Colombia and the Apocalypse

Swapping hemispheres for a few weeks is a surefire way to pack home some stories.

Second day in, joined hundreds in Bogota (and millions around the world) in a Global Day of Action against Monsanto. Serendipitous encounter with a fellow foot travel activist, Juanita Ariza, who ran from Tierra del Fuego to Guatemala for world water rights. Humbled and inspired. One full week in Cartagena, a coastal town spewing magic from its tragic roots as slavery port. Meeting up with old-time family friend Karina Bell. Spanish classes, salsa-dancing on repeat, swimming backstroke deep inside a mud volcano. 5 cups of coffee per day at least. To finish, a solo, 10-hour, pant-crappingly harrowing bus journey south of Bogota to the mountain village of Salento. Two days weaving through coffee plantations, sampling local trout and posting Fastest Known Times by terrorizing trails on a fluorescent bike full of squeaks, trying to keep with a fleet of Colombian kids in polychromatic Raybans.

All while devouring Craig Childs’ newest book Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth. Certainly one of his best and not nearly as depressing as it sounds, I promise. Absolute mastery, the highest recommendation.

New camera, new possibilities. Quotes + Photos. 

Video: Protest Run Movie Trailer

Had some fun with this one. Currently collaborating with Mexican editors to finalize a short documentary film (July 2013) about the 70-Mile Protest Run in Baja against open-pit mining in the Sierra de la Laguna Mountains. Here’s a teaser to snack on in the meantime. Only had a few of the clips to play with. Full media coverage list below, too. Disfruta.

Off tomorrow to Colombia for some revolution in Bogota and Spanish school in Cartagena.

Complete List: Digital Media Coverage (Mexican + US print articles not included):

• March 20 – Octavio Dia: “Atleta Correra en Defensa de Sierra la Laguna”
• March 20 – Peninsular Digital: “Correrá Triolo por la Sierra”
• March 25 - El Informador – “Ambientalistas protestan contra la minería tóxica”
• April 1 – Sentinel: “Gulf to the Pacific, Saving the Sierra.”
• April 2 – Calaveras Enterprise: ”Ultrarunner Preps for Race.”
• April 3 – The Jasmine Dialogues, Scouting Trip: ”Fox Tails + Orange Peels.“
• April 9 – Octavio Dia: ”Race for Sierra Laguna a Peaceful Protest“
• April 17 – The Jasmine Dialogues: “A Day of Protest: In Photos”
• May 20 – The Jasmine Dialogues: “The Sleeping Indian.” (Full Story)
• May 22 – Vimeo: “Running for the Gold” Movie Trailer
• May 28 – Calaveras Enterprise: “The Power of Movement.”
• June 6 – Destellos de Saber: “El Indio Durmiente” (“Sleeping Indian” translated into  Spanish)

The Sleeping Indian

On April 6th, I organized a 70-mile crossing of the Baja Peninsula on foot, to protest US-Canadian companies planning to open-pit gold mine the Sierra de La Laguna Mountains. It was one of the most difficult, powerful and moving days of my life. Here’s the full story.

It’s 9pm, and I am lying in the Pacific Ocean. Fully clothed. Salt water sinks cold fangs into comprehensive chafing around pits and crotch. Like being stung by 5,000 box jellyfish. Breath is robbed at gunpoint by powerful surf rolling over sun-scalded neck and seizing legs.

It doesn’t matter anymore. It just doesn’t.

It doesn’t because the pain is drowned out by a rising tide of absolute bliss. The kind of bliss generated from having just run across the entire width of the Baja Peninsula. In a day. 70 miles. 18 hours. Up and over a mountain range. Highway miles, mountain miles, sand miles. Joined by dozens, supported and followed by thousands. First-ever recorded attempt. All to save a mountain range. All to ally with wild space instead of profit. All in defense of wildness. And in a moment, it is over.

Earth Day in Las Vegas

Hotel linen sterility
Bleached blank.
Swapped by Invisibles,
Overworked.
Hiding in Shadows.

Flatscreen stares long
Cold and grinning.
RoboRetinas,
Pixelated price-tags
Taunt groggy animal eyes.

Boobtube bleeds panic.
News anchor war paint
Dripping from chin.
Prying. Trying. Crying.

Air-con meat freezer.
Dull machine bizz-buzz.
Decry, deny and defy
Intensifying, warming world
Outside.

Parking lot. Feed lot.
Lonely lines painted
Conformity Cream.
Factory-farm eggs
Stand no chance
On this searing sidewalk.

Paper pup-cup caffeine.
Honoring Tree with a quickie.
Harmless rape.
Styrofoam saucer-eyes.
Single-use everything.
Disposable all.

Shower blasting,
Sipping playfully
From stolen water.
Scrub with urgency.
Save the whales.

Front-desk façade.
In hot pursuit
Of the American Dream.
Banana in tailpipe.
Follow corporate crumbs,
Clever acronyms.

W.I.N.
T.E.A.M.
R.O.A.R.
L.O.S.T.
S.O.S.

Hooters. Bellagio. Circus, Circus.
Psychic porous poisonous pour-overs.
Towers of excess. Toothless grin.
Rapacious rotting from
Inside out.

To the Airport!
Great Carbon Party.
Gasping trumpet
Asphyxiated Elephant.

Monkey contact, scoff!
Tuck behind DigiVeil.
Micro-bulb-lumens ablaze,
Snuggle nearest, Avatar dearest.
Perfumes of posturing.
Apply liberally.

Stay where it’s safe.
Do. Not. Engage.
Color inside the lines.
Otherwise,
You’ll get hurt.

And don’t you forget…

The House always wins.

Grand Canyon Double Crossing

Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim. Required visit to Mecca for ultrarunners. 42 miles. 11,500 vertical feet. Across the Grand Canyon to the North Rim…then back. Kaibab Trail. In company with best in the biz, Joe Joe and TK (ran it sub 7-hours, what?) + Joe’s Uncle Dave (aka Uncle Boss). Took over 15 hours. Slow, meditative crossing. Full day enveloped in this gaping fantasy chasm. Most visuals snapped by the one and only Alpine Works. No one today inhabiting the intersection of Artist and Athlete quite like Joe can. Period.

Fox Tails and Orange Peels

One final mountain scouting expedition in the Baja high country gets into the heart of Mexican ranch culture and inspires me to fight for what remains wild and free in all of us.

“It’s entirely conceivable that life’s splendor surrounds us all, and always in its complete fullness, but veiled beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn’t create but calls.” – Franz Kafka

I hide my peripheral glances across the wooden table as orange peels fly from his knife like bubbly shavings of pastor pork from the spit. My clumsy laboring yields a negligible pile of citrus confetti unmatched to Martin’s work.

I am tucked into a lesser-known canyon on the east side of the Sierra de Laguna Mountains in Southern Baja, Mexico. Through the process of organizing a campaign against open-pit gold mining plans here, I was invited to a meeting on the beaches of La Ribera with CONANP (National Park Service) and several community organizers. Following the meeting, two officials agree to drop me at the foot of the Sierra. The plan: Stay the night near the trailhead, run up and over the 25-mile, 7,000ft vertical mountain section the next morning and get picked up on the west side in the afternoon. This eastern ascent is the only piece of my 70-mile trans-peninsula project I have not yet covered.

The Green Flash: Mexico, Week 12

Did you see it? Have you seen the green flash? You know, that split-second moment when retreating Sun cannonballs into Sea delivering a cosmic wink, celestial eyelashes flapping emerald firework. How did you miss that? It was right there. Perhaps you looked too early. Gotta be careful, you’ll pan-fry your damn eyeballs and then you bet your bottom dollar no one’s ever seen ‘em a green flash through an eye patch.

No one sees a flash through an eye patch.

Somos Salvajes: Mexico, Week 7

Aussie Byron ripping his new Ibanez

Sea Turtle Nest Excavator. Member of Agua Vale Mas Que Oro, organizing 70-mile Transpeninsula pedestrian protest with local activists against cataclysmic Canadian gold mining operations. March 21st. Hasta La Victoria, Siempre. Befriended two young Aussie travelers. Hours exploring trails and land. Cardon Catcus. Ocotillo. Torote. Palo de Arco. Picaya Dulce. Todos Santos Music Festival. Took Ben Gibbard, lead singer for Death Cab for Cutie/Postal Service, on 14 miles of Baja singletrack. Solid foot traveller. Sat with REM lead singer and artist Michael Stipes for a chat. Offering weekly trail running classes in town. Wednesdays, 3:30pm. Forget money, only trades/gifts accepted. Get creative. Helping conceptual design for “huerta” ecology center development near town. Giving yoga one last chance. Ukulele progress, one and two new songs. Apprenticing with neighbor to learn biodynamic gardening practices. Graduate applications in. And I wait.

Anxious. Excited. Confident. Ready. Free.

Photos accompanied by music and favorite quotes from Jay Griffith’s Wild: An Elemental Journey. Delicious book. Don’t die before reading this one.

Photo: Nic Heidbreder

“Nomadism is like an original fire in our wild minds; we stole it from the gods, and we made it our own, leaping to new places, quickening to motion, curious and light as flame. The keen urge has never left us to take a flinting tent and fling it under the stars, then swing on, on at dawn, on an elemental journey. That is how to burn most brightly. That is how to catch like wildfire.”

The Ocean Floats Red

Currently in Todos Santos, Mexico. One month in. Simple living, daily love affairs with sea and mountain. Studying. Writing. Creating. Connecting with community. Contact! Contact! 

Its evening, and the ocean floats red.
Corneas crawling through linen forts
Of blankets crimson.

Hermit peers West, emotional heat.
To honor the demise of Sacred Sky Fire;
Exoskeleton vibrations
Toast soft buttery soul beneath.

Gray and Humpback Grace,
Impossible journeys;
Still breaching, lunging, playing;
Old Faithfuls of the Sea,
Exhalations powerful, resonant.

Breath Deep. Breath Now.

Hatched Olive Ridley,
Mere minutes into life;
Time has come Brave One!
Enter Wave, Enter Mystery.
Welcome Life, now face Death.
Charge ho! Heave! Heave!

Follow current. Trust its tug.

Reds swallowed whole
By eclipsing twilight diamonds.
Nature, Grand Alchemist.
Turning East, to honor mountain jigsaw;
Barefoot sandy signatures,
Animal stamp collections
Of wandering Horse hoof, furtive Jackrabbit,
And callused feet.

Enter the deep end.
Melting into wondrous waves of Unknown.
Here now, accessible and available fully
To see what lives
Just beyond the breakers.

Pitaya Dulce – Organ Pipe Cactus

Olive Ridley Hatchling. Working with Local Sea Turtle Effort.

Maui and the Noosphere

A last-minute opportunity to go to the “Valley Isle” of Maui for 8 days presented itself, so I bounded on it. Returned with some grand adventures in my pocket…

• Hitchhiking the road to Hana
• Surfing with giant sea turtles at Ho’okipa
• Synchronistic crossing with PDX friend Jesse Cox. Ran Haleakala Crater (10,000ft)
• Hand-rolling sushi with family and high school friends. Fish minutes fresh.
• Party with festive Argentineans in Haiku.
• Living in a tent under falling coconuts. Dreams thrashing wildly with the fronds.
• Paying homage to the grave of Native Hawaiian and visionary David Malo. Short but steep trail, 2,000ft climb, overlooking Lahaina.

All of this complemented by wrapping my head around French philosopher Pierre Teillard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man. Complexification, the Omega Point, Cosmic Involution, the Noosphere. Whoa. Photos + Quotes.