The other Round the World

Laura and I went around the world in 2008-2009. It's a bad habit we learned back in 2002-2003, when we did the same thing. We were both living in Utah. I quit my jobs, sold a lot of stuff, and put the rest on a trailer that I hauled down to Texas.

We left June 2 and flew to London. We hopped and skipped across Europe, Turkey and Morocco for three months before flying to India. Stuck, we went to Bangladesh, where we got stuck again and wound up in Nepal, where we spent two months. I went to Tibet and then we flew to Bangkok. We moved around southeast Asia for several months before flying to New Zealand, where we bought used bikes and camping gear and spent three months circumnavigating the South Island. We sold the bikes and went to Tahiti, where we island hopped on freighters for a month. We flew to Los Angeles and took Amtrak to Houston, and that was a year.

We each had a camera on that trip, but we used film cameras. In all, we took about 800 photos -- a lot, but a piddling compared to the 18,000 or so we took on our 08-09 trip, when we both had digital cameras. Anyway, we printed our photos and put them in albums, occasionally assaulting visitors with "Would you like to see our trip photos?"

I've got access to a scanner now, so I thought I'd post some.

November, 2002: A hike around Annapurna, Nepal



August, 2002: Hamil loads our camels after a lunch break outside Zagora, Morocco



September, 2002: Laura in an old Bedford taxi in Calcutta



September, 2002: Quite an amazing photo, considering the circumstances, and difficult to this day to look at. We took a Trooper from Calcutta to Dhaka. We left at 6 a.m. and had three flat tires. We were left alone to walk through the border into Bangladesh. They kept us in a room where Laura got a marriage proposal, and the bus left without us. A boy came with a bike and pedaled us to a new bus, which poked across the Bangladeshi countryside before loading onto a boat which crossed the Ganges in the dark, surrounded by thousands of other boats, in what I can only describe as a scene out of Dantean novel. We arrived, with Laura now quite sick, in Dhaka at about 9 p.m.



November, 2002: The morning of our flight to Bangkok, at Amar Hotel, where we stayed for several weeks in Kathmandu, often the only people there. Amar is on the left.



February, 2003: A minibus ride from Medan to Bukit Lawang, Sumatra.



February, 2003: Me looking quite sweaty in the jungle in Malaysia.



January, 2002: One of my favorite photos. Laura on a perfect beach in Ao Nang, Thailand.



August, 2002: Dolomites, Italy.



November, 2002: Another amazing photo -- downtown Lhasa, Tibet, with Potala Palace, the boyhood home of the Dalai Lama, in the background. Lhasa sits at more than 11,000 feet above sea level.



June 2003: Round the world, completed. Laura in Atlanta with Jimmy and Bill.

Urban Wilderness

One of the great things about Missoula is that I can wake up on a Saturday, have breakfast and coffee, and make plans for a day in the mountains.

(This is the view my boots have all day long)



One of the main factors that finally won me over to the Smokies and life in Waynesville was that I could drive 30 miles from my house and been in deep wilderness. Some of my best days there were on the Smokies' long trails -- 17 or more miles with 3,000 vertical feet of gain and a bike shuttle or hitchhike to round the day out, plus an evening's worth of limping around in pain from the exertion.

(Bass Lake)



There's that same kind of challenge in western Montana, only you don't have to go looking for it, like you do in North Carolina, and purposefully set yourself on to a punishing mountain. Here, you have to make a conscious decision not to overexert yourself.

(The remote headwall of South Fork Lolo Creek)



With three major ranges converging on the Missoula Valley, it's almost hard to narrow down your options.

(Tom pushing off from Little St. Joe, the Bitterroot Valley more than 5,000 vertical feet below)



Two Saturdays ago I drove to the Bass Creek Trailhead and set out on skis up Bass Creek. Eight miles and five hours later I was at the mouth of Bass Creek Lake. I skinned across the lake and climbed the east face of Bass Creek Peak, turning around short of the summit when I experienced signs of snow instability. I made it back to the truck at 6 p.m. exhausted and limping.

(View into the Great Beyond)



On that trip I saw exactly one other skier -- Tom, a recent transplant from Maine, who told me he got to the trailhead at 6 a.m. This, I figured, was someone I needed to get to know.

Last week I picked Tom up and we went back to Bass Creek Trailhead, but this time bushwhacked up a steep ridge until we found a trail and put our skis on. Six hours later we traversed across the summit of Little St. Joe, 9,033 feet, and took in the nearly monochromatic expanse of rock, snow and tree that make up the background of the surrounding few thousand square miles. From here, we could see into the heart of the Bitterroot and off into Idaho. The Bitterroot Valley, brown under the effect of a warm winter, slumbered more than 5,000 vertical feet below.

(A phalanx of rock, snow and tree: the view from Little St. Joe south into the central Bitterroot)



We got back to the car at 7 p.m., making for an even 10-hour outing, and I was so sore that Sunday was for the most part a loss.