Austin and San Antonio, Texas

I hate to fly. But I like traveling - the actual act of traveling, the main carriage, I enjoy that. The people in their business suits, the luggage, the rush-rush-rush of everybody around me, the feeling that all normalcy is suspended, so I can run into one of the little airport shops and buy a candy bar and five magazines, and who cares? I love the men and women who still get all dolled up in their best, as though we are all living in some fabulous 1950s movie musical. Airports are also a prime place for excellent people-watching, and I am a passionate people-watcher.

So powerful is this rush of anticipatory adrenaline, I usually forget about the fear-of-flying thing until I’m actually sitting in the plane and hearing the engines roar to life. It’s the take-off and landing I can’t stand; during the stable part of the flight, I can actually bear to open the window and admire the view, the quilt of the land below, the soft curls of the clouds, city lights like jewels on black silk. But during the bumpy parts, hopefully I’m in a window seat, so I can pull down the blind to spare myself the traumatizing sight of the plane plummeting uncontrollably toward the earth. As Patton Oswalt so eloquently put it, flying is spitting in god’s face. It just shouldn’t be happening, this metal object filled with people should not be floating above the ground. I can’t get over it.

Anyway, where all this was leading before I jumped the rails was that I went to Texas this weekend. Glenn was out there for some training, and he flew me out to see Austin and San Antonio with him over the weekend. His brother, who is a chef at a gay restaurant (seriously), lives out there with his wife and two kids, so I met part of the family, too. On Friday night, we spent the early evening standing on the Congress Avenue Bridge, waiting for the 1.5 million bats that nest underneath it, the largest urban bat colony in North America, to fly out for the night. That was pretty spectacular - there were boat tours sailing back and forth beneath the bridge shining red lights up at them so you could see them better, and sometimes when the light hit just right, it was like watching thousands of autumn leaves falling at once. It was very cool to see them zip around after insects and hear them clicking away with their echolocation.

After it got too dark to really see any more bats, we were planning to visit Glenn’s brother Mark’s restaurant, M2, but Glenn made a very Glenn suggestion that we go to another restaurant first for a sort of pre-meal meal. I readily agreed, given that all I’d eaten in the last few hours was a candy bar, and we got jalapeno cheddar sausage kolaches and drinks at the Shiner Saloon. I really regretted our visit to the Saloon later on, though, when we got to M2 and Glenn’s brother began sending out bowl after bowl of absolutely delicious free food and I could hardly touch it. The antelope skewers over the grilled watermelon were my favorite - it is a testament to Mark’s skill and talent that I ate the watermelon and liked it. No eel bacon, though – it wasn’t a very popular item and they pulled it from the menu. In fact, the whole restaurant isn’t doing too well, and Mark’s expecting it to go under very soon; we were actually worried that it would close before I even flew into Austin. I was concerned about what Mark was going to do, but he’s already got another job lined up, and he really seems to loathe the place anyway.

Saturday morning we checked out of our hotel and went to meet Mark’s family; I played Lego Harry Potter with his little boy while Glenn and Mark caught up, and then Glenn and I drove the 90 minutes to San Antonio and the Alamo. The best thing I learned at the Alamo was that Phil Collins is a huge Alamo freak; he owns the largest collection of Alamo artifacts in the world, which he keeps in the basement of his house in Switzerland. His collection includes the world’s largest Alamo diorama, which is housed in a little antiques shop across the street from the Alamo itself. The shop owner says that he comes to visit it occasionally, and that he was just there the previous Friday. The story is that he used to love watching Davey Crockett on TV as a kid and now he’s incredibly passionate about it. My favorite thing about historical sites is seeing all the little domestic items they used, the sugar pots and the bits of china and the silverware; I like the idea of something created entirely by hand, before mass-produced became the norm, totally unique and one-of-a-kind.

"If this siege continues, I may have to surrender sober." - Davey Crockett

Mark had recommended the Tower of the Americas as another cool thing to see in San Antonio, so after the Alamo, Glenn and I Riverwalked over to it. We saw a wedding and a quinceanera on the way! I think the view from the top of the Tower would’ve been more spectacular at night than during the afternoon, but the Riverwalk was pretty fun. It’s so hot in Texas, it was nice to be able to splash the water on my chest, no matter how gross it was. That night we tried to find the Bracken Bat Cave, home to more than twenty million bats, but we drove in circles forever and never saw a hair of any bat swarm, so we just went home. Neither of us was feeling too well by that point anyway; I’d had a headache all day and I was getting hungry, and Glenn said he felt “funny.”

Sunday morning saw us both feeling refreshed and healthy, so we went to the Natural Bridge Caverns near San Antonio.

The natural bridge of Natural Bridge Caverns

I think Glenn may have preferred the Alamo, history buff that he is, but this was definitely my favorite part. Unfortunately, my camera ran out of batteries as soon as we entered the coolest parts of the cavern. I was being injudicious with my photographs, though. I don’t take a lot of pictures on my hikes, since a tree’s a tree, a rock’s a rock, and mountains are actually really ugly up close, but I’ve never seen anything like these caves! I was taking pictures like, well, like Glenn. However, I continue to be the world’s worst photographer; below is what I could scavenge from my memory card full of blurry photos with bits of my fingers and hair in them. These sculptures were really unbelievable, and the pictures don’t do them any justice.

All of the formations had this low waxy sheen to them. I was dying to touch them, but you’re not allowed. They did pass around some chunks at the end, but they were dirty and rough from being handled.

We did a couple tours of two different caverns; the Natural Bridge Caverns are what’s known as commercial caves, meaning they’ve been thoroughly explored and set up with staircases and hallways so us normals can go through them. Going up and down the stairs made me really feel like I was in shape, since everybody else was huffing and puffing around me – yay for being used to thin air! Then it was back to Austin for another brief visit with Mark and on to the airport to face the flight back home. It was so nice to breathe in Colorado again; breathing in Texas made me feel like a fish.

It was such a fun weekend that I’m really looking forward to Utah in a week.

Colorado Gators Reptile Park

I wrestled alligators this weekend; what’d you do?

No, seriously: the Colorado Gators Reptile Park in Mosca offers an alligator wrestling class for anyone who’s stupid enough to do it – obviously G and I had to sign up. The price is 100 bucks a head, and it’s well worth it. We were taken under the wing of Jay, a man with a ponytail and a cowboy hat who kept making these dry morbid asides that I’m still not entirely sure were jokes; he started us off with the babies, which were swimming around in a big metal tub with red-eared sliders. After he showed us the technique and while everyone was standing around looking unsure, I hopped right in and caught one; according to Jay, the number one rule in gator wrasslin’ is don’t hesitate.

Alligators are surprisingly squishy; I thought that lovely texture of their skin would be bony and hard, but it’s not. After the babies, as a bonus, we got in the tank with the farm’s 100-pound alligator snapping turtle. Kong is truly a dinosaur. I couldn’t lift him by myself, so I got a pic with his smaller cousin.

The insides of turtles are very sandy and wet. We moved onto teenage alligators next. This required a more elaborate technique than just snatching them up by the back of the neck. We had to drag them in from the water by the tail, swinging and dancing around them while they tried to snap at our legs and hands, yank their tails backward towards us and then jump on their backs and push all of our weight down on their necks. Usually at this point, they’d go nuts and somebody else would have to hold the tail or it would drag you back into the water on its back.

Before you feel too bad for the poor little guys, there was a purpose to this that wasn’t purely sadistic. Alligators are nasty creatures, particularly to each other, so what we were doing was catching the gators and holding them down so Jay could put Neosporin on their cuts or give them shots of antibiotics. It’s something that has to be done around the farm, and the gators just swam back out to their sunning areas when you let them go.

Lastly we got to do a photo shoot of sorts with the biggest gator on the farm, a gigantic nine-foot female. This was actually probably the safest of all of our encounters, as Jay put her on a rope leash while we got to sit on her.

I got to kiss her nose, too, but I couldn't hold her head up long enough for a picture.

For completing the class, we each got a certificate of insanity, er, I mean completion.

Very cool weekend trip, and an excellent workout. I have an alligator head souvenir on my desk at work now; I’m telling everyone that I twisted it off with my bare hands.

Mount Evans, Colorado

Mt. Evans and I have unfinished business; it defeated me last time when dizziness, exhaustion, cold, and nausea sent me up thirteener Mt. Spalding instead, but I’m remedying that this weekend. Alone. My usual hiking partner has company visiting this weekend, and none of my other friends are quite so “hardcore.” Anyway, I could use the Alana-time - it’s such a rare occurrence.

Sans Glenn, I get to plan my very own trip. He says that it’s going to be a transformational experience. I’ll be leaving the house Sunday morning at 4:30-5 to get to Summit Lake trailhead around seven, where I’ll make my way up Mt. Spalding and around and further up to Evans. I was debating shooting straight up the nasty gravel slope on the side of Mt. Evans, summitting, and sliding back down, but heading up via Spalding seems more substantial, and more respectful, in a way. 3.7 miles, 1,829 vertical feet - cake, right?

So… will I make it up the mountain without Glenn pointing out the trailmarkers I missed, telling me when to drink water, and feeding me crackers when I get crabby?

LATER: I spent the weekend breezing through Colorado 14er Disasters by Mark Scott-Nash and working myself into a tizzy about hiking Mt. Evans today. Actually, it was cherry pie. I arrived at Summit Lake (12,850) around 7a, despite forgetting my driving instructions and having to get there by memory. I realized I’d forgotten my compass after I’d headed off on the trail so I had to dart back to my car after only a few minutes, but then I was on my way. Glenn and I had used Summit Lake as the trailhead to climb the Sunrise Couloir in June, but in August, all the snow has melted out of the ravine, and now it’s just an ugly red scar in the rocks.

Today was foggy. The mountains’ summits were both veiled by this low-hanging haze and as I climbed further up, it started dropping. I’ve been researching mountaineering safety, and while I’m well-aware of what to do in the event of, say, a thunderstorm, but I hadn’t considered fog. It wasn’t too bad at the altitude I was at, though, so I kept going and hoped that the sun would burn it off, since I really really really didn’t want to have to turn around on my first planned attempt at a fourteener.

I unfortunately fell into the company of two couples also making their way to Evans. As we made small talk, I really missed Glenn, who is the strong, silent type. And also, this is silly, but I had gotten attached to the idea of going it alone: I was supposed to be traversing unknown territory with only myself to rely on, like a pioneer! But instead I was hanging out with these four people and their jumpy yappy dog.

The fog got worse as we gained altitude, and I got more uncomfortable; I even started hiking back down at one point, but something got the better of me, whether it was the nonchalance of the other members of my hiking club or my own intractability. As the fog closed in, I didn’t like the idea of turning back alone, either; visibility was just as bad behind me as it was in front of me, and at least going forward, I was part of a group. It’s easy to get attached to people when they seem like your only lifeline.

I began to doubt the wisdom of placing so much faith in them, though, when they started heading west from Mt. Spalding, when Evans was very definitely south. Initially I followed them - the male half of the couple seemed very confident in his choice of direction - but I’ve been on the saddle between Evans and Spalding, and I didn’t recognize anything. I told them I didn’t think we were in the right place, but they continued on while I was plunging around the ridge looking for something I could remember. Long after they’d dashed into the fog, I remembered I had a map and compass (thank god I went back for it!), and using the two, I was able to correct the wrong turn and head southeast. Oh, my heart when I recognized the ridge by Sunrise!

From there, it was easy. The sun came out and the fog fell away, so I was able to move off the trail and do some scrambles nearby. I ran into more hikers (no sign of my former group, though), and I must have looked impressive on the rocks or something, because the rest of them started following me - talk about the blind leading the blind. Before I noticed this curious behavior, I accidentally “led” them across some unpleasant outcropping, which is when they started hollering, “I can’t get over that, is this the trail? I think the trail is down there!” I had to explain to them that I was specifically trying to climb around the rocks and that they should follow the cairns if they want to take the trail. So we went our separate ways, and I managed to maintain a perfect distance that kept them within line of sight but outside of earshot. I stuck to the ridge of the saddle, where I could look out pretty easily; it’s so weird to see birds flying far below you!

The summit of Evans was covered in remote control cars, children, dogs, and photographers. Happily, I encountered the couple who had ignored my warning on Mt. Spalding - they had made a bit of distance west before realizing their error, but they, too, were able to right themselves. I didn’t stay on the summit long; I’d had my way with Mt. Evans, and I didn’t care to sit around admiring the scenery or allow tiny plastic cars to run into my ankles. I debated hitching a ride down, but my energy level was high and I was feeling very cheerful - I’d made it up my first fourteener and I was very relieved that couple hadn’t gotten lost in the wilderness - so I decided to finish the loop on foot and face my nemesis, the loose gravel slope. I was making steady progress until I fell and twisted my knee, and then the unpleasantness of stumbling down loose gravel was multiplied by pain. I hate loose gravel slopes.

I made slow progress back to my car and finally reached Summit Lake at noon. I was on the trail for five hours - a glacial pace, I realize, to walk four miles, but in my defense, I spent most of it taking long unnecessary detours whenever I saw a rock with good handholds. My energy level was excellent the entire time, I kept myself hydrated and sated, felt no ill effects of the altitude, found my way back after being lost, got a lot of scrambling and exposure practice, set a new altitude record (14,264), and, most importantly, I finished.

Spending the evening with my knee elevated and iced.

Denver Adventurous Eaters' Club at P-17, or I eat ant larvae and silk worms

I got to wear my killer LBD for the first time to P17, the hep little restaurant where the latest DEAC meeting was being held. Not only was the food delicious and utterly wacked out, the presentation was just beautiful. On the menu tonight was:

Salmon Roe Boba. Boba is a pudding/drink that usually has little balls of tapioca on the bottom, but this one had salmon eggs.

Veal Bone Marrow on toasted bread with salt - my favorite course of the night.

Ant larvae salad. You couldn’t even tell it was ants unless you looked close enough to notice the little eyes and antennae; it was a little spicy and very good.

Our first palate cleanser was basil done three ways: a sorbet, a sauce, and basil seed caviar.

A salad with an orange-y dressing and a wedge of anchovy spawn gelee. Honestly, the ant larvae didn’t really bother me, but looking at those little fish eyes and twisty little fish bodies was off-putting. I made sure to eat it with the salad, so I could just pretend the crunch between my teeth was all lettuce, instead of the bodies of many tiny fish. It was really good… just weird.

Yes, I actually ate silk worms! They have a good texture and a nice low-key nutty flavor. Again, more creeped out by anchovy spawn than the worms.

Another palate cleanser: lychee and lavender-infused aloe gelee. I was expecting to hate it, since I hate lavender and aloe, but it tasted like fruit snacks! 

My least favorite course of the night, the snails. I actually liked it the first time I tried it, but I got some really gritty awful piece of something in my second snail and that sealed my appetite on this dish.

Poached quail eggs with pork butt, and a trotter. I really enjoyed the eggs and the pork, but I couldn’t find anything edible on the trotter; it was all fat, and I can’t stand the texture of fat. I took a small bite and forced it down, just so I could say I ate a little of everything.

The “main” course was blood sausage-stuffed quail with potatoes, mushrooms, and chrysanthemum. It was good, but I was so full at this point, I could hardly eat anymore.

Dessert!!! Sea urchin cheesecake, which just tasted like cheesecake to me. A good way to finish the gauntlet.

The CT Clipper (Clinton Peak, Mount McNamee, and Mount Traver), Colorado

Something Glenn said during this weekend’s trip really stuck in my mind; roughly paraphrased, he mentioned that hiking is something that you don’t really enjoy until after it’s done and you’re home reflecting in your massage chair. At the time, I probably just scowled at him, but there’s a lot of wisdom in those words. If you would have asked me on Sunday while I was freezing and wet to the bone trudging through the weather if I was having a good time, I would have bitten your face off; but looking back, I’m quite pleased with the whole experience. I feel accomplished and game for another go.

The route we did was called the Clinton-Traver Clipper, or CT Clipper, although we did it backwards - the TC Clipper. Clinton Peak is part of the Mosquito Range near Leadville, and our plan was to summit it, as well as two unranked peaks nearby, Traver and McNamee.

A note on unranked peaks: while Traver and McNamee are both technically thirteeners (13,852 and 13,780 feet, respectively), some unwritten statute of mountaineering common law states that if a peak does not rise 300 feet from the ridge, or saddle, that connects it to another peak, it is not considered an official peak. So of the three we did, only Clinton really “counts.”

We were already hours behind schedule when we started off from the Montgomery Reservoir trailhead. The guidebook we were using underplayed the roughness of the 4WD terrain and we weren’t able to drive as far in as we had planned, adding extra miles to our hike before we’d even started.

We passed a lot of old remnants of mining operations, and our first milestone was Wheeler Lake, which almost cartoonishly idyllic, surrounded by the bright green grasses dotted with wild flowers.

It was getting late in the day by this point for hiking up mountains - rule-of-thumb is to finish before noon, when afternoon thunderstorms can make hiking uncomfortable at the best and perilous at the worst. Those extra miles at the start really threw off our timing - the clouds overhead were getting a little grayish around the gills, but Glenn and I would not move before the mountain; we headed up anyway, hoping to get a better idea of our weather situation from higher up. We started gaining altitude pretty quickly after the lake, hopping over the broken stones, called talus, up to reach the valley surrounded by Clinton and his ilk.

As we climbed/hiked further and further up the mountain to Traver Peak, my spirits were plummeting. I felt light-headed and cold, I was fighting sudden stabs of nausea - altitude sickness, says Glenn, drink more water - and frustrated, because no matter how far I walked, the summit was not getting any closer!

There are a lot of pictures of me sitting down on this hike.

But I guess all that walking really did get us somewhere, because next thing I know, I’m standing amid a bunch of debris and rock cairns and I’m higher than most everything else around me.

I can honestly say this is the most beautiful view I've ever seen. Too bad the Invisible Man is in the way.

Our next step was walking along the ridge to McNamee and Clinton Peaks, which was a lot less narrow than I’d feared when I was looking up at it, but I was still feeling sick. Glenn gave me some cheddar crackers to eat, and thus galvanized, I toughed it out to Clinton, breaking my previous altitude record (Traver Peak) by five feet; Clinton tops out at 13,857 feet.

Making progress around the horseshoe. The bump on the right is McNamee and the bump on the left is Clinton.

Chained to one of the rock piles on the summit was a PVC tube with the summit log in it. It was a photocopy of a couple pages from a guidebook (the same guidebook Glenn and I had used, actually) with a bunch of people’s names scribbled on it, along with the date of their summit. I scrawled our name on it along with the date, and put it back in the tube. Glenn says that occasionally someone will come along and collect the paper and file it away with all the other papers covered in the names of everyone else who’d summited the mountain.

I really thought the worst was over; I’d summited three peaks, I hadn’t fallen off the mountain, and I hadn’t keeled over from exhaustion - it was all downhill from here! Unfortunately, downhill from Clinton entailed slipping and sliding down a steep length of extremely loose scree.

The trick, said Glenn, is to dig your heel in and sort of slide down with the tumbling rocks. And sure enough, he plodded down, steady as a mountain goat. I found the terrain a lot more challenging, and all my previous frustration and exhaustion snowballed until I’d worked myself into a truly foul mood, and I made my way unsteadily downward trying not to cry. “There’s no point in crying now, you have no choice, there’s nothing to be done but go through with it. You can cry when you’re done,” I told myself. And it kind of worked, until the weather came.

We’d been extraordinarily lucky thus far, that those ugly gray clouds had skipped our mountains entirely, but as we were walking back down the valley, it clouded over and started raining. I had been holding onto this foolish hope that we might run into a friendly four-wheeler at Wheeler Lake who’d be willing to give us a ride back to the trailhead, even though it was around five or six at that point, and the weather would surely have chased away anybody hanging out at the lake long before we got back there.

Not quite as welcoming as before.

Happily, the cold numbed my body effectively enough that I was able to forget about my pains and make pretty good time back to the trailhead. Believe it or not, the worst thing about that miserable trip back was my pants, which were falling down the whole time. I mean, rain happens. Cold happens. Sore happens. But fearing that I was about give Glenn a show should my pantleg get caught on an errant branch? That’s just annoying. Glenn said that I did “really well,” given the circumstances, although he did say it before I really started in on the crying jags and shooting him nasty glances. Hiking really brings out all the worst parts of my personality.

When we got home, all I wanted to do was look pretty, be warm, and play videogames. I took a shower, and even though I had to wash my hair with a bar of soap and I couldn’t shave and I had nothing to wash my face with, it was one of the best showers I’d ever taken. All in all, the hike was 10 miles and took us more than 10 hours - not bad for a noob.

Fourth of July Mine, Colorado

Several times this last weekend, I felt the backpack on my shoulders and looked down at the shapeless mishmash of clothing that has become my hiking “uniform” and looked up at the trees stretching overhead and the mountains in the near distance, and I asked myself, “Who are you, and what have you done with Alana?” Not that it has been a bad change, but changes of all kinds beget contemplation; a few Sundays ago, the only hiking I’d be doing would be in the mall, but here I was, at the Indian Peaks Wilderness, dressed like a bag lady, tramping up a mountain wearing a 23-pound backpack.

Glenn and I began at the Fourth of July trailhead on Sunday, the Fourth of July, a coincidence which delighted me, but which Glenn says was completely unintentional. We stopped in Nederland on the way to pick up a pass; I only mention this because there are still irises and lilacs blooming in Nederland. I wonder if the spring growing season is longer there, or if it is just correspondingly later. Anyway, the plan was to hike the Arapaho Pass from the Fourth of July trailhead, camp for the night at Lake Dorothy, climb Mounts Neva and Jasper, and loop back around to Fourth of July. But we started late, the weather got bad, and we ended up bedding down early near the Fourth of July mine.

I haven’t been in a tent in fifteen years. As soon as I was old enough to start arguing with my parents, I protested against my father’s efforts to take me camping (sorry, dad); but even way back then, “camping” was never quite camping. My mother brought a space heater and refused to camp anywhere where there wasn’t a real bathroom nearby. So it was trial-by-fire to try to sleep on the ground in Glenn’s floorless tent - so much so, that I didn’t do much of it. I spent a miserably cold, lonely, scary night trying to remember song lyrics and poems to distract myself from the thunder.

Glenn’s wind-up alarm clock rang at four; I was cold, exhausted, headachey, and nauseated. Glenn was very sweet and let me sleep some more, which I did, on and off, for another six hours; he said that conditions weren’t right for the climbs anyway, which I’m not convinced isn’t just something he made up to make me feel less guilty for wrecking his weekend plans. He sported the dourest look all morning, excepting the one bright spot where he got to eat something.

It was practically afternoon by the time we got started, and all we did was hike back to the trailhead. Glenn did take us off the trail (“bushwhacking"), and we encountered some wrecked mines, as well as an old mineshaft with the most intriguing ice sculpture in it. My poor friend was visibly cheered getting to explore a cave, and I really enjoy clambering over rocks, so we both were in better moods as the day went on. My biggest achievement: I hit my stride carrying the backpack, which had been a huge burden the day before; my pack wasn’t that heavy and we didn’t go that far, but I am proud of how well I did that second day. I also got the opportunity to observe Glenn in his element, now that I wasn’t trudging head down thirty feet behind him as he marched doggedly up a switchback. He really thrives in this kind of environment; the sheer joy there is something rare to behold.