Delicate Arch

I’ve mentioned this before, but I have this mental condition where I avoid anything that sounds too popular in my mind. Delicate Arch, in Arches National Park has always been one of those overly popular places. I’ve seen so many pictures of it over the years that I simply never had any interest in seeing it in person. I had some experienced friends tell me recently that it was indeed worth seeing, and that the hike was pretty cool, so since I had a week in Moab, and since it was still very snowy in many nearby places I figured I’d give it a shot. Below is my “review.”


Delicate Arch

The first half of the hike is rather boring, but after a long ascent up a large body of slickrock things start to get more interesting. After not too long you round a cliff and walk unexpectedly out onto the large rock bench with the arch on it. The arch is much larger than I had imagined. It looks to be four or five stories tall, and it’s unarguably a beautiful carving. I was sure by the time I left that I had almost found the control panel that turned it into an inter-dimensional portal.


Delicate Arch

So the thing to do is sit around and wait for the sun to set, and that’s exactly what every one does. As expected, there were a ton of people milling about. Some arrived early and had staked out their respective positions. They had their tripods set up and were snapping a picture every three minutes, capturing the slowly changing light. The majority of people though, were constantly getting in the way of that first set of people by taking turns posing underneath the arch in whatever silly charade they could think of. I mean seriously, some people were actually pretending to be in bed underneath the arch. How do they think of those things? At least they were having fun.


Delicate Arch.

I didn’t see any way to get a shot of the arch without people standing under it or in the way of it, unless I took enough pictures that I caught every part of the background in at least one picture, due to people constantly moving around, stacked the resulting images into layers, and then photoshop the people out. Furthermore, it seemed silly to just stand around and take the same picture I’ve seen a million times over. The arch is pretty, but it’s really just one jewel of an exceptionally interesting landscape of slickrock.

The rock plummets off a massive escarpment into a canyon right behind the arch, and also off the side of the trail that you walk on during your approach. A deep round bowl on the front side of the arch prevents people from getting any different angle than what you normally see in typical photos. I found the bowl itself very interesting. It was probably 50 yards long and 25 wide with no outlet. Eventually my curiosity (and lack of being able to sit still) got the better of me and I wandered away to see if I could get down into that bowl.


Delicate Arch. Here you can see everything in the other pictures. The depth of the bowl, the other arch and little people on the rim that do a good job at demonstrating how large the cliff is in front of the Arch.

I began climbing around all over the place. There were a lot of neat little areas nearby, and I kept running into a few other people who had similar interests. Then the sun set and everyone started heading back to the parking lot en masse. That meant I had to run back. There was no way I could bear being stuck in post concert style traffic in the middle of nowhere.


Delicate Arch.

Speaking of Arches, across the street is a road that winds along the Colorado River. There is a little state park in the area that goes to a place called Corona Arch. It's a kind of a fun hike to a pretty arch that's like a scale model of Rainbow Bridge in Lake Powell.


Corona Arch

Island in the Sky

One summer at Bullfrog, on the stark shoreline of Lake Powell, the temperature climbed to around 120 degrees for two weeks. During that time we discovered a way out of the heat by driving up into the highlands. The nearby Henry Mountains rise up 12,000 feet to sub alpine meadows. Gazing eastward across a wide martian landscape, our vision was unhindered all the way out to the La Sal Mountains in Colorado. We couldn't really make sense of the landscape in between. It literally looked like red martian satellite imagery.



This past spring I decided it was time to visit Canyonlands National Park. I've only heard good things about it, and although it was right next to Lake Powell, the logistics in getting there during that time were out of balance with the million other, closer places that were available for exploration. I left Alaska, and arrived in Utah just in time for a freak April snow storm. I got to drive through snow most of the way from Salt Lake to Moab. Knowing the storm was coming I didn't take long to settle into town before heading up into the park that afternoon. I needed exercise just to stay awake anyway.



Canyonlands is divided into three naturally defined geologic areas (although a fourth area exists at the almost inaccessible west side of the park). The afternoon when I visited the Island in the Sky District, the most accessible area, the temperature was a foggy 26 degrees with blown snow squalls. I wasn’t happy about it at all. I had left Alaska precisely to get away from the snow. The good news was that although I was walking through a blizzard, I was quite comfortable, since the storm was still quit a bit warmer than I’d been most of the time for the previous 6 months. It was actually a nice day to walk the dog, although my dog would immediately kill himself in such a place.




Another squall approaches. Quickly too, it only took a few minutes for it to overtake me.

Walking in snow in the desert was a new experience for me. Slickrock, covered in ice, is definitely some slick rock. That had to be kept in mind when walking near cliffs, which was usually where I was. The snow also covered up small groups of cacti. Retracing my steps to find my way back in the poor visibility that first day I saw numerous cacti sticking out from my footprints. Luckily I never got pricked on the sides of my shoes.




That morning it was just perfect in the sunlight, but like a refrigerator in the shade.


In the distance, the Henry Mountains in sight proved to me that many years earlier i was looking out across Canyonlands.

Yet another hazard created by the sticky snow were snow bridges that covered up wide joints between blocks of stone. The cracks were big enough to fall through, sometimes hundreds of feet, so upon seeing a rift come in from the cliff edge and disappear under the snow, I felt it was wise to make a wide berth around it.


I needed to go here for sure.


This just looks ridiculously impossible. I had to find a way.


Wanted to go here too.


The Green River

The next morning I returned. I had hoped to get up before dawn to catch a sunrise picture, but that didn’t happen. It’s such a long drive from Moab that by the time I got back to the hotel I would have had to gone straight to bed right after dinner in order to wake up in time. I did manage to get back to the park pretty early. Somehow the following morning was crystal clear. The sunlight was warm enough that I only needed a light jacket despite an air temperature of 26F. In sunlight the redrock covered in snow was very pretty, and I soon found myself leaving the viewpoints and wandering far off along the edge to see how far I could get. The views below were spectacular, and I could clearly see the Henry Mountains far to the West. For those of you who worked at Bullfrog and went up into the Henry Mountains, I can now say with certainty that you were looking out over Canyonlands without knowing what you were seeing. I vowed to come back for some sunset pictures, but I never did. There were simply too many other options to take advantage of.


I couldn't see the bottom of this canyon, so i couldn't tell how tall that column was.


There was so much detail to see you couldn't even make sense of it.


It looked dry and almost sunny in the bottom of the canyons.

East Maui

By Maree Shogren

The road to Hana was only 60 miles long, but it took us four and a half hours to get to our destination. It was beautiful on that side of the island and not very populated since it was so hard to get to. Unfortunately, we had only planned a day trip and in retrospect should have planned to stay in Hana for at least a couple of days.



We finally reached the parking lot of the Seven Sacred Pools with only a few hours of daylight left and we didn't look forward to driving back on that road in the dark. We decided to hike up to Kupulua Falls first and then visit the pools on the way down. It was a hot, sunny day with a cool ocean breeze so the 1.5 mile hike up into the bamboo forest was delightful after that long, stressful drive. As we ascended into the forest, I was in awe of the bamboo. I'd never been in a bamboo forest before and I was surprised by how dense it was and how quickly it grew. Bamboo can grow up to 3 feet in one day given perfect conditions to do so. It seemed they were 100 feet high. What I found particularly interesting was the way the forest sounded. When gusts of wind blew through the forest the bamboo clanged against each other sounding like giant wooden chimes you'd hear on someone's front porch or a creepy or a creepy wooden dock full of huge old sailing frigates. I loved listening to it, but as the sun started to sink in the sky and the forest got more and more dense the further we went up...I started to get a little frightened. I think a bamboo forest after dark on a windy night would be a very creepy place to be.

There were many pools to investigate along the way and the trail started to take on a more groomed look with the addition of stairways and boardwalks. There were even livestock gates we had to go through and be sure to close behind us so that none of the cows would get loose. The falls were 400 feet straight up a cliff wall, but Hawaii was experiencing a drought when we were there so there wasn't much water coming from the falls. It was a serene place for a quick break before we decided to head back down the trail. Sunset was still coming, after all.

When I had gone to Maui before, the Seven Sacred Pools were much more full, and I had even jumped off a cliff into the main pool which was overflowing into the ocean. There were warnings to be sure not to get sucked out to sea because of a shark's den under that opening. On this day the water level was far lower and if you jumped from the cliff, you would undoubtedly bump your noggin, or worse. Since daylight was dwindling, we decide not to take a dip and to head back to the other side of island. For some reason the traffic was considerably lighter, probably the fear of impending darkness, so Adam was able to race back to the hotel an hour and a half faster than on the way in. That's a big difference for a 40 mile drive, especially considering we never stopped for photos on the longer drive!

There's a beach at the end of the road in Makena, appropriately called 'Big Beach , that we had heard about. It was pretty crowded when we went to check it out so we decided to venture where most people were not going to go. There was a smaller beach just past Big Beach where we parked and then walked down a trail along the coast for a half mile until we reached the lava flows. Apparently, the lava flows were only a couple hundred years old and we were walking on the same trails that King Kamehameha had walked on not so long ago. The area was rampant with wild goats. They got around really well considering the terrain was so inhospitable.

It was a pretty hot day, and the heat emanating from the black lava felt like I was being scorched. You could see heat waves in every direction. We were looking for a private beach aptly called 'The Oasis” which was supposed to be about another 2 miles on the flows. We were trying to follow the markers in a guide book that we had borrowed from a friend, but the markers were hard to find.

Finally, we were starting to walk by an area with palm trees all around it by the coast and we could hear the waves crashing. We made our way down to the beach and it truly was an oasis. Because of the high surf warnings during our stay, we weren't able to go in the water very much, but this oasis had a perfect breakwater – lava. The beach was fairly small with white sand, but you couldn't walk barefoot because of the pricker bushes that had littered the beach with unpleasantly large thorns. The bushes, a plague on the island, were introduced by insane missionaries. They were so misguided about reality that they though it would be a good idea to plant thorn trees all over the island for the sole reason of getting the native Hawaiians to start wearing clothes.

We were in our own little cove with the breakwater where the waves would come, bounce of off the cove walls and then again off of the breakwater, so you got two waves for the price of one! It was a lot of fun, but also a lot of energy to expel while not trying to killed by the waves. We spent a good amount of time there before heading back on the lava which seemed especially hot after our cool sojourn. I noticed that a lot of plastic Nike emblems from the back of tennis shoes littered the trail on the way back. The sharp lava made my shoes a little worse for wear too. We also had the pleasure of witnessing some nude sunbathers who thought they had some privacy...or maybe not.

Maree climbs a tree in a cool grotto on the way to a surf spot.


The view of the west crater from our hotel on the southwest side of the island.


The view of the western crater from another famous surf spot on the northeast side of the island. It looks pretty much the same.

Maui Island Excursions

During the week in Maui we bought a few guided excursions. One was for snorkeling. Unfortunately due to high surf we were stuck snorkeling in sub prime areas and the tour pretty much turned into a wildlife cruise. Whales were breaching the water all over the place, massive schools of dolphins were swimming along with the boat, and we even saw a couple of sea turtles, something new for me.


You don't have to travel to the Amazon or Borneo to see something like this, we've already got it in the United States of America.

We took a helicopter tour to Molokai. I wanted to see the cliffs on that island, which are supposed to be the highest sea cliffs in the world. My experience with the small helicopter in Panama had me stoked for the "doors-off" tour offered by a company called AlexAir. This turned out to be a bad idea. The helicopter they put us on was a different, much larger model than the one pictured on the website for the doors off tour. The larger sized aircraft created huge amounts of turbulence in the cockpit that buffeted us all over the place. It was extremely difficult to hold yourself steady, i even had to hold my glasses onto my head so i could see properly.







Additionally, the tour was very rushed. The pilot seemed to be in a hurry, never slowing down, certainly never stopping, and turning around pretty quickly after we got to the cliffs. In general i felt like the whole operation was pretty shoddy and misleading every step of the way. I would advise against using AlexAir.

Molokai itself was a pretty neat island. It's to the west of Maui, long, narrow and far less populated. The cliffs on the west side of island are indeed enormous, and there's really no way to see them other than by the air or by boat. One surprise was that we got to see the second highest waterfall in Hawaii pouring down those cliffs.






The cliffs of Molokai are 3,000 feet high.


I didn't catch the name but this is the second highest waterfall in Hawaii.

Although the buffeting was pretty annoying and even uncomfortable, i was still having a good time with the scenery. I didn't notice though, that Maree was scared to death about what was going on. Apparently she was horrified every time the helicopter would tilt sharply on it's axis during a sharp turn.


I wanted to see where this canyon led and the creek in the bottom of it.

One of our last days on the island i just couldn't take it anymore and decided i needed to go investigate what the "real" Maui was like. There was a pretty cool trail system on the top of Haleakala. You can hike from the very top of the volcano, at 13,000 feet, down through the crater system, through the high steppe, and down all the way to the ocean. They have a few cabins you can stay in too. I didn't have the time or equipment to do that, but looking down into the summit crater made it look like an attractive idea. Instead i decided one afternoon to try and hike cross country down this canyon on the southwest side of the island.



We'd driven by it numerous times. There was an undeveloped neighborhood that got close to the bottom of the mountains. From a water tank on top of a hill you could look up this canyon, and it looked like on the other side of the canyon was an old stone wall. I assumed there must be a trail over there. First i tried walking down the canyon, crossing the bottom and then going up the other side. Turns out the grass down there was up to my shoulders and hiding all kinds of loose treacherous rocks and logs. So i went back up, drove down the hill to the main road and tried to find the highest point i could get to on the other side of the canyon. Continuing on foot i followed an old overgrown jeep trail until it petered out, then angled my way over to where i thought the wall and theoretical trail would be.


The views were getting very nice on top of the ridge. The canyon lies at the bottom of the opposite hillside and in the foreground you can see those annoying chaparral like thorny bushes.

I don't know about the jungle, but these grassy fields were much more difficult than meets the eye. The ground was still completely covered in loose rounded lava rocks of random size. The grass was prickly and bushy enough to obscure all those stones. But the worst thing out there were these scraggly bushes covered in long thorns. They had a way of reaching out and grabbing you from 3 feet away and made a great support beams for tons of occupied spider webs stretching out between them. I'm told these plants are not native, but another example of a plant introduced for some other purpose that ended up ruining paradise.


From here you could keep going right up the mountain. Not visible in this small picture is a waterfall pouring off the side of that mountain in the clouds.

I couldn't believe it, but i never found the stone wall. I think i misinterpreted part of the old exposed lava flow. Once i got over there i realized i was making terrible time. The canyon was long and my best chance for seeing something was to go straight up the side of a nearby ridge that would get me up out of the deeper grasses and away from all the annoying bushes. It took a bit of effort but was well worth it once on top. I realized right away i should have just gone up the ridge from the very beginning. The view was great and the ridge continued for a very long way, potentially offering a route halfway up the mountain to much higher ridge. Once up there things were pretty nice but the sun was setting, so i had to hurry back. After a three hour excursion without seeing anybody else at all i was in a very good mood when i got back to the car at the end of twilight. Finally some relax time! But man, my ankles were super itchy from all the burrs and seeds stuck in my socks. Fortunately there were nice beaches and ocean waves that could remedy that particular condition very quickly....

Maui

Only a month after getting back from Panama i was forced to leave 3 weeks of sub zero temperatures and head to Hawaii. Panama had been planned on kinda short notice, but we'd bought our tickets to Hawaii the previous summer, which is when you need to do it if you want to find a hotel room or rental car. Hawaii was the only state i hadn't been to aside from Maine. Now that i have been there, i can say that Hawaii is the best place you can go during winter in Alaska. On a direct flight you can go from -30F to tropical paradise in only 4.5 hours, just an hour longer than a typical flight to Seattle.





Maui is very small, only 50 miles long and 25 miles across at it's widest point, but it takes FOREVER to get anywhere due to low speed limits and excruciatingly slow tourist traffic. For instance, the road to Hana is only 40 miles long, but it took us four hours to drive it, solely because people seem to enjoy driving an average speed of 6mph and there are almost no places to pass. Sure, it's an old narrow road built on cliffs with 600 sharp turns, but if the fastest driver i came across was a large, fully loaded dump truck, i can only make the conclusion that the other drivers were idiots.


Surfing makes you assume a lot of weird poses.


There were several girls out who were quite good, and actually much faster than the guys at turning and twisting. This girl was one of the best and most daring.


But she was greedy and eventually got stuck between a rock and a hard place.


Not gonna make it..... Or is he?


This guy had some good times too.




Nowhere left to run.

The other major turn off for the place was the robbing of your pocket book and the seemingly unified "branding" of the Hawaiian experience. There were a select few songs by various artists that were played in nearly every single shop, hotel, restaurant, and even airport that we found ourselves in. You were force fed these songs everywhere you went. Most of the the food is expensive, which i expected, but we also ran into annoying hidden fees like being charged a daily fee to park at the hotel, where there were no other choices. It made you suspicious anytime you signed up for anything else. The whole experience was quite a shock that left a sour taste in my mouth after the isolated, relaxing atmosphere i enjoyed in Panama only a month earlier.

Aside from the major complaints though, Maui, (or i imagine any of the Hawaiian Islands) is a place you really should go if you want a nice tropical vacation and want to still be in the United States. It blows away everything else the country has to offer, and is an ideal winter get away for my situation. I already want to go back this coming winter.


A very cool blowhole.

The terrible cold weather we left in Anchorage was actually so powerful that it affected our vacation in Hawaii. Strong winds from under the door of our house to the north were causing a cold snap in Hawaii too, making the locals feel very cold. It still felt great to us but the cool high winds did prevent us from doing much swimming on the beaches. On the other hand, they made for some great surfing conditions on a couple of the days. From what i hear we never hit the surfing locations on exactly the right days but one day we drove around the west side of the island for sightseeing and found ourselves taking a long break at Honolua Bay.




Some high rollers going by.

Honolua Bay is a famous surfing spot, and indeed, there were many surfers out there both times i visited. It's a great place to sit and watch because of this little cape that sticks out into the wave action. As such you get a great view of the surfers with some of them even riding past you and beyond. Additionally, were on the island during mating season for humpback whales, and it was cool to see a guy or girl surfing a wave with a huge whale breaching out of the water behind them. I have a hard time just laying on the beach doing nothing but the surfing gave me the entertainment i needed to just relax and let the time go by.




A lot of neat, weird rock formations to wander through. The rock on the right demonstrates a kind of wind erosion i've often seen in the desert.

Farther up the west coast was another fun spot: a blowhole down on some crazy looking lava terraces and a newborn whale leaping out of the water with it's mother just a few dozen yards away from the cliffs. This blow hole was shooting up 60 feet in the air very regularly. The high winds on this northern tip of Maui were creating some huge waves that were crashing into the cliffs. Down at the level of the blowhole you could stand right at the edge of the lava and watch the crests of these beasts roll by just a couple of feet underneath you. They came in sets of course, with each wave being a bit bigger than the last. The last in the set was usually big enough to crest the terrace as it went by, sending spray all over everyone as it continued on before making a huge explosion of water when it hit the mainland. I took a long time trying to get a perfect shot, which i never came close too (in fact i was screwing up my photos all week) while Maree collected green and amber crystals in some of the rocks.




This grass is way deeper than it looks.

I think a lot of people on the road turn around after the blowhole because there was virtually no traffic after that point. Maybe because the road becomes narrow enough that it is sometimes one way only winding along the cliffs. This was by far the most pleasant driving experience i had while on the island. It eventually goes by some small peaceful communities of locals with no businesses and a few by a few ranches on incredibly nice property luring passersby with wine or small art galleries.


Kahakuloa Village

Heart of Darkness

OK, maybe that title's a bit of an exagerration, but my first trip into the jungle, to take pictures of the vegetation, was still an eye opening experience. One day while I was still sick, Ben left me alone on the island for a few hours with very little food or water, and no insect repellent, probably hoping i would die. Although i needed a great deal of water due to being sick i wished more for insect repellent. I didn't have a problem with any ticks or large flying insects, but these sneaky little no-see-um type insects ate me up. Returning home i had dozens of bites on each of my appendages.


Although the rocky sunset picture is getting a lot of attention, this is my personal favorite from the trip. It looks great at a large size.

Inside the jungle it is ungodly humid, and I sweated more on that island than anywhere I’ve ever been. My equipment kept sliding out of my hands because I was sweating so much. There are insects crawling around on almost everything. You don’t really notice it until you stop and try to find somewhere to sit or kneel (as i often was doing) while you rummage around in a pack. Then you see huge frightening spiders wearing gloves, cute leaf cutter ants, and everything in between. I was reminded of Survivorman (the Costa Rica episode). It's pretty much exactly like that, except Costa Rica is a bit drier with the appearance of cacti as part of the flora. What i remembered about that particular episode, was how Les seemed close to freaking out once he saw how the the whole ground started crawling around at night. After that he moved to the beach.



As the days went by, the weather was almost too good. Ben got obsessed with sunset pictures, for which you need at least a few clouds. Each day we stayed on the island until shortly after the sun was gone so we could be sure not to miss a good sunset image.



One of those evenings, about 15 minutes after sunset, Ben had been boating at a high speed through some rather rough seas for the size of his boat. I didn’t like it because the last time I had been in that exact type of situation I ended up with two broken teeth (during a violent thunderstorm in a canyon of Lake Powell). At some point Jerrod exclaimed that there was an awful lot of water in the back of the boat. I turned around to see every single item behind me floating as if in a bathtub. Ben immediately cut the power, which caused a big wave to wash all those floating objects forward to the front of the boat, knocking against everything. As the wave settled the boat suddenlylooked halfway underwater. We even had to turn the engine off because it was mostly submerged. Acting very quickly, Jarrod emptied out some small coolers and began furiously bailing. I looked around. It was getting dark at this point. The rolling waves were half black, their shoulders midnight blue with highlights of peach and vermilion flickering across their crests as they rolled by.



The boat had a swimming pool of sloshing water in it. Water was threatening to come over the back. Although Jerrod was bailing very quickly, it was still taking an impossibly long time for the water level to go down. I began eyeballing the uninhabited islands that were nearby, stars appearing over the trees. I was seriously frightened for a minute or two, but then it hit me that I was not on a sinking boat in Alaska, where I would surely die. No, I was “luckily” on a sinking boat next to the equator, and even if I was too weak to swim half a mile to the nearest island I could float around in a life jacket all night and not get hypothermia. Whew! I felt so much better after that revelation.


One of the nearby islands with a very nice beach.


As you move in from the beach the trees grow horizontally towards the sea and sun. Some of the branches were half buried in the sand.

From there the trees change to a more vertical orientation and you come across a variety of palms.

The engine no longer wanted to run, but by moving slowly, and with frequent breaks for bailing to keep the engine above the water, we eventually made it to the dock under the cover of darkness (there were no lights on the boat). After showering and some dinner we returned to the dock to try and figure out what the problem was. Ben claimed he just had a poor bilge pump, but every one's got a bad bilge pump and I’d never seen so much water accumulate so continuously in a boat.




Once deeper inside the palm type plants disappear and a high jungle canopy emerges with old growth prehistoric looking trees.

The hosts of the lodge came down to offer assistance and in a little time it seemed clear that the water was coming from inside the hull. The boat was indeed sinking and needed to be removed from the water. We all walked up the dock then down to the pebble beach, and dragged Ben’s boat out of the water. I couldn't help notice how, even as they waded out into the ocean with flashlights, the number of stars in the sky was astounding for a place so humid.

Since it was low tide Ben and Jerrod had to take turns waking up every hour to go down and pull the boat farther on shore. The next morning we took it to a nearby mechanic. Once out of the water it was easy to see that the hull was cracked. From that point on we had to rely entirely on Cesar for our transportation. Cesar is the son of one of the local lodge owners. He grew up in Bermuda, went to college in Florida and is now living a pretty alternative lifestyle as a young man in the back country of Panama. He had a nice boat and if just dropping us off for an hour at at time he spent his time offshore fishing. As you can see below it was pretty roomy.

In addition to sunset pictures, Ben wanted some pictures of the Howler Monkeys that live on Palenque. I wanted to see some too, and even though we could hear them we didn't have any luck actually finding any until the end of the very last day. We spent quite some time looking for them in the high forest but the ones we eventually found were far out on a peninsula ridge top above the beach.



Some of these monkeys may have had no human contact until a few months ago. They were very upset about our presence and began aggressive posturing and howling. Silly monkeys, we weren't scared at all, and that fact deeply disturbed them. Although we never acted the least bit aggressive or antagonistic, they were visibly worried and became shy, climbing higher into the trees.







We were on a newly cut trail on a narrow high ridge, and the tree they were in was rooted on the side of the steep hill. Although this made it easier for us to see into the higher branches of the tree, it also meant i was limited to moving just forward or backward a few feet on the trail. Every time i got a view of them they would try to move behind something else so i couldn't see them directly.

We found them so late in the day that, like everything else, i had very little time, to try and get a shot before Jerrod made us head back to the boat to leave. It was very cool though, especially since we saw a baby monkey with it's mother. Also, although it doesn't show in the pictures, they were situated on a hill right over the beach. They had a great view of the ocean from where they were, and it was fun to imagine that they might sometimes venture down to the water.


The monkeys were on that distant ridge at the far left.

Palenque was a great adventure for me. I'm grateful for the opportunity to have been a tiny part of it. It's the closest to the equator i've ever been, the first time i've seen wild monkeys up close, the first time i've been in a country whose residents consider themselves closer to being Brazilian in culture than Latin American. In the coming years a world class resort will slowly take shape on the island and i look forward to going back sometime when it it completed.

The developer, Amble, has grand plans for the island. You can find far more details about the resort and the islands wildlife, history and the area in general at The Resort at Isla Palenque.


For me, this was the end of a wild adventure, but for Ben, Gerrod and Cesar it was just the end of a typical day of work.

Isla Palenque

Palenque is over 200 miles from Panama City. The island at over 400 acres has 5 miles of shoreline and 3 beaches. It has a variety of terrain, with a lot of nice equatorial jungle canopy, palm groves, brine swamps, a few large hills and some kind of open grassland from some small farms that happened years ago. People lived on it in Pre-Columbian times and possibly even earlier than that. Today, the island supports a rich array of wildlife in the surrounding ocean as well as on land, including monkeys and jungle cats.


In this image we are flying towards Palenque over the small island at the far right in the next photo. However, this image was taken earlier in the morning.

The Northwest area of the country is already a popular tourist destination for the Panamanians. The coastline explodes into an archipelago of small tropical islands with beautiful beaches. From those islands one can look back toward land and see high mountains obscured by clouds in the distance. Often times sweating in the boat, i would gaze up at those mountains and wish i was there instead. I found that surprising. There i was, in a tropical paradise, wishing i could go up into the cold mountains, where you could die from hypothermia. Ahh that would be great. I guess Alaska has definitely changed my tolerances over the years, especially considering that i grew up in a climate not too far removed from tropical.


You can see half of Panama from this altitude. Palenque is in the center. In the distance high volcanoes that make up the spine of the country are hidden in clouds.


And in this image we are looking back at that smaller island at the far right in the photo above. Additionally, this is the same beach pictured in the title photo. The rocks in the bottom of this photo are the ones that stretch out into the water in the center of the first picture. The water level is different in the two images. Confused yet?

One day we did visit the mountains, very briefly. We drove up to Boquete, a mountain town (only about 35 miles from Costa Rica) famous for it's coffee. During the drive up we went through a very gradual rise, across flat expansive fields of high grass with black stone walls.

Boquete is famous for it's nice climate, and it's coffee. This windy hilltop was the first time i'd felt comfortable in a week.

Homes on the road up into the mountains. Notice the variety of coloring in the foliage.

Yo, this is the river. It runs down from the mountains and destroys all the bridges so you have to go a different way. I mean, it REALLY destroys the bridges. The cliff on the right side was hexagonal basalt. I like this river. It's angry but not so big in the dry season.

At some point i put everything together and realized that the entire region was created through volcanics. The islands out in the ocean appeared be be volcanic rock, possibly remnants of old flows from the land (although i did find some old pillow lava, created underwater). The large fields were from a massive flow pouring from the higher summits, and the cliffs around Boquete were also basalt. It's no coincidence that above Boquete is the highest point in Panama, Volcan Baru. From the dormant volcano's summit it is possible to see both the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea. That's pretty cool.

Two of the many other islands. This one had cool wind blown trees on it with underlying rock that was volcanic in origin.

Ben is briefing the engineers on how the marina must be made of solid gold. I could tell they were good engineers when one of them mentioned that simply gold plating the shells of a bunch of tied together sea turtles would be cheaper, as sea turtles are a renewable resource.


The morning view from our breakfast table. You can see the long dock in the middle. We arrived and left at the long dock and had to walk up the steep hillside to get to the lodge. If you forgot something it sucked. But it's a nice view!

The view in the evening. This must have been while the engineers were visiting because after that we never got back until well after sunset.

I should mention that while i was in Panama i was terribly ill until the last day of the trip. I somehow manage to get sick every time i go to the tropics, but this time i managed to catch something on the flight from Seattle to Houston. By dinner of my first day in the city, i knew i was already screwed. I ended up with one of the worst colds i've ever had. The fact that it was actually making me nauseous and unable to eat, and causing cold sweats with goosebumps in the middle of the jungle, makes me think i either had a cold and then also came down with some other typical tropical illness, or i was the first person from the US to get swine flu. My first two days of going out to the island i was in the deepest part of this sickness. Fortunately we were spending most of our time on those days boating around with some engineers who were looking at the possible locations for a marina on the island.


A river delta that has formed in a sandbar, temporarily connecting Palenque to a larger island next to it. A large tropical storm could eradicate the area on the right.

I learned that Palenque was not entirely uninhabited. On one side of the island lives an old man and his wife. Menique has lived on the island since his youth, when he arrived to work as a servant for an old woman named Catalina. Menique was now something like 60 years old, but he's as badass as Charles Bronson.


Looks to me like a nice place to hang out. If there was a resort here, people would probably come.


Looking the other direction the beach continues on for a long distance after this rocky outcrop. We were at this beach nearly every day, as there was a work camp in the jungle here. Notice that some trees still lose their leaves in winter, even at the equator.

On the other side of the tree close to sunset. Cesar waits for us in the boat.

He lives in a kind of a shack house and I don't think that he can read or write, and is also uneducated about the outside world. If you showed him a computer he would have absolutely no idea what is, but he can survive on that island no problem. He fishes, grows a few crops and kills feral pigs which he then hangs up, skins, and eats. One day not so long ago he decided he needed a wife, so he got into his boat and went off to some town where he visited the bar. He returned soon after with a 30 year old wife. I'm telling you, he is badass.




Dozens of the islands in the archipelago are reachable by boat from Palenque.

A high tide island.

A big tree that hung off the cliffs on the beach. It hinted at what was in the jungle.

Although a resort is to be built on the island, part of the agreement on the use of the land was to allow Menique and his family to continue to live as they do. It is all they've ever known. Ben pays him to look over the crews of workers that were, at the time i was there, clearing out trails across the island. Apparently people listen to him. Maybe he threatens to cut their throats.

This was the smallest helicopter i've ever been in. I loved it. It was very maneuverable and light.

I almost forgot. The first photo on this page is an entry in the World in Focus photo contest. It's already in the top ten of the Peoples Choice contest, so if you feel like it head on over and vote. If i win that portion of the contest, i'll get a small.... Duffle Bag!!! You know how hard those are to come by????

Palenque has nice sunsets. The end of a days work.

Next time we head into the jungle....