Uganda Gorilla Safari - The Crowning Glory

I recently returned from a five week East African safari through Tanzania (including Kilimanjaro climb), Kenya and Uganda. Kenya and Tanzania were stunning, but the crowning glory was gorilla tracking find the rare Mountain Gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda with my mother, aunt, and cousin. You would not believe the terrain we covered! Steep inclines, extremely dense vegetation and the humid sticky climate of a tropical rainforest. What a challenge! But, oh so completely worth it when you are face to face with one of humanity's closest living relatives. I was humbled by their gentleness and their complete concern for each other. We watched as young gorilla played without care, jumping off the dominant Silverback as if they were in a WWF wrestling match. Mothers cradled their babies and the young males bravely sat sentry against any danger. I was relieved to note that we were not considered a danger to them. We were welcomed into their world with complete trust and I was so honored to be a part of that. I cannot fully describe the peace which we all felt watching these beings in this incredible forest.

The second day of trekking was harder...no cut trail anywhere. Two members of our group decided to give up their permits to locals in our camp who have never been up the mountain. The gorilla group we were tracking was on the move and they were tough to find in that tangle of vines, branches, thorns and other fun stuff! We all were exhausted from fighting the forest! Again, the exhaustion slips away when you realize what you are witnessing. Young gorillas climbing trees, one just above your head, the Silverback guarding the group as they move to a relaxing spot to feed, a baby so close to me her smell floods my senses. I could have reached out my hand to touch her. Absolutely overwhelming. I loved it and drank it in.

I cried when I left Uganda. After five weeks on the continent, I had become so attached to the rhythm of Africa, to the simple ways and happiness of the people. There is a certain satisfaction of surviving without lights and running water and the modern conveniences we all take for granted at home. I yearn for the peace that is evident in so many ways in Africa. Not everything is handed to you there--it is earned and it is so much more valued. I am still processing a lot of what I saw, felt, heard and tasted.

By Nicole Russo

Guides in Costa Rica

Having a good guide in Costa Rica with natural history knowledge and a keen eye are essential or you can miss so much. I am a university educator and teach a number of field courses. Our Wildland Adventures guide, Leo Chavez, left an impressive mark in my memory. I really don't know how he spotted the Laughing Falcon, the Bat Falcons, or the numerous sloths. Our family had the same vantage point in the van, was avidly looking for birds, but would have missed 50% of the animals that Leo found. Leo's experience and gestalt for finding items of interest was exceptional. Towards the end or the trip, Leo had really learned something about each of us and knew what we wanted to see. For my wife, he pointed out the large Mexican Elms in the valley leading to La Paz. For my children, he found tarantulas and cool insects. For me, he pointed out the song of every inconspicuous flycatcher. In Manuel Antonio and Monteverde, I overhead three other guides stop their tour groups to introduce Leo Chavez as their mentor and the greatest ornithologist in Costa Rica. Leo has taught ornithology courses to guides in San Jose and he has a positive rapport with his former students. It was an honor to have him as a guide.

Steve Broyles
Costa Rica Vacation

Feeding your kids to the sharks

In The Footsteps of Darwin (Galapagos)

"My daughter lives in San Francisco where she loves to surf. Her dream was to surf in the Galapagos. When we had a few days at Finch Bay Hotel in Puerto Ayora after our Galapagos cruise, we decided to rent surf boards and hike the two miles to Tortuga Bay. The beach was magnificent and totally empty except for sea lions and of course, birds. The first thing my daughter noticed was the huge shark off shore.



Here was a true dilemma for a parent. Do I encourage the kids to surf or do we turn around and hike back the two miles without accomplishing my daughter's cherished dream? Trusting the naturalists whom we had learned so much from on our Galapagos expedition, we decided that the animals of the Galapagos were not as aggressive as they looked. So off went my son, age 28, and my daughter, 31, to go surf with the sharks.
Thank god we are all in one piece and in the end, it was a magical day. So much for feeding your kids to the sharks!"

by Flo Meyers

Kids & Buffalo

Like most people, not knowing anything about a subject doesn't keep me from making assumptions. Strong, firmly held, bet-the-ranch assumptions. And then being shocked when proven wrong.

So it was when, sent out to photograph a family tour in Yellowstone one year, I watched a handful of kids between 12 and 15 years of age spot a group of buffalo for the very first time in their short lives. I thought they'd be transfixed. Instead they paused, looked at them impassively the way we might view a clump of black-and-white milkers on a hillside in Vermont, and walked on toward the bubbling mud pots. I was stunned.

On the van that morning I'd discovered that they'd never seen a bison in the flesh. Or in the fur, which seems more apt in this case. Immediately a photo leapt into my brain, a close-up of four young faces as they stared in wonder at a 2,000-pound living locomotive able to leap a barb-wire fence in a single bound. An animal who, disguised as a mild-mannered cud chewer, fights a never-ending battle to prove itself otherwise - completely, utterly otherwise - if people don't leave it alone.

Our guides that morning had made this very keep-your-distance point in no uncertain terms, and so I figured my chance to catch that shot of awe was even more assured. When we entered the park my hopes were ratcheted up even farther, for a ranger had provided handouts showing a buffalo standing on the ground, a man nearby but traveling through the air (with a singularly surprised expression on his face), and his camera on its way to the ground. The drawing was accompanied by the warning that a buffalo can run at three times the speed of the average human, plus the words "These animals may appear tame but are wild, unpredictable, and dangerous."

Yet none of this had produced the effect I had expected. Why?

At lunch I quizzed the parents, once the kids had wolfed down their bison burgers and taken off, excitedly, to explore the cavernous and historic Old Faithful Inn. These mothers and fathers seemed amused at my befuddlement, and exchanged knowing smiles as they explained things to non-parent me.

"They've grown up seeing them," one mother said. "In books and magazines, on TV, and full-screen at the movies. You can't expect kids today to react the way we did years ago."

"That's right. They can Google 'em up any time they want on the computer," another mother added. "Or think how many they saw just in "Dances With Wolves"!

A father said I'd misinterpreted their reaction. They weren't overwhelmed, granted, but neither were they uninterested. As they saw more buffalo through the week, he promised, I'd hear them asking questions. "And later, when they're back home, they'll remember seeing them in real life. All the pictures will mean more to them then."

He was right. I did hear questions, from how many buffalo there used to be and why there aren't more now, to how the Indians killed them and what they made from their hides. I was impressed with the questions, and with some of the guides' answers, and especially with the fact that when the guides didn't know they said so, promised to find out and get back with the kids on it - and did.

Here's some of what I learned that week:

Numbers: It is estimated that before the commercial hunting of the late 1800s, between 30 and 60 million buffalo roamed the Great Plains. By 1889 there were only some 600 left.

One of the first European descriptions of the buffalo, & how they were used by the Indians: It was the early 1540s when Spanish conquistador Francisco de Coronado and his men wound their way north out of Mexico to near present-day Santa Fe, then east across the seemingly never-ending Great Plains into central Kansas. The survivors of that expedition called the American buffalo "cows" and "oxen," and said of them:

...they are the food of the natives, which drink the bloud hot, and eate the fat and often ravine the flesh raw...That which they eate not raw, they rost, or warm rather at a fire of Oxe-dung, and holding the flesh with his teeth, cut it with Rasors of stone. These Oxen are of the bignesse of our Bulls...haire...which is like wooll...They are the meat, drinke, shooes, houses, fire, vessels [dishes], and their masters [the Indians] whole substance.

Noted with respect in many explorers' journals were the practical uses of almost every part of the buffalo, from the tail (used as a flyswatter), to the eyes at the other end (which were boiled down to make glue). The meat was eaten, the skins worn as coats or used as blankets and as wrappings around the poles of teepees. The tendons served as tough thread to sew the skins together, and also as bowstrings.

Hair was used as insulation, and for its softness (as in winter moccasins), and braided into rope. Skins that weren't tanned (using a mixture of brain, bone marrow, and liver) became rock-hard rawhide, which could be soaked into pliability and then dried and shaped into kettles, cradles, cups, war shields, drums....

The animal's large stomach was cleaned (no doubt many times) and, along with the bladder and large intestine, served as containers for food and water. The shoulder blade, strapped to a long stick with rawhide (which was soaked and then dried in the sun), served as a hoe.

How many buffalo remain today? In the United States, some 150,000.

by Dennis Coello

A Yellowstone Tale

All week I'd been tagging along on Austin-Lehman's "Yellowstone National Park Family Adventure," shooting catalogue pics of the kids and parents as they'd hiked and rafted and ridden horses. And laughed.

There was lots of laughter, which surprised me. Never having had kids myself, nor even nieces or nephews, I'd worried that a week with a bunch of brats, even in the natural amusement park of Yellowstone, might drive me crazy.

I couldn't have been more wrong. They were interested in looking through my camera, fascinated by the hulking buffalo, delighted in getting to know one another and the young tour-company guides, and filled with questions for the rangers about the geysers and bubbling mud pots and lots of things I wouldn't otherwise have noticed. I found myself marveling at how alive they were, and they and their parents kindly made me feel like part of an extended family. I didn't want it to end.

The kids even paid attention, for a while anyway, when on a hike one day the old history teacher in me brought on a lengthy discourse about a man who'd been with one of the early expeditions into Yellowstone, became separated from his party, was lost for weeks and weeks as he wandered around, and had nearly starved to death before he was rescued. The munchkins peppered me with questions for his name, what he ate, the year this happened, if the Indians had helped him, why he didn't kill a buffalo and tan the hide to use as a coat and blanket....

I squirmed beneath the barrage. But I didn't take the easy course of making up answers. I told them only what I remembered distinctly, absolutely. It wasn't much. I knew his last name was Truman. That the event had occurred in the late 1850s. That he was lost for three months and weighed only ninety pounds when found alive.

Fast-forward to the final dinner of the tour, the last chance to see everyone together and reminisce happily about the week. I was mugging with the kids, trying to get some final portrait shots, when one of the mothers arrived with apologies for being a few minutes late. Then she smiled broadly, asked for quiet so that she could make a "presentation" (as she put it), and while still standing turned to me and said:

"Dennis, we have enjoyed your company this week. Most of the time, anyway. We even enjoyed being models, some of us more than others. But..." she hesitated, removing a book from the bag she'd brought in with her, "the next time you give us a history lesson you should get your facts straight!" The group erupted into laughter.

And with this she handed me the book I later learned she'd found that afternoon at the Visitor Center, the very one I'd read decades earlier and, to put it kindly, misremembered--"Thirty-Seven Days of Peril," by Truman Everts. She pointed out that I'd gotten half the name right. That I was off by only two decades when recalling when the expedition took place. That while the poor man was lost for just over a third of the time I had told them, he weighed only half as much when he was found.

Next time--and I sincerely hope there is a next time, preferably on another family tour--I'll just say some guy got lost a long, long time ago. And that if anyone wants more details (the correct details!), to call up the Trusted Adventures blog and read all about it.

So, with warm thoughts about that evening with families that had become friends in one short week--and with the book in front of me so that I get my facts straight this time around--I'll offer a few paragraphs about a tale that will entertain you during your own time on the trails in Yellowstone.

Truman Everts was fifty-four years old when, as a member of the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition, he rode horseback into Yellowstone in the summer of 1870. This nineteen-man group had been organized to "prove or refute the existence of natural phenomena" in the region, for many people still believed that the tales of erupting geysers and boiling mud were myth.

It was the ninth of September, late in the day, and the party was negotiating a huge windfall at the south end of Yellowstone Lake. Each man was "working his separate path through the thicket" of brush and fallen trees when, as Everts himself writes, he simply "strayed out of sight and hearing of [his] comrades." This had happened before, to Everts and to others in the expedition, and so he was relatively undisturbed. "I selected a spot for comfortable repose, picketed [tethered] my horse, built a fire and went to sleep."

But deep concern began to take hold the next day, followed by fear when his horse--taking fright while Everts, dismounted, studied the ground for hoof prints--galloped off into the trees. "My blankets, gun, pistols, fishing tackle, matches--everything except the clothing on my person, a couple of knives and a small opera glass--were attached to the saddle." He spent half the day trying to locate his horse, and thereby putting even more distance between himself and his traveling companions. He passed a second night, this time without a comforting fire, longing for "food, friends, and protection." In the distance were "the screeching of night birds, the angry barking of coyotes and the prolonged, dismal howl of the gray wolf."

He had eaten nothing for three days when, overjoyed, he spied an Indian paddling across the lake in a canoe. Nearsighted and having broken his glasses, he rubbed his eyes and called out to his fellow human. But at that instant the "Indian" transformed itself into an enormous pelican, spread its wings and flapped into the sky--"as if in mockery of my sorrow. This little incident quite unmanned me."

Four days out, he ate his first meal. It was the same food that was to keep him alive for all of his thirty-seven days of peril--thistle roots. (Now called the "Everts Thistle," you will find it in the meadows of the northern half of the park.) He found these roots "palatable and nutritious...not unlike a radish." I'll take his word for it.

But the occasional protein dish also came his way. While hiding from a storm for two solid days beneath a spruce bough a "little benumbed bird" hopped within his reach. He ate it raw. One week later, he spent an entire morning catching a grasshopper. Fashioning a hook from a bent pin he pursued the wary trout--to no avail. But he caught and ate two minnows, and one evening found a seagull's wing and judged it "delicious."

Nevertheless, in lucid, honest moments Everts realized he was slowly starving to death. He also recognized that he was wearing himself down through a series of mishaps. Frostbite had taken the heels and sides of his feet. While he slept next to a life-sustaining thermal pool (the heat protecting him from the gathering fall chill) the crust broke, pouring steam onto his hip and scalding it badly. And while he had at last deduced a way to make fire with the lens of his opera glass he inadvertently fell asleep, falling into the flames and burning one hand severely.

And then there were the encounters with Yellowstone's animals. A mountain lion yowled and scratched and thumped its tail when it ran Everts up a tree, keeping him there for hours while the intended victim hurled branches and epithets in return. He came upon several bears in the daylight and heard hungry wolf packs in his dreams, but managed to escape meal-hood as he first made his way toward the Madison Range (to the west of Old Faithful), then thought better of an attempted crossing of the mountains and retraced the party's route north along the east side of Yellowstone Lake.

By now it was touch and go. Everts, alone for more than a month and growing ever weaker, began having visions. His weight had fallen to only fifty pounds. The end was near.

But then John "Yellowstone Jack" Baronett and prospector George Pritchett, employed by Everts' comrades to search for him, appeared on the scene. Riding in the bitter cold and spitting snow near today's Roosevelt Lodge, Baronett's dog began to growl at "a black object...making a low groaning noise, crawling along upon its knees and elbows and trying to drag itself up a mountain." Baronett almost shot it, thinking it a small bear.

He later described Everts as looking more forlorn than any human he'd ever seen, "A few tattered rags upon an emaciated skeleton, frozen, scalded, singed and festered into the semblance of a two-legged animal, hideous beyond description...." He took him gently down the mountain into camp, made him warm, gave him sips of antelope tea, and began round-the-clock nursing .

Truman's rescuers moved him to a cabin close to present-day Gardiner. Days of rest, more tea, meals of meat broth, and a pint of bear oil to restore his digestion (kindly rendered from the fat of a bear killed by a passing mountain hunter), in time put Everts in the pink. Or nearly so. It would be months before he regained his weight, and more than a year before he recovered from his wounds.

But recover he did, magnificently--and lived until 1901. When he died in February of that year, at age 85, he was survived by his daughter, and a young widow, and a son who was only nine.

by Dennis Coello

Bullet Ants for Band-Aids

When you were ten years old, there was nothing cooler than sporting a big old Band-Aid over a new scrape. Especially if it had Spider-Man plastered on it. Well, you thought there was nothing cooler, but then again, you'd never been to Costa Rica.

Fast forward a couple of years to a family vacation: You, your little sister Suzie and your parents are walking along a trail through the rainforest on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, sporting the new wide-brimmed, floppy hats Wildland Adventures suggested you buy. You scoffed at the hats at first--they screamed dorky! But you're actually grateful for yours now, as you've just learned from Maricio, your naturalist guide, there's a good chance you might get splattered with monkey dung falling from the sky.

Maricio stops suddenly at the trunk of a tree where he's spotted a giant red bullet ant, named on account of its powerful and potent sting--the sensation of which has been likened to that of being shot with a bullet. It's an inch long, nearly the size of your pinky finger.

Maricio picks up the writhing insect between his thumb and forefinger and places it on his arm, demonstrating how, growing up in Costa Rica as a boy, his mother used the ants to suture wounds.

You, your sister and your mom and dad watch in amazement as the bullet ant suddenly clamps its mighty stingers deep into Maricio's forearm. Without batting an eyelash, he pinches the body of the ant from his skin, leaving the stingers submerged in his flesh.

"It's like a Band-Aid," he says, matter-of-factly. "When you place the bullet ant over a wound, its sting will hold the skin together until the wound heals."

Your eyes bulge, Suzie's nose wrinkles, and Maricio starts off again down the trail pointing out Howler and Cappuchin monkeys in the canopy of trees above.

Tugging at your sleeve to conceal the week-old Spider-Man Band-Aid clinging to your elbow, you spend the next half hour whispering with your dad about bullet ants, Band-Aids and of course, Maricio's undeniable bravery.

Given the option, you're pretty sure you'd stick with Spidey.