Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Hawk and I have made our own Super Bowl Sunday tradition. Since we don't care for sportsball we take advantage of the day everyone is inside guzzling chips and guacamole while glued to their TVs to go hiking instead. For this year's not-watch party we drove up to the North Bay, to the Marin Municipal Water District on the flanks of Mt. Tamalpais.

What's there? Among other things, a bunch of waterfall trails. And the weather we've had the past week— rainy most of the week but clear and sunny Saturday and Sunday— made it a perfect time to hike waterfalls. In particular we headed to the Cataract Falls Trail, with an option of doing Carson Falls nearby as a two-fer later in the day.



It's a surprisingly long drive out to the Cataract Trail. ...Not because of how far it is; it was only 70 miles or so from home, most of those miles on freeways. But the last 10 or so miles winding into the mountains from the town of Fairfax, California are on narrow, twisty Fairfax-Bolinas Road. Making it even slower than normal was the fact that there are still a few construction spots where Caltrans is still repairing washout damage from a few years ago.

Speaking of a few years ago, it's been two years since our previous visit to Cataract Falls. So while we've been here a few times before, it was clearly time to visit again.



The trail begins at the back corner of MMWD's Lake Alpine on the flanks of Mt. Tamalpais. As you can see in the pic looking across the lake it's a clear and sunny day. But quickly the trail turns into the deep Cataract Canyon, and suddenly everything is cool and damp and dark.



The trail passes by several waterfalls as it climbs the canyon. For many of them, like those in the latter two photos here, there are small use-trails to get closer to the water. One of these photos I made while actually standing in the water. Yay, sturdy hiking boots instead of shitty trail shoes.



There are more individual waterfalls on this trail than I can even count, let alone share photos for. I've included these two for now. I'll post a Part Two soon with photos of the biggest cascade.

Stay tuned for more!

Panama Travelog #26
Soberania National Park, Panama - Fri, 27 Dec 2024. 2pm.

This is another blog I've unstuck from my Panama trip backlog.

Today we're driving from El Valle de Antón to Panama City with a a few stops for short hikes. Around noon today we visited El Chorro de la Chorrera. Now we're doing a bit of revenge hiking.

It's revenge because this is a hike we tried to do Monday after we stayed nearby in Gamboa, but we were turned away by a sign that the trail was closed. The parking lot was gated off by a chain. "Maybe it's just closed on Mondays," we shrugged. Not wanting to run afoul of local authorities who might be upset we entered a closed park, we gave up and left.

We gave up and skipped a hike? you might wonder. Yeah, well Monday was a shit day overall. The first hike we did was a bust. It was supposed to be full of wildlife. We saw a butterfly. One butterfly. And the night before we'd had trouble with our room at the hotel. "Let's move past these snafus and get on to the next thing!" we agreed. HAHAHAHHAHA, was that ironic. Everything this trip has been a snafu.

Thus when we arrived back at the trailhead today and saw it's still closed, with the small parking lot still chained off, we were of two minds. One mindset was, "Everything this trip has included an element of failure. Let's just accept our bad luck and leave." The other mindset was, "Fuck it, we're going in!"

The second mindset won.



We parked in a pullout area on the side of the road opposite the small, closed parking lot. There was already another car there, just like there was a car there when we bailed several days ago, so that tempered our worries about whether the authorities would give us a hard time. Plus, when we crossed the street and looked more carefully at the guard hut at the start of the trail, we could see it wasn't just closed for a day or a week but looked like it had been abandoned for years.

The main attraction at this trail is a swimming hole and picnic area near a small waterfalls. There's also a nature trail that loops around about 1km. We opted to hike the trail count-clockwise, putting the falls at the far end as a bit of a reward.

Well, just like that guard shack at the parking lot has seen better days, the nature trail here in Soberania National Park hasn't been maintained in at least a few years either. There are two suspension bridges crossing the creek, and both of them need repair. I mean, we were able to cross both of them, but one needs several planks replaced, and on the other one the joint in the middle of the of the span is broken. Fun times!



When we got around to the falls and the swimming hole it was starting to rain. That didn't seem to bother a small family who were already in the water. I mean, why not? They're literally already wet. When I was a kid we used to go out and play in the rain on hot days.

The folks who were in the swimming hole started chatting with us in Spanish. We used our rusty conversational Spanish to converse with them. We talked about where we're from, where we've visited this week, and what our plans for the rest of the trip are. "What, you're not going to visit our beaches and mountains?" one asked, hurt, in Spanish.

What I wanted to say was, "Have you seen your damn weather forecast?"



It's rained every single day we've been here, and rain is forecast for the next few days, too. And it's not the type of "Oh, it rains for 30 minutes in the afternoon every day then clears up" rain that some tropical areas are known for. No, Panama's rain is on-and-off, all day.

Oh, and this is supposedly the dry season.

Chalk that up as another thing that's snafu this trip. 😡

A few months ago... or maybe it was a year+ at this point, I'm not sure... Hawk and I were straightening the pile of shoes in our hall closet, and I found a pair of footwear I didn't even remember buying.



They're hiking shoes. Not hiking boots, but hiking shoes. When did I buy these? I wondered. I couldn't remember! So I stuffed them back in the closet— except in a more orderly fashion than the pile of shoes that was in there, because that's what we were cleaning up— and promptly forgot about them again. 🤣 Until today.

Today, for whatever reason, I remembered these shoes were in the hall closet, sitting there almost certainly never used for who-knows-how-many years. So when Hawk was feeling well enough to want to do a light hike today (she's still not fully over traveler's diarrhea after two weeks!) I figured it would be a great opportunity to try out these hiking shoes. That's because while the trail we picked, at Bxybee Park on the bay in Palo Alto, is too easy to want to wear hiking boots, the gravel paths made me want to wear something a bit more protective than my Keen sport sandals. Even with their toe cap the sandals still pick up small rocks on gravelly trails.

"I don't even remember when I bought these," I mused out loud as I laced them up in the hallway. "Maybe a few years ago at REI when I saw them on a clearance sale and figured, 'Why not try them?'"

"I think you bought them fifteen years ago, at Footwear Etc.," Hawk countered, name-checking a store that used to be around the corner from us but closed up years ago.

Well, regardless of when or where I bought them I could easily surmise why I'd bought them. While I've never bought hiking shoes before, always preferring either the sturdiness of hiking boots or the light weight and breathability of hiking sandals, for the right price I would've taken a chance on trying hiking shoes. And today, finally, is the time to try them!

Update: By the second time I'd worn them they fell apart! 😡

Panama Travelog #35
Metropolitan Park, Panama - Mon, 30 Dec 2024. 12pm.

"It figures," I scowled as I arose to brilliant sunshine pounding through our hotel room's floor-to-ceiling windows this morning. "The first sunny day in Panama City is our last full day in Panama!"

What a fitting thing to say on this star-crossed trip. A bit of good news is hard to appreciate because it reminds us of all the frustrations we've had to deal with.

But hard to appreciate doesn't mean impossible. And with a list of possible activities Hawk drafted in advanced we looked for the most outdoorsy one still in the area. It would be Panama City's Metropolitan Park, right in town and with a small network of trails including a stellar view of the city itself.

We Ubered over to the park's visitor center. The fare was $3.19 for a trip of just under 4km. Uber is ridiculously cheap here by US standards. I left a baller, 30%+ tip— a whole dollar. 🤣



From the park visitor center we walked 0.7km up a trail that mostly paralleled a road through the park then 1.1km up to the top of Cerro Cedro. It's the 2nd highest hill in the city, at 160m (524') above sea level. Outlooks at the top of the hill provide commanding vistas in multiple directions, including the one in this photo showing the main downtown area of Panama City.

Edit: Which building is our hotel? We're about 90% of the way over to the right in the photo above, just to the left of the tall, black building (Tower Bank) anchoring the right edge of the picture.

As we looped back down a different trail from the summit we saw some wildlife. I'll share short videos of those in another journal entry.

Update: see my journal with video of 3 animals we saw in the park.

Panama Travelog #23
El Valle, Panama - Thu, 26 Dec 2024. 4pm.

I see my blog backlog growing huge with this trip in Panama. For example, the hike to La Dormida wound up spanning 5 entries— which will fill most of 2 days if I maintain my pace of 3 posts/day, longer if I don't. (Ed: It took 4 days to finish.) Thus I'm going to shift gears and start posting one-a-day summaries. I'm leaving space to fill in later with detailed entries including photos and such. One benefit of structuring my blogs this way should be a clearer narrative for our trip.

An Easy Start to the Day

Our day started off with breakfast in the usual place, with the usual foods, at the hotel. After breakfast we rested a bit; I'm still getting over achy legs from overexerting myself with the La Dormida hike two days ago. Today's better than yesterday. Going up the stairs is only slightly tough now. Going down the the stairs, though... ouch, that's still painful. My stabilizer muscles are wrecked from the uneven, steep, slippery trail at La Dormida.

Mid-morning we noticed that the sky was clearing overhead. How fitting that now, on our last full day in Anton's Valley, it looks like it will be sunny. Rather than just shake our fists at the sky as it mocks us, we decided to take advantage of Mother Nature finally taking pity and smiling on us a bit. We pulled together our hiking bags and headed out in the car with a list in mind of many things we could do while the sun is shining.



Also seeming to mock us is that today we could actually see La Dormida. The vantage point for this photo is not ideal, in down with electric and telephone wires running above us, but it's the clearest view I've seen. If you squint you can see the form of a woman lying on her back in the mountain. Her head is on the right, her next to the left of that, then her chest further left.

Hiking Cerro Gaital... Or Not

First on our list was hiking Cerro Gaital. It's part of the rim of the volcanic basin the valley lies in, and it's the mountain just behind our hotel. Of course, getting to a good trailhead to reach the top meant driving all the way around to the other side. I mean, we could have just walked straight up from the hotel... but that'd be a monster hike even more monster than La Dormida. So we drove.

Driving around to the upper trailhead on the other side of the mountain brought us up into the clouds. I knew it was possible, even likely, this trail would be socked in with clouds. While the sky was mostly clear from down in the valley there were places where low clouds were sticking around. And Cerro Gaital was one of them. This is where it was critical we planned a list of many things we could do today. We opted to nope out of hiking Cerro Gaital and instead go to the next spot on our list.

The View from Cerro La Cruz

Bailing out of hiking Cerro Gaital was absolutely the right choice. I had misgivings, strong misgivings, when we decided to get back in the car at the trailhead rather than hike. All those misgivings melted away as we came back down around the mountains and saw that our next destination, Cerro La Cruz, was clear. Beautifully clear.



We parked the car in a few places up on the ridge to explore different areas and see different views. I'm including just one photo here because, like I said at the top, I want to actually catch up on my backlog with these one-a-day entries, not fall further behind.

I picked this photo out of my collection for two reasons. One, it shows the spread of Anton's Valley below us. And two, that far mountain in the middle? The one with the clouds on it? The only one with the clouds on it? That's Cerro Gaital. Once I got to this spot around midday I knew that pulling the plug on hiking Cerro Gaital was 110% the right decision. Coming here I got the beautiful view I would not have gotten there, and it was much easier here with a super-short trail instead of a steep slog I would have been miserable doing.

Waterfalls at Las Mozas

I did stretch my legs at our next stop, the Las Mozas trail. It's just down the hill from from Cerro La Cruz. A short trail leads into a stream canyon with a few waterfalls. The short trail was surprisingly primitive. Any semblance of a constructed trail disappeared after about 20 meters as the route simply traversed the rough, volcanic rock next to the stream. With my weak ankles I was concerned I'd slip on the wet, very uneven rocks and stopped about halfway. Then I decided "Fuck it, I'm only here once" and pushed on to see the main waterfall. I'm glad I did.

Update: I've posted a blog with photos of Las Mozas waterfalls.

Lunch & Butterflies

Next up on our agenda was the butterfly sanctuary in town. But first was lunch. We stopped at a pizza spot in town we'd eaten at a few days earlier. Their pizza sucked but their empanadas and fries were good. So today we ordered just empanadas and fries. I washed mine down with a Panama beer. Usually I'm not a day drinker, but at these local restaurants a domestic beer is almost the same price as a soda. For an extra 20¢ I'll enjoy a beer.

The butterflies were... huge. There's this one species in Panama that's at least 6" across when it opens its wings, and it's brilliant blue on top. The butterfly sanctuary uses a double-door system so visitors can get right in with the butterflies. Some people in there with us had butterflies landing on their fingers. I couldn't get them on my fingers, but they sure loved my shirt and kept landing on my collar and shoulder.

Sharing photos and video of the butterflies is definitely a thing that would backlog my blog worse, so I'll leave those to post later.

Panama Travelog #16
El Valle, Panama - Tue, 24 Dec 2024. 3pm.

There's good news and bad news on the trail to La Dormida. The bad news is we finished climbing through the stream canyon filled with waterfalls. That should mean the good news is we're almost at the top. But, bad news: the trail got even steeper making it up to the ridge. At least we started to get views at the ridge.



Here's one (above) looking across Anton Valley. Our hotel is out there somewhere, at the foot of the misty mountains toward the left of the frame.

Good news: there's a vendor hut on the trail.



I often joke with fellow hikers, "I sure am ready for that ice cream stand at the top." Good news: here in Panama they actually do things like put ice cream stands at the top! Bad news: no vendors today. (Also, I think they sell fruit here, not ice cream.)

More bad news: it's starting to rain.

"Should we turn around here or keep going?" Hawk and I discussed. I voted to keep going. "We're almost there!" I explained.



Bad news: while we're almost there, the trail keeps getting even steeper. And it's raining on us now.

We keep asking ourselves, "Should we turn around?" And I keep feeling like, "I did not come 98% of the way just to turn around because it's raining."

Besides, it's only raining gently. 🤣 So far. 😰

Panama Travelog #14
El Valle, Panama - Tue, 24 Dec 2024. 1pm.

Only a few minutes after beginning the trail to La India Dormida we're stopping. ...No, not stopping entirely; just stopping for a few views!



Along the trail to La Dormida are a few native petroglyphs. They're called piedra pintada, or painted rocks (also a common American-English name for petroglyphs). The big rock you see in the photo above has petroglyphs carved near its base. No, there were no acrobatic graffiti artists in antiquity here to carve things implausibly high up the rock face, just people scratching shit into the rock[*} at arm's reach.



Modern scholars are not sure what these carvings represent. They don't have the structure of a written language, nor do they have the structure of petroglyphs. Academics' best guess is that it's some kind of a map of the valley. 🤷 There you go— prehistoric land use planning!

Just beyond the painted rock there's a small waterfalls on the stream we're following up the side of the ridge.



That sure looks like a nice swimming hole beneath these falls. Guess what, though.... Not only did I forget my fancy camera back at the hotel for today's trip (still using my iPhone instead, as I mentioned on an earlier hike) , I forgot my swimming suits back at home. 😵

Now it's time to get back to hiking. There's only about 99% of the trail left to go!

_____

[*] If this was the US I'd get to give you an earful about The Antiquities Act of 1906. Be glad it isn't... unless you're into that sort of thing. 🤣

Panama Travelog #12
El Valle, Panama - Tue, 24 Dec 2024. 11:30am.

Finally, we've done a hike in Panama. A hike on a trail that was open, accessible via our weeny rental car, and which delivered exactly what it promised (no touts or shills filling sites with fake reviews). And it only took us... 5 tries.

On the way back to town from our aborted attempt to get to Pozo Azul we stopped at Chorro Macho falls. It's part of a small eco-park, and its small parking lot was full of tourist outfitter vans. Oh, buy, just the sign we hate. Oh, and speaking of signs we hate, there was the literal sign advertising the admission fee to hike the trail. It was only a few bucks each. That's not much... but it's also a super-short trail. The cost works out to something like $25/km. Shit, a limo is way cheaper than this walk. But after the frustration with this morning's thwarted hike we said "Whatever", paid our money, and started on the hike.



I'd forgotten to bring my nice camera on the day's outing. It's sitting in a dark corner of the one closet-like shelf in our sparsely furnished hotel room. I gave thought to driving back through town to get it but at this point am so sick of wasting time not getting to hike that I decided I'll do the best I can with my iPhone camera. Which... is fairly good nowadays. The photo of Chorro Macho falls above is way better than I could have captured with my old iPhone SE 3. My new 16 Pro has a higher resolution imager, multiple lenses, and more powerful computational photography. It still doesn't achieve the richness of color than my aging Fujifilm X-T3 delivers, but it does other things well that save me time try to fix them up in post, like fixing highlights and shadows by quietly and smoothly combining multiple exposures.

I'd share more than this one picture, but it was a short hike and this falls 100m in from the trailhead was basically it. We'd definitely like to hike more today.... We'll have to go back to our plans and see what else we can pull forward to today.

This past Saturday we tried hiking to The Nipple, an artfully named peak in the Carson Pass area, again. I say again because we set out on this hike 5 weeks earlier. We had a mixed experience the first time. The views were amazing but the wind was fierce. We turned back well short of the peak.

I'm not the kind of person to let a hiking thing go. When I decide I want to hike somewhere because it's beautiful, and temporary conditions like weather force me to turn around without enjoying the full measure of it, I'm going to want to try again. So we tried again this past weekend, hoping that the wind wouldn't be as fierce.



Well, I had a little more than hope about the weather.... While there's no forecast directly for "Will this mountain ridge over 9,000' have pummeling wind?" I can make educated guesses about wind conditions from checking a few days of temperature and precipitation. Saturday looked like it would be a clear, steady day, so we did our Friday Night Halfway in Jackson, stopped at Silver Lake on the way up, and began our hike at Lost Lake.

The first leg of the hike was familiar, ascending the ridge on the Pacific Crest Trail as it rose up from Lost Lake. The landscape seemed slight more barren this weekend than 5 weeks earlier, as the wildflowers of Alpine Spring turns rapidly to Alpine Summer and then to Alpine Autumn.



We rounded the bend above Blue Lake, 1,000' below us, and climbed ever higher into the mountains. This about as far as Hawk went 5 weeks earlier (her spot in the photo above). I continued as far up as that shelf below and to the right of the peak near the center. That peak, BTW, is not The Nipple. The Nipple is farther away, on the right side of the photo. You can see the summit sticking up like a nub. Yes, that's apparently how it got named.



The wind was mild the whole hike, though it did get slightly stronger as we hiked later in to the afternoon. Heavier clouds started to build up over the high elevations, too. This photo (last of the set, above) shows a view from just below The Nipple looking back down over Lost Lake. The ridge to the left is that imposing looking scarp in the center of the previous picture. To the right of Lost Lake is a cliff. Yes, the lake is right at the edge of a cliff! That's part of the Carson Pass. And that peak in the distance, near the center (left/right) of the picture is Mount Round Top, elev. approx. 10,500'. Just the other side of it are Winnemucca Lake and Round Top Lake. We've hiked those lakes several times in the past. In fact, they were our "Plan B" for today in case the wind was howling as we drove over the Forestdale Divide just below Round Top.

Speaking of the Forestdale Divide, I've got some wheeling pics and video to share from Saturday, too, along with a few more photos from this hike. Stay tuned!

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #31
Old Fort, NC - Sat, 7 Sep 2024. 1:30pm

Our hike up to Catawba Falls in western North Carolina today was enjoyable. The hike wasn't too bad of a climb, especially with a wide trail the whole way. And the falls were beautiful. For a long time that was the end of the line for most hikers. The brave few knew there was another falls high up above the main one. The even fewer brave dared to climb up the canyon to it, pulling themselves up on ropes hung over the cascades of the lower falls or looping around over the mountain ridge to descend from the top. Now there are stairs.




Within the past few years the Forest Service built an elaborate set of stairs to guide hikers up the canyon. These stairs are great in that pretty much anybody can climb them. ...Well, anybody who can climb more than 500 stairs, that is.



Fortunately this is a situation where hard work pays off. Not only did climbing the stairs afford us different views of the main falls as we ascended, it led us to this beautiful spot with the upper falls. Before the stairs were built, this spot might've seen a few visitors on a Saturday afternoon. Today it's seeing hundreds. Making the photo above I shared above was challenging.... Challenging to capture the whole falls while not including kids in diapers peeing in the water, young women stripping down to their bikini tops and posing for cheesecake pictures for their social media, and at least one guy who was either recharging his Ki or in full-blown mental health crisis suffering flashbacks to being bombed in Afghanistan. Well, it's their great outdoors, too.

From these falls there are two routes back to the trailhead. One, we could have retraced our route back down the stairs past the falls. Two, a trail continues up over the ridge to the east then snakes down the ridge to the trailhead. We hiked the ridge trail thinking we might see long distance views from atop the ridge. And even if we hadn't decided on that in advance, the fact that 2/3 of our fellow hikers were heading back down the stairs would've inspired us to take the path less traveled. Alas, there were barely any view from the trail over the ridge. And it wasn't even a particularly nice trail. It was a fire road with an ugly cut as it ascended the near side of the ridge. It was like the Forest Service decided, "Let's run a bulldozer through here and be done with it."  But at least we had the memories of those beautiful falls to tie us over. In beauty I walk.