Is it October yet?

This phrase became a running joke during the most brutal days of summer last year at the River Ranch. "Is it October yet?"  During the time when most of our time--nearly every day--was spent harvesting endless rows of tomatoes, the weeks stretched on interminably, and it seemed there was no end in sight.  "Is it October yet?" was code for, I need a friggin' break.  October, we were told, was when things finally slow down.  Days are shorter, so the workday starts later, the weather is pleasant, and the bulk of the harvesting is in the past.

That phrase definitely came up a few times this summer between Eric and I.  The weeks before the Fall Equinox Fundraiser at the Hurley Farm, on September 22, were frenetic, with extra hands on the farm helping to mow, weed-wack, weed, and beautify the place for the big party.  It felt great to see the place all spiffed up, and so gratifying to have so many people come that evening, and to join them in eating great food, drinking free microbrews and celebrating a great season.

Michele and Hurley, all dressed up for the Fall Equinox.

And then, it was October.  After the fundraiser, I really started to feel like the season was ending. Most of our plants had been pulled, our tomatoes were slowing down, and we're due to finish now in less than two weeks!  We've spent the past couple of weeks slowing down, treating our sore bodies to yoga classes again for the first time since spring, waking up a little later, and enjoying the lack of stress and the absence of that feeling of too-much-to-do.

I thought taking the tomatoes down last week would be bittersweet, but it turns out, it wasn't so hard to see them go.  Eric and I were finally sick of tomatoes--even the giant, tangy heirlooms--and have rediscovered our love for winter squash, kale, and arugula.   Eating seasonally is great in this way, because each seasonal change brings newness and excitement at the return of the vegetables six months ago you never wanted to eat again.  It's kind of like the first day of school, except instead of homework, you get to cook delicious food :).

Some of the winter squash, pre-harvest.

Fall out here is nothing like fall in the Northeast.  It was 87 degrees today.  It still hasn't rained since May, and the only fall colors we have are the golds and rusts of dried out grasses and shrubs.  Fall is more like spring in the way that, despite the lack of rain, new growth comes from cool nights and dew lingering longer in the morning.  Spring crops come back--our rhubarb plant has exploded with the cooler weather, and the strawberries have picked up again (for real!).  There are still apples and pears and pumpkins.  I kind of like the Central Valley autumn, even without the leaf peeping and sweaters.

Tomatoes are down, and pigs are enjoying their "last meal."
(You can see their cute ears peeking from behind the white tent, on the right.)

In a couple of weeks, the field and garden at the Hurley Farm will be tucked in for the winter under a blanket of cover crop, Boda the pig will be "harvested" and in the freezer, and Eric and I will be closing the door on this little adventure in hand-scale farming.  At some point this winter, we'll move back to the River Ranch, into "the duplex," over there, into one of the two staff apartments (the cozier side), and I'll be moving into a couple of new roles at Soil Born.   I'm excited about winter at the Ranch.  It's lambing time, and three little babies have been born this week.  There will be two calves, in February and March, which means fresh raw milk again!  The farm is beautiful and quiet in the winter, with everything green and damp, the animals fattening up on lush winter pasture.  It will be such a gift to have the river and the parkway next door, and a bit more of a buffer from the concrete jungle of "parking lot-landia," that is outer Sacramento.  I couldn't be happier that it's October, and that finally, the dog days are over.

 Here are some of the ways I've taken advantage of "October":

Eric and I played hooky and went to the beach in Half Moon Bay

Ian and Anila came for the weekend and we visited the Ranch....

....and then we visited Meg in San Francisco

I went on a gorgeous solo overnight hike in Desolation Wilderness, near Tahoe.

This is how happy it made me.

The best thing ever.

I am such a procrastinator. I've had posts in my head for weeks, and haven't been able to sit down and write them. And then I go off and do something else, and this really can't wait, so you'll just have to bear with me for some out-of-order postings coming up (hopefully).

So I just got back from Torres del Paine National Park, in southern Chile. I left the farm two and a half weeks ago and took a 26 hour bus to El Calafate, where I am right now. I had planned on spending a few days here and in El Chalten, hiking around Glaciares National Park, where there are some ridiculous glaciers and huge mountains. I knew that it would be amazing, but in the days leading up to my departure, I just couldn't get fired up about it. Twenty-six hours seemed like a really long trip, and I was feeling a bit reluctant to unstick myself from my cozy farm home for the last time to become a tourist again.

As soon as I started my trip, though, I got into it. Travelling in Patagonia is different than travelling up North; down here, everyone is a tourist. Everything exists so that people can enjoy the spectacular natural beauty, so I didn't feel any of the anxiety or discomfort that I had felt last time I travelled. I met some Swiss girls on the trip, and spent my first full day with one of them, Corinne, visiting Perito Moreno glacier near El Calafate.

On the bus to the glacier, Corinne told me that she was planning on going to Puerto Natales, Chile, the following day, and to Torres del Paine National Park, to hike the 8-9 day "full circuit," a popular backpacking trip around the park. I had no definite plans, but had no intention of crossing the border to Chile to visit Torres del Paine. I had been there for a couple of days of hiking in 2002 while studying abroad in Valparaiso, Chile, and felt like I had checked it off my list of places to visit.

Later that day, I spent about an hour sitting on an observation deck watching the glacier. Every once in a while, a thunder-like rumble would announce the breaking off of a chunk of ice and snow into the turquoise lake water below. Mostly, though, I just took in the presence of this mammoth, frozen river of ice and snow.



At some point, a young pair of Americans, a guy and a girl, sat down next to me, and I couldn't help but overhear their conversation. At one point, the girl leaned over to the guy and whispered, "I like the other glacier better." "Me too," her companion agreed. Without thinking, I turned and asked, "Which one?" Surprised and embarrassed at my uninvited participation in their conversation, the girl told me they had just finished hiking the full circuit in Torres del Paine, and that an entire day was spent walking along an impressive river of ice called Glacier Grey. Was I planning on hiking in the park? she wanted to know.

Until that point, as I said, I hadn't been, but I suddenly realized that I had travelled near to the end of the world to be in proximity to some of the most spectacular natural scenery that exists, that it likely won't exist for much longer, and that I had absolutely no reason not to take the next two weeks to see as much of it as possible. How could I come so close to a glacial experience possibly even more magnificent than this one, and pass it up?

That afternoon, when our bus arrived back in El Calafate, I bought a ticket to Puerto Natales, Chile, for the next morning. Two days later, Corinne and I set off hiking. And the next nine days were some of the best days of my life.



We carried our tents and enough food (kind of) for ten days, and took a route recommended to us by an outfitter in town, expecting driving wind, rain, and maybe snow--all the nasty weather this park is known for. Incredibly, however, we were blessed with several days of blue sky and only a couple of brief rain storms. Every day we walked through postcard-like beauty: jagged, granite and magma spires of rock, snow-capped mountains, surreal turquoise rivers and lakes, honey wheat fields of grass and wrinkled rolling hills, scattered brilliant fall-red lenga trees among the green ones tucked into grooves in the sides of mountains, pure blue rivers of glacial ice and snow, breaking off their ancient resting places in thunderous avalanches. It was like being inside an issue of National Geographic, though that never occurred to me at the time. Instead, I found myself stopping, slack-jawed, dozens of times each day, as some new, magnificent vista revealed itself around a bend in the trail.



It's hard to put into words what this experience was like. Corinne commented yesterday that she didn't know how to respond to her mother's excited prodding for stories about the trip. It was amazing, but it's not the kind of thing you can tell in stories. For me, the most powerful experience came on the sixth day, as we walked six hours along hillside paths. The sky was clear, the wind was blowing, and we were accompanied by the oblong, turquoise Lago Paine to our right, with snow-capped peaks beyond. As I took in the landscape, the sensation of being alone in a place of such vast, pure natural beauty (for we were truly alone for much of the time, it being the end of the season), was, more than anything, a consistently spiritual experience. I couldn't help but feel, over and over again, that I was in the presence of god, or rather, that everything around me--each gnarled tree, summer-dried blade of grass, grooved granite mountainside, was filled with the divine. It was strange but also utterly clear to me, that rather than being an outsider, an intruder in this place, I too was part of it, and I understood more completely than I ever had, how every living thing is inextricably connected. It was an overwhelming realization, at once positive and frightening, but definitely unforgettable.



I brought my camera with me, of course, but didn't bring a charger, assuming, falsely, that there'd be no opportunity to recharge the battery while on the trail (a few nights were spent camping outside of refugios/hostels where this would have been possible). On the morning of Day 5, the low battery light began blinking. I spent the rest of the trip carefully preserving the remaining battery life, taking only a few photos each day. At times, it was frustrating not to be able to capture some of those incredible scenes, but it forced me to take in each view in the moment, and I tried hard to imprint in my memory those things I couldn't photograph, and choose carefully the images worthy of a bit of my camera's remaining battery life. Each night I listed in my journal, "Images to hold on to," calling forth the single fire-red lenga tree amidst a forest of green, or the small clump of yellow, slipper-like flowers by the side of the trail.

Corinne and I returned to town on Tuesday tired and sore, having walked eleven and a half hours the previous day in order to not have to get up early and hike on the final morning. We were ready to be done, splurged on a private room with a king-sized bed in the hostel, and took ourselves out to a gringo-style dinner (veggie curry and a bean burrito w/ cilantro, yoghurt, and avocado!). I think they were luxuries well-deserved, though I was lucky enough not to have suffered much more than sore hips from sleeping on the ground each night. I'd say we made out pretty well :).

Soggy Days

Back in November, the other volunteers (Aily, Lucy, Anna) and I were looking for weekend hikes around El Bolson. When we asked Cynthia for recommmendations, she replied that, while there were lots of hikes around the area, most of them were "nothing special." There was one place, however, that she said is "incomparable." So we set out, one Saturday, for an overnight hike to El Cajon del Azul, a refugio, or hikers' cabin, in the mountains, five hours by foot to the west of Cynthia's farm. She was right. The hike took us deep within a narrow valley between mountains, along the Rio Azul, an unimaginably clear turquoise river, to this impossibly gorgeous, isolated farm and refugio, where Atilio, a sixty-some year-old man, had lived for thirty years.

That hiking trip was beautiful, but too short. Cajon del Azul was just the first of a series of refugios, each several hours apart, that promised to be just as spectacular as the first, but we had to return to the farm the next day. So when my sister Meredith arrived on the 26th of December, and we set off to travel for a month, the kick-off trip was a no-brainer: a four-day hiking trip into that same narrow valley. Luckily, Mer was up for it, and after buying food supplies and loading up our packs, we set off around noon on Sunday, the 27th.


On Saturday, while running errands in town, we had stopped in the office of the local "Club Andino," or mountain club. There we had registered and seen a five-day forecast, which predicted cloudy but mild weather for our hike, with chances of occasional light showers, at worst, for one of the days. On our first day, the weather was windy at times, but all-in-all pleasant--we spent the afternoon shedding layers until the last half hour or so, when, with the lowering sun, the air became chilly, and it started raining lightly. We arrived at Cajon del Azul tired but content to share a liter of homemade beer and take in the beautiful scenery.


The next morning, we woke up around 9:00, among fifteen or so other bodies sleeping on foam mattresses side by side in the loft of the refugio. After an oatmeal and apple breakfast, we began to pack up and prepare to leave for a long day of hiking. One thing I had learned about Argentines is that their sense of time is a very personal thing. We had been told by different people that the next refugio on our trip, Los Laguitos, was anywhere from six to eight hours away. In any case, we expected a long day. As we packed, Meredith offered to pay for our stay, which cost about $10 per person, since she owed me money. It was then that she discovered that her envelope of money hadn't made it into her pack, and was (hopefully) still back at the farm.

Yikes. So, this changed things. The money that I had would last us two nights, but not the three nights it would take to complete the full circuit. We'd have to cut our trip short a day by taking a path through the middle of the original circuit we had planned, bypassing Los Laguitos and spending our second night at Encanto Blanco, so that we could be close enough to hike back to Cynthia's on the third day. I went to pay Nicolas, the "refugiero" and Atilio (the owner)'s son-in-law, and asked him for advice, explaining our dilemma. He showed me on the map where to go, and then disappeared for a few minutes. When he returned, he thrust a 50 peso bill in my direction--more than enough to cover our expenses for the original three-night journey. "Take this," he said. "When you get back, you can leave the money in an envelope at the store near the trailhead." I protested, incredulous of his trust and generosity. "It'd be one thing if you were staying at a hostel in town, and were just tourists passing through. But you're staying at the house of people we know. But hurry, it's getting late and you have a long walk ahead of you!"

Indeed we did. Our moods bolstered by our good fortune, we set off around 11:00am, unconcerned about the gathering wind and occasional drizzle. We stopped to take pictures at pretty spots, walking rather leisurely, knowing that the sun doesn't set until 9:30 at this time of year. However, two or three hours into the hike, the wind had good-and-gathered, and the occasional drizzle had turned into a cold, steady rain. The turquoise Rio Azul, such a picturesque companion to our left as we set off, became a menace; every fifteen minutes or so, we'd come to an arroyo, or stream, which fed into the river. While some were tiny, and easy to cross, the rain had turned many a trickle into roaring streams, requiring treacherous, barefoot crossings, numbing our bare legs and delaying us several minutes each time. The trail was increasingly muddy, and Canio de Colihue, a bamboo-like cane, grew in endless fields, soaking my leggings with icy rainwater, and threatening to poke out an eye with trimmed tips.

Utterly soaked, we forewent lunch in favor of an earlier eventual arrival, trudging on. Conversation had ceased, and, as the hours stretched, I focused my energy on avoiding the muddiest parts of the rutted-out trail and transforming my increasingly negative mood into a more positive one. "We're never going to get there," and "This is the most miserable hike of my life," became, through sheer willpower, "At least I have legs to walk on" and, "This isn't so bad--Cambodian children had to walk through worse for much longer during the Khmer Rouge."

It was a long, cold, wet day. Towards 5:00, we began waiting anxiously for an incline; Nicolas had said that the last two hours were uphill. As tired as we were from negotiating the rutted trail, every time the trail veered upward for even a few steps, our hearts leapt with the hope that we were beginning the final stretch. Eventually, we began climbing, and though the trail became even more rutted and difficult (we later found out that a group with fifteen horses had come through the day before), our spirits picked up, and I had to fight to keep from focusing too much on the eventual warm meal and fire we'd soon enjoy.

The last two hours of climbing stretched into three, but at last, the woods began to open up, and a mist-covered lake appeared to our left. Still not wanting to get my hopes up, I held out believing we had arrived until I saw the log cabin in the distance on the lake shore, chimney smoke mixing with the fog-choked air. We practically ran the last five hundred meters, bursting through the door of Los Laguitos Refugio like two drowned rats. Not having anticipated the downpour, our packs and 90% of their contents were soaked through. We stripped down, changing into whatever clothes had managed to stay dry. Lorena, the "refugiera," helped us to hang everything above the roaring wood stove and made us mate and tea. It was 8:00.

That night, we lay in the loft listening to the rain on the roof and praying that tomorrow morning would never come. Having discovered that our third destination required an even steeper climb, and would almost certainly be covered in snow from the current storm, we had decided to take the trail back the way we came. The prospect of doing it all over again, this time sliding down the two-hour incline, crossing streams even more swollen from the continued rain, was far from appealing, though it was our only option.

The next morning, after putting it off for as long as possible, we got up and began to prepare ourselves for another rainy long day. This time, we covered feet with plastic bags, and stuffed them inside our packs to keep our freshly dried clothes from getting wet again. We set off around 10:00, expecting the worst, but the rain had stopped, and miraculously, the streams that had been so formidable yesterday we crossed almost without issue (Meredith took a plunge that submerged the entire lower half of her body!). We passed the day pleasantly, enjoying sunshine and a real lunch break, and reached our destination, another cozy cabin an hour called Retamal forty minutes from Cajon del Azul, in seven hours.

The following day, we set off even earlier, and were back at Cynthia's by 2:00, spurred on by the prospect of ice cream in town later that day. Although the hiking trip hadn't gone exactly as planned, it was certainly an adventure well-worth the icy feet.