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Published: February 14th 2010
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The private Parque Andino Juncal is tucked into a valley just off the serpentine highway that crawls over the Andes to Mendoza Argentina. Arriving at the park guards hut, there are papers to sign, discussions about resident cards and entrance fees. Then we gather our stuff. Complicating things is that our stuff includes Mino the Mountain Dog. The plan is straightforward enough. I run distraction by bumbling along in Spanish about campfires, campsites and what not while Nick, John and Charlie circle behind the building with Mino stashed in a backpack . . . the best laid schemes of mice and men. Two minutes into my diversionary drivel, the guarda-parque asks if we perchance have a dog with us? Despite our thoroughly unbelievable dissimulating dithering, they let us go after extracting promises that Mino won’t ravish the local flora and fauna.
What follows is like most days in the Andes: a trail winds up a valley toward an impressive amount of snow and rock, the valley narrows, gets steeper, gets more impressive, then more. The next 3 paragraphs are more or less the extended version.
Beginning at the end of the northern end of the valley, the trail follows
the Rio Juncal south toward the imposing northern face of Altos de los Leones, a black slab on a field of cloudless blue. To the east are a couple of jaggedyy canine teeth peaks leading over to the 5950m summit of Juncal. The walls of the valley are barren, dusty, and enveloping. Initially, the valley floor is scrubby, filled with sharp prickly tenacious things and cut by deep furrows where spring melts run to the rio; further in, the floor turns lush, wildflowery, and soggy. The green green grass has not escaped the attention of the neighbor’s cows who have clearly spent many years munching on the local flora and shitting about the valley. We pause to consider whether this is the fauna that needs to be protected form Mino. Kicking away the cow pies, we set up camp, chase the cows from our shared water hole, eat pasta, drink a couple liters of Gato Negro, and wait for the full moon to rise. It does, fat, yellow and shimmery above the valley wall. It’s nice.
Over coffee and oatmeal, the morning sun slides down the face of the mountain before spilling into the valley. Then its time to
go ford the nearby ‘stream’. The Estero Monos de Agua, Water Monkey Stream, flows down from the Francisco Glacier. I don’t know what the hell a water monkey is, but stream to me is a pleasant gurgling thing where you catch crawdads and frogs and watch water spiders. Ideally, there should also be lightning bugs at sunset. This did not fit the picture. Water monkeys are apparently angry little beasts. This was a raging, foaming, boulders rolling around the bottom, churning, bit of frothy brown glacial melt fury. Though clearly told to go up the valley to ford, Charlie and I inadvisedly decide to cross too far down stream. It’s 20 feet across, how bad can it be? I try one spot and have to retreat. Then moving a little upstream, Charlie goes first. When it reaches waist level and the chocolate milk monkey arms are gleefully tugging him down stream, his methodical progress is replaced by a look of unmasked horror and a flailing panicky lurching toward the other shore. While amusing to watch, it does not inspire confidence, but I foolishly follow. The water is unfathomably cold. Instantly, everything is numb, so I jam bare feet blindly into
glaicer juncal
river flowing over the top of the glacier
reminiscent of a Coors commercial according to John rocks hoping for any hold. Almost perfectly, I emulate Charlie’s terror stricken thrashing across the stream. Hilarious when you are sitting on the other side of the stream. Meanwhile, further upstream, brains are functioning better; John, Nick, and Mino ford where the water is knee deep and the threat of being swept away only possible rather than very probable.
From here, the impressive kicks in. Quickly crossing the Valle de los Monos de Agua, the trail turns up into the Juncal Valley. Rather suddenly, you are at the edge of a whole lot of glacier. True, out at the end, it is a dirty ugly bit of bouldery monstrosity with the river gushing out of it, but a quick climb and you are up on the moraine which is cocoa dusted with pulverized rock. Like icing on a cake, the moraine scoops and swirls down from the tiered shelves of white giganticality. Moving up the valley, the rock and dirt thin and sink holes of deep turquoise filled with clear water appear. Separating the moraine from the ice of the glacier is a thin river running down over what looks like a ice sculpted staircase. Nick, John, and Charlie
decide that the ice is easier to walk on and jump the stream. I decide they are morons and stay on the tapering moraine. Eventually, it peters out, so I sit and watch the rocket scientists out on the ice jumping crevasses. Later, over lunch, I am informed that I have not only missed great fun but also the 'real' glacier. So it goes.
This story continues with an uneventful hike out - crossing the estero de los monos de agua at a much saner place- followed by a hole in the radiator on the highway, flagging down of a passing truck, and being towed back to Santiago with a couple of ropes that snapped as we neared Santiago. However, all this was recently dramatically overshadowed and back-burnered by the expected, but still hard to get your head around, announcement that carly is getting reassigned to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. As your pretty average American, I know close to zero about Africa, in general, and Ethiopia specifically. Reviewing everything I learned in public high school, private college, and mickey mouse graduate school, I came up with this list:
1. Ethiopia is in Africa
2. Sometime in the early 80s, Stevie
Wonder, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, Lionel Richie and a galaxy of ‘stars’ decided they could end famine in Ethiopia by singing ‘We are the World’, rather than the traditional western aid model - throwing money and hoping the problem can be bought off.
3. There was once an emperor named Halai Selassie, who inspired both Rastafarians and college students to smoke copious quantities of grass. Just as a side, ritual cannabis for god always seemed a lot less screwy than ritual cannibalism, i.e. transubstantiation.
4. Speaking of the Good Book, Ethiopia is old school Christian and apparently claim to having squirreled away the Arc of the Covenant (despite the false assumption by Indiana Jones that the Nazi’s had it) through some son of King Soloman and the Queen of Sheeba - pretty vague on the details of all this.
So, that’s all I got. 35 years of living and 17 or 18 of formal education. Pretty thin on facts. I did learn that Addis Ababa is the third highest city in the world after La Paz and Quito. Apparently, Africa is not all Sahara Desert, NGO aid organizations, and big game reserves. Who new? Anyway, I suppose things are
gonna get stranger . . . .
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Janice Frederick
non-member comment
Africa is special
Colin, All the Ethiopians that I knew were beautiful people. They were very proud to be Ehiopian. I think this adventure will be most educational and a surprise that once you leave you will miss the people more than the country. All the best wishes. Janice