NEW PLACES

I may have been born at the wrong time.  I’d like to think I would have made a good member of an expedition to some exotic location or made it as a mountain man.  It is hard trying to fill that personality quirk in today’s world. But I try.  I always want to know what is around the next bend of the river or where the gravel road that goes off to the left will take me.   Fishing the Pedrogosa the other day gave me a sense of exploring.  But likely it is just a sense.  There will always be new places to me but just being new isn’t the same as exploring.

Getting to the gorge on the Pedragosa wasn’t all that hard a trip.  Most likely more than a few fishermen have made it.  The gorge was a little intimidating to navigate, especially for someone in the last third of their life, but passable.  I wanted to think that I was one of a few to do it.   By a few, I mean fisherman and not gauchos.  I know the gauchos make it there from the remnants of small cooking fires and occasional fence.  Even if I’m not the first gringo to have traversed the gorge I can still feel a certain sense of seeing and being in a place most other will never go to.

Friday after lunch in Bamaceda I studied my map to see if there was a way to get to an area of the Rio Blanco that was off the beaten track.  The lower sections don’t look that fishy.  But if I could just find the way to the upper section it had to be better.   My map showed a potential track but being by myself and without a 4 wheel drive truck I wasn’t going to be that much of an explorer.   I stayed on the road more traveled, such as it was.  The two wheel tracks with grass in the middle, twisted and turned along and up over a mountain and then down to a lake.   A couple of small homesteads dotted the lake side.  Nestled on the shore of one cove was something other than a homestead.  A new (the logs are still un-weathered) two story lodge, 3 upscale cabins and two rafts on trailers spelled fly fishing destination.

Twenty plus kilometers on barely a road, up and over a mountain, was an outpost of civilization.  Seeing it was like a pin bursting my bubble.  People are going there for an adventure.  I was going along the track in search of a new place and an adventure.   There may not be any more new places to be found or adventures to be had. 

Maybe I just should be happy with just going above the gorge on the Pedragos, where likely the only ones who go there are the gauchos, and have my Adventure being the only gringo in a local restaurant and trying to order diner when I can’t speak Spanish. 

On the 27th my son Ethan arrives.  E speaks great Spanish.  Dinner won’t even be an Adventure then.