Patagonian race... The highlights from Mark.

I am back home from Patagonia - tired but very happy.

Thanks to everyone who followed Team Calleva online and kept us in their
thoughts as we struggled during the last stage of the race.

Patagonia vastly exceeded my imagination of what it would be. The legendary
wind was ever-present. We saw a 200 foot waterfall coming off a cliff and
never reach the ground. The wind turned the water into mist about halfway
down the cliff. The forests were dense and moss-covered - pinks and
purples, black and white and an assortments of greens. Sometimes the moss
was several feet thick. They were also a variety of textures from hard (the
bright green ones with the small white five-petaled flowers) to the huge
puffy red ones that sunk up to a foot when stepped upon only to rebound as
if no one had passed. I imagined the Mirkwood of Middle Earth to be like
this. I half-expected Tom Bombadil to appear in one of the stands of trees.
The river valleys were mazes of bogs, ponds, small lakes and muddy
expanses. Some of the bog holes were easily over 6 feet deep (i know I fell
in one while portaging our kayak). The craggy peaks and cliffs seemed to
rise up from everywhere.

Here are some highlights of the trip/race... (I'll be sending out a detailed
race report in the coming days.):

We kayaked with humpback whales in the Straits of Magellan.

We startled a huge sea lion on a remote beach (and vice versa).

We communed with a green-eyed fox one morning just before dawn.

We laughed at the antics of penguins on shore and in the water.

We dug tunnels through underbrush so dense, it appeared to be an
impenetrable living wall of leaves, trunks and thorns.

We camped above a glacier one night and listened to four inches of snow
accumulate outside the tent.

We paddled our kayaks across open water and up a fjord defying the
Patagonian wind - if only briefly.

We kayaked down a glacial stream from an iceberg-filled lake to the Strait
of Magellan.

We biked 80 kilometers into the Patagonia wind. It seemed to take forever.

We walked for days and days and every time we felt we had seen all their was
to see, Patagonia came up with a new sort of terrain or puzzle for us to
solve.

I ever-scanned the skies for an albatross to no avail. I though I saw one,
but he was too far away to be sure.

And lastly, we got our first helicopter ride (medivac from the finish to the
hospital). 3 days with no food and one day with no water and hypothermia
sets in pretty fast.

More soon,
Mark