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One Night at Laguna Hanson - 1985

Napajohnb
2006-01-03 20:43:27

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Cielo Alto - Spring 1985 (for in2wolfs)

I had been camped by the side of the lake for three days and today I saw another person for the first time. An old man had walked into camp about noon and shared lunch with me. After much struggling with my poor Spanish and his non-existent English I found him to be the caretaker for the ranger. Seems I�m in a park, after all.. I knew it said that this was a park on the map but there have been no signs and except for the cattle and a road in, no mark of human activity.
The countryside here in the mountains of Northern Baja California is beautiful in a stark way. There is none of the thick aspen and pine forests of a few miles south but the grass is green and thick and there are pines scattered about. I�m on a large plain next to a shallow lake and huge boulders are scattered around the plain and the lake. These boulders, big as houses, were perhaps dropped by some long melted glacier from a colder time. They make the landscape slightly surreal and alien.

The old man had been pleasant enough and had refused when I offered him a fee for camping. We "talked" through the afternoon, though we really didn�t understand much of what was said. I found that he lived in the village I�d passed through on the way up and that I�d caused quite a stir as not many gringos came up this way. He�d come up to check on me and see if I was OK.

I asked him about bandits because I�d been warned in Ensenada that I�d surely be robbed and maybe killed if I went into the mountains. The old man laughed and waved his hands across the landscape. "There are no bandits here" he said "there is nothing here to steal only a few skinny cows. The bandits live in Ensenada, where all the money is."

He finally walked on his way, in the other direction from which he�d come and I had no idea where he could be coming from or where he could be going, there was no ...