http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Del-Favero/ Travel adventures in journals and photos from Del Favero en-us Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:16:58 +0000 Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:16:58 +0000 Outside the heat builds until raging dust devils meander through the upper valley. They arise from the playa and vanish where brown morphs to blue. Waves of air shimmer upwards radiating from the hard alkaline earth. Unfortunately I find myself retreating more often here to my whitewalled cave than to the ridge of the Panamints. Here I avoid all light and heat. I Leave the lights off. Open http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/United-States/California/Death-Valley-National-Park/blog-435850.html When I come home from work on a 128 degree day like today and enter my apartment I often feel relief. I forget that I've left the swamp cooler off for the last 10 hours and eventually realize its 95 degrees inside. Thirst has become a constant here where drink is now likened to breath. Unfortunately the water from the faucet on cold is too hot to take a shower under let alone drink. The water http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/United-States/California/Death-Valley-National-Park/blog-423313.html The Air Condtioned Daydream When people I don't like ask me about Death Valley I tell them itrsquos hot. A horrible place. A lifeless hell. When people ask me what I did to deserve a job and life in Death Valley I nod my head in no particular direction and smile. Similar to the nine or so adjacent mountain ranges misconception enfolds this place with the ominous name Death Valley. In many wa http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/United-States/California/Death-Valley-National-Park/blog-391921.html Lying on a gray foam mat on a patch of desert pavement in a wide wash in the Owlshead Mountains.Flashes of chemical light had preceded the dawn. Bomb blasts glided across the salt pan. Only a mountain range separated me and the war games being had while the scorpions and tarantulas fought over space in the bottom of my left boot. I was sleeping and not at the same time. Machine gun dreams.Slowly http://www.travelblog.org/Middle-East/Israel/Gaza-Strip/Gaza/blog-378058.html Now and then life dips its greasy hands into the belly through an incision in the universe's ether and thus into the void. Every once in a while my heart races with each balanced step on the edge of a steep scree slope as if it mattered. Today I stared at a computer for ten hours while nibbling on pretzels digitally drawing my life experience and perceptions over a 2D map with satellite accu http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/United-States/California/Death-Valley-National-Park/blog-363563.html Rocks Sand and Twisted Metal. 90 miles an hour out of Shoshone. Midnight. 20 gallons of gasoline in the trunk. Loaded pistol on the passenger seat. Too much to drink. Uninsured expired tags... Car burning through the night. Its remains the only warm place to sleep. Sun rises. Watch it slowly climb waiting. Stash gun under rock. More waiting... Hitch ride back to Pahrump.So the story goes. I w http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/United-States/California/Death-Valley-National-Park/blog-356248.html We woke up on a strange barren planet. We were in a valley covered in salt which was inhabited by creatures much like ourselves but whom oddly had no sense of their own nakedness. Overcome with confusion and slight disgust we sought escape. Marty the 5foot tall 55 yearold BLM Wilderness Manager led myself 5 SCA volunteers and a certified chainsawman on a death defying trek into Cougar Can http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/United-States/California/Death-Valley-National-Park/blog-346270.html Yes.Pathetic.I have nothing to say. Nothing worth saying. My words are utterly crushed by the weight of what they attempt to convey. 1 conscious being. Trapped. Solipsistic. But I go on... My thoughts spiral out of a colorless void in the center of my spaceless being like thirsty bats from an abandoned mine. They flap around in the dusk and die in the encroaching darkness. Die just as desperate as http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/United-States/California/Death-Valley-National-Park/blog-346089.html Today is last night. Now is tomorrow. Seconds ago will be coming soon. Each day has the same differences. Somewhere over 90 degrees ground temperatures much higher than that the sun hanging heavily in the sky with its dense rays completely unobstructed. Displaced clouds occasionally wander though. The mountains no longer merely smile but rather laugh spitting drooling fracturetoothed cackl http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/United-States/California/Death-Valley-National-Park/blog-338653.html 8664 hours to go...The mountains that trap me in this vast plane of salt and sand smile down upon me. Sometimes sinister always coloful inevitably stark and empty smiles. The wind is panting and hissing. The moon is rising overfading hills blotting out the stars.I arrived back in Vegas slightly hungover on Saturday morning. I rolled my bag full of what remained of my life in Portland out into t http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/United-States/California/Death-Valley-National-Park/blog-335616.html Horse bits strewn bones and hair. A skull a jaw a tail etc. scattered along the east bank of Black Bear Lake. The blood crusted in the dirt entrails long digested. They pack you in you blow them up. One stick of dynamite carefully placed carefully lit. Light it up and equestrians be gone...running on foot.Bobcat tracks in the mud flats Great Horn calls through the lodgepoles sleeping by t http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/United-States/California/Yosemite-National-Park/blog-326810.html Hiking on the clock. We probed we dug holes we played with soil plugs we took pH and temperature readings we filled out reports we crawled around on our hands and knees looking for botrychiums and we cooked our nightly gruel by a small campfire. Eight days working in the Emigrant Wilderness went by quickly and smoothly. It was a beautiful hike in from Leavitt Lake. We started at at 9000 ft a http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/United-States/California/Lee-Vining/blog-316527.html Buck brush Deer Brush Green Leaf Manzanita Whitethorn Mariposa Manzanita logs that turn to dust stumps that turn to dust needle duff mats on steep slopes bear clover invisible holes and sticks that lie hidden beneath bear clover rattle snakes ticks vicious ermines bears that look cute rabid squirrels coworkers with sleep deprivation forgotten hardhats forgotten lunches forgotten http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/United-States/California/Yosemite-National-Park/blog-309190.html I live in Pine Mountain Lake a schmoozy little gated community full of vacation homes and vacation rentals not far from the small village of Groveland. I live in the smallest and stuffiest room in the house in the basementof course and must walk through my Botany Crewmate Wyatt's room to get to it. The housing is much nicer than I anticipatednot to mention nicer than I am accustomed to. http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/United-States/California/Yosemite-National-Park/blog-298860.html Lost is not only the name of a forest in Southeastern Oregon.It was five hours on dirt roads alfalfa fields private property burning straw bales sage brush plantations and barbed wire fences making the trip a solid eleven hours. With one sideview mirror less our heads full of intriguing Christian literature and a number of fits of hysterical anger and cackling the early van of mammalo http://www.travelblog.org/North-America/United-States/Oregon/blog-280829.html Now that I have realized that I am nothing more than a machine which transforms experience into memorychewing the small bites of reality I take into digestible morcels and storing them hopelessly into continually dying cells on bits of wood pulp and in various plastics and metals as binary code I know for sure that I have forgotten where this paragraph was going. http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/France/Franche-Comt-/blog-202656.html I sleep in a teepee in the French Alps. There is a totem pole not too far away. Lying awake sometime near 7 AM I listen to the ring of cowbells eight cowbells and the snorting of three hungry pigs who await their winter slaughter. The cheese ages in silence. Thirteen hungry cats meow. If I lay here long enough I will be reawaken by the bellow of the bull as someone separates him from his hare http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/France/Provence-Alpes-C-te-d-Azur/blog-197650.html HmmmmThe sheep had been moved and the seats and seatbelts reinstalled in the van. The blueberrys were ripening in the sun. Family vacation ensued. We wound into the mountains. Night fell. The van found its way up a steep mountainside in the darkness and tents were erected in a field. The following morning the family was awakened by the sun and the cold glacier wind. With the van repacked and brea http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/France/Rh-ne-Alpes/blog-188234.html I have found a computer. I arrive at the next farm this afternoon.Well It seems my last two blog entries were lost in a server crash. Maybe its for the bestI have readded some of the pictures....and a summaryCrazy long lost brotherunclecousin Steve lands in Geneva Switzerland in an intense delerium returns to his french family drools into his fondu and mumbles unintelligibly. He is forced http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/France/Rh-ne-Alpes/Val-d-Is-re/blog-188205.html Smudged colored pencil sunrise over the atlantic in a metal humming tube. Insomnia from Newark New Jersey to Geneva Switzerland Eight hours on Qatar Airlines complimentary socks flight. Presleep Breakfast 10 cheese at 2 AM I stumbled around in the night sun in the ridiculously expensive city 3 coffees and 8 Kebabs for 2 daynights and a nightday throwing my money away and drinkin http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/France/Rh-ne-Alpes/Grenoble/blog-183781.html