The Sleeping Lady and Peru

 The Sleeping Lady

Located on the east side of the Cascades, in the Bavarian-themed town of Leavenworth, the Sleeping Lady Mountain Resort Hotel spreads across several acres of ponderosa/lodgepole pine forest. The various cabins, eateries, and walking path are open to visitors and guests. A combination of dirt and concrete paths meander through the grounds pasisng a restaurant, iniduals cabins, several 8-room building pods, a library, bar, and spa. The back property line is the famous Icicle Creek, a popular river for access to climbs, rafting put-ins, and trailheads.

We stayed in a room located inside one of the 8-room pods and it was perfect. The sheets were the softest sheets I can ever remember sleeping in. The bathrobe was made of the same material. After slipping into the robe for the night I laid down and couldn’t tell where the robe started and the sheets ended. I was a sleep in 5 minutes. Which is saying something in Dex times.

However, we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Before I fell asleep, we had a wonderful evening eating apps at the sleeping lady and then going into town. We brought our snacks down to the river, and enjoyed hors d'oeuvres as the sun set. The golden hour was lovely and we soaked it in while we munched on Beecher’s crackers with goat cheese and sipped rosé.  We reminisced about college times and hiking in the area. I took my shoes off and soaked my feet in the river. My feet quickly went numb, To top the experience off, an American Dipper flew upstream and entertained us by diving head-first into some rapids. It was a lovely time.

But being Covid-times, not everything was open at the Sleeping Lady. This included dinner service at the restaurant, so we headed into Leavenworth to catch our 7:30 reservation at our favorite spot: Yodelin Broth Co.  Sounds gross, who wants broth on a hot Leavenworth day? But it’s actually really tasty and represents the new Leavenworth: trendy, earthy, worldy.  Everything else in town has been taken over by tourist apparel and food. It is now like all other tourist towns: selling the same trashy “show me your kitties” t-shirts and ubiquitous fries and burger brew-pub food. However, Yodelin is a sharp contrast to the tourist food. By combining flavors from around the globe, Yodelin offers an unconventional way to enjoy PNW seafood. I chose between ordering the coconut curry broth with udon noodles or the carrot lime ginger broth with rice noodles. Both had veggies and then options to add protein to the broth. I ended up getting the curry broth and added a 6-oz wild-caught coho salmon fillet to it. Yum.  Briana went with the coho salmon sandwich, also a tasty entrée.  With outdoor tables located at the back of the restaurant, on a verdant perch above Icicle Creek, a Yodelin dining experience is an oasis escape from the tourist bustle of Leavenworth.  Full and content, we took our dessert to-go and headed back to the Sleeping Lady.

Now, one of the reasons the Sleeping Lady has always been a desired destination for me is the breeding pair of White-headed Woodpeckers that nest on the property. This pair is famous in the WA birding community, and I’ve read in a bird blog that it’s likely that over 50% of WA birders see their first WA White-headed Woodpecker (WHWO) on the grounds of the Sleeping Lady. (You don’t have to stay there to walk around the grounds).  I’ve already seen a WHWO pecking away on a Jeffrey Pine in the mountains at Kirkwood Ski Resort, CA, but I had never seen one in WA.  A stunning, mountain pine-forest speciality, and our only woodpecker with a white head, they are hard to miss if you can see one. But being quiet and average sized, they’re not always so easy to find. Unsure if any were even around in August, I scouted the eBird data and saw that a birder reported two individuals on the property just one week ago! They were still around! Inflated by the good news, the woodpecker became my target bird for the next morning’s birding. And boy was it an outing.

At 6:05, I left the room with a coffee and my binoculars.  At first light it was hard to see anything, but a few robins were waking up and soon the place was abuzz with birds. By 7 am, the grounds were bustling with chips, cheeps, and zeeeets. Walking around, it was hard to not get overwhelmed by the unfamiliar sounds of the east-side mountain birds, but I had my ear trained for the sharp “pee-dee-dee-dink” call of the white-headed woodpecker. Strolling through the wooded parking area around 7:30, I heard it. I scanned the trees above and there it was: my first WA white-headed woodpecker! The sighting used one of my favorite components of birding: the ear. Being elusive, birds are much easier to hear than see. Having a trained ear is an essential component to getting the most out of bird outings. Some birding trips, I might record 50 individuals but only see 5. While the ear is especially useful for familiar birds, I don’t like to claim new life-bird, or state-bird, just by ear.  A new species should be verified by multiple metics, usually sight and ear. So hearing the woodpecker and then seeing it too, was essential and the goal was complete! Elated, I birded for another couple hours and saw some other new state birds of the mountain pine forests. I added Pygmy Nuthatch, White-headed Nuthatch, and Cassin’s Finch to my WA list that morning. I also had good looks at American Goldfinch and a Clark’s Nutcracker. My full list can be seen here.

At 9:30 I rendezvous with Briana at the restaurant for breakfast. Usually this is a buffet, but during Covid-times, they bring the buffet food out to you. In the cool morning,we ate on the back porch  of the restaurant. We enjoyed omelets and coffee and yogurt bowls. The highlight was the mixed fruit. After ordering hundreds of mixed fruit bowls from the UWMC meal service, I’m accustomed to a bowl of mostly cantaloupe with some unripe honeydew and 3 grapes. Why can’t there be more grapes?! Oh I’ve asked, trust me, but dining service will not budge. Thankfully, the Sleeping Lady had a wonderful fruit bowl: a medley of perfectly ripe nectarine and figs on top of watermelon.  It was delicious. Bree was most impressed and quickly mixed it into the yogurt parfait.  After breakfast, we decided it would be good to get a little exercise before heading back to Seattle. Unfortunately, most hikes out of Icicle creek go up into the mountains, and these hikes were going to be too strenuous for my current state. However, there was one hike that went along the river and the trailhead was just down the road.

With the windows down, we drove to the start of the Icicle Gorge Nature Loop. A popular hike for families because it’s flat, the trail wasn’t crowded on a Tuesday morning and the proximity to the river kept it relatively cool--under 85 F. We completed the scenic 4.5 mile loop and then headed back into the 93 F Leavenworth for lunch. We dined at the Icicle Creek Brewing Co, and recharged for the drive back over the mountains to Seattle. We stopped first in Mulkiteo to see my parents and pick-up Alpen. We lingered and watched the sunset over the cascades. We drove Alpen back to our house, shuttled him off to bed, and cozied into our own bed after a wonderful night away.

The whole experience was wonderful and I was so happy to be able to be in good enough health to fit this night-away into the schedule.

~~~PERU~~~

You might have seen the Peru comments from Professor Ralph Bolton after a previous blog post.

Now, shifting gears a bit here. I’m going to write some about my volunteer experience in Peru. The experience was quite memorable and meaningful to me. .

For six weeks during the summer of 2006, I volunteered in the remote village of Chijnaya (pronounced Chick-nigh-ya), located in the highlands of Peru between Cuzco (Machu Picchu)  and Puno (Lake Titicaca). More information about the community and the non-profit can be found at the Chijnaya Foundation website: https://chijnayafoundation.org/.

The foundation does great work improving the lives of people living in the Altiplano. An important note is that Ralph did not push these ideas. All ideas for improvement were requested by the villages, and Ralph just helped them refine, organize, and finance them. A few highlights from 2019 taken from the website are as follows. The foundation helped communities to invest $149,00 into a rotating loan fund to improve income generating activities. They provided 48 students with scholarships to university and technical institutes.  They added potable water to villages and improved irrigation in others. The foundation paid for oral health visits for children at 28 primary schools.  When I volunteered, these programs were just getting started and have since blossomed into a wonderful resource for these communities. I am proud to be in the first volunteer cohort to help launch this work.

The setting for Chijnaya is a stark, dry, place of dust, tussock and sun at 13,000 ft. It's difficult to imagine that any human civilization can live there. But these Peruvians are tough, suffering through daily freeze-thaw cycles, constant wind and sun that causes face sores, subsisting on potato soup, and herding their mixed flocks of sheep, Alpaca, and cows to pasture every day. Everything was creatively reused. Old school papers doubled as toilet paper. Plastic two-litters became shelving. Cow dung was combined with mud to build fences and structures on their compounds. Dung also doubled as the fuel source for their ovens to keep the soup hot and the chickens warm. Chamomile sprouted along the sheds and was picked to make tea.

The village of Chijnaya began when entire lakeside communities around Lake Titicaca were displaced after a flood in the early 1970s.. With so many refugees, and not wanting to move people back and then have it happen again, the government decided to relocate people away from the lake. Asking for volunteers to relocate, members from different villages around the lake left their homes and moved inland to these experimental villages. Chijnaya was one of them. Unsure how these villages were going to work, or even get along,  the government asked for Peace Corps volunteers to help with the relocation effort. Ralph Bolton was one of these volunteers. He spent two years living out of his sleeping bag in the village, helping to get it going. I know him as Professor Bolton, Professor of Anthropology at Pomona College. I never took a class from him, but just responded to an email about the volunteer opportunity. Over the years he had lost contact with the village. But in the early 2000’s, a villager contacted him and said the community was doing quite well and a few elders still remember him and would like to see him. They would love for him to visit.  Not knowing what to expect, he went down, and was surprised by how much the place still meant to him. He listened to the village elders and decided that he could help more.

They wanted to learn English to expand their tourism potential but they also wanted help with micro-finance loans and basic healthcare.  When he got back to the states, he started a non-profit, invited friends and experts to the board, and then asked Pomona students to volunteer. I was in the first volunteer cohort of 7 students to go down to Peru..Since 2006, the foundation has expanded and is involved in other highland communities and has volunteers outside of Pomona. But for the first year, our goal was to see if volunteerism component in this remote would even work and to see if using untrained college kids was the right move to do so. With high spirits and enthusiasm we set off to teach English to any interested adults, kids, and children of Chijnaya. No one really knew what to expect. With one day of English teaching lessons under our belt from a Claremont College professor, our group was novice, you might say ill-equipped, but we were college kids and could do anything, right? We tried our best to develop lesson plans that worked but it was hard. Making lesson plans takes time. A good lesson for me, I feel for you educators out there.

The English teaching was the core of the day, but we had many other experiences besides teaching English. We played volleyball and soccer, suffered though chuño potatoes in our soup (see pic for more info), walked to the top of the local hills, and three of us started a 13,000 ft running club (they thought this was crazy! Why would you ever run if you didn’t have to?). We often played soccer after school too. But early on, before I had touched a ball, Chijnaya hosted a regional tournament. No Peruvian believed an American could be good at soccer. But being on the Pomona Soccer team, I was in good shape and form. Taking a chance, they threw me a Chijnaya uni (see pic) and I joined the squad. I scored two goals in that game. And wow, that really elevated my status in the village. For the rest of my stay, elders would hobble older to greet me and say “dos gols,” “dos gols.”  It was also the most tiring game of soccer I ever played. After one half at 13,000 ft, my muscles were spent, but I staggered into another half and then enjoyed the after-party.

Quite the experience, the team brought me in with open arms and we celebrated Peruvian style after the game (see pictures).  We bought a crate of litre beers, always cusqueñas. Beer was passed around and poured into small cups, an aspect of South American drinking I wish we shared. But before we drank a new bottle, the opener would always face west and pour one out for Pachamama (mother earth). The connection to the land and to the Incan Gods was still present.

I could go on and on with stories, but I wanted to paint a little bit of the picture here. Some quick stories were that I had a few bulls named after me when I was in the village. I got a picture with one of them. They chose Derek because "big, tall." Ralph also informed me that a child received the name "Derek." (!) He is now a teen. Ralph was a bit peeved because no person has been named Ralph or even rafael yet. I told him to score two gols and see what happens. The Chijnaya experience was special. And of course, the corny axiom held true: “they taught me so much more than I taught them.”  Just witnessing their lives in the remote village, eating their mal-nourished soup, and watching them work so hard just to subsist was eye-opening. My host-mom would always remark how fast her day flew by. I never felt that way, but I could see where she was coming from.

I also caught the travel bug on this trip. After wrapping up in Chijnaya, I traveled first with two fellow volunteers: Becky and Lolly. We went to Cuzco, took the train to Machu Picchu, and then finished with some tourists areas around Lima. We then took the 8 hour bus to Huaraz, the mountain town for the Peruvian Andes.  It only took a week of traveling to learn (warning: large blanket-statement coming here) that Americans suck at traveling. I rarely ran into any other US travelers, but found a whole world of Europeans who take off 6 to 12 months of their normal lives to backpack from Mexico to Argentina. They were fun and young and down to adventure. I stayed in hostels for $5 a night, did excursions during the day, and ate at local restaurants for super cheap. Beck and Lolly left to back to the states, but I remained for another 2 weeks in Huaraz. Through my hostel, our owner helped us organize a 4-day trek on the Santa Cruz Loop. The hike through the mountains was guided and donkeys carried our gear. Peruvian guides set up camp and cooked for us. It was quite plush compared to my PNW backpacking experience of carrying our own stuff and doing all the set-up and cooking. The southern night sky was incredible: crystal clear with the southern cross burning through the high-altitude air. And the people on the trip were great too, a mixed group of international travelers from Germany, France, England, and Israel. We played various forms of word games and charades after dinner, laughing and joking until it was time to go to bed.

After the Santa Cruz Trek, and desiring more adventure, Florian (a funny french guy), Russell (an English viking of a man), and I teamed up to climb a real Andean Peak. We hired equipment and a guide and climbed Nevado Vallunaraju, an ideal beginners accent with no technical sections. At 5686 m (18659 f) it was still a challenge though, and was the highest I had ever been. Coming from Chijnaya I was in the rare spot to be somewhat acclimated to the altitude. Russell and Florian were not, and they struggled more. A one-night accent, we hiked to camp, ate some dinner and then tucked into our sleeping bags at 8pm and lied there until midnight. Awakening from a partial sleep, we ate some breakfast and started climbing by 2 am.  We all eventually summited at sunrise, collapsed into the snow, and then cried at the beauty. The ascent didn't lock-in a passion for high-altitude climbing, but I was glad to try it out and do it once.

I stay in touch with Florian and Russel through Facebook, and the trip convinced me that there is a whole world of adventure and international travel to be experienced. I became convinced that money spent traveling is money well spent. The next summer, after finishing-up research in Spitzbergan, I had my flight back from Oslo moved 3 weeks later so I could travel through Scandinavia. I spent just about everything I earned doing the seabird work (Scandanavia is sooo expensive!). I took trains from Oslo to Stockholm to Copenhagen, but the money spent was worth it--just to see how well those Scandinavians lived with their bikes and their boats and their style. Then the following year in ‘08, I arrived early to my study abroad experience in Buenos Aires travel to Patagonia. I stayed later to get to a few more spots too. These traveling experiences make-up a huge part of who I am, and it wouldn’t have happened had I not signed up for the Chijnaya volunteer experience.

Dinner at Yodelin in Leavenworth

Pre-dinner apps and wine on Icicle Creek, Sleeping Lady Inn

Curry broth, udon noodles with wild sockeye and sockeye sandwich for Breezy. Delish! 

Brunch at the Sleeping Lady. Notice the fruit in the yogurt!

Admiring the Saskatoon berries on the property. 

Beautiful morning at the Sleeping Lady 

Hike on the Icicle Gorge Trail

Back in Seattle, take-out from Homer eating at Jefferson Park

Cool Cat on the deck

Uncle J showing Alpen the basic of Gloomhaven, our newest board game

Alpen's first bites of ñoqui night from Ristorante Machiavelli. He loved ñoquis. I was so proud.

                                                                                           ~~~~PERU~~

A standard post game party pack 

Getting ready to hit the pitch at 13000 ft

Pretty sweet unis

Chijnaya. It was amazing that a community could live in this stark environment. 

Teaching the younger classroomn

Derek the bull! 

A rare delicacy for lunch: Meat! This was sheep jaw soup. But even a delicacy can't escape a few chuños. The middle potato is a classic chuño potato, freeze-dried potato made from a high-altitude specialty potato. A traditional food of the Quecha and Aymara communities of the Altiplano, it requires a 5-day process of freezing overnight and subsequently thawing in the intense morning sun.  To this day I haven't eaten anything as unappetizing as a chuño. Soft and chewy with no flavor, the mouth feel is terrible, and then did I mention no taste? I didn't feel as bad about not liking them after I saw my host family avoiding them in their soup as well. Usually when serving the soup, they too grudgingly accepted a few chuño, to do their part to help save fresh potatoes for the next day. 

        

Typical lunch and dinner. At least everything was boiled, so it was safe to eat. Trying to maintain my weight, I would eat three bowls, but even that couldn't keep me from losing muscle, so I supplemented with the "gobiernos." See below. 

A solid afternoon Chijnaya snack. Fruit and a packet of Galletas Forticada. 

My Altiplano savior. A Gobierno! These government-administered, fortified cookies (or galletas forificados) packed a whopping 350 cals. They tasted like a beefed-up graham cracker. Yum. Getting hungry just thinking about it. They were given to the children at school to help keep their weight up. I collected and ate as many as I could to keep weight too. They're were plenty to go around, and the community got a kick out of my appetite for the "gobiernos."  I often received a few as presents. 

The 8 volunteers in traditional Altiplano clothing (plus Professor Ralph Bolton in the middle in coat.  The other male volunteer, furthest left, Jonathan, departed the program after 1 week because he needed to get back to the US to study for the MCAT. We wore these outfits for a parade near Pucara, the town on the main road outside of Chijnaya. This was not cultural appropriation. The villagers said they were honored that we dressed down in the clothes of an Altiplano peasant. 

At 13000 ft, the village went through a daily freeze and thaw cycle. These cold cows await the morning sun to melt the frost. A good example of the local micro-loan system was to loan money out to a family to build a shelter for the cows. This would improve their health, which would improve their milk production, which would bring more money to the family. Another family couldn't use the loan money until the loaners had paid it all back. This created social pressure to pay back the loans, increasing the amount of projects that got done.  

Had to store them some where. I shared my room with these bikes.

My afternoon English class

One of the families in the village

First ever wild condor sighting. Planted a seed perhaps? We saw many Andean Condors flying in the Cañon del Colca. 

Russel, Florian, and I at summit of Nevado Vallunaraju (18659 ft)

Summit Collapse and tears of joy

Florian, Russel, and I 

The Santa Cruz trek hiking group

 

Florian and I

Meal with a view

Getting ready for the bus ride with Lolly and Becky. This bus represents the typical way we got around. 

Takes your breadth away

Long ways down. Incas farmed small terraces like this.

First light at Machu Picchu

Lolly, Becky, and me sandboarding on the dunes of Huachachina, south of Lima.