Me in the hot springs There is something disconcerting about that helplessness you feel when you learn you will spend the next two days without access to email or social media. You don’t want to believe you are one of those people so hopelessly addicted to your phone that its loss causes anxiety. But you …
Chile Part 1: From Graffiti to Paradise
Chile is almost as long as the US is wide, but it snakes along the Pacific Ocean for 2700 miles, hemmed in by its portion of the 5,500-mile Andes range. Most of its 17 million people live in the center, within a couple of hours of Santiago and at its extreme ends are sparsely populated …
Death Valley: Zabriskie Point
I admit that I humored Pete when he said he wanted the Road Trip to stop in Death Valley. He had grown up in California and had never seen it. I imagined a boring, flat, scorching, dusty wasteland hardly worth the detour. Boy, was I wrong. Death Valley is dazzling, in the way only an …
An American Concentration Camp: Manzanar, California
The cemetery at Manzanar In a time when anti-Asian hate crimes are on the rise, a visit to Manzanar reminds one that the most shameful anti-Asian hate crime in our history was committed by the American government during World War II. Guilty of nothing, but targeted because of their Japanese descent, 120,000 Americans were forcibly …
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There were people here: The Gila Cliff Dwellings, New Mexico
It's good to be reminded that people have always inhabited places we now call "wilderness". The Gila Wilderness, home to the Gila Cliff Dwellings, was the first wilderness area designated by Congress in 1924. I note that the Gila Wilderness claims to be the "first wilderness in the world", ignoring the fact that New York …
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