2013 I´ve been hoboing cargo boats around the Amazon for three weeks, and the other morning found me on another jungle riverbank with my thumb out in a light rainstorm flagging a ride. Sunrise is the prime time to hitch rides because Peruvians, including fishermen and captains, are early risers to beat the heat of [...]
March 20, 2006 I throw a rock into the hole. ‘One, two…three,’ counts my partner in climbing gear. A wind whistles up the 5-foot diameter portal. Underground Civil Defense shelters were placed strategically around the country during the Cold War scare of the 1960’s. I grew up in the prior decade listening to the Duck [...]
On December 20, 2012, the day before the end of the world by the Mayan calendar, a notice fluttered in a steamy breeze whipping past a rotting Colon telephone pole: PANAMA TO COLOMBIA The Last Sail of El Gato I followed its little map down the street to a hole-in-wall travel office with an open [...]
I’m leaving Fantasy Island Iquitos, Peru in the heart of the Amazon after seven months in the rainforest Big Rock Candy Mountain, where everything has gone right, including: 15 hands on fights without suffering a loss. 13 dog bites without turning rabid. Chased by a hundred senoritas without stumbling. All drugs are legal but haven’t [...]
Practicing for summer vacation is like preparing for a sports tournament. In the past month I’ve ventured in an ever-widening radius from remote oasis, Blythe, California to get ready. The technique is drive desert flats and mountain back roads in my 63 VW bug pickup until spotting a prospect Sometimes its an animal trail, old [...]
Clomp, clomp across the Golden Gate bridge in a Bay Area 10k race that began one week ago with a crash on White Mountain. I am bicycling 1500 miles from Canada to Mexico along highways #101 and #1 on a Peugeot PX-10. ´Bikeman!´ is relayed for two weeks up and down the Pacific coast to [...]
I´m bouncing up and down off the ground six inches up and down with Ross Perot´s In His Own Words in my hands. It’s a 7.2 Richter earthquake off the Sea of Cortez! On the Richter Magnitude 7.2 is a ‘major earthquake’ with damage to most buildings, some shake and completely collapse, and the vibration [...]
The lesson from these survivals is don’t believe anyone who tells you, ´You´re gonna DIE!´. But I had to put myself in the coffin after one cold freight trip in 1985. That winter, I returned to my alma matter MSU seeking two things: warmth and money. I spent my last $50 on a simple pine [...]
The Chocolate Mt. Bombing Range, 2nd largest in the world covering a few hundred square miles, lies adjacent to my Sonora desert property. The main target of cardboard tanks, green dummies on posts, and stacked pallets is 2.5 miles from my burrow. When a 1000lb bomb goes off the ground shakes, but I shored up [...]
It was my first ghost hunt and I didn’t know what to expect. The site last night was the Kelly, New Mexico ghost town with focus on the church, graveyard and a 1000’ vertical shaft where it is said many miners perished when the town boomed at the turn of the century. It was dark, [...]