ (in the words of Chris Beeler) has been terribly stiffled here. I suppose it´s sort of like living in a comunist utopia, where there is no money just toil and food. There will be money at some point though. At some point they´ll ask for $15 per day; but til then it´s really pretty cool, espeically as an American, to go so long without touching or even feigning consciousness of money.

Anyway time for dinner. I´ll probably next be back online in another week or ten days. ¡Chao!

17 of us or so, following René to one of his favorite spots, a mountain lake Puma Paradise. He has been tracking the puma here for the last three years. He pulled out the antenna every 30 minutes or so on this hike to check the location of the pumas to prevent us from encroaching on the pumas. We also walked in silence and in single file so as to leave the smallest possible footprint on the flora and fauna.

The white stone beach of the mountain lake we hiked to.

dinner at camp 3.

View from the hike with Justin from Camp 1. This is Lago Cochrane.



A view heading the other direction. The whole area looks like Wyoming or maybe Utah on steroids and about 80 years ago. There is just no sign of life, even from such a high perch with such an amazing view.

I wish that I had made this photo bigger (maybe click on it?). This is the Asado we had on our first full day in the Valle Chacabucco. It´s a whole bull sheep, splayed on an iron cross and slow roasting to a delious feast.

Ahora, mas sabor!

Valle Chacabucco, Aysen, Chile

Wow. so one week down. Justin and I arrived at around 5pm last Saturday and left Sunday afternoon to head out to our work site. Two Brits arrived the day before us (Jey and Amy from Bristol) and a Kiwi (Femke from Wellington) arrived a little after us. The five of us hastily threw our gear into the backs of two pickup trucks and drove for 50 minutes into the Patagonian backcountry. 8 other volunteers had been at this site for the last 6 days. A couple of employees set up an Asada. It was amazing -- basically a giant rack of lamb skewered and stuck into the ground beside a large fire inside a shack. Two hours on one side, an hour on the others. The fatty meat fell off the bone and was simply a fantastic mess of a meal.

After the meal the employees loaded up the trucks with gear and the extra family members who had come to partake, and left 6 of the week-old volunteers to train us the following day. Turns out the other volunteers had all thought they were leaving that day, but Conservacion Patagonica had just changed their minds and decided to leave them for another two days. So yeah they can be a little flaky - but they were good about dropping off enough food to keep us happy.

Oh so the site! We pitched our tents in the middle of a grassy field near an old Gaucho shack. The shack was an amazingly tacked together bunch of sheet metal and hand hewn logs, buuut it had an amazing wood fired, cast iron stove. The view from the meadow was some nice tree-covered and rocky mountains.
The most amazing thing about it was how underwhelming our location was. It was New Hampshire, or maybe Montana, but really nothing too different than something you could find down a dirt road somewhere back in the States. Justin and I both agreed on this and were perplexed by it. After 5 days of pulling fences from 9-5 we took a full day off out at the site. I woke up early to go try to get some sunrise shots over the lake that was supposed just down the valley. Thick, deadly-spiky, scrub barred me from reaching anythign but the closest small hill, but the view from the top of there was enough to correct any misgivings about our location. massive snowy ranges loomed on most sides, but were obscurred from our base camp by the lower hills. Downing some of the ubiquitous stale, white, biscuits for breakfast on the top of the hill, I plotted a more ambitous route for further exploration later in the day. I got back down to camp before any of the others had awoken, stoked the stove, and prepared a second breakfast. Justin and I set off on the hike around 12pm.
The really amazing thing about hiking out here is that the only trails that exist were formed by sheep or cattle and are only still viable if they have be utilized by the massive population of wild Guanaco, and most of the hiking is forced off trail bushwhacking. My two favorite national parks in the US are Capitol Reef and Teddy Rooselvelt -- you probably haven´t heard of them, but that´s why their my favorite. You can set off and not see another soul for hours or days and the parks are so under utilized that you don´t necessarily need to stick to trails. Here, there aren´t even trails to stick to in the first place. And actually, there aren´t even maps -- navigation is easily performed though by simply pulling your barings from one of the many giant mountain ranges nearby. Needless to say it was a great hike.

The work was pulling fences. It was nice and mindless. The kind of thing that you master within about 30 minutes. The large group was a bit much to handle, but once they left the remaining group of 5 (Jey, Amy, Femke, Susan (super nice Chilean from Puerto Montt), Justin and I) was fantastic. We averaged about 3 hours of cooking time per dinner. Highlights include the night we made pizza from scratch without an recipe (or ever having made bread before) in a cast iron wood fired oven. Con Pat drops off bread, butter, jam, cereal, fuit and veggies, yogurt, etc. every couple of days and leave us to cook it up how we see fit.

We´ll definitely all be in great shape after 6 weeks here. Forearms get major workouts trying to role wire fencing, and lower backs will either be ripped or, well, ripped to pieces.

Okay well that was a senseless brain dump. I get about 30 minutes of internet once a week apparently, so I´ll do my best to keep in touch.

Valle Chacobucca

hey! We made it!
After something like 60 hours of travel over the course of about 5 days, Justin and I were dropped off at the side of the road near ¨Entrada Baker". A friendly American named Cameron(who had previously tried to contact Conservacion Patagonica) decided on the spot to jump off the bus with us. He´s touring around for a few months before beginning a Fulbright Fellowship in Bariloche, Argentina to study massive "die-backs", i.e. single species mass extinctions and will just be visting the park area for a few days.

Two Brits (jay and amy) and an Kiwi (Femke) also arrived yesterday and will be newbies with Justin and I. Also, two American girls from UC Berkley are here for a few more days doing a pilot for one of their dissertation. We had a big table of gringos at dinner last night, and it was fun to be surrounded by intelligent outdoorsy people again. I had forgotten again how much I missed it since leaving Williams.

We just had a quickie powerpoint introduction to the project. Very Cool. We head up to go start pulling fences this afternoon and have a BBQ with the other volunteers up there. We´ll be out for roughly a week then before we come back here and have a few free days. Schedules are not necessarily weekly, so I won´t necessarily have internet access every Saturday for instance.

The park is literally filled with Guanaco (llamas ancestral wild cousin)--far more common than even whitetail deer in Western PA--, skunks, and we´re already seen a fox twice now. Amazing to be so surrounded by wildlife.

Jon, can you please try to get some topo maps while you´re in Santiago (apparently the army-government are the only ones who have them) and then get maps of Reserva Nacional Jeinimeni at Conaf in Coyhaique. I had checked Conaf in Santiago, but they just referred me to the Conaf in Coyaique.

Pictures will arrive at some point, sorry. Looks alot like the picture in my first blog post, except everything is really far far bigger than in the picture. Absolutely beautiful spot. I immediately feel like I could stay here for a year pretty easily, but we´ll see how pulling fencing changes that opinion.

Puerto Montt to Coyhaique

Soooo...

Justin arrived on Tuesday night -- as I should have expected it was much harder to catch a bus to the airport than from the airport -- and I completed my wing-and-a-prayer round-trip journey to the airport with more help from a nice Santiagoan. At the airport , we checked on the price of a flight to Coyhaique (as per the original plan) and found they had jumped to 230 USD from 196USD earlier that day and 65USD a month ahead of time, but I think the month-ahead-of-time price was really a lie, because we couldnt actually make reservations.

So Justin and I headed back to the hostel to mull things over. Zoey, my new Australian friend, convinced us to check out the bus situation because she and Alice had taken them for hundreds of hours over the past few months and found them extremely reasonable in price and accomidations. Justin and I booked a ticket 12 hours south to Puerto Montt the next morning.

The ride was an overnighter and left Wednesday at 9pm, so Justin and I headed out to see the one final sight that I had missed in my previous 4 days in Santiago: Cerro San Crystabal. Its a giant hill that pops up 800m from the middle of the city, where a 100ft tall Mother Mary looks scornfully down at all the sinners. A 27-yr old fellow Pennsylvanian joined Justin and I for the day. Yogi had gone to Pitt and played Wide Receiver behind and was roommates with Larry Fitzgerald -- and was an unwaivering Cardinals fan despite not liking their chances versus the Steel Curtain. He had worked the last 4 years under Pete Carol out at USC and was now taking 6 weeks to go travel South America. His upcoming job upon return is to market Coach Carol`s WINFOREVER saying. He already has endorsements from ESPN and Nike and some coverage on 60minutes to build from -- life is good when you´re a talented wide receiver with a winning smile.

After yet another day of seeing (the same) sights in Santiago, Justin and I hopped on a bus to head South. The seats were the Semi-Cama classification... and just fantastic. Despite some peoples need to rustle plastic bags for 30 minutes at a time at 6:30am, I slept pretty well in the wide chairs that reclined 45 degrees. We arrived at 9am in Puerto Montt and schlepted our giant backpacks (with daypacks haning off the front) down to the Ferry station to find that the Thursday boat had already filled. oops. It turns out that there is in fact no road that heads further south from Puerto Montt, so you must either cross the mountains into Argentina or take a ferry. We decided to fly. The flight set us back about 125USD but combined with the 35USD bus ride still saved us 80USD from Santiago-to-Coyhaique total. ... AAAAND we were able to go spend 5 hours hanging out on a beautiful beach overlooking the city with mountains in the background and cruise ships anchored out in the bay.


We´re now in Coyhaique. The flight was uneventful, but the airport is actually 55km away so we received a nice tour of the surrounding countryside. We catch a bus tomorrow at 9:30am toward Cochrane and get dropped off on the side of the road at Entrada Rio Baker. We´ll spend the next 6+ weeks there before picking up to go hit all the tourist sights again.

Santiago II

my Spanish is improving rapidly, but I can't understand a thing if it is spoken. Apparently Chileans drop syllables and use lots of slang phrases though, so it is hard for even graduate level speakers to get it all. I've been staying in a nice hostel (~$15 a night, which isn't that cheap but it's easier than moving). It's so confusing because sunset is actually 9pm here whereas it was 4:15pm when I was at home on Friday -- it's almost exhausting to have so many more hours of daylight. I wish I had some more of them back in Portland. Saturday night I made friends with my Austrian roommate and two Australians and hit up a huge local club. Apparently things don't really get started until midnight. A live band came on at 1am and we ended up back at home around 6am -- wasn't exactly the way I had planned to spend my first night in Chilean (/any night in Chile for that matter), but I made some friends and got to see a good bit of Santiago.
Sunday I slept in late -- I had slept about 6 hours thursday and friday nights combined -- and I just wondered around the city parks nearby. Monday, the Australians and I rented bikes and saw a bit more of the downtown. We had lunch in the giant seafood market (Mercado Central) -- had a great seafood soup -- it wasn't gourmet but it would have cost at least $25 at home but was just $5 and was full of clams, mussels, fish, and crab with no filler material (i.e. potatoes, corn) just the good stuff. Justin gets in today at 8pm and I'm supposed to meet him at the airport and escort him back to the hostel. I feel fairly confident navigating the city during the day, but I'm not super thrilled about finding my way after dark--I'm not sure I'll recognize things as well. As two guys we should be pretty safe though I still have yet to use the metro (which is supposed to be very safe, mom). We'll spend tonight in Santiago, and fly to Coyhaique on Wendnesday. It will be nice to have a buddy, but I think it has been good for my Spanish to get my feet wet alone.

Santiago!

I'm here!

26 hours and three flights with three different airlines and going through security three times, my bag and I eventually reached Chile early this morning. On that note... time here is 2 hours faster than East Coast ( so 9am in Pittsburgh is 11am here). Since Chile is actually due South from the East Coast, it means that sunrise is at about 7am and sunset near 9pm, which makes a lot more sense to me than the 5:15am sunrises that American time creates during its peak of summer.

I cashed in some Kharma almost immediately upon arrival... made friendly with another tall blond who is from somewhere in South America, but has been a student in Santiago for 6 months, and he basically escorted me directly to my hostel. I thought it would have been challenging to bus to the hostel alone -- I probably wouldn't have ever made it here if not for him. Since I don't have a cell phone, we unfortunately parted ways after finding the hostel. So I guess I'll just pay it forward.

I spent a few hours today wondering around the Bellavista section of the city where the hostel is located just trying to get oriented. Tomorrow I'll probably be a little more bold and take a camera with me to go see some of the big sights.

It's strange to be surrounded by a language I can't understand (reading is okay though), but stranger to be here with out any plan and no companions or affiliations at all. But, new expereinces are why I'm here in the first place. Anyway, time to go make friends/ learn Espanol / and find some delicious empanadas for dinner.

So where are you going?

Ahh well glad you asked…


In Chile, Jon, Justin and I will be volunteering with the Patagonia Land Trust in the Chacabuco Valley of Chile’s Region XI in Northern Patagonia. Basically, the founder of North Face and the former CEO of Patagonia Clothing are married. And filthy rich. Obviously. These two rounded up some other benefactors and bought up 300 sq miles of sheep ranches abutting a 600 sq mile National Reserve in southern Chile. Taken together, that's nearly the size of Rhode Island and three times the size of Grand Teton National Park. The founders bought the 'estancia' complete with sheep, and have been slowly working to decrease the herd while they remove any traces of the last 150 years of agricultural use.


And that's where we come in. The job description was almost entirely composed of euphemisms, but it seems like we'll be pulling out miles of old barb-wire fences and other manual labor tasks. We'll head out to a location on Monday morning, work there for four days, and return to base camp on Friday evening. We'll then have two rest days to go explore the park on our own or head 15 miles to the nearest town (Cochrane, pop. 3000). We'll camp out every night, but will have access to electricity, showers, and laundry once a week. To keep their funds heading to actual projects, the program asks for $15/day for food and maintenance of facilities. Elevation at base camp is only ~ 1500ft, but 7000ft peaks loom just a few miles away. A giant glacier field with some 15000ft peaks lies 50 miles to our west. Find more information and pictures at the gorgeous website www.PatagoniaLandTrust.org


Here is a map of the location …

And a photograph of the base camp …