Category: stories

I landed in Nome in a light drizzle after spending two hours above the overcast following the Alaska Range from my window. Its loftiest peak, massive Denali (Mt. McKinley) topping out at 20,320 feet glowed brilliant white in the morning light. With the briefest of introduction to my crew boss, I was whisked away immediately →

Not quite ready for a day on the sand, I found my way to the Jardim Botanico located in an upscale Rio neighborhood of the same name. Protecting something like 6500 species of Atlantic rainforest trees and plants on its 370 acres, it is listed as one of the finest botanical gardens on the continent. →

Incallajta was our final destination – a remote set of Incan ruins that Randy had visited with his family almost by accident a year before; a place he promised would blow our minds. I never found the ruins on the map, but instinct would guide me back there today. My enchantment with Incallajta (een-ka-YAHK-tah) quickly →

Four hundred miles and nine hours by bus beyond Arequipa are the plains of Nazca – an immense, barren canvas for the famed Nazca Lines that Erich von Däniken highlighted in his 1968 blockbuster “Chariots of the Gods.” He suggests that the remarkable designs etched into 200 square miles of sand and earth in coastal →

By the time we reached Laguna Verde – a pea-green soup of a lake at the southernmost point of Bolivia, Emiri and I were ready to walk. The massive strato-cone of Cerro Lilicanbur loomed above the water, straddling the border like armed sentry. We would skirt its left flank over the broad summit with a →

Captain Jesus cautioned us not to go swimming because “las pirañas comen la gente” (the piranas eat people) – as if our first instinct was to plunge into the turbulent brown floodwaters choked with jungle debris and challenge the undertow and carnivorous fish with a backstroke. He clearly underestimated our judgment. However, after two days →

As the Pacific Plate makes its inexorable journey to the east at the speed that fingernails grow, it meets South America and dives beneath it. The ragged edge of the continent bends and compresses unnoticed until the stress is no longer sustainable. Snapping back to equilibrium from time to time, the shudder becomes an earthquake →