Kevin Andersen Blog

Had some manatees in the marina for the last two weeks:

 

These two were behind the trawler in the next slip, sleeping.

Waking up to take a breath.

 

Rolling over to get a look at the photographer.

We woke up in November at No Name Harbor to a guest relaxing in our boat’s dinghy, tied astern:

 

Marine iguana in the Avon dinghy.

Here’s the remix of photos and music of the second part of our four-part loop trip thru Utah in early October. 

 

This part is Goblin Valley State Park, just off the San Rafael Desert, with Wild Horse Butte the nearest significant landmark.  After GVSP, we headed west to Capitol Reeef National Park, and did a couple days worth of day hikes and exploring the heritage of both the Fremont People a thousand years ago, and the Mormons of over a hundred years ago.  Click on the link below and allow a minute for it to load.

http://s140.photobucket.com/albums/r33/kevonionia/?action=view¤t=d2c81ab6.pbr

We both had an extra-good time in Capitol Reef.

We did a big loop trip thru Utah in early October — a shockingly beautiful trip.  What a spectacular place Utah is. 

 Here’s a 3-minute remix of part one (of four) of that Utah trip.  This is Arches NP and Moab.  We camped on BLM land on a walk-in site about 30 yards from the Colorado River, and did excursions — day hikes — from our camp in Arches, and up canyons off the Colorado.  We had a great morning hike on the second day, then rain in the afternoon, a beautiful evening, followed by listening to Aron Ralston speak at the local high school auditorium.  That was followed by another day at Arches and invading local UTAH winery (one of two ‘real’ wineries in Utah) south of Moab.  The remix (photos and music) — is here:

http://s140.photobucket.com/albums/r33/kevonionia/?action=view&current=4fa0b316.pbr

Give it a minute to load.

To break up the pix, here’s a note about an event we attended in Moab on Oct. 1, 2007:   

On our Utah NP road trip that just ended, we had a rainy day & evening while camping near Moab, and I remembered seeing a poster in town for a “lecture” at the local auditorium by Aron Ralston, known by all hikers (and most everyone else) as the guy who was forced to cut off his arm or die in a slot canyon in Canyonlands NP. 

Rather than us facing a soggy night in the tent on a site at the BLM’s Colorado River Rec. Area (off Hwy. 128), we went.  Although this was a Monday in October, several hundred people still came to hear what he had to say. 

 

Aron Ralston speaking at in Moab on Oct. 1, 2007.  

It was the end of April in ’03 that he got his hand wedged in between an 800-pound chockstone and the wall of that narrow canyon, so he’s had time to tell his story many times — and to write a bestselling book about it.  So he has a very articulate, introspective presentation, and even I (the cynic) was surprised to be so drawn into it.   

What an incredible story he told – with a slide presentation to accompany his talk.  The article in Outside (August of 2003) a couple of years ago certainly kept my interest, but hearing him tell the tale in person put a whole new light on what he was forced to do – and what he has done with his life since then.  

I’ve since read the book – a signed copy, more on that in a bit – and realize that he was, and still is, a very serious outdoor extreme athlete.  He had climbed most of Colorado’s 14er’s in winter – solo, prior to the accident, and has now bagged the rest of the fifty-nine (in winter – solo) since the mishap. 

His detractors point out his screw-ups that contributed to his drastic action, most obviously his failure to give someone the details of his trip that would have helped in the search.  He readily admits to his errors.  And in his defense, during his 4-day trip to Utah (from Aspen) when the accident occurred, he had more planned than most of us do in an entire summer.   

The bottom line is that any canyoneer or extreme outdoor athlete who reads the book or hears his speech will do what is necessary to avoid his mistakes.  Proceeds from ticket & book sales at his event in Moab went to SUWA, or the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.  Blue John Canyon, where he was trapped, is in Utah’s Canyonlands NP.  Interestingly, he was flown to a Moab hospital from the slot canyon after he hiked out of Blue John.

  

 Ralston signing the book, proceeds going to SUWA, Oct. 1, 2007.

Ralston has a great love of nature and desire to preserve it.  A part of his talk focused on the BLM local office’s announcement of a “plan” to open up great areas of the wilderness around several of the national parks in Utah to Off Highway Vehicles (OHVs).  If their plan goes through, in some of these areas the hiker would walk no more than half a mile before encountering an OHV trail.  That was certainly a factor in my buying the book.   

For more on SUWA, click here:

http://www.suwa.org/site/PageServer 

I’d post a link to Ralston’s site but it is temporarily down.

 

Second in the six-part series on the fall vacation to SD, CO and Utah.  This is a “remix” with pix of a day-trip over Guanella Pass into Georgetown, Colorado, the old mining town turned sleepy little tourist stop on I-70 (the big excitement now being when mother earth sends a refrigerator-sized boulder down on the roadway squashing a car like a repugnant bug.)  It was a perfect late-September day in GT.  Click below to view.

http://s140.photobucket.com/albums/r33/kevonionia/?action=view¤t=e999d409.pbr

 

 Bison, Custer State Park, South Dakota, September 20, 2007.

This is the first in at least a six-part series of photos and text on a long — 3 1/2 weeks — vacation to South Dakota, Colorado and UTAH.  The first pix here are in a “remix style”, so just click below to see the photos taken in Custer State Park in SD in late September.

http://s140.photobucket.com/albums/r33/kevonionia/?action=view¤t=76c39cdd.pbr

On the hike to Harney Peak, highest point in South Dakota, Black Hills trip, Sep. 22, 2007.

(This is the no-longer-in-use stone firewatch tower atop Harney built by the CCC in the 1930s.)

 

Having to abandon my photo storage site, since they’re quitting the business at the end of September, I’ve scrambled to place all my photos on another online photo site.  So I’m using photobucket and snapfish.  Testing the “remix” capabilities on photobucket, I made this slide show with music of our July ‘06 heli-hike to Mt. Assiniboine Provincial Park in BC, Canada:

http://s140.photobucket.com/albums/r33/kevonionia/JUL06%20Mt%20Assiniboine%20Helihike/?action=view¤t=3feca358.pbr

(To view a ‘remix’ of this hike with music, go to here.)

Spent Aug 8th-14th in northern Washington State hiking the excellent Little Beaver Creek/Big Beaver Creek loop in North Cascades National Park.  Four of us went, all working for the airline at that horribly frantic & disorganized place called Miami International Airport.  We went hiking to get away from there and enjoy the serenity of the wilderness — sans people. 

We had read about the hike in two books, Falcon’s Hiking in the North Cascades, and in Ira Spring & Harvey Manning’s great 100 Classic Hikes in Washington. 

We had chosen this route for a 5-night backpack for a variety of reasons.  Debbie had been working long hours all summer, I was preoccupied with book sales, and Tony & Alvaro had been working extra by flying to Cuba as ground security coordinators on the Miami-Havana charter flights, so no one had the time to do much training (and Alvaro, the rookie, proved he didn’t need much anyway.) 

Plus we wouldn’t have much time for an altitude adjustment, since we flew into Seattle from Miami one day and were at the trailhead the next.  And this Little-Big Beaver loop trip was at a low elevation — averaging about 2,500 feet, never over 5,000 — and had some incredible scenery.  And the hike allowed us to use a boat up Ross Lake to enter at one trail head, go over a pass and return to another lakeside trailhead, so the loop required no backtracking.

 

Map from Ira & Harvey’s excellent book, 100 Classic Hikes in WA, showing the Little to Big Beaver Loop. This book is highly recommended.

Afraid that we wouldn’t get the backcountry permits, I made everyone get up at the crack of dawn on Thursday to be early at the Ranger permit office in Marblemount.  The nice ranger looked at the itinerary, gazed at her computer and to our relief said we could have the camps we wanted.  She said something to us about our hike “being popular, although few people do it,” which didn’t make any sense until we were well into the hike.  What we got from this hike can be summed up in the following two statistics: 

Number of BEARS seen in five days on the trail and in camp: ONE. 

Number of PEOPLE seen in 5 days on the trail and in camp once we were dropped off at the trailhead:  NONE*.

(*on the last mile as we rolled into the lakeside Pumpkin Mountain camp, we came across a kayaker who had wandered up from the boat camp; he was the only person we saw on the trail.) 

Hard to believe that Seattle and environs with its millions was less than 150 miles away.  For an “air camping” backpack, this was one of the best.  What follows is the story in photos of the 40-mile hike.

  

Day ONE:  6.1 miles, 4.5 from trailhead to Perry Creek camp:  Tony Fennema, Debbie Andersen & Alvaro Nieto at the hike’s start – they’re still smiling.  All photos by Kevon Andersen, the fourth hiker.

  

The floating Ross Lake Resort, where we caught the boat up the lake to the trailhead.

   

Alvaro and a forested backdrop of firs on the trail.  He was the leader of the pack and first to finish.

  

Close-up of ground plant and the bark of the red cedar tree.

Alvaro standing up behind the trunk of a giant, ancient red cedar, estimated to be more than 1000 years old.

Lady fern and Douglas fir bark in the filtered light through the overhead canopy.

  

Alvaro & Debbie setting up their tents at Perry Creek camp.  No one else seen on the trail, no one else camped there.

  

All the camps had a stream nearby.  As a precaution, all water used for drinking and cooking was purified, using the reliable PUR filter (in Tony’s hands), or boiled.  Each person drank about 2 liters of water per day.

  

Each camp had one of these, an open-air composting pit toilet, with this one at Perry Camp.  And most had great views from the backcountry throne.  

Ultralight meals.  On the stump is the package of freeze-dried dinner (this was Chicken Teriyaki).  We used up the last of the stash of packaged freeze-dried meals and will use Sarah Kirkconnel’s freezer-bag homemade meals on future trips. Those are plastic origami bowls, and they collapse flat when carried.  On the right are a titanium bowl/cup and film cans of spices.

 

Tony & Alvaro at the first night’s dinner.  In Alvaro’s hand is a spork – a combination plastic spoon & fork – everything is geared to be light, except for that monster pack seen below, Kevon’s old Kelty Redcloud (5,000 cu.in.+) loaned to Alvaro for the trip.

  

Day TWO:  8 miles, Perry camp to Stillwell camp.  Many of the gullies and avalanche fields were covered in head-high ferns and bushes, many with berries.  They called out “Bear” often to not surprise one, since they saw plenty of berry-loaded bear scat on the trail.

 

Close-up of the shadow of a fern on a granite boulder near the trail.  On Day Two we hiked through an 1/8-mile strecth of avalanche rubble with many snakes (several dozen) basking in the sun.  Alvaro led and shooed them out of the way.

 

The trail wound through dried and wide watersheds on Day Two, since a tremendous amount of rain falls here in winter.  Here the trail follows a creek for a ways – easy to get disoriented here – so the trail was marked with “blazes,” the blue plastic ribbon on a branch in the upper left.

  

Trail crossing a boulder field of large scree (falling rock) as we near camp on Day Two.   Sign for Stillwell Camp, where we would put up the tents for the next two nights.  Second day done and still we have seen NO PEOPLE, and NO other hikers are at the camp.

 

Alvaro with the fire at Stillwell camp.  We’ve seldom been allowed to have an open campfire at a backcountry campsite in a National Park, but with so few people on these trails, it was allowed here.  So we had a fire the last four nights.

 

Day THREE:  Dayhike to below Whatcom Pass & return, 10 miles.  With the tents up and the food hung in net bags from trees (to keep bears and rodents out), we set out on a day hike in the upper Little Beaver Creek watershed on the third day.  Debbie & Tony went half way up and headed back, and Alvaro & Kevon hiked up to near Whatcom Pass.  

 

Alvaro at a stream on the hike up toward Whatcom Pass.

Waterfall, one of seven visible, as the canyon narrows on the hike up what is known as Luna Cirque.

At our lunch stop in a steep boulder field, Alvaro looking up at the cirque with Mount Challenger and its glacier above him.  This string of peaks is known as the Northern Pickets.

  Close-up of Challenger Glacier and Mount Challenger.  The melting glacier and ice fields up here feed Little Beaver Creek.  

Alvaro on a fallen cedar over Little Beaver Creek.  The tree fell in the huge flood in the Pacific Northwest in November of 2006.  Scrambling over three logs over the creek knocked 4 miles off our day hike up to the cirque.

Day FOUR:  Stillwell camp to Luna camp, 7 miles.  Alvaro and a large hewn cedar.  The morning started with a bear sighting when Kevon went early to a nearby stream for water.  The bear was foraging on the bank about 20 yards away.  When he came back with reinforcements the bear was gone. 

At Beaver Pass after the switchbacks up at the emergency winter shelter.  All downhill from here, with many trailside bushes loaded with blueberries and huckleberries for the picking.

Young fir in filtered sun on the Big Beaver trail. 

After an up-and-down day, Alvaro at Luna Camp with his fire.  Debbie and Tony are napping in their tents.  The nylon tarps – called rain-preventers by Kevon since when they go up it never rains – are up just in case.  No one seen on the trail, no one at the other campsite here. 

Day FIVE:  The long day, a little over 10 miles to the Big Beaver trailhead and the camp along Ross Lake.  We woke to beautiful clear, blue skies, thanks to having up the “rain-preventer” tarps.  This is Elephant Butte.

 Lady fern on the trail.  The stands of giant 1,000-year-old cedars were to have been inundated by raising the Ross Dam back in the 1960s, but an epic 15-year battle by environmentalists kept the Big Beaver Valley and its groves of ancient red cedars from being lost forever.  Thank you. 

 

Sunlit, translucent leaves with Sourdough Mountain as a backdrop. 

 

Tony plunges his head into the glacier-fed waters of Big Beaver Creek to cool off.

 

After a long hike, the view of Jack Mountain from the shore below our camp at Pumpkin Mountain.

 

Day SIX:  Water taxi – made of aluminum because of floating logs – picks them up promptly at 9 a.m. on Tuesday. 

Debbie & Alvaro with North Cascades Nat’l Park behind them, cruising back to the dock at the dam, hike almost  over.  (We had to walk uphill for a mile back to the car.) 

From the boat, Pyramid and  Snowfield Peaks rising over Ross Lake.

Back at the car at 10 a.m., celebrating the hike’s successful end with an appropriately named Pyramid Ale with Pyramid Peak overhead.  Photo was taken by a local logger on his day off, who took the picture and joined us in a morning microbrew. You can smell this motley crew from here.

Stopping at a roadside fruit stand in the Columbia River Valley.  Alvaro has apricots in hand and those are monster peaches on display.  The apples — millions of them — aren’t ready for picking til early September.

With a day to kill in Seattle, catching the Mariners-Twins game from our $10 seats at Safeco Field, with Seattle’s tallest building upper left and the retractable roof at upper right.  The Twins won, 6-1.

After dinner at an Irish pub in Seattle’s Queen Anne area, we caught the sun setting behind the mountains on the Olympic Peninsula across Puget Sound from Seattle.

So why were there so few people on the trail?  We can only guess.  Perhaps gas prices are limiting the number of  people going to the lesser known parks like North Cascades.  We saw quite a few hikers getting permits at the ranger station, and think that since most of them were locals, they were preferring to hike the higher alpine trails with those fantastic views in August.  That said, this would be a great fall hike when those upper trails are unhikable.

How do you beat the high cost of gas on a long-distance, cross-country vacation?  Don’t get in a car, at least not yours.  And as I watch crude oil prices continue to spiral upward this summer of ‘07, I’d like to tell how we battled preposterous pump-prices on a fall trip when this insane spike began two years ago.  On that trip we attempted to do what we thought was impossible: travel halfway across America, enjoying a five-day stop in a spectacular national park, without using our own car or a rental.

Sure, we had made excursions to foreign lands in our younger days with just the packs on our backs.  But could we still do it trekking all the way from Chicago to Portland, Oregon?  Or would we cave in by Montana and whip out the credit card for a gas-guzzling SUV?  Debbie and I decided to try this experiment with Denver-resident J.J. Smith, our longtime fall travel companion.  We had backpacked with him in Tuscany on a two-week loop trek from Florence to Siena and back years earlier. 

But for this trip we planned to fly from Denver and Miami to Chicago and take a train west.  The plan was to hop off in Montana to hike and camp in Glacier National Park, so we had to take all that outdoor gear with us.  A daunting challenge since our every move was not being recorded, and there were no production assistants to carry our packs or act as chauffeurs.  We faced reality, not pseudo-reality.

 

The Empire Builder pulling into West Glacier, MT (this is the eastbound train).

J.J. had been the one to suggest taking Amtrak’s historic train, the Empire Builder, running daily from Chicago to either Portland or Seattle (the train splits in Spokane.)  We did our planning on short notice, within a month of departure.  After dealing with Amtrak reservations on the phone and the Web, we found and bought cheaper tickets ($184/pp, with stopover) to Portland rather than Seattle. 

We touched down on our early flights to Chicago on a perfect, blue-sky autumn day.  Taking a shuttle from O’Hare to an airport hotel, we dropped off our bulky backpacks and rode the shuttle back to the airport to catch the elevated train.  At the O’Hare station for the Blue line, for $5 we bought a 24-hour pass on the famous El.  We headed downtown and over to Oak Park to view the Frank Lloyd Wright home and studio and other nearby houses designed early in his career.After the tour, we wandered back to Oak Park’s downtown, in the midst of an autumn street fair, stopping at a wine bar for bruschetta and a local microbrew, observing the festivities bathed in golden afternoon light.

The next morning, we were up early loading the packs on the hotel van to repeat the El shuffle downtown.  We dropped them off at a locker at the majestic, but deserted Union Station, and walked to Grant Park for Chicago’s annual Celtic Festival.  Beneath a dozen tents was every kind of Celtic music and dance.  And out in the street there was even a tattoo – a competition of marching drummers and bagpipe players.

By two that afternoon we were aboard the famous Empire Builder heading for Milwaukee.  The train took us north and west across Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota.  Being a Sunday, the evening train was filled with young Chicagoans heading back to a string of college towns.  Most of them lugged big garbage bags stuffed with clean laundry, ransom extracted from their parents for the visit home.  By the Minnesota border and nightfall, the train was almost empty.

Our remaining fellow passengers were a quiet, subdued lot, except for an older woman who was traveling with her middle-aged son about four rows back.  In her loud and raspy voice she continually griped to the passing car attendant about not being able to smoke.  We lost her wheezy cough and chronic complaints somewhere in central Minnesota, and I expelled my sordid thoughts of throwing mama from the train for some sleep.

Conductor & passenger silhouetted against the Empire Builder in Minot, ND.

We had opted to buy economy seats for two reasons, one, the sleepers were already full, and two, a sleeper was more than $500 a person, and we were out to do this trip on the cheap.  The economy seats on an Amtrak Superliner car are spacious, with lots of recline and an extendable footrest – much like a business-class seat on a plane. But the longest we’d ever been on a flight was ten hours, and from Chicago to Montana our reign on our Superliner throne was a marathon 36 hours.

We breakfasted at dawn in the dining car, finding the prices reasonable, the coffee strong and the French toast delicious.  The endless rolling hills, dotted with a surprising amount of lakes and ponds in eastern North Dakota, slowly gave way to more arid country.  We were able to stretch our legs at a scheduled refueling stop in Minot, North Dakota.  I could not think of a better way to see this endless landscape than by train – unless high above, speeding by at 600 mph on a plane.

Sunset approaching, we entered that band of mountains rising up in western Montana, the Northern Rockies.  Just after dark we hopped off at the tiny station of West Glacier, within a mile of the southwest entrance to Glacier National Park.  We donned our packs and took about 30 steps to the Glacier Highland Motel, a small, log-built inn across the street from the quaint station.  The plan was to shower and get a good night’s rest in a bed before heading into the park – and a tent.

We caught a ride the next morning on the van delivering passengers from the eastbound Empire Builder to the lodges on Lake McDonald in the park.  After persuading the driver to drop us off at Apgar, the one campground open after September 15^th, we wandered about until we zeroed in on our favorite vacant site. 

We were car-camping, but car less.  This situation bothered some of our fellow campers, who strolled by and invariably asked what had happened to our automobile. We explained our grand experiment, which elicited either bewilderment (by the motor-home crowd) or support (by Europeans, mostly Germans driving overstuffed Echoes, who had been told they couldn’t use public transportation to see the West.)  Twice we came back from day hikes to find items such as half-used propane canisters on our campsite table, gifts from concerned neighbors.

Debbie & J.J. at the start of the dayhike on the Highline Trail in Glacier NP. 

And hike we did.  Glacier is truly a hiker’s park with 700 miles of trails. A single road crosses the park, the scenic Going-to-the-Sun Road.  With many hikes starting from the roadside, the big question for us was how to get to the trailhead.  We hitchhiked.  Realizing, as we stuck out our thumbs, how recent books and movies have portrayed the car-less crowd as cannibals, we wondered aloud just how easy this hitchhiking was going to be.  We were picked up by the first car, a fancy Suburban owned by a recently retired couple from South Carolina.  She told us that they had spied we were on foot from their trailer back at the campground.  She was effusive and sweet and the obvious reason we were picked up.  He barely spoke, and the three of us believed that he had a gun hidden under his seat ready to fend off any suspected attack.  We made feeble attempts to prove we were harmless, mostly by J.J. conversing non-stop until we reached Logan Pass, our drop-off point.  When we jumped out we could see the relief on our driver’s face as it dawned on him that he wasn’t going to be bludgeoned – or talked to death.

Looking into the McDonald Creek watershed from the Highline Trail. 

The Highline Trail below the Garden Wall is the premier, one-way day hike in Glacier.  Eight miles long, the trail slopes away from Logan Pass hanging high above the famous road.  Then it climbs over a saddle to Granite Park chalet, an alpine hut already closed for the season.  We had two obstacles to overcome on the hike:  the early-morning ice at the start of the cliff-hanging trail, and J.J.’s serious fear of bears.  Glacier has a healthy population of grizzlies, and only a month before two hikers were attacked after surprising a sow and her cub just over the ridge from the Highline. We knew all about it.  J.J. had express-mailed the clipping to us from The Denver Post.  But we saw no bears, just spectacular scenery on a perfect autumn day.

 Hitchhiking, our major form of transportation in GNP, back to camp.

After a picnic at the chalet, we walked the 4-mile Loop Trail down to a curve in Going-to-the-Sun Road.  We put out our thumbs and were immediately picked up by a young couple from Austin, TX.  They said they were shocked to see people our age hitchhiking; we figured we got the ride out of curiosity.

Nostalgic mass transit: A Jammer in Glacier NP. 

The following day we hopped aboard one of those famous red coaches called a Jammer, for an all-day tour of the park.  The canvas-topped coaches, built by White Motors in the 1930s, were recently restored by a grant from the Ford Foundation.

View from a Jammer stop of Wild Goose Island on St. Mary’s Lake. 

With rain forecast, we broke camp the following morning and headed up to Lake McDonald Lodge to spend our final night in Glacier at the historic inn.  After stowing our packs in a back office, we attacked the breakfast buffet like a trio of trappers coming in out of the wild.  Even the Lodge’s dining room is famous; the noted Western artist Charles Russell held court there during his frequent visits to the park back in the early 1900s.  Our digs?  A quaint log cabin on the grounds with a lakefront view, where we watched the DeSmet, a ‘30s-era wooden tour boat, make its final circle of the lake before being drydocked for the winter.

Log cabin for a night at Lake McDonald in Glacier NP. 

The next morning we had the gracious staff again stow our bags, since we didn’t catch the train west until eight that night.  We hitched a ride to the Avalanche Lake trailhead, driven there by a park ranger on her day off.  We hiked a forested trail from the lake back to the Lodge, making it a decent 7-mile walk.  After a van ride back to the station, we boarded the Empire Builder for the final scenic leg to Portland.

The DeSmet on its final voyage before being drydocked for winter. 

The hike had exhausted us and we slept like babies, not even aware of the train splitting up in Spokane.  We woke at dawn to the train entering the beautiful Columbia River Valley, with snow-blanketed Mt. Hood poking its head above the southern horizon.  We were at the other Union Station in Portland by 10 a.m.  Hefting our packs, we walked the eight blocks to a light-rail station, where, for $1.75, we hopped on Portland’s MAX that deposited us less than 80 yards from the PDX ticket counter for the flight to Denver and home. 

Hopping off Portland’s MAX train at the PDX airport. 

We had accomplished our mission.  In eight days we had toured one of our country’s largest cities and hiked in one of her most spectacular national parks, finding ourselves enraptured again by her diversity and her beauty.  And we had done it without being gouged a penny for overpriced gas.