When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.
— from Chapter 6, On Tyranny – by Timothy Snyder (2017)
Are We Great Yet?
I stumbled upon this chart showing the relative reputations by countries. Reputation Lab visualized a survey that ranks the world’s 60 leading economies by their reputations. Countries with stronger reputations may attract more foreign investment, tourists, or respect in international institutions.
You can go to my source link below to access the details.
Source: Ranked: Countries With the Best Reputations in 2025
My observations:
United States – The US dropped from position 30 to 48 in just one year. That must be the largest drop of any country in history. The reputation of the US in the world is now below that of Kuwait, Algeria, India and Turkey. It’s just a couple of notches above Colombia.
Russia – Solid in place 60, right there below Iran, Iraq and China.
Switzerland – Solid in place 1.
Canada – Now in place 2.
And with all this, and our collective common sense, our leaders have the gall to tell us that we are finally respected in the world. My question is: How deep can we fall? Are we going to the territory of Russia and China?
I did another annual solo hike up my favorite ridge in Borrego Springs. There is no trail, no other people, just rough terrain high up on the mountain. When I hike there alone I have to be hyper alert since I can’t misstep so I don’t twist an ankle, or worse. Most of the time I am huffing and puffing, looking down for every placement of my boots.
Imagine then when I look up to catch a breath and find myself almost in the middle of a small herd of bighorn sheep. I am literally 30 feet away from them, just standing there, transfixed. And so are they.
If you click on the images you can zoom in. Some of them wear collars with trackers. Others have tags on their ears. The park service monitors and studies them closely, I guess.
As long as I am still and quiet, they just mind their own business.
I took an alternate route around them, so I would not disturb their grazing. They kept an eye on me nonetheless.
Here are a couple of videos I took, just so you can see them in their natural habitat.
Running into a herd of bighorn sheep during a hike always makes my day. It’s an awe-inspiring experience to be surrounded by these creatures who are superbly adapted to the rough environment of the desert mountains.
It’s 1944 in Seattle. World War II is in full swing in Europe. Genevieve “Gigi” Parsons is a housewife living at Parsons Manor, a gothic house her husband John Parsons built for her. They have a 14-year-old daughter named Sera. John runs a successful accounting business. However, recently he has started drinking and gambling excessively, to the point where they are about the lose the house. Their marriage is deteriorating. John has started to abuse his wife, both emotionally and physically.
Eventually, Gigi finds out that John’s gambling debts are to the mafia. Around that time, she notices a mysterious man watching her from the shadows of the woods outside her home. Eventually, the man enters the house and the two start a love affair. Gigi is torn between her safe but boring life with her faltering husband and her daughter, and the passionate affair with Ronaldo Capello. She learns that Ronaldo works for the mob and has his eyes on her husband.
The passion scenes between Ronaldo and Gigi are abundant and the book is basically just porn.
Yes, porn.
Of the 326 pages, I am sure half of them are just graphic and explicit porn, nothing else. Carlton is a pretty good writer, so rather than just building transitions between the Chi Chi Bow Bow scenes, she weaves the porn into a novel with a full plot and a World War II mafia story. But I get kept getting the feeling that the entire story was just there so we could read about the great sex they were having all the time.
I have never read any romance novels; I guess this was my first and last one. I remember reading Fanny Hill by John Cleland when I was 15 or 16, and I remember it was highly erotic (to the teenager I was, of course). This is much more explicit, but I am not a teenager anymore, so it really didn’t interest me much.
When I researched the author after reading the book, I learned that Phantom is a prequel to the “Cat & Mouse Universe” books by the same author, but readable as a standalone story. It combines gothic elements, historical fiction, and mafia stuff with morally gray characters and intense emotional and sensual tension.
Carlton is a bestselling fiction author known for dark romance and thriller novels. While this stuff is not for me, the writing is actually pretty good. I will give it one and a half stars.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show was first released over 50 years ago in 1975. It first was a box office flop, but by 1977, alternative movie theaters started midnight showings and it quickly created a cult following. I am aging myself when I tell you that I must have seen the movie at least 20 times in the years of 1978 and 1979, always at midnight, in Phoenix, Arizona. It was a great event to bring our friends and guests to.
While visiting my son and his girlfriend for Thanksgiving, we looked for cult movies to watch, and we talked about The Room, which my son had made us watch ten years ago. I will reassert here that The Room is the worst movie all all time. But speaking of cult movies, I remembered The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and so we watched it together. For me it was the first time after many decades, and while I had remembered many vignettes, much of it I had forgotten about. For instance, the singing lips through the initial scrolling of the credits was such an iconic feature – how could I possibly forget it?
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a rock musical that crossed many cultural threshold in its time. It was also one of the first audience participation movies. People came to the theater dressed up like the characters, they recited key lines of dialog before they came up in the movie, and there was much audience participation, like throwing rice during the wedding scene, throwing toast and lighting cigarette lighters (we didn’t have smartphones with flashlights then). Going to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show was much more than just going to a movie, it was an experience that you took your friends to.
The film opened up the world for the LGBTQ+ community. It celebrated gender fluidity, queerness, cross dressing, sexual liberation and bisexuality in an unapologetic manner at a time when such images or concepts were rarely dealt with in mainstream society or media. It provided visibility and a sense of community for people who had few opportunities for public expression of queerness.
The music is pop rock and original to the movie. The songs stayed with me over the decades. In particular the “let’s do the time warp again” song is the one I think about when I think about The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Susan Sarandon has a lead role as Janet, and it was one of her earlier movies at the beginning of her career. Also, notable is Meat Loaf’s role as Eddie in the film. Tim Curry, who plays the lead character of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, was already a Broadway actor when he appeared in the movie. He rose to prominence with this role.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a sanctuary where outsiders, misfits, and young people exploring identity could gather without judgment. I was proud to be part of that world as a 20-year-old, just coming of age and looking forward in wonder to the world awaiting me. Life was just getting started. “Don’t dream it—be it” became a catch-phrase for me, and I still fondly remember those days.
Watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show with my family felt a bit like passing a torch. It was nostalgia all the way.
Here is an excerpt from pages 318 to 319:
I am making it publicly known that in no way, shape, or form am I suicidal,” I typed hastily but resolutely (making several spelling and grammatical errors that I’ve corrected here). “I have made this known to my therapist and GP—If something happens to me—for the sake of my family, do not let this go away and help me to protect them. Too many evil people want to see me quieted.
On April 25, 2025, Virginia Giuffre died of suicide at her home outside Perth, Australia. Nobody’s Girl was published posthumously on October 21, 2025. She finished writing this memoir shortly before her death. She had expressed a strong wish for the book to be published, regardless of her circumstances.
A close friend of mine is the father of one of the over 150 gymnasts who had been abused by USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. My friend has found it difficult to talk about what it is like to be a parent of a daughter who he entrusted to an academic institution for her education and training, only to be horribly betrayed, not just by the abuser, but by the entire system surrounding the abuse and allowing it to go on for such a long time. And yet, the sheer scale of Nassar’s abuse is paled by Epstein’s, as we all know now.
Virginia Giuffre has been one of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s most outspoken victims. Her dedication to bringing justice contributed to both Epstein and Maxwell to be convicted and put in prison. She was also the central figure who brought down Prince Andrew and eventually caused his ultimate expulsion from the monarchy.
In her own words, she describes her life, starting with her childhood, or should I say, the lack of her childhood. Her mother was a consistent drug abuser. Her father groomed her and then sexually abused her when she was a young as 7 or 8 years old. Worse, her father traded daughters with another man, so they could abuse each other’s daughters “for variety.” Her mother stood by and later claimed she didn’t know. This went on for years. As she got older, she ran away from home, only to be put into a correctional facility which – you might have guessed – also abused its teenage inmates. Her father was a handyman working at Mar-a-Lago when he got her a job as an assistant in the spa. She was 15. That’s where Maxwell first saw her. She told her that she knew a wealthy man who would teach her to be a massage therapist and she’d get paid well while she was learning. That evening, after she got out of work, she was at Epstein’s estate in Palm Beach, thinking she was going to give a massage. During that very first meeting, Maxwell and Epstein manipulated her into sexually servicing Epstein. And that’s how several years of sexual abuse in broad daylight started. She even suspected that Epstein paid off her father, so he would let it happen. In the course of her service, Epstein forced her to perform sexual acts with hundreds of other men, billionaires, scientists, politicians, two U.S. senators, one former governor of a U.S. state, and – as we all know, Prince Andrews.
Eventually, after several years of servitude, she managed to break free of Maxwell and Epstein’s clutches, eventually get married and have a family. But for the rest of her life she was haunted by the horrors of the abuse she had endured.
Reading Nobody’s Girl illustrates how sexual abuse can first start, then proliferate, and how vulnerable minors, boys or girls, can become victims of repeat and systemic abuse by predators who are master manipulators. It also shines a powerful spotlight on our current system that protects powerful and wealthy people and shelters them from exposure. The victims are called whores, opportunists who accuse rich people just to extract settlements from them. They are accused as liars or even perjurers, when it’s the word of a powerful royal, politician or mogul against a young woman that they “rescued from the gutter.”
Nobody’s Girl is a very important book at a time when our news are flooded with “the Epstein files.” The whole rhetoric of what we are currently witnessing every day becomes all the more real and poignant after reading this book.
Now I must point you back to my introductory quote. Virginia Giuffre, after you read her book, you will find is not the kind of person who kills herself, just as she has reached some success in bringing justice to her perpetrators and helping the thousands of other victims out there whose lives have been destroyed.
Yet, the media and the government will have us believe it was a suicide.
I – for one – do not buy it.
Somebody got to her.
A friend of ours (RW) had repeatedly recommended that we watch Pan’s Labyrinth, since it was one of the best movies he had ever watched. So it was on my list, and when our family was looking for a good movie to watch on the evening of Thanksgiving day, we decided to try it. That was after almost an hour of browsing various good movies and watching trailers, only to reject one after the other. Pan’s Labyrinth is also on a list of the “125 best movies of all time you have to watch before you die”, so how can we go wrong?
Guillermo del Toro’s film El Laberinto del Fauno is a Spanish film in the Spanish language, with English subtitles. We did not expect that we’d be “reading the movie” when we chose to watch it on the evening of Thanksgiving.
In Spain in 1944, fascism under Franco is in full swing. Military all over the country is brutalizing the population. Resistance warriors fight back as much as they can, waiting for the war to end. The captain of the local military force is an exceedingly brutal man. He married a woman with a young daughter, Ofelia. The woman is pregnant, expecting the captain’s baby. Ofelia does not accept her stepfather. She lives in a fairytale world, full of magical creatures like giant bugs, fairies, an old faun, and many other “monsters.”
While the story unfolds of how the resistance fighters try to undermine the regime with the help of the general population, and how the military thugs use sheer sadistic brutality against their own people, Ofelia tries to get out of her impossible situation by the magic of the fairy tale world that only exists in her mind.
Pan is a Greek god which the Christians later borrowed to embody evil, like Satan. He had horns, goat legs, fur, hooves, and a grotesque overall appearance. Such is the faun that appears to Ofelia and leads her through a set of impossible tasks to accomplish her own return to the throne of her true royal father and to live her life as the princess that she really is.
Pan’s Labyrinth brings a little-known aspect of World War II to life, namely what went on in Spain under Franco, while Hitler and Mussolini did their own murderous and ruinous deeds. Is Pan’s Labyrinth a great movie you have to watch?
No.
Does it, in my opinion, belong on any list of great movies you have to watch?
No.
There is not a spark of happiness, the good guys don’t win and gloom lives on. Pan’s Labyrinth is a dark and mystical tragedy that, after watching it, left me numb.
Yesterday I loaded up my mountain bike and went to Hemet to ride around Diamond Valley Lake, one of the largest reservoirs in Southern California.
About 15 minutes after I left my house I needed to get gas. At the pump, as I was trying to pay, I realized I didn’t have my phone with me. I had forgotten it at home.
After a moment of panic I realized that I also had my wallet and I could just pay the old fashioned way with a credit card. Then, while the pump was filling up my truck, I wondered if I should go back home and get the phone. It would add another 30 minutes to my travels, so I decided I was fine without it. I had some cash with me, and what would I need the phone for?
I felt oddly naked stepping back into the car knowing I was “off the grid.” As the day progressed I realized how dependent I was on my phone.
All the points above are fairly benign, nothing bad happened, but it was really strange to be spending the day off the grid.
I think I need to do that more often. On purpose next time. I’ll bring a book.
I have always been fascinated by crows. They are known to be extremely smart and they can recognize and remember human faces. We have a lot of crows in our neighborhood, and I have been trying to befriend them. There is a bag of peanuts in their shells in our vestibule. When I see a crow perching on our roof or on the lamppost out by the street, I go get a couple of peanuts and put them outside while they can see me. No takers yet, no crow friends, but I will keep trying.
The protagonist of Hollow Kingdom is a domesticated crow. The crow is the narrator. The entire novel does not have a single human character. The only referenced human is Big Jim, who rescued the crow when he was just a chick and raised him as a pet. We know about Big Jim only based on flashbacks told by the crow.
Big Jim had named the crow Shit Turd, but he goes by S.T. (not surprisingly). His other pet is Dennis. S.T describes him this way:
Dennis is a bloodhound and has the IQ of a dead opossum. Honestly, I have met turkeys with more brain cells. I’d suggested to Big Jim that we oust Dennis because of his weapons-grade incompetence, but Big Jim never listened, intent on keeping a housemate that has zero impulse control and spends 94 percent of his time licking his balls.
Yes, S.T. thinks and talks like a human. In fact, all the animals in Hollow Kingdom talk, all the way from whales to spiders.
This book is about an apocalypse. All the humans get sick and eventually die of some virus, but not before they mutate in grotesque ways. Think of zombies that do nothing but eat each other and their pets. That’s got to suck if you are a dog or a cat trapped in a house with a sick human.
S.T. calls humans MoFos, based on the name Big Jim had for them. As he realizes that the MoFos are all going crazy, he goes on a mission to “free the domestics.” But how do you open doors and windows to let them out if you are just a crow, and your only friend is a (stupid) dog?
Hollow Kingdom reminded me a little of Stephen King’s The Stand. The premise in The Stand is that a manufactured disease kills off almost all of humanity. Only a very, very few survive to rebuild society. The entire story is based on a group of survivors trying to make a new world. In Hollow Kingdom, humanity disappears and nature comes back. Domesticated and wild animals try to make sense of what is happening.
Hollow Kingdom is a black comedy and satire, wrapped in a fable. It made me think about how fragile our society is, and how easily humanity could devolve.
Shit Turd’s point of view is delightful and comical. Overall, this book is unlike anything I have ever read before. Extremely readable, it’s also completely whacky.
I could not help but give it 4 stars.
Reading Hollow Kingdom is a whacky adventure.
During a brief visit in New York, I saw the Christmas Tree in Rockefeller Center “under construction.” I have always wondered how they do this. They actually build a massive scaffolding and there are dozens of workers on it.
But no trip to New York is complete without a walk in Central Park. I didn’t have much time during the day, but I did a walk at night. Here is a view looking south from within the park.
On my way downtown I emerged from the subway and had this iconic view of the World Trade Center, the tallest building in the United States. The antenna alone is 408 feet (135 meters) tall.
But what I really went downtown for is a visit to The Strand bookstore on Broadway and 12th Street.
I was there on Friday around 1:00 pm. It was packed with people. Books are not dead yet. The art section alone on the second floor is larger than the entire Barnes and Noble store back home in Escondido.
It has become a must for me to visit whenever I go to New York.
The hike up El Cajon Mountain is a 5.65 mile trail, making for an 11.3 mile round trip. It took me 7 hours and 13 minutes.
I first hiked this trail Christmas 2012 with my son. Here is my report from then. I stand by every word, so I won’t be repeating some of the pictures and my lamenting. But I can’t help it. I just recently hiked the Haleakala Crater, and then down hiked Pikes Peak. Both were strenuous hikes in their own right, both were of similar length, both were at much higher altitudes, but in terms of exhaustion, El Caj0n takes the cake.
Two reasons:
I talked about the first reason when I hiked it 13 years ago that it’s uphill, both ways. How can that be? Let’s look at the elevation profile over time:
As you can see in the graph above, after you go up, have have do descend quite a bit, before you get to climb again. The trail is very step everywhere, so going downhill is hard on the knees, and it’s dangerous because it’s easy to slip, fall or trip. And then you get to climb again. This is bad on the way out, but twice as bad on the way back, when you just want to get to the car, and there are all these terrible hills to climb.
The second reason is because it was hot. The trail is exposed to the sun all day, and it was one of those high 80ies in November days with a blue sky.
In the photograph below taken at the beginning of the trip, you can see the peak in the distance. That’s where I am going, 5.6 miles uphill, both ways.
Here is a closeup, about 20 minutes before I reached the top. You click on the image and zoom in and you can make out the faint trail with some people on it. The white arrow points to a person, if you look very carefully. The rocks on the top are huge boulders. That’s the peak.
Finally, after 3.5 hours, I am there. In the background you can see the mountains of East County, San Diego.
Looking southwest from the peak is San Diego. You can’t make it out in this picture. It’s too far away in the haze, but the bright line in the distance is the Pacific Ocean.
I said earlier that it was hot. Uncharacteristically, I didn’t bring enough water for this hike. I had only packed two liters. I needed more. Lucky for me, the park service, or some trail angels, left caches of water. I refilled my bottles here on the way up, and on the way down. If it hadn’t been for these caches, I would not have been able to make the hike. I consumed at least four liters over the seven hours.
Thanks, trail angels!
In summary, when all the guide books for hikes in San Diego tell you El Cajon is a very strenuous hike, believe them. This is not for the casual hiker. You can get yourself into serious trouble on this trail if you are not experienced, if you don’t have the right equipment or stamina, and if you don’t have enough water.
I was exhausted when I got home, but it was a good exhausted. Let’s see if I will want to do it again in 13 years.
The story is remarkably reminiscent of The Spaceship in the Stone by Igor Nikolic, which I read and reviewed in 2022.
I read The Starship in the Stone by M. R. Forbes only to 49%, at which time I gave up and put it aside. You might say that’s a long way to go into a book before abandoning it. I agree. The author is a pretty good writer, who has a little bit of a Stephen Kingesque touch and tells a good story. The problem is that the story itself is not very interesting or refined. He just lost me.
This is the first book of a series of ten books so far. Given that I wasn’t able to make it through the first one, I will definitely not go for the next nine.
The story starts out in Manchester, England. A bicycle courier named Thomas, the protagonist, has a troubled past and is trying to work his way out of a life of crime and failure. During one of his delivery runs he passes by an alley where he hears cries for help by a woman. Against his better instincts, he decides to help whoever is in trouble and gets into a life-and-death conflict with an armed assailant. But rather than coming out as the hero, he ends up being framed as the villain and arrested by police. When he realizes that his situation is hopeless, he busts out before they can book him and starts his journey as a fugitive. This whole lead-in plot is well written and crafted, but it really has nothing to do with the story of the Starship in the Stone. The author spent some 20% of the book on a lead-in that was, in my opinion, not necessary and did not contribute to the overall plot.
As Thomas escapes by train and bicycle in the woods, he comes upon a secret military facility in a cave. An artificial intelligence contacts him and assists him entering the cave. There is a starship that has been buried in stone underground for 1,500 years, since the days of King Arthur. It’s in the process of being dug out by the military.
The alien intelligence decides, after 1,500 years of searching for a “worthy” human to pilot the starship, after seemingly thousands of military people and others through history didn’t fit the bill, it was finally Thomas who was the anointed.
By subjecting himself to alien technology, he is able to melt she ship out of the mountain and fly it. As soon as he is in earth orbit, there are enemy aliens that have been waiting for this for the last 1,500 years ‘behind Mars” who come out and seemingly instantaneously engage him in a space battle.
You get the idea, there is no realistic space travel science here. Ships coming out from behind Mars can’t just attack around Earth within minutes. It takes light between 3 minutes and 22 minutes, with an average of 12.5 minutes, to get from Mars to Earth, so if the spaceships traveled even at the speed of light, it would take some time. This is just one of the examples of magic masquerading as science that permeates this book and makes the story more of a cartoon or superhero tale, rather than a science fiction book I would be interested in.
Sprinkle in that King Arthur and his associates were actually aliens that came in that very spaceship, and you see how it’s mixing earthly legend with science fiction and magic technology.
Don’t get me wrong, Forbes is a good writer, and I am sure he has a great following for his series of ten books so far, but he could not keep my attention.
As usual, I do not give a rating to books I don’t finish reading. I just review them here and provide my reasons.
Pikes Peak is the prominent mountain just west of Colorado Springs. The summit at 14,115 feet (4,302m) above sea level is higher than any point in the United States east of its longitude.
There are only 96 mountains in the United States that are over 14,000 feet tall. They are generally referred to as the Fourteeners. 53 of them are in Colorado. There are 29 in Alaska, 12 in California and 2 in Washington.
Pikes Peak is only the second Fourteener I have been on. Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain outside of Alaska, being the first one.
The view at the summit of Pikes Peak is commonly believed to have inspired the songwriter and poet Katharine Lee Bates to write “America the Beautiful” in 1893.
I decided that I needed to get to know this mountain. It is fairly unique, since there is a road that allows cars to drive to the top. There is also a cog railway which takes tourists to the top in about 75 minutes. I took the cog railway to the top and then hiked down. I figured this was a safe way to “get to know the mountain” without taking any undue risks to my health and safety. I am glad I did.
The trip from the peak down back to the train depot was 12.5 miles long, descending through 7500 vertical feet from 14,115 to about 6,500 feet. I left the top at 10:30. It took me about 6.5 hours. My 69-year-old feet and knees were mush by the time I got to the bottom. But I did it, and I am glad for it. There are more hikes on Pikes Peak waiting for me, no doubt.
Below is the view from my hotel window in Colorado Springs the morning of my hike. The tall peak in the back is Pikes Peak. You can see it got a dusting of snow in the previous few days. I was equipped to deal with that. I had additional layers of clothes and my micro spikes for my boots, in case the trail was icy.
I took the famous cog railway to the top. The ticket is about $80 round trip. I had a round trip ticket since I didn’t know what the conditions at the top would be and I needed to be able to abort my quest, just in case. The train holds about 260 people, tourists of all ages. It takes about 75 minutes to get to the top, and then they allow you about an hour to tool around before going back down. Most people are not accustomed to 14,000 foot altitude. There is a noticeable lack of oxygen at the top of the mountain.
Below is a view from the parking lot. This is also eerie, seeing cars at that altitude in that environment. In the background you can see the visitor center on top of the mountain. It is a huge building, with restaurants, gift shops, museums, and all you might look for at a tourist attraction.
Here is a picture of the train we came up on. The trail starts on the other side of the tracks. I had to walk around the front of the train.
Here I am at a small set of wooden steps down from the train platform to my right, and the trail starts here. It was snowy, packed with about 6 – 12 inches of snow, but not icy, and I decided to just walk in my boots. I never used my spikes.
After a few minutes, the train station, and the tourists, and all of gross-national-product-land was left behind. I was utterly alone, on top of a huge mountain, on a snowy trail, with more than 12 miles of walking ahead of me.
Here is a photo of the trail in the snow.
As I descended the many switchbacks through the snow section, I was able to look down into the distant valley of Colorado Springs. Looking east to the horizon, that would be Kansas. I am about to leave the snow fields.
Another view down into the valley where I am going, from the edge of the snow.
From that point, I turned around and looked back from where I had just come from. On the top you can just see the roof of the giant visitor center at the top of the mountain.
Here is the trail where I finally leave the snow behind.
On the upper sections, between 13,000 and 12,000 feet of elevation, the trail is actually quite easy, sandy and fairly level.
Again, with the trail in the foreground, we can see to summit ridge in the distant back.
After about an hour and a half of hiking, I finally entered the tree line at 12,000 feet.
Four miles down, looking back up, I saw this sign. It warns hikers going up that they are entering a danger zone. “Your life depends on your ability to hike back down.” This does not seem so bad when the weather is nice like it was for me, but it can be deadly for an unprepared hiker getting caught in inclement weather this high on the mountain.
There are sections at this altitude where the trail is quite easy and fairly level.
Further on down, there are planks that stabilize the trail, which make hiking a bit harder, as they require larger steps over them. There are hundreds and hundreds of those, making walking challenging.
About halfway down there are mile-long sections of trail that are almost flat. I made very good time in those. They are shown in red on the trail map above. Red indicates high hiking speed.
Here is a look back to the top of the mountain from where I came.
Below is the same view as the top, but zoomed in on the mountain. You can still make out the visitor center as a little nubby on the top. The ice field to the left of the center is where I hiked down through switchbacks.
Finally a good view of Colorado Springs.
In the lower sections, the boulders are gigantic, and the trail sometimes goes right under and through them.
The trail at this level is more maintained, with fences along the side, although the fences are often in a state of disrepair.
Here is a view of the bottom cog rail station from the trail. That’s where I need to go. When I took this picture, my legs were rubbery already, and my knees and feet screamed for relief.
At about 5:00pm I looked down and saw the train with tourists arrive. The last train leaves the top at 4:00pm, and it takes about an hour to come down.
And always with any hike, there are the last steps. Here is the parking lot where anyone hiking up the mountain starts from.
Ahh, I have finally made it.
Ironically, I saw no wildlife on the entire trail. But this is what greeted me on the parking lot. Mule deer.
Hiking down Pikes Peak was an amazing experience and a great way to get to know the mountain. I loved every minute of it. My feet and knees were in pain in the last few hours, but that’s expected at my age. Now as I am writing this post about two days after the hike, my muscles are still sore, but it’s a good sore, and I am already wondering what my next big hike will be.
Every time I visit Maui I am newly astonished how this is the one place on Earth where we can observe and feel the passage of time, and where geological timescales are laid open for us.
The islands of Hawai’i are formed as the Pacific Plate moves northwest over the Hawaiian hotspot, a mantle plume that creates volcanic activity. The youngest island, Hawai’i, or the “big island” as it’s called, is only 400,000 years old and its volcano is still active today. That island is growing every day as lava pours into the ocean.
The next older island is Maui, with an age of about 1.3 million years. Going west from there, Lana’i with 1.3 million years, Moloka’i with 1.8 million years, O’ahu with 3.0 to 4.0 million years and finally Kaua’i with 5.1 million years.
Maui is really an island of two volcanos, on the west side we call it West Maui, and the large volcano, Haleakala, forming the main island. There is a low point between the two mountains, sometimes called “the valley.” On the north side is Kahului, the largest city on Maui, and on the south side is Maalaea. There is a road that leads from Maalaea to Kihei that goes write along the ocean, and it’s obvious that at high tide, if there were a storm, the water would come over the road.
I took a couple of photographs from close to the top of Haleakala where the green arrow starts, looking down. Those are below. Then I added another photograph from the ocean, approximately where the blue arrow starts.
You can click on the images to enlarge them and zoom in.
When looking at these pictures, it is obvious that some time in the future, perhaps in 10,000 or 20,000 years, perhaps even much sooner, depending on climate change, the ocean will break through and separate West Maui from the main island, and from then on our descendants will experience it as two separate islands.
If humanity had arisen to intelligence only 100,000 years later than it did, it would never have known Maui as one island. There would be another, separate island there with a separate name. and there would be water between the two, just like there is now water between Maui and Lana’i and Maui and Moloka’i.
Below is the view from along the blue arrow of the map.
Here we can see the rise of both mountains to the left and right, with the land connecting it really low by the ocean.
It makes me want to come back and time travel to this island 20,000 years from now and see what it looks like.
When I hiked through the Haleakala crater a last week I thought about this. Here I was at 10,000 feet elevation, and I was kicking rocks, thinking that no human being may ever touch those individual rocks again. Furthermore, 10 million years from now, this entire giant mountain will be washed into the sea. Not a single rock will be above water.
Geological times become visible and tangible in Maui. I never tire of marveling about that.
The Pīpīwai Trail is one of Maui’s most iconic rainforest hikes, located in the Kīpahulu district of Haleakalā National Park on the island’s south-east side. It is very remote and it takes over two and a half hours or more, depending on the route, to get there from the urban areas of Maui, like Kahului or Kihei. It is also the most spectacular bamboo forest hike on the island.
The hike starts at the Kipahulu Visitor Center in the Haleakala National Park. As usual, there is an entrance fee for the park. We got in for free, probably due to the government shutdown currently in force.
The trail is about 2 miles long, making for a moderately difficult 4-mile round trip. Unfortunately, you hike back out the same way you hiked in. The whole hike took us about two and a half hours, and there was plenty of time for picture stops at the more scenic places. The trailhead is at about 130 feet of elevation, and the end point is at 750 feet. So there is some climbing involved.
Be prepared to get wet from sweat and muddy from the trail.
The hike begins with a climb to Makahiku Falls. This waterfall was completely dry when we got there, due to the dry season this year.
I might note here that I need to give photo credit for all the photos below to my wife.
Along the way there is a large Banyan tree where there is usually a small crowd of people resting and taking pictures. So did we:
At about one mile into the hike, the bamboo forest starts:
The path is often narrow and more like a tunnel than a hiking trail. From time to time, when the wind is stronger, the bamboo trunks bump into each other and a clackety-clack ruckus permeates the forest. I tried to take some videos when this was happening, but the sound quality I got was not close to doing it justice to what it was in real life. Noise from wind in a bamboo forest is unlike anything else in nature.
Here you have me under a bamboo canopy. I am wearing camouflage, so you can hardly see me!
Good portions of the trail are built up by plank ways to avoid having hikers slip and slide in the permanent mud below.
There are also many bridges that span over gorges or pools below.
Here is one such pool that was visible below one of the bridges.
Of course, looking to the side of the trail, often unnoticed, are many treasures of nature. This one might end up in a painting one day.
At the end, the highlight of the trail, is Waimoku Falls. This is a 400-foot waterfall that looks absolutely spectacular, even with just the trickle that we saw. After rains, this must be a truly roaring waterfall.
Overall, this is a truly memorable hike in a tropical forest. The only challenge is how long it takes to get there. It’s two to three hours or more away from the urban centers of Maui, so doing this hike takes an entire day out of your schedule. However, I might add that the drive, whether you take the northern “road to Hana” or the southern road, is an entire adventure of its own. I don’t recommend either if you easily get car sickness, or you are scared of driving along sheer cliffs with no guardrails.
’nuff said.
I strongly recommend the Pipiwai Trail hike.