Things that went around the world.

Every once in a while I’ll look down at something I’m holding – usually some sandals or a shirt – and think, This thing has been around the world.

(A once around-the-world hat that was given to me by the manager of the Bi-Lo in Waynesville. Yeah, I know, pretty gross.)

Before each of our year-long round-the-world trips we for the most part bought all new gear – shoes, hats, socks, jackets. (And I did the same for my second trip to Africa.) A handful of items made it on both trips – my Vortex backpack, both of our sleeping bags (Moonstone and REI), an Eagle Creek document bag and toiletry bag. One item – a Pur water filter pump – went to Africa once, around the world once, and halfway around a second time before giving up the ghost in a campground in Tasmania. And an Eagle Creek money belt went around the world once, spent nine months in Africa on two trips, and visited most of Central America and even Venezuela.

(A one-and-a-half times around the world Petzl headlamp, bought in Nelson, New Zealand.)

A surprising number of items from each RTW trip are still around, and several of them get regular heavy use – something that is immensely satisfying for a person who likes to buy just one thing and use it until it is useless. (Beyond that, I think it's also plain cool to think that, say, a single backpack has been held by the hands of people of dozens of nations, or that a headlamp has lit the night in hotel rooms and campgrounds from Dubrovnik to Dhaka.) But things pass, and in the past few weeks a couple of well-loved things from those trips have been put to pasture.

On the next-to-last morning of our trip to the Olympic peninsula I was getting dust and twigs out of our Mountain Hardware Meridian 2 tent when the center pole snapped. This tent was used 59 out of 62 nights on our bike trip across Victoria and Tasmania in 2008 (in a different camp each night) and has been used for warm weather camping in Montana since. Mountain Hardware advertises a lifetime warranty, so I sent the poles in, but I’m not confident this will fall under their normal wear-and-tear clause. But even if not, I’d still say we got our $159 worth.

(The tent, when it was still standing, in the Hoh rainforest, Olympic National Park.)

While mowing this week the strap on one of my Keen sandals snapped, rendering these lovely, smelly sandals rather useless. They were purchased new from the clearance rack at Mast General Store in Waynesville for the second round-the-world, and have stood on six continents. (Incidentally, my Chacos purchased for the first trip are still in daily use – and completed 36 miles of rough hiking in two days in July – but are clearly in their final days too.)

(The Keen sandals, resting nearly where they broke.)

Finally, the one I least want to let go is a tattered, disgusting shirt I bought under unusual circumstances on La Rambla in Barcelona.

I say ‘unusual’ because it was a moment of fun that presaged a near-tragedy. A few hours earlier we had bought bus tickets from Barcelona to Tangier, and at the ticket seller’s suggestion we went ahead and put our bags on the bus so we did not have to lug them around. Then, since we had a full day before the bus left, we saw Barcelona, one of the world’s great cities. When the sun set we went back to Estación de Nord to get on the bus, only the bus was not there, and while trying to figure things out and squelch a growing panic realized we had suffered some grave misunderstanding about when the bus was to depart. (To this day I still don’t understand what happened – and no, it was not the common problem of confusing the European 1000hr for the American 10:00 pm.) We eventually found a bed for the night – in someone’s home – but it was of little comfort as I imagined our fully stuffed backpacks being gobbled up on a streetcorner in Morocco. We had on us our cameras, a guidebook, some documents, and cash and cards – and the shirt I had bought. At first light we were back at Estación de Nord and happily sat through a prolonged berating in three languages from the bus company staff, who said they looked throughout the station for us before mercifully pulling our bags off the departing bus and locking them away in a storage closet for the night. Everything worked out fine – they even changed our ticket for free – but it’s still hard not to look at this shirt and remember that night in some stranger’s living room, and the feeling that while I was buying that shirt, all our stuff was headed south into the night.

Anyway, here’s a picture of a baby who just woke from a long nap:

The furthest beach is an empire of sand.

(Kalaloch, Washington. A former local had to clue me in on how to pronounce it.)

(Chow time in the Hoh.)

(The trail to fabulous Sand Point Beach in Ozette.)

(Practicing fence jumping at Kalaloch Lodge.)

(Ringing the five-nations bell of commerce in Port Angeles.)

(Enjoying leftovers on the last night.)

(La Push -- an anglicization of the French term 'La Bouche', so named for the town's placement at a river mouth.)

(Washington does have bears, but as you can tell from this picture I took on our last day they are much smaller than Montana bears.)

Beautiful extravagant wretched excessiveness.

The baby and wife went to Atlanta for a vacation (of course, Atlanta in August, who wouldn’t?). I had something like a vacation, too, only different: too much red meat, too much red wine, too much bacon, too much biking, too much hiking, too much beer, too many late nights.

Sad but true.

A guide book had said it was 10 miles to Sundance Pass. The sign at the trailhead then said it was 11 miles. It ended up being 11.6 according to my GPS, for a nice 23-mile day.

Weather report at 11,000 feet: brisk, but colorful.

Anyway, this hike resulted in some unsightly blisters. For a follow-up I decided to stumble around Mystic Lake. But when I got there I felt pretty good, so I decided to make a late-morning rush for the Froze-to-Death Plateau, just because I like the name. But I was too late and got turned back by storms at mile 7.

During the week I asked around about my blisters (fun topic of conversation, by the way, and plenty of lively debate). It was advised that I spend about $100 on fancy socks and fancy liners, or just wear sandals. So the next time I went hiking I wore sandals.

The sandals, I’m surprised to report, work pretty well, though do leave some room for improvement when it comes to crossing snowfields and scrambling around on scree.

(Wallowa River. Luckily, I heard the word ‘Wallowa’ mentioned on the radio, so I now know how to pronounce it: Wuh-louw-ah, with the ‘louw’ rhyming with ‘now’. Though it was AM radio, so I could have misheard it over the static.)

After my success with an 18-mile hike in Chacos I tempted fate and did another 18-miler. At the end I was delighted to find an entire meadow full of my favorite wildflower. (I thought this one did not grow south of Montana.)

After that it was a long drive back to Missoula, the highlight of which was avoiding an elk in the highway a ways off Lolo Pass. I got home at 1 a.m., unloaded the cooler, took a shower, and went to bed, only to wake up four hours later and go to the office. Sometimes when you go away and have a full weekend, it seems like when you get to work on Monday everything is different. Nope, not this time. Everything stayed the same. Here’s a picture of me making some copies:

Get lost in Montana.

Yeah, that’s the state tourism motto. The past few weeks we’ve made it a goal, and now have the bills from fixing flat tires to prove it.

(Welcoming Saskatchewaners in Havre.)

The Frontier does pretty well in two wheel drive, so when it’s time to switch to four-wheel I usually take that as a hint that it’s time to turn around. The past few weeks, though, it’s had plenty of 4WD mileage bumping around in the Flint Creek and Pintlar mountains – and even 4-lo, which is cool, but which I really don’t care for. (Naturally, the baby cries the whole time we are on the interstate, and then magically sleeps as the truck crawls over rocks, ridges, stumps, and roots, his head forward and being jostled violently for miles on end. Does his neck ache when he wakes up? How do you sleep through that?)

(Keeping the front hubs lubed.)

(Exploration burns calories. The breakfast, lunch, and dinner the Corps of Discovery only wish they had.)

We snagged an incredible lakeside camp spot at Storm Lake and got totally skunked in a fruitless morning-long search for Gold Creek Lakes (I think we were one drainage west). We got a miserably flat tire on a dirt path euphemistically called the “Old Stage Road” and rolled into a lovely camp site at a lake I’d never heard of before, Rock Creek Lake. (We had to make an emergency evacuation from that same site when, the next morning, it appeared that a scenic old dead ponderosa pine was actively falling on the truck. In the haste to decamp – no, not haste, it was panic – I ran over the baby’s stainless steel water bottle. Sorry, baby.)

("Where the hell is my stainless steel water bottle?")

(The kitchen at Storm Lake.)

(Awww, how cute. Pretending he cares about what girls want already.)

Twenty-nine.

After a long, hard winter of biking it had become apparent that my old Cannondale needed a serious amount of work to stay functional – and even with that it was still going to be a light, fast bike that was also pretty obsolete. In the late spring I spent a few days test riding new bikes and came to the conclusion that there are a lot of fun, beautiful bikes out there that are not suitable for poor folk like me. Hellgate Cyclery had a lightly-used Specialized Carve Expert on their sale rack – an $1,800 bike marked down to $900 – which I test rode one day and bought the next.

(Awwwwwwww Yeeeeaaaaahhhhhh.)

The Carve is a nifty bike for the price. At 27.8 pounds it’s much heavier than I wanted, but most bikes that cost less than a Civic are pretty heavy these days. Going into the hunt for the bike I was pretty ambivalent about upping to 29-inch wheels, but after having pedaled about 1,000 miles on this bike, going back to a 26-inch ride feels like you’re sitting in the dirt.

I originally went into the bike search intent on trying the others and then getting a Cannondale, but the Cannondales for sale in town were either too pedestrian or too pimped, and the in-between ride I was hoping for would have had to been purchased sight-unseen. Just a few days after I got the new Specialized, a friend was riding my old Cannondale and one of the pedals suddenly spun off; a quick look showed the crank was stripped, and so the poor thing, which barely brakes and really does not shift any more anyway, is sitting gathering dust in the garage.

I guess I can recycle it? Anyway, here’s a picture of a baby with a headlamp:

Fata morgana.

Visiting a familiar place with someone who's never been there isn't quite analogous to seeing it through new eyes, but it's interesting nonetheless. Old friends made the long drive from Waynesville to stand atop the Continental Divide, throw snowballs, see grizzlies at close range, and pay too much for potato chips at the only store in a tiny town 38 miles from Canadian customs.

(Two Medicine)

(Rattlesnake National Recreation Area)

(near Choteau)

(Missoula)

(Logan Pass)

(Two Medicine)

The park was full. We got reservations for a tent site at St. Mary two months in advance and even by that point more than half the spots were taken. Four adults and three babies ruled out a single-vehicle expedition into the park, so on Saturday we drove back to the St. Mary visitor center and got on the free shuttle bus. I'd been aware of theses buses but had never taken one before, and I have to say they work pretty well, with just a few glitches. One route runs from St. Mary to Logan Pass, connecting to another route that goes from Logan Pass down to Avalanche, connecting to a final route that uses larger buses to go from Avalanche to Apgar. For the most part they run frequently enough, but a few times we had a wait of about a half-hour, and we had a half-hour of uncertainty later in the afternoon at Apgar when the bus stop sign suggested we had missed by 20 minutes the last bus that would allow us to connect and connect and get back to our truck. Blair and I each presented our hitch-hiking resumes to see who would have to thumb it back over the Divide, but then Lauren asked at the backcountry permit office and was told to disregard the sign. Sure enough, a bus pulled up a few minutes later, and by 7.30 we were back at St. Mary, contemplating which expensive beer to buy for dinner.

Ladies and gentlemen, here is the chicken salad recipe you have all been waiting for.

I was calling this ‘Spicy Southwestern Chicken Salad” but may change it to “Montana Style Chicken Salad”. There’s not a single thing in here that has anything to do with Montana, but I figure Big Sky Country could use a gastronome boost.

Cook four pieces of bacon. Set the bacon aside on a paper towel, and when it cools, crumble it up. Pour most of the bacon fat BUT NOT ALL OF IT out and save it for when you make refried beans (AWWWWWWW YEEEAAAAHHHH!). Take four chicken breasts cut into pretty small pieces and cook them in the pan fat. Add a bunch of spices that you have on hand – taco seasoning, salt, pepper, chili powder, blackening seasoning, creole mix, whatever. Toward the end add two or three green peppers cut into small pieces; use something like poblano or pasilla. Also, you can add a chopped onion, but don’t cook it too much. Remove everything to a big bowl, let it cool for a minute, and stir in a cup of mayonnaise, a cup of shredded cheddar cheese, a dozen or so spurts of hot sauce out of a bottle (something like Cholula or Tapatio), and most of a head of finely chopped cilantro. Top with the bacon. Serve.

Here's a picture of a baby with an axe.

Praise for the mutilated world.

A garden party.

A hot day.

Clouds over the Anaconda-Pintler.

A secret lake.

A cool morning.

Daylight at 11 pm.