The Aniak, the Whole Aniak, and Nothing But the Aniak

If you're fond of the sayings, "third time's the charm," or "persistence pays off!" then I may have a story for you.  After what is effectively five years of trying, I finally got my ass and my kayak up to Aniak Lake in Alaska, where I put the ass in the kayak and floated/paddled down to Aniak village where the river terminates in the Kuskokwim.  Wikipedia is going to tell you that's 95 miles, but my GPS differs, claiming 125 miles (actually 128, but I did troll around about 3 miles on the lake).

     I first attempted this in 2013, arriving in Aniak five years younger and stronger than I am now, full of piss, vinegar, and eagerness to float down from the lake.  "Can't take you up there," said the pilot. "Too dangerous this year, too many log jams.  You won't make it."  Of course I argued the point, but mine was not a strong negotiating position, as I had no idea how to fly a plane.  I let myself be flown to Salmon Creek instead and had a great trip.  When I returned in 2015 I had a little more of the pilot's confidence, but still not enough good luck: high winds at the lake turned us back, and I had to settle for a starting point some 10 miles down the Aniak mainstem, just above the timberline.

    Guess what?  Persistence pays off!  The third time is the charm.  August 26, 2017 was a gloriously calm day in the general area of Aniak Lake, and by 5:00 p.m. I was standing on its shores, alone on a scruffy tundra landing strip surrounded by dry bags full of gear and two big bear cans full of food and coffee and scotch whisky.

Aniak Lake is beautiful.  Nishlik Lake used to be my gold standard of gorgeous headwaters lakes, but it has been supplanted by Aniak.  It's just too stinking pretty, with fragrant rolling tundra backed by incredible ice-carved mountains.  On my first night, I woke up to the sound of a talus field readjusting itself with a thunderous roll that bounced off the mountains across the lake, and then back again.  Good weather held; at times it got breezy for a spell, but then it got calm and glassy again, and I could hear the waterfalls on the mountainsides again.

Sitting quietly in a chair sipping scotch after feasting on the world's tastiest, freshest lake trout, I watched the caribou slowly graze their way closer and closer to my tent.

   

It would have been easy to sit there for a week peace-ing out, "lost/
in miles of land without people, without/one fear of being found," but there was a river to float and fish to catch.  Typical of the upper parts of Southwest Alaskan rivers, the Aniak was slowish and shallow up top, with ridiculous fish-a-cast grayling fishing in any hole or run of reasonable depth.

The first 10-11 miles were entirely new to me, which was very cool.  I camped on new ground, a wide-open gravel bar, and was awoken in the wee hours by the splashing and thrashing of a bunch of caribou trying to cross the river via my camp. Quite a commotion!  The next morning I floated into a known grayling pool, marked "greymax" on my GPS, and found the water higher and the population mix a bit different, with some "fish of color" moving into the eddy at the top:

This trip brought me the most consistent topwater wogging for cohos that I have ever seen. Almost every likely hole had a taker on the wog; every really good hole had several.  I marked one spot "upperNS" for "Upper Nonstop," and there was a lower nonstop as well, both of them spots where the wogging just wouldn't stop until my casting arm was quite worn out anyway.  I spent a rest day at the Kipchuk confluence (where I saw my first jet-boaters go by after eight pure sweet days without having to look at a single human being), on a gravel bar whose north end abutted Middle Nonstop.  I got a nice trout and some grayling from that bar too; but I am a pragmatic man, and when I got bored with resting, I sauntered down to the pool, wogged it up for 15-20 minutes, and then sauntered back to my chair under the tarp.  I don't ask much, really.  Especially when there is a Whole Fucking Lotta.

There was a lotta topwater fishing for cohos and grayling, but it's my duty to report that there was zero topwater for me on rainbows, though I certainly dragged a mouse around in likely spots, and, worse yet, zero topwater pike action on the Dahlberg diver!  Either someone had been down the river earlier in the summer and really punished the fish on those flies, or possibly it was just unlucky light conditions or water turbidity, both of which turned against me as I got into the middle reaches.  Whatever; I didn't cry.  More the opposite.

Rainbows are great, but I try not to get too wrapped up in targeting them in Alaska.  They're the main stream fishing target right here in California!  But good luck in the golden state finding these other species that filled my docket on on the Aniak: lake trout, arctic grayling, arctic char, coho salmon, sockeye salmon, pike, and -- just one, but a real treat -- sheefish!  In a shameful act of waste, I cut a pan-sized fillet out of this 34-inch fish, and tossed the rest into the current.  It was my last-night shore dinner, and oh boy it was delicious tasting and feeling a lot like California halibut.

On the topic of shore dining, let us speak of one of nature's most perfect foods: the salmon egg.  It is delicious, nutritious, and warming, and it seems to retail for $5-10 a spoonful down here in the lower 48.  Hell with that; how about completely free of charge for as much as you can eat?

There's a slightly false ring in it if I type, "Of course, it's not all about the fishing;" so I'll amend that to, "Of course, it's not ALL about the fishing."  Right?  It's also about being outdoors for two weeks at a stretch, watching eagles swoop and listening to wolves howl.  It's about breathing pure air while you listen to the river and wind and rain day after day, and shrugging off the cold and wet for as long as you can before crashing out under a tarp with a dead-tired old body. It's about chasing off the morning frost with hot coffee and enriching a sweet sunset deepening over the soulful spruce tops with sips of fine scotch.

And it also is, quite centrally, about boating. On Alaska fishing streams that's generally fairly simple for anyone with basic paddling or rowing skills, but the Aniak is kind of special.  It doesn't have major rapids (like the Kisaralik and Kukaklek do), but it does have major obstacles in the form of lots and lots of downed trees.  In the worst cases, this means total blockages of the river where "log jams" force you to portage your stuff over land.  I did plenty of that in 2015, and it gets old.  But this year, for my charmed third run down the Aniak, it was actually possible to get through the notoriously jammed-up section of the river known to locals as "Deliverance," without once getting out of the boat!  And with only a few minor near-crashes and scratch-ups . . . 

As I probably mentioned elsewhere in this blog, I've lived over 35 years on earth, ever since I started canoeing back in high school, with a vague dream of paddling a canoe through a bleak tundra landscape with wolves running along the shore.  My Alaska floats, now 12 in number (eight solo, four social) haven't exactly brought that dream to reality.  What they have been, instead, is one of those few things in a lifetime that end up being more rich and wonderful than your imagination was even able to conjure.  I'm going to put this Aniak float right up at the top of the bucketed list with standing on top of Huascaran Norte and making it down Rio San Juan to the Caribbean.  

I am so glad it finally happened, and completely grateful.

One Trip to Rule Them All

    At 15 or so on a lovely Maine day skipping school to go hiking, I had the basic epiphany that it was GOOD to be outside in the woods and mountains and lakes and rivers.  Not too long after that, I started to have a vague dream of canoeing down the Yukon river, with wolves and caribou running along on the wide-open tundra banks and huge arctic char practically jumping into the boat.

   At 48 I know a bit more about the nature of the Yukon river, and would probably pick somewhere else for a dream trip.
   One possible project is to land in the Aniakchak crater, run the class IV Aniakchak down to where you can carry a few miles over to the Meshik River, and then float fishily down to Bristol Bay.  Of course, then you have to somehow schlep a blowup boat several miles up the tidal flats to Port Heiden, where there's an airport, but nobody willing (apparently) to fly turistas around.  Expense and lack of services has put that plan on hold until I have some serious sabbatical time again.

   Another idea, to go 300 or so miles down the Noatak (pictured above) has arisen, but in the end, that project seems likely to suffer from a fundamental problem: long stretches of fishing-challenged paddling (and probably against some serious wind and weather).  I'm sure the Noatak's fishing kicks the ass of just about any float I could do here in California.  But is it in the same league as the salmon-swarmed, biologically rich rivers of the Bristol Bay and Kuskokwim drainages further South?
   The Aniak River (in the Kuskokwim Kountry) presents itself as a great compromise for balancing the wild & remote with the fishy & fun.  Second-hand sources have commented that, "90% of the time I was floating down the Aniak I was scared out of my wits; but the other 10% I was having the best fishing of my life."  When I heard this a few years ago, I thought: "There."
  So, in 2013 I showed up in Aniak village with my maps and GPS and yak and all my homework done, raring to get in there are start climbing over logjams (for which the river is famous).  I quickly discerned that the pilot guy in Aniak is a little bit crazy, but, worse, I soon learned that he also a little bit cautious: because conditions were worse than usual on the main stem Aniak, he could only in good conscience drop me on the Salmon River, a relatively tame tributary of the Aniak.  Arguments ensued.  But rather than bag the whole trip, I sucked it up and started my float on the Salmon.  It turned out to be no stick in the eye, as my first-night happiness attested:

   However, it was still frustrating.  After a terrific trip full of cohos and rainbows and pike and sheefish, I beached my yak at Aniak village and radioed for my pilot to pick me up in the pickup. What does he say as soon as he sees my yak fully inflated and loaded on the beach?  "You know, I bet you could have got through the main stem in that thing."

  Fast-forward past a 2014 plan cancelled due to buying, of all things, a goddamned house, and we find your correspondent six days away from the same routine: packing up that blue yak and landing in Aniak village raring for a rare and wondrous float trip. This time I have been mildly concerned about a knee tweak in particular and my overall fitness for paddling in general, but as we get to the final prep stages, I feel READY.  Crazy Pilot informs me that the river has been as clear and friendly this year as ever.
   So it's on!  Starting next Sunday afternoon, I'll land on Aniak Lake and get ready for twelve nights on the river.  At last, I'll get to see the mouths of Atsusovluk Creek and the Kipchuk River where they empty fishily into the upper Aniak.  I'll get to climb over some logs!  Eventually, I'll get to familiar scenes at the confluence with the Salmon, and I'll fish the sublimely woggy pool there before moving on to more GPS-marked sweetspots:  "Cohomax," for a coho-a-cast slough; "Mousey" for a small tributary with a great cutbank for fishing the mouse; "Slam" where I got all main species (bow, grayling, char, coho and chum)  in one riffle, and "Slay," which I don't remember exactly, but sounds promising.  The Doestock mouth will have pike, and may produce another sheefish or two for me.  I have high and fairly realistic hopes of a seven-species fish-o-rama.

  Given my advancing age and decrepitude, will this trip be the climax of my wilderness floating career?  That's possible.  Over the past ten years, I've found that my fitness goes down for spells (plantar fascitis, gout attacks, full-time jobs intruding) and then goes up again (biking fitness, Baja trips, younger women contributing).  Hopefully on one of the ups, I'll get my sorry old ass to the Aniakchak crater, and maybe even haul a Feathercraft to the headwaters of the Noatak.  I can dream.
   But what's way more exciting than any dream, is execution.  Six days and counting down.

Wet Year Woes

My adopted home state of California, along with everyone else West of the Mississippi, is in drought.  In fact, given the lack of rain over the past 13 years, the situation may even qualify as a megadrought.  Nice term!  Scary-sounding, and, if there's any truth in the forecast of a three-decade dry spell, genuinely scary.

And yet, my memory tells me that at least two or three of those years must have been pretty wet.  Since completing my first 210-odd miles on the John Muir trail at 19, I figure by now I must have walked at least 2000 miles in the Sierra Nevada (I'm 48) -- and quite a few of those miles were cold, snowy, wet-boot miles.

Yes, I distinctly remember an early-oughts cross-country hike over Graveyard pass, where I was surprised to see that someone else had already stuck a few walking sticks in the snow up there before their footprints got snowed over.  More recently, I've slid and stumbled and butt-glissaded in The White Stuff in places like Yosemite and Emigrant Wilderness, with witnesses!

Sometimes, lovely witnesses:

My wet tale of woe, though, was a solo late June hike in the northern Yosemite wilderness.  Experienced people will tell you, as I now know, that June is still pretty early for backpacking up high -- especially in a wet year.  But I had it in my head that I was going to be the first guy to fish a few of my favorite lakes up there at the 9,000 foot level, and I had lovely images of stripping wooly buggers in front of the noses of hungry trout along the edge of a lake still in the process of ice-out.  

Along this 20-24 mile schlep into my favorite lake, I was to experience five increasingly convincing, disturbing, and finally disastrous signs that it was not only a very wet year but -- ironically enough -- too wet for wetting a line effectively.

Sign #1

When the trail turned into a U-shaped track through meadowy areas, that track was in fact a slow-moving, inches-deep stream of clear, cold water.  To save my boots, I switched out to Tevas until my toes got numb. 

Sign #2

Arriving after about 10 miles at lovely, trouty lake at 6500 feet, I found that the lake's shore had extended WELL back into the trees.  The rocks that I had cast from in previous years were either submerged, or were little islands out in the lake, and there was a good 2-3 feet of cold-ass water lying between the pines where I might have expected to camp.  Casting a fly in those trees was not going to work well (assuming there were even any trout rooting among the pine cones), so I kept moving along.

Sign #3

The main waterway in this canyon, the same one feeding the aforementioned flooded lake, was, as I found upon climbing up the granite slopes, not the usual collection of fishable pools connected by quaint waterfalls -- it was a ROARING TORRENT.  I remember standing by the white, leaping water and having two thoughts: 

1. "This sounds like a goddam jet engine at full blast."
2. "This could be dangerous if I slipped and got my sorry ass swept in there."  

Sign #4

My final hope for that first day was to fish a second-favorite lake around 8,000 feet -- but that was not to be either, for a whole new Cause of Unfishability.  In this case, the flooding stream, normally crossed on stepping stones or waded at a cold but shallow ford, completely locked me away from the lake.  Believe me, I covered ground looking for a crossing of some kind.  But the prospect of wading with a backpack in four or five feet of firmly flowing, icy water didn't have great appeal.  I pitched a camp away from the stream and put all my hopes on the #1 lake, still 8-9 miles and 1000 vertical feet away.

Sign #5

If you've ever walked a hard day in the Sierras, filled with anticipation of arriving at a sweet camp and throwing your backpack down at last, you'll know exactly how I felt the following day when I rounded the last few hills blocking my view of the lake.  I was excited and walking fast through about a half-foot of damp snow. There was snow on the trees too, all of which created a fairly blinding effect in the midday Sierra sunlight, but I tramped along with my lovely image of the ice-ringed lake brimming with big, hungry trout.  Finally arriving at an overlook to the lake, what did I see?  WHITE STUFF.  A big, long field of it right where the lake should have been, without a single break of visible, liquid water surface.  The lake was still ice-covered, in late June!

Those were some wet year woes.  I got to walk through some unique conditions, and I sure got a workout -- but in one the wettest multi-day California hikes in my personal history, I did not get to wet a line.  I'm sure you appreciate that I'm not making this up, because you can't make this stuff up.

For last summer's backpacking, the bigger issues were shallow, warm water, and smoke from wildfires.  One night, after a long, hazy day, I woke up in the wee hours with genuine concern for the breathability of the air.  Smoke from various fires in the general area had created a dense, white fog around my camp.  The next day -- a much clearer day, thankfully -- my tent smelled like it had been held over a campfire. A group of kids hiking down from higher up were very relieved to hear from me that the trailhead was not actively aflame.  

I'm wondering how things will look this year.  Will the plumbed and piped lower Sacramento be running high and clear during the shad run?  Will the aqueducts in Glenn county spill the usual flood of water into the furrows between the almond trees, or into the big shallow lakes where a fat percentage of American rice is grown?  Is "megadrought" a scary enough prospect that Californians might adjust their agricultural use of water, in addition to asking citizens to wash their dishes more efficiently?  

As a guy whose wilderness activities are partly motivated by a desire to create distance from the general disappointment created by fellow humans, I'd tend to think: probably not. However, in an effort to see the glass as half full, I'll reflect that there will probably be no problem fishing a certain lake system this year, even in late June.  

Tarpology

Though it happened twenty years ago, the scene is still vivid in my mind: I'm backpacking in the Japan Alps with my English pal Phil, and we're setting up a tent in a nasty cold wind.  As I try to tie down a tarp line to a stake, gusts keep blowing the corner of the tarp into my face, and I keep messing up the knot, untying it, and trying again.  Phil, watching this, eventually comes over, grabs the line out of my hands, and makes the unforgettably English utterance:

"OH, you're SO unSKILLful!!!!"

I offer this anecdote as a disclaimer.  I am not a certifed, trained tarpologist, and I will not pretend, in this blog post, to inform you about tarping solutions as much as tarping problems.  With the latter, I am very familiar; with the former, I adopt an approach which is, shall we say, intuitive?  (Unskillful).  Tarping is on my mind today because I'm just a few weeks away from the kind of trip where you could end up setting and re-setting a couple of different tarps a few times a day.  The kind of trip where the wind changes like this:

That billowing setup is a pretty clear example of my intuitive tarping methodology:

1. Find two fairly tall trees that are not further apart than 3/4 of your longest piece of nylon cord.
2. String a "backbone" cord from one tree to the next and super-tighten it with a trucker hitch.
3. Laying the square tarp along the line in diamond orientation, hitch the tree corners the same way.
4. Tie down the remaining two corners to ground stakes or logs or stuff on the ground, and tighten those down as much as possible, again with trucker hitches.

One important thing about this method is the location. In addition to the properly-distanced trees, you'll need clear space in the middle, and flat space if you're intending to tarp over a tent (which is a very good idea in Alaska, where it really really pours and blows, often).  I'm reminded of what fly fishers sometimes say: you can either change your line and rig, or go find some water where your line and rig will work.  Tarpologically, I go find sites where my rig will work.

"Rigs" I should say, because in bad rain I usually set up a tarp over my kitchen/dining room as well as my tent or hammock.  In low-volume kayak packing, this means carrying one large dedicated tarp, and then double-tasking the small integrated tarp that comes with the hammock (I'm referring to a Hennessy wilderness hammock, which is indispensable for swampy or jungly terrain and a perfect backup for a tent).   Here's the small tarp deployed for the dinner hour:

Tip: a few ounces of single-malt scotch can dramatically increase the comfort of almost any tarp scenario.

I'm sure a Google search would turn up plenty of improvements and better ways to set up these tarps. After posting this blog, I may even have the motivation to do that search and learn some new tricks! Even an unskillful dog can learn a new trick, Phil. The most "technical" tarping I have done is probably my Baja-trip sun tarping, which involves two extendable poles that themselves must be staked in the sand and tied down tight:

When it's hot, you extend the poles up for ventilation; when the Norte is blowing, they come way down:

And with that, I think I have exhausted my material on tarpology.  Though I am necessarily a low-level gearhead simply because it comes with the territory of kayaking, fly-fishing, and wilderness camping, I really don't obsess on gear or methods.  When a setup works, I'll usually forget about it and go fishing. 

Some Good Years Left

The way I have been stealing fishing hours in the interstices of my overworked, silicon-valley-slave lifestyle of the past year or so, I have always felt like I deserved every damn little bit of goodness and happiness coming from fishing, and therefore haven't noticed something important: it has been GOOD and better than normal, better than before.

This came home to me a moment ago when I was reading back to blogs from a few years ago, when I camped on a delta levee and had a ball in general -- but only picked up a few two-pounders for my troubles.  What?  Well, generally, that's the delta: if you're not in the right place (in a massive quasi-wilderness of waterways) at the right time (in a swell of tidal currents that changes speed and even directions, daily) then you're out of luck.  Sometimes you hit it, often you don't.  Sure, I smacked the hell out of small stripers on the San Luis forebay with topwater all through September -- you expect that.

But check it out, on the big old delta, even with my lil kayak program, which limits me to a 10-15 mile range instead of the zipping and zooming 50 miles or more claimed by motorboats, I have been catching good fish every damn trip since they started in October.  

October:

November:

December (OK, I took a break in December, but this still looks like good luck, right?):

January, in cold-ass, turbid water:

And last week, one of a dozen-fish FEBRUARY day!!!

Yes, I have been taking this for granted, along with radically wonderful Baja fishing over Christmas  break, and Thanksgiving ceviche in Costa Rica . . . what an ungrateful pig I am!  I should have been thanking my lucky stars while scarfing down a "Four Fish Feast" on New Year's Eve (sierra-grouper-snook-bonito), and the same for the day I fried up most of that big vermillion rockfish . . . but in flashes, I guess I actually was :)

Reminded of the reminding power of this blog a moment ago, though, I wanted very much to make sure to remind myself: though I'm aging and achey and overworked and disgruntled, I have been having it pretty damn good. So I should shut up --

Must Love Wild Dogs

There was great power in a wolf, even in a coyote.  You have made him into a freak -- a toy poodle, a Pekingese, a lapdog.  

    -- John Fire Lame Deer

I'll need to tread lightly here, as I come from a dog-loving family.  Some of my fiercest sisters love dogs to distraction.  One of them passionately advocates for pit bulls, while the other takes in any well-behaved mutt with a big heart (which you might think would incline her fondly toward me, but is not always the case).  My mother continues, at 70-something, to care for the latest in a string of cairn terriers of varying degrees of likability.  My maternal grandmother and grandfather are infamous for naming all of their poodles "Twiggy."  Twiggy Two, Twiggy Three, Twiggies four, five . . . how high did the Twiggies go, anyway?  I lost count long before we lost both of the grandparents.

Needless to say, those dear old Twiggies are exactly what Lame Deer refers to above.  How did we get to a point where a wolf was transformed into a poodle, and not only did humanity fail to be appalled by this turn of events, but was made strangely happy.  "Here's my best friend at last!" we said, instead of "What in tarnation have we created here?

Let's put our domesticated dog and a wild dog side by side, in very literal terms.  This is exactly what happened when, a couple months ago, our local (and very lovable) golden doodle (a perfect name for my current purposes, I must say) came in direct contact with coyotes.  The doodle belongs to my landlord and landlady, while the coyotes belong just to the general neighborhood of hills and houses.  Every once in a while they start to raise an unholy chaos of cries, barks and yips in the middle of a sunny day, and then, some minutes later, your human ears start to hear the ambulance siren on Old San Jose Road that set them off.  The coyotes are loud, and they're close.  It is my belief that they live near the top of a little arroyo that I could hit with a stone thrown from the landlord's yard.

And, Rosie, golden doodle-cum-Escape Artist, broke through the fence one day and made her way down there.  The result was a few hundred dollars worth of veteranarian stitches, a few shaved patches in wiry white fur, and a somewhat chastened domesticated creature.  Much to their credit, the doodle's owners didn't go crazy with blood lust for coyotes.  Unlike certain ranchers described by Lame Deer, they eschewed poison or booby-trapped carrion, and viewed the problem in terms of supply (domesticated dogs encroaching on coyotes) rather than a problem of demand (coyotes creeping up and trying to eat us all in our backyards).

Just for fun, let's take a minute to imagine this particular encroachment from a coyote's eye-view . . .  and I don't mean that we should try to morph our minds into the coyote's, but rather that we should try to imagine what it would be like if some human creature, domesticated by who-knows-which unwise alien race, were to suddenly come at us out of left field . . .

That's right, you're sitting at home watching TV with your kids after a  well-earned dinner, when -- yikes!! -- suddenly, right through the front door, sweeps an oversized, crazy-looking dude with, say, chartreuse-colored hair and, say, hot pink skin on comically long and ill-proportioned limbs . . . I mean, this guy just does not look natural; there's something really really off about him . . . he's got big bugged-out eyes and a clumsy way of standing just an arm's reach from you as he shouts right at you and your kids, in some almost-understandable but completely ridiculous quasi-language, apparently very upset and aggressive about something you can't make out.

"BRAH RAH RARY RAH RAH BRAH WILLY RILLY ROO ROO!!!!!!!!"

The guy is making no fucking sense, and he is completely ruining your relaxing evening.  More than that, he appears to be a vague (if bizarre) threat to your offspring's safety.  So, after trying to talk to the thing and give it obvious verbal cues to leave, you swat out at it in frustration.  And lo!  a weak, feeble blow from you knocks it right over, and it runs off with a bunch of high-pitched, pathetic crying.  "I'll be damned," you think, and settle back down into the couch.

Coyotes confronting a white-furred, long-limbed "dog" barking into their den might see it something like that, and might just give the thing a gentle bite to send it on its way.

I'm exceedingly fond of Rosie the doodle, so don't tell her that I would like very much to make friends out of the coyotes.  It ain't gonna happen, I know.  Those guys down in the arroyo are living on the lam, and no doubt they have made a way of life out of studiously avoiding humans even while living in our midst.  But I sense that, in a perfect world, like one in which I could live permanently on the shores of Mag Bay most of the year, I might just be able to make quasi-friends and semi-pets out of some wild coyotes.  I think they'd accept bowls of water and fish carcasses regularly, and hopefully they would conclude that it were best not to try and eat up the strange human creature apparently providing them.  Dogs have proven to be smart that way.

If that happened, I guess the coyotes would just end up being mildly domesticated.  But they'd still be coyotes!  And I think that's what I'm really wanting here: a little less domestication, and a little more wildness, in whatever creature I pick for my best friend.

That's where you have fooled yourselves.  You have altered, declawed, and malformed not only your winged and four-legged cousins; you have done it to yourselves.

The Lazy Way

I never mastered (never even attempted) the truly lazy turista vacation where you sit on a beach for a number of days relaxing and reading a shitty novel.  For me, a luxury vacation is when I´m sleeping in hotels instead of pitching a tent in grizzly country or swinging a hammock between two trees. 

And that is the kind of vacation I´m on this minute!  And I´m liking it.  Sitting in my nice-ish hotel room in San Jose Costa Rica, clicking between Premier League and Seria A football matches or alternately gazing out my three arched windows at the ring of mountains around the city, I congratulate myself on being good and lazy. 

Of course, some activity has to be woven into the program.  The model for a Lazy Vacation is the trips I took to Argentina, which involved a small amount of camping, but often just involved a long hard day of wading and hiking, and then a long sweet evening of pigging out alone in a hotel room watching soccer on TV.  Maybe you think that is boring -- but what can I say?  This is how I´m made, this is what I like. 

For a time, I contemplated "popping into Nicaragua" in the middle of this eight-day trip.  Why the parentheses?  Because I "popped" in there last Christmas, and came away with two types of memories: 1, the bliss of paddling and fishing on Lake Nicaragua; and 2, strong memories of waiting in long, hostile lines at the border, sweating profusely, hauling around my kayak bag with no help from dour locals . . . bad memories.  The kind of stuff I´ll do in order to win the reward of a couple of weeks of good fishing.

But for three or four days?  Not sure about that.  In fact, I doubt it enough to have reserved four days at a relatively schwanky hotel on Cano Negro, the lake source of the Rio Frio -- all on the Costa Rican side of the border.  I have a bad feeling the fishing won´t be much, largely due to emails from a local guide who happened to be honest (rare in guides) about conditions in November (turbid, cold, and bad). 

But at least I´ll get out into the bird-loud, croc-lurking jungle waterways and give it a try.  The lake can be paddled, and one can put together a roughly twenty mile day paddling down the Rio Frio and bussing back, which I hope very much to accomplish.  In my perfect dreams, I´m dragging a popper across a shallow side lagoon on the Frio, and it gets HAMMERED by a tarpon!  Then a snook for dinner.  Then a gar for the novelty.  But, in fact, I´m expecting skunk.  That or a sudden panicked tweak that sees me running into Nicaragua for 36 hours.

My current sweet love of laziness may render that unlikely.  I have to hike across the city right now to gather my rental car, and that will be work.  Driving in Costa Rica -- that is work, amigos!  And I´ll paddle around, fishily or not.  In my current mood, it may be plenty.  Vamos a ver :)