Category Archives: Travel

Crossing Paths

I put the book down and brought my head back into the 21st century. I’d been reading 19th-century correspondence about explorations in the far Northwest by some of the most important people to document the biological diversity of Alaska and western Canada. I’d just finished a long letter from 1864 by Robert Kennicott to R. McFarlane, a Hudson’s Bay Company factor.

This was in William Healy Dall’s 1915 biography of Spencer Fullerton Baird, who was the first curator at the Smithsonian Institution and later served as Assistant Secretary and then as Secretary.
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Driving Mr. Li

It was the 6th of July, and we set out on a beautiful day to drive over to Dawson City via the Taylor and Top-of-the-World highways. After loading the camper, we made a quick stop at the store for gas and hit the road with deli sandwiches for lunch. It was an easy drive to Tok, where we gassed up again before arriving at Tetlin Junction and heading north toward Chicken. Up there in the high country, past Mount Fairplay and back below treeline, it began raining. We pulled over to camp in a gravel pit and relaxed for the evening.
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A-Hunting We Will Go!

It had been three long years since I’d gotten a moose, and the freezer was clatteringly empty. We hadn’t done so well with fishing this year, either, so it seemed like a good time to shake things up. As I hopped in the truck to go, I didn’t realize that someone I didn’t know was just down the road brandishing a gun and threatening to shoot police officers. This guy’s escapades caused one of the oddest beginnings to a hunting trip I’ve ever had.

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“¡Guate, Guate, Guate!”

Gaudily painted bus in Antigua Guatemala

Gaudily painted bus in Antigua Guatemala

The conductor bellowed out the bus’s destination for Guatemala City, trying, through sheer volume and enthusiasm, to lure a few more passengers aboard before the gaudily painted vehicle roared out of town on a cloud of diesel exhaust. The ambient noise and bustle did make shouting required, and with the noxious exhaust clouds people weren’t hanging around in this place for fun, but nobody was tempted aboard this time, so the guy(1) swung aboard as the driver pulled the bus away on its journey along winding mountain roads.

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