San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
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araguan shore when two men and a woman emerged out of the jungle, one man shirtless with a fresh 14inch knife scar across his chest. They were Sandinista deserters and needed my boat to get over the Rio Colorado and into Costa Rica.
Nobody would swim the river: bull sharks migrate into freshwater here.
I gave them my lunch, a few Cokes, and then I took them across the river a few miles to a small jungle village.
That week, armed Sandinistas arrived from Nicaragua in chase. They took over the fishing camp and grabbed a hostage. After a day, they let him go.
Turns out the day before, I had flown out of the jungle to San Jose, Costa Rica, then back to the U.S. When I returned the next year, locals said the escapees hid during the Sandinistas’ search and eluded capture.
When I fished for 4,000pound great white sharks, catch and release, the idea that “I might get eaten today” was always in the back of my mind.
At different times over several years in the early 1990s, about 12 pals joined in on the trips. The Fish and Game Commission then banned all fishing for great whites in 1994, and many thought that is why I stopped. But here’s the real story. On my boat, a 20foot Wellcraft, I’d cruised near the big cove on the west side of the Southeast Farallon Island, when we saw a giant shark take a sea lion and bite it in half like a dog with a bone. An hour later, a 19footer, 4 feet across at the shoulders, pulled up alongside and looked me over as if sizing up its next meal.
After that, I had nightmares about sharks. My fishing buddy Abe Cuanang told me he had a similar encounter and similar nightmares.
Well, I sold my boat in the Delta, moved to the mountains. After hiking about 250 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, the nightmares stopped.
After camping in Yellowstone, I drove my motorcycle south into Wyoming, past Jackson Hole and along the Green River corridor. It was a euphoric moment, free on the earth.
The next morning, I cruised at about 35 mph on a gorgeous twolaner into Wasatch National Forest in northern Utah. After clearing a ridge, the pavement turned to deep gravel.
As I tried to slow, the bike’s rear wheel fishtailed. Like a stunt man, I had a vision of laying the bike on its side.
Instead, with the bike at a 45degree angle, the tires caught and the bike flipped and catapulted. Some 600 pounds of motorcycle landed next to me.
A rancher pulled up in an old pickup truck, and the first thing I said was, “Do you think it’ll start?” Yep, it did.
One little problem: The crash had broken off the hydraulic filler caps for my brake lines, and I ended up riding out the final 750 miles home to the Bay Area with just enough fluid for a few stops. I had to plan a route where I could plan the stops, going through the gears, about a quarter mile out.
In a fiveweek expedition hunt for Bigfoot, an old Hoopa tribal elder, Jimmy Jackson, told me, “Do not go charging into Blue Creek,” a wilderness canyon with no trails, or “something bad would happen.”
He added: “You have to show respect for Blue Canyon, this wild place where all men are only visitors.”
The thing is, that’s where we wanted we to go all along. To get there, Jeffrey Patty and I descended off trail from Klamath National Forest to the headwaters of Blue Creek. With no trails and steep slopes, there was no other way to get there than to go charging down.
We then crossed the stream many times to explore up and down the canyon, tracing out bear trails. When it started raining, Blue Creek was about thigh deep during the fords.
Some 30 hours later, it was still raining, the river had risen 2 feet and we were on the wrong side to get home. Jeff, at 6foot5, went first and barely made it across. He waited for me, 40 yards downstream, positioned above a small waterfall.
With a tree limb for stability like a tripod, I worked my way across. The water came to waist deep, too high for a ford, and near the other side the stick slipped and I was swept downstream.
I remember looking up at the surface a foot above, so close but so far, when a hand appeared. It was Jeff. I grabbed that hand, and my momentum pulled him in with me. But his weight was enough to lift us into the shallows. On hands and knees, we scrambled ashore.
The next week, I visited that Hoopa tribal elder and told him the story. “Now you know better,” he said, “no matter where you go in your life.”
After 10 years of waiting, we got the rare permit to canoe the most remote river canyon in America: the Owyhee, from the foot of the Jarbridge Range in northern Nevada, through southern Idaho and into Oregon.
The Owyhee looks like a
On a trip in the High Sierra, my pal, Dave Zimmer, and I decided on a side foray into Reno. Outside town, I got redlighted by one of Reno’s finest, pulled over, and in seconds, the officer had me out of my truck, hands up on the camper shell for a search.
I turned and asked, “What’s this all about?”
In the next microsecond, the cop, his eyes burning with fear, pulled and pointed his M9 Beretta 2 inches from my forehead. Roughly a dozen police cars showed up with skidding stops. Turned out that Dave and I matched the descriptions of two suspects in an armed bank robbery a few miles away.
We were seated in separate patrol cars, and as luck would have it, a Sunday Chronicle was open to my column on the seat next to Dave. “Look, look!” Dave pleaded in an urgent voice. “It’s him!” The cops took turns, holding up The Chronicle photo to my face, and finally conceded, “Yep, it’s the outdoor guy.”
Tom Stienstra is The Chronicle’s outdoor writer. Email: tstienstra@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @StienstraTom