To Speak of a Short Walk

i hate typos.

i sometimes reread what i have written previously… and i find a typo or two. They make me kind of angry. Please forgive me for my occasional typographical gaffe.

i am writing once more from the Cusco area.

The past few days have passed reasonably quickly… Sunday with church and John Piper sermons, Monday with another casual mountain stroll.

i am writing this Monday night… and am pretty tired, so i will probably make this a shorter than usual update… although it probably still won’t be short. Again, apologies.

i’ll start with a little bit more portraiture… just a picture of a man, i think i took it on Saturday evening, but it may have been Sunday evening. Just a little bit of 18mm portraiture, i suppose.



And as a post-processing note… i made extensive use of the clone stamp in this one. You see… this man apparently has weak convictions about zipping up his pants (a common area for Peruvian men to have weak convictions in, actually)… and while i aim to portray the culture honestly… well… this is one area where i felt that it was ok to take some Photoshop liberties. i zipped up his pants for him in Photoshop, in short.

And this morning i decided to go for another walk. This would just be a gentle, easy walk along the road… i would get to know the area better, take some pictures of people doing what they do, not kill myself, and come back feeling awake and energetic.

Hahahaha… Right….

So i made it a few feet when i heard some water running in the valley below. i am kind of maybe a huge waterfall addict… so i had to investigate, of course. i charged down the hillside… saw that there was indeed a small waterfall… and worked my way back to the road.

i lasted 50 yards… if even that. At the first switchback i saw a weak trail leading straight ahead. i couldn’t help but follow it… it could take me to the home of some elves, maybe, or perhaps even a door to Narnia!

i can be kind of an ADD hiker sometimes…

It goes without saying that this trail, like most Peruvian trails, inexplicably died out after a few feet. That didn’t stop me from pretending it still existed, though! Tenuous slab-climbing moves on loose dirt, intense bushwhacking on a sixty degree slope, aggressive laybacking with hands full of grass… words don’t really express what i had to do to make progress over the extremely steep valley (canyon?) wall.

But sometimes… my progress would bring me to another waterfall… this one is five feet high! That’s pretty cool…

And a little farther… and i hear something roaring. This one’s taller than me…

i wanted to see what it looked like from above… so i worked my way to the left in hopes of finding a way up. A rock wall blocked my way… but a few fun moves brought me to the top.

And what was waiting for me there was unlike anything that i had seen before. It didn’t translate into pictures very well, and i fear that nor will it translate into words… but perhaps if i try with words and pictures both, you will have some sort of conception of it.

The stream funneled into a very narrow stretch of rock that acted like a tunnel with the top half cut off so that we mere mortals could observe the internal happenings. The tunnel S-curved, forcing the water up onto its sides, before opening up as the waterfall as i had seen it from below. For this picture, i backed out to 18mm, stopped the aperture as narrow as it would go for a slower shutter speed that would blur the water, held my camera about an inch or two above the water (note the water spot in the bottom left corner), and tried to hold my camera still for about 1/20 second. Which yielded this… which was taken just before the S-curve.



i eventually did find my way back to the road… but not until marveling at a wide range of waterfalls… from 30-foot three-level cascades to a fifteen foot straight drop off of an overhang. This road seemed to like to go up, and it did so quite well until coming to a stop at what looked like a forgotten tree farm at 12,000 feet… trees planted in row after row, with the intervening spaces slowly becoming overgrown with other kinds of trees and brush.

i was a little disappointed that the road had ended… and then i was suddenly at a pass at 12,300 feet. All thoughts of the road ceased… i charged madly up the hill on one side of the pass… but all too suddenly found myself standing on a little 12,600 foot summit directly over Cusco. Cool… but not quite what i had been going for.

i decided to try the other side… and after more technical near-vertical grass climbing and endless up-and-downing over false summits and proving my rare knack for taking all of the wrong trails and avoiding all of the right trails, i found myself on top of a 13,460 foot hill. This is a little bit of a different landscape style for me… but here is one of my summit views, looking towards Cusco, parts of which can be seen in the distance.



i thought i would try going back a different way, and started doing so immediately. Probably because i could see a decent trail from the summit that seemed to be going generally down. It seemed a little bit more appealing to me than descending near-vertical grass. i love that stuff.

And as i started towards the trail… i was greeted by some old ruins. How old they are is difficult to say… but i think they are pretty old. The sort of care that went into the structure in question is simply unseen in recent architecture… my guess is Spanish, at least a hundred years ago, likely older… although Inca is not out of the question completely, i think. My summit is in the background, too.



My short day’s walk… ended up yielding 11 miles, 4,000 feet of elevation gain, and a high point of 13,460 feet. That makes me tired.

And don’t forget… we, too, would like to echolocate.