Pilgrim Planning Continues...

My computer has been on the blink. Comatose, really. Even my minimalist life was thwarted by the temporary electronic lapse.

The planning continues - 5 weeks until my feet are on the path of long return. Much is still to be done.

Firstly, my friend the Pilgrim-in-Training continues her training but has gracefully bowed out. The undertaking even from Denver to Chimayo is no small undertaking and requires 100% commitment. She quavered and didn't want to interfere with my parallel efforts. So she'll continue to fulfill her steadfast role as being my much-appreciated planning assistant and continue her training toward her weight-loss goal and may someday make the pilgrimage from Denver to Chimayo, but just not with me in October.

The fallout for me is that my pilgrimage is more uniform: there will be no camping; no llama. I'll simply (!) commit myself to walking further and longer each day until I get to some sort of refuge for the night. I'll put myself at the mercy of strangers' kindness and benefit from the risk as I have always done. A pilgrimage. Not always easy, but always adventurous =)

Spanish is coming more frequently and easily off my tongue, but still intermingled with Italian and French. Alors. Alora. It's still much further along than Russian or Ukrainian were a year ago and I did well enough when I needed to with those languages.

Though I tooled with the idea of sponsorship in getting outfitted, nothing has really materialized comfortably. So I forged ahead and bought everything new I determined was necessary after repairing what I could from last winter. A new, smaller pack and sturdy new boots are the most important additions to the kit. I've got an active to-do list going that will keep me busy for the next five weeks, but honestly, I'm eager to get going - if the heat of summer would only pass!

The greatest challenge niggling at me at the moment is obtaining the necessary permissions from the 10 sovereign lands standing between me and the Chihuahua desert in New Mexico. I've researched it to the point that I know I must coordinate with the various tribal War Chiefs, as opposed to the Tribal Governors, in order to gain access to the dirt tracks across the lands. Accessible, paved highways exist, but experience warns me against these - hot, dangerous, and stressful. So far, the direction I've received is to go around these delineated sovereign lands of the Native Americans rather than cross them. I can see their perspective... I'm setting off on a journey of 4,000 to 5,000 miles, what difference would it make if bypassing their lands adds another couple of hundred miles? What would motivate them to grant me permission to cross their territories? But I'm setting off on a cultural excursion and would like to see - without tarnishing thoughts of exploitation or profit - the various corners of this vast and diverse nation. I hope to appeal to a few War Councils in the coming weeks to convince them that I, one tiny, solo woman, pose no threat in walking respectfully and peacefully across their lands in a given autumn afternoon. Fingers crossed.

Although there is a long tradition of pilgrimages to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, from what I've gleaned, the distances covered by foot in generational memory seem relatively short. I'm feeling like a sort of pioneer pilgrim in this area. I wonder if the early pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela had to individually figure out the politics of gaining access to the autonomous territories they'd cross when leaving from their front doors...

Planning for Chimayo

The planning of this pilgrimage is turning out to be the busy part - I look forward to when all I have to do is walk everyday. Language, history, culture, and logistics are all competing for the little available time remaining.

Honestly, though,whether I had 10 days or 10 months, I'd fill it completely with reading and planning, so it makes little difference in the end... 8 more weeks is a good amount of time; still, if the temperature dropped enough tomorrow, I'd leave at dawn. (It won't drop enough until October, though, so the departure date is set at October 10th.)

Becoming conversant in Latin American Spanish isn't particularly daunting, but it takes a little time... two or three times a week, I get myself to a happy hour or cocktail party where everyone speaks only in Spanish. I've found meetup.com a fantastic resource for locating such places around town. Every day, I create an opportunity to speak out loud, even if only to the cats. Spanish fits much easier in my mouth than Russian or Ukrainian - I have to force myself to remove the 'vee' sound from the alphabet, but I'm not crying out to buy a vowel like in those eastern dialects.

The Pilgrim-in-Training is walking so much around town that she's already walked the equivalent distance of 90% of the way to Chimayo. The training is paying off - in four months her pace has increased from a scant 2 miles per hour on relatively flat paved surfaces with a rest required hourly to more than 2.75 miles per hour, sustainable with only short shade rests for 12 miles with a 15-pound backpack. She's lost more than 20 pounds in the process and has noticeably more energy. Which is all great, because there's no good way to Chimayo without crossing a few very big mountains.

The route planning is not at all straight forward... there's a multitude of permutations and no direct path. Under such conditions, there's no way to get lost. We'll head south along the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, crossing them in the first week and then the Wet Mountains and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in quick succession into the expansive San Luis Valley not far from the headwaters of the Rio Grande River, which continues all the way down to Mexico. The 'mile-high' city from which we start will mark the lowest altitude of the route to Chimayo. We'll have to weave our way between many 14ers - mountains exceeding 14,000 feet (4,300 meters) - to get into the San Luis Valley.

One week after leaving Denver, we'll encounter an interesting but subtle demarcation. The Arkansas River between the Front Range and the Wet Mountains was formerly the extent of New Spain and a long-standing border between Mexico and the US. In an interesting geographic and linguistic relic, once we cross the river [at Cañon City], the predominant language will be Spanish. I'll have plenty of miles to transition from English through Spanglish into full-fledged Spanish.

Although the distance between Denver and Chimayo - 331 miles, it seems - is perhaps only 10% of the distance to Mexico City, it's an important milestone. This is a bit further than the distance between Burgos and Santiago de Compostela in Spain along the Camino Frances whence tens of thousands of pilgrims pass every year. It's a very do-able distance to trek in about three weeks. Of course in Spain there is an abundance of pilgrim houses to stay in and a well-worn broad path marked with big yellow arrows to walk along with no fear of straying from the destination, and an absence of mountain lions, bears, rattlesnakes, and other creatures of the day and night looking for a meal... Otherwise, there's beautiful landscape with wilderness challenges that can be an interesting alternative to the Camino right here in America.

Chimayo may be one of the most-visited and long-standing pilgrimage destinations in the US, but it lacks the inveterate tradition of foot treks originating from places further afield than Santa Fe or Taos, New Mexico as compared to Santiago de Compostela. There are a lot of foot pilgrims to Chimayo, but mostly limited to Holy Week for specific traditional celebrations. I think originating in Denver will be spectacular with regard to culture and nature and landscape, and in October when the golden leaves of the aspen trees will be quaking in sweeps within spruce and pine groves below the snow-capped 14ers during harvest time in the broad Rio Grande Valley, passing through various mining districts and ghost towns of the Old West... this will be something I'm sure a lot of people will enjoy. Giant yellow arrows and pilgrim houses aren't requirements for a pilgrimage.

PIT & Biometrics

Eileen's made a milestone! She's walked over a century - 100 miles - since her training began in April. She's still a committed PIT (pilgrim-in-training)and we're tracking her miles around town and on the biweekly mountain hikes - as of today, 102 miles in these 7 weeks. This is with a weight loss of 10 of the 70 pounds she wants to loose, and a significantly improved diet. Her kitchen is now free of artificial foods, which interfere with proper metabolism, unnecessary additives like high fructose corn syrup, and aspartame, and processed foods no matter what claims are printed on their eye-catching packaging. Fruits, veggies, yogurt, grains... wholesome, real food now fills the fridge to fulfill daily nutritional requirements. Very simple.

If she were really walking from Denver to Chimayo, by now, she's made it as far as Cripple Creek, a former mining town up in the mountains. The plan remains: walk a cumulative distance of 383 miles around town and she'll be ready to walk the 383 miles (or so) to Chimayo. She only whined in protest once on today's mountain hike, but close to the summit and short lived.

Our first interim destination toward Chimayo will be San Luis, Colorado's oldest town and the location of a remarkable public art exhibit installed a few years ago - bronze life-sized Statues of the Cross. Neither of us has seen it yet, though it's gotten quite a bit of publicity here in Denver. For Eileen, the challenge lies in the fact that the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies must be crossed in order to get into the broad San Luis Valley. I'm not exactly sure of our route yet, but right now, it seems that we'll take a route up through Cripple Creek in the direction of Cañon City and then to Westcliffe and down into San Luis. No matter how we'll do it, there will be mountains to cross. Mountain training is therefore important for her.

Getting a sense of a comfortable pace on steep ups, level ground, and steep downs is important for a long-distance pilgrim. These are examples of the biometrics I use everyday on my treks. Eileen's pace on the uphill part was markedly faster today than it was two weeks ago. Other than fitness level, heat, breeze, shade, time of day, mood, etc, affect pace. One's pace (one example of a personal biometric) will vary, but hopefully will fall into a predictable range useful for planning a route. The PIT effort over the coming months will include gathering biometric information for Eileen - mine are well established by now:

Pace - kilometers(or miles)/hour
Stride - the distance in meters(or feet) of each step, right foot to right foot (or left to left)
Step Rate - number of steps per 100 meters (or tenth of a mile), to be extended to kilometer(mile)

Pilgrims going to Santiago de Compostela on the Camino Frances or trekkers using other well-established paths might not concern themselves with these measurements and do just fine. Others who blaze their own trail using a map and compass or who combine paths and tracks in unusual ways to get where they're going will need to know how their bodies perform in order to predict their progress reliably. It just makes sense - the map shows a village is x miles away... wouldn't anyone want to have a sense of how long it would take to get there?

Conversely, you spy a village on a hillside some distance away - wouldn't you like to know how far away it is and how long it will take you to get there? This would require perceptual biometrics. I've learned that if I - nearsighted as I am - can just make out that there are buildings, but not necessarily individual ones, the village can be up to 10 kilometers distant. If it's a sprawling city, it could be much further. If I can see individual buildings, and maybe some characteristics about them, like watchtowers or steeples, then it's somewhere just beyond 5 kilometers. If I can see individual buildings and their doorways and windows, maybe individual farm animals, big ones, that is, then it's maybe 3 kilometers. And if I can see individual people, smaller animals, smoke from the chimneys, more details like this, then the village is likely 1 to 2 kilometers away, in other words, for me, 10 to 20 minutes by foot.

I know my biometrics and use them every pilgrim day without thinking. So many people, men and women alike, who comment on the 'courage' I must have to go walking on my own. I think it's rather more confidence that comes with knowledge than it is courage. Courage implies overcoming a fear. I'm not afraid to walk on my own in land unknown to me, so it takes no courage to do it. I'm confident that I know how far I can walk in an hour or a day, how far I can walk in a morning, how long it will take me to get from one village to the next. This part is empirical data. Easy-peasy.

Kyiv - Patras Statistics

It took a little while, but here are some geeky statistics that future pilgrims/trekkers might find useful.

Firstly is lodging. The graph reflects the lodging distribution for the entire 140 nights. It's a little misleading to think of it equally distributed per country... I never stayed in a hotel until I got to Turkey, for example, and both in Turkey and Greece, every time I stayed in a hotel, it was as a guest of the town, church, mayor, police chief, etc.

In Ukraine, when I started tracking the type of lodging, I made a distinction between staying as a guest in a village house and staying as a guest in a Soviet-style block apartment. In hindsight, I'm not sure why I thought this was a noteworthy distinction. Either way, I was a guest in someone's home.

The category 'Religious House' includes both monasteries - men's or women's - and churches. Often, I found that churches have side rooms or outbuildings with basic accommodation for guests. Monasteries were far more interesting because there were monks or nuns for company and conversation. Small church rooms were usually pretty rustic and I was on my own.

I would have enjoyed couchsurfing more often, but because I didn't carry a computer with me and there wasn't always wifi or mobile coverage around me even if I did, the online nature of connecting with couchsurfing hosts made it challenging. I did send requests to couchsurfers while I was on the go in Ukraine but never got responses. I sort of gave up until I got to Turkey where the couchsurfers were more often situated along my route, but again, it was a little difficult to go back and forth to finalize the arrangements. I only stayed twice with couchsurfers - once in Kyiv and once in the northwest of Turkey. On both occasions it was relaxing and fabulous. For anyone packing more electronics, I still recommend it as a way to meet and mingle with interesting like-minded folks.

While I walked, I collected weather data, if for nothing more than to show yet again that winter is not a bad time to take a long walk. See, there were more sunny days than snowy and rainy days combined. It's just that in my memory, there were a lot of bad weather days. It must just mean that when the weather was bad, it was really bad.

It should be obvious that the temperature ranges reflect the temperature variation while I was walking, not the nightly low... I slept at night and wasn't inclined to get up to check the temperature outside. I noted the temperature when I started walking in the morning and again sometime in the afternoon. I would guess that until the end of March, the temperature sunk below the freezing point every night. I like best walking between -5 and 10 Celsius (25 to 50 F). There was just one wicked cold snap right there in the middle of January. March was generally a little too warm for my taste, though it was a nice change and I was physically strong enough by then not to feel the extra weight and bulk in my backpack from having to carry most of my clothes instead of wearing them.

It's interesting to note that during the autumn and winter, the temperature variation was relatively small, yet as spring approached, and I happened to be in very mountainous terrain, the morning and afternoon temperatures varied widely. In the winter, I wore nearly everything I had and wore it all day long; in Greece, it was very important to dress in layers and I was actively stripping throughout the day.

Pilgrim in Training

My pal, Eileen, is really intent on being physically fit enough to walk to Chimayo... she readily admits that it won't be an easy task, but her commitment is admirable. She's well along the way on the virtual pilgrimage starting from Denver.

Since her training program began when I returned on April 12th, she's already logged a respectable 77 miles (124 km) of walking mostly around the urban neighborhood. While she walks, about 3 miles a day, 5 days a week, she tries to keep at an aerobic pace - one where she can still hold a conversation, often with retired neighbor, Ellen - and stays pretty close to an average of 2.5 miles per hour. She finds enjoyment walking a different route every day and reports for me to tally the number of blocks east/west and the number of blocks north/south. (Denver blocks aren't square - there're 16 blocks to a mile east/west and 10 north/south.) There are endless opportunities for her to gaze at the houses and apartment buildings in a 1.5-mile radius and gather ideas for gardening, landscaping, window treatments, etc. [This would bore me to tears! I need to have a destination to head towards in order to get enjoyment out of a walk.]

By the distance she has accumulated so far, she'd be past Monument, CO by now, via Littleton, Sedalia, and Larkspur southward along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. But there's an important lesson learned in her training: her pace in the mountains is very different than around the urban environment.

We took a day hike at Mt Falcon Open Space earlier this week for performance testing. She walked for 3 miles (5 km) up a long, steep mountain path with an elevation change of +1,600 feet (490 meters) and then down a slightly longer trail to the starting point. Big difference! While around town, her level-ground pace is a pretty consistent 2.5 mph, yet in the mountains, her ascending pace is barely 1 mph and her descending pace is 1.7 mph. The climate was a significant factor for her - the east-facing mountain slope gave us a lot of exposure... 74ºF (25ºC) and very arid. She had to stop for several short rests, especially when there was a bit of shade. I took longer trails than she and reconnoitered at agreed-upon landmarks. I also brought along a book.

For whatever series of reasons, the climate and steepness factors don't impact my pace much... I'm at 3 mph up 3.5 mph on the flats and 3.8 mph down. Clearly, this underscores that people with different paces shouldn't even try to walk together. I'm younger (she 58; I 46) and in better condition, yet I'm somewhat shorter. These factors don't cancel each other out. More significantly, I'm more comfortable taking risks - more confident to have both feet leave the earth as I jump from one rock to another or over a gulch, more experienced in shifting my direction with the walking sticks, less inclined to take even a slight pause seeing the rattlesnakes on the path. I do my gawking on the go, she stops to gawk. Different people, different paces. Walking to Chimayo together, we'll be using her pace to determine the length of a day's stage and won't walk together between stopping points (except when prudent).

Eileen's training continues. It will be interesting to see if her pace will improve as her fitness level does. My planning continues... determining the stages and appropriate routes, and supply points.