The Road North (Part 2)

…runs through mountains and along rivers and took us from northern New Mexico to Washington state. We drove north from Taos into the San Luis Valley in Colorado and then over La Veta Pass to Interstate 25 to northern Colorado, a route we've traveled many times. Our household goods are in storage there and we stopped to swap our summer clothes for warmer jackets and rain gear.

Sawtooth Scenic Byway, Idaho

For the rest of the trip, we planned to visit parts of the country we hadn’t seen before on roads we hadn’t driven before, mostly blue highways. That term appears in the first line of the 1982 book of the same name by William Least Heat-Moon: “On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue.” He was separated from his wife, had lost his teaching job and wanted to change his life. He outfitted a van for camping and drove 13,000 miles around the country on blue highways writing about people he met and places he visited.

The Road North (Part 1)

…runs through New Mexico. In late August, I left Loreto in Baja California Sur and drove 1,100 miles to Taos where Rande had spent the summer. Our plan was to drive to Whidbey Island in northern Puget Sound to visit her family, but first I had to deal with an ear problem. On what turned out to be my last dive of the summer in the Sea of Cortés, I had what diver’s call reverse squeeze – a sharp pain in one ear as I returned to the surface. I couldn’t equalize (reduce) the air pressure in my ear with the pressure of the surrounding water. 

Rio Grande south of Taos, New Mexico

The next day, I went to the emergency clinic in Loreto and learned that I had an infection in one ear. The doctor, a young woman who spoke some English, gave me a prescription for antibiotic ear drops and told me to stay out of the water for two weeks. My summer of diving was over. Before leaving Mexico, I made an appointment online for an ear specialist in northern New Mexico. When I arrived at his office in Taos a week later, the infection was gone, but he sent me to a clinic in Los Alamos to test for a tear in the eardrum. They pressurized the outer ear and waited; a decline in pressure indicates a tear. I passed the test; I could go back in the water.

Morning in Santa Rosalía

I spent last summer in Nopolo in Baja California Sur diving the islotes and headlands that I could reach with my kayak. I dove early in the morning, the coolest part of the day, and often saw the sunrise from the Transpeninsular Highway on my way to places where I could launch a boat. The Sea of Cortés was warm (low 80s°F) and gin-clear (visibilities greater than 40-50 ft). By mid-afternoon the heat was oppressive, weighing on me like a thick blanket; I spent them studying Spanish by the pool or visiting friends in homes where air conditioners and fans ran all day.

Santa Rosalía harbor with abandoned copper smelter (tall smokestacks)

Several divers told me that the best visibility in the Sea of Cortés occurred during the summer and I had to find out if that was true. The heat of Mexico in the summer was too much for Rande; she spent it at 7,000 feet in northern New Mexico looking for a place for us to live. We’ve been on the road since we sold our house in northern Colorado in 2013 and she was tired of living out of a truck always on the go. Near the end of the summer, with her father seriously ill, the plan was for me to return to New Mexico, meet Rande and drive us to Washington to be with her family.

Looking for Whales

Jacques Cousteau called the Sea of Cortés the “the aquarium of the world” (link), and you know it has to be a helluva big tank to hold 6,000 animal species – 4,854 invertebrates, 891 fishes, 181 birds, 36 mammals and seven reptiles (Brusca et al. 2005). We could discuss the “health” of the Sea of Cortés – the lack of freshwater flow and nutrients from the Colorado River; habitat destruction and bycatch by commercial shrimping; overfishing of sharks and groupers; over-harvesting of pearl oysters, sea turtles and whales; population crashes of the totuava (link) and vaquita (the world’s smallest and most endangered cetacean) and more (link, link). Maybe when I feel sufficiently misanthropic about the future of the “world’s aquarium,” I’ll depress you with some of those stories. For now I’d like to celebrate the remaining diversity in a diminishing sea.

Ron photographing humpback whale (Isla Danzante on the right)