A-C-B: A Damp Expedition

October 23rd was a day when we wouldn't be traveling to a new hotel; instead, it was an expedition aimed at Los Cardones National Park. It had rained overnight, and the outlook for today was uncertain, so Joan and I donned our rainpants and jacket.  We had barely left the Hotel del Dique when Carlos spotted a burrowing owl on a wire.

Who are you looking at?

After heading north to El Carril we turned west on Highway 33 and began a winding climb into the mountains.

Switchbacks galore.

Rain showers commenced. At our first stop, for birding, the pavement was still in good shape.

The opposite lane is higher up.

We scrambled around in the drainage, hoping that the blooms would draw hummingbirds or other visitors.

Apparently this wasn't a good location today, and we moved on. At the second stop we had more luck. Our first sighting was probably a cream-backed woodpecker,

although there are a few other species that look similar from a distance, at least to my inexperienced eye. This sayaca tanager refused to return to its nest until we withdrew. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

It's carrying something in its bill.

Not such a good picture, but here's a golden-billed saltator. The view was better through binoculars!

We began a more serious ascent, with switchbacks more frequent, the valley bottom dropping further and further below the road, and constant rain. We didn't make any out-of-the-car stops until we reached a point where we escaped the precipitation, but the wind was still howling.

Looking upstream from a bridge.

The valley floor was streaked with stone walls, to divert and slow the descent of floodwaters, reducing and redirecting erosion.

A small settlement was squeezed between the road and the mountain.

Llamas in the courtyard.

Joan spotted a group of Andean condors circling and landing on the ridgeline opposite. Even with binoculars, it was difficult to see detail, but there was at least one juvenile just hanging out on what appeared to be a nearly vertical rock face.

You can't see them in the photo, but that's the ridge.

The route became largely unpaved; at one point we passed a road grader. More, heavier showers caught up with us, making bird-watching pointless. Carlos was concerned about washouts and rockfalls on our way back, given the heavy rains. One switchback in particular was at the foot of a sloped valley holding waves of dark, slate-colored debris. It had spilled into the road before. Carlos explained that, because of the lack of alternate routes across the mountains, if a slide covered the road behind us, getting back to the hotel would mean a detour of at least 8 hours, including almost all of yesterday's drive. Joan and I agreed that the best course was to turn around, forgoing a quick visit to the Parque Nacional Los Cardones.

We arrived back at the hotel by 4:30pm, which gave me a chance to catch up on the notes I jot down on trips to refresh my memory when writing these blog entries. There was no wine less than a full bottle at dinner, so I tried a Salta beer. I'm not a beer drinker but today it worked just fine.

A-C-B: Cafayate, Quebrada de las Conchas, Dique Cabra Corral

On October 22nd Joan and I took a post-breakfast walk at our hotel, the Casa de la Bodega, 19 km outside Cafayate.

A saffron finch sat observing from its arboreal mud nest, a reoccupation of a rufous hornero residence. (The rufous hornero is Argentina's national bird.)

A small bird fetched lots of mud.

The establishment is also a winery,

and we got a tour of their boutique operation before we departed. We headed out the back way, as we had come in, to check out the waterfowl at a pond. We had several good sightings just sitting in the car:

A Cinnamon Teal

A Yellow-Billed Teal

Carlos drove back to Cafayate where we visited the Vasija Secreta winery on the outskirts of town.

After a short wait we  joined the next museum tour.

Fermentation tanks.

Old equipment.

Artistic barrel!

Afterwards we attended a tasting of the Malbec and Torrontés wines, and then took quick peek at the vineyard.

This rose demonstrates planting technique appropriate to this soil, in a dry climate located between two rivers.

After saying goodbye to the winery we drove to the town square of Cafayate.

Blooming jacaranda and the cathedral.

After orbiting it twice, we selected a place for lunch.  Afterwards we drove out of Cafayate to the north and east on Highway 68, heading towards the Red Canyon, also known as the Quebrada de las Conchas (Shell Canyon), passing the turnoff for the Casa de la Bodega one last time.

From Google Maps; click on the image to enlarge.

We stopped often in the next few hours.

The canyon looms ahead.

After swinging up and into the canyon Carlos stopped the car at a viewpoint.

The river, modest looking at this time of year, was visible.

Down near the stream a llama grazed, losing its winter coat.

Further along tilted slabs formed a ridgeline, frozen in flowing contours.

A zoomed-in photo; click to enlarge.

There was an overdose of beauty here. Jumping ahead, here's the road at Las Tres Cruces viewpoint, a thread in a rusty landscape.

The view to the river valley after a short uphill walk at Tres Cruces. Cattle graze down there.

Next we stopped at two geological formations that are part of the indigenous patrimony. First, the amphitheater.

Carlos and Joan pulled ahead as I stopped for a photo.

A closer look.

One slice of the amphitheater with Joan and Carlos for scale.

A short distance further on we visited the Garganta del Diablo, or Devil's Throat.

The throat is a narrow, winding gorge that sports waterfalls pouring down the cliffsides in the rainy season.

This photo was taken looking up, not forward!

What does that sign say?  "Do not enter with sandals or barefoot."

People arrived behind us, including a throng of children from School #28, according to the sign on the bus.

 The schoolkids immediately tackled the rock barrier.

Their calls bounced back and forth across the gorge. From there we continued down Highway 68 to the town of Coronel Moldes, and then across the dam that forms the artificial lake (Dique) and reservoir (Embalse) of the Cabra Corral.

After a few twists and turns along the shoreline we arrived at the Hotel Del Dique. Although this photo was taken the next morning, I'll include it here to reveal the view Joan and I enjoyed from our room.

At dinner that night there was an English couple, avid birders, that enjoyed complaining about the hotel food and the birds they hadn't seen. Carlos was glad he wasn't their guide. We were glad Carlos was ours.

The Tale of the iMac

Joan's iMac turned ten years old in 2018, and early this year we decided it was finally time to upgrade from Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) to El Capitan, (10.11), the last macOS release that supports this generation of iMacs. An old operating system meant old versions of apps, which meant more and more web pages and other features just didn't work any more.

The 24" iMac of 2008.

After the upgrade, the computer was incredibly slow. Painfully slow. I tried various remedies suggested on the internet, but to no effect.

Typically a large slowdown indicates that the hard drive is starting to fail, but the coincidence of it happening simultaneously with the upgrade left us uncertain. Still, at ten years old, it was beyond time to replace the original hard drive, so we decided to replace the old spinning-disk hard drive with an SSD (Solid State Device) -- no moving parts to fail. Plus that would also help the speed issue ... maybe.

After two months of procrastination, waiting for a slack time in use of the computer, I took the iMac to The Computer Store on a Monday afternoon. It received a fresh install of El Capitan, a 500GB SSD drive transplant (a non-trivial operation on a machine built before SSDs were around), and our old apps were all copied over. In many cases our app versions were frozen: they were so old that the usual upgrade paths weren't available any more, but the new apps in the Apple App Store wanted a later version of OS X than El Capitan. "Pages," the word-processing part of iWork '08, was a prime example of this. No upgrade path, and the program in the App Store wanted OS X 10.13 or higher! All the old programs were copied to the SSD for us.

We got a call late Wednesday afternoon that it was ready. Apprehensive but hopeful, I picked it up Thursday and we turned it on. Wonderfully improved; Joan took some timings:

The right-hand column is the speed-up factor.

I can definitely recommend The Computer Store. Thanks, Saed and James!

A-C-B: El Infiernillo, Los Quilmes, to Cafayate

On October 21st we experienced a wide variety of terrain, climate, and experiences during a very long day. Let's get started.

We drove up and away from Tafí de Valle, and our first stop was checking out the birds where the main road bridged over a side valley.

Looking up that side valley.

With the help of Carlos, our guide, we did see several bird species, including a caracara in a tree across the street. I managed a photo of a white-winged cinclodes, with head feathers ruffed up.

We drove on and up towards the El Infiernillo pass. Half an hour later, just before Carlos' next stop, an unconcerned sub-adult eagle forced us to halt and admire.

Carlos pulled over at another good location for birding, a few kilometers before the El Infiernillo pass. As we started exploring a van appeared with another group of birders, intent on seeing a particular rarity. Carlos and the other guide exchanged some comments and advice in Spanish. Later, I took a photo looking back at the two parked vehicles. Once the rare bird was spotted, the group left.

You can see we've wandered a good distance. Carlos also led us along a farm track, a remnant of the old road. We passed the remains of a stone cabin where a hermit lived in decades past, greeting those who passed by. Carlos and Joan spotted a tinamou, but it moved before I could locate it.

We got a good look at a bare-eyed ground dove, also called Moreno's ground dove, through our binoculars, even though it was facing away.

Click on the image and see the orange eye patch.

I also snapped this photo of a red-tailed comet. They're a perpetual motion machine, so it wasn't an easy task.

The light's not great, but I was determined to get a picture.

Then it was a short drive to El Infiernillo, 3042 meters above sea level, just shy of 10,000 feet.

The geological rift here is reputed to be an entrance to the gates of hell. Nestled at the foot of the clouds (click on the image to enlarge) are Lake Angostura and Tafí de Valle, where we started.

A resident of the pass.

This pig's seen lots of tourists. Not excited.

Driving through the pass we saw several vicuña, a smaller and delicate relative of the llama, and the wild ancestor of the domesticated alpaca. It's highly prized for its fine fur, which can be harvested only once every three years. No photos this time, but we'll see more vicuña later in the trip.

A short distance below the pass, now in much drier terrain, we parked above some ruins.

Carlos had intended to have our lunch at a large shade tree down in the wash, but another group had already taken it over. Joan and I ate a quick snack from the cheese strip we'd bought in Tafí, and then we explored the ruins and checked out a few birds.

The drive continued with a lengthy descent into the next valley, and we arrived at the Quilmes Ruins.

The sky was clear and the sun hot. We parked under a tree offering some scanty shade, and ate the lunches packed for us in Tafí before entering.

The ruins are back under the administration of the indigenous people.

Rather than relying on accounts made by others, here's a historic overview from a Quilmes point of view. Click on the image to enlarge.

A panoramic view from the ground level of the ruins back towards the valley and mountains beyond, whence we came.

These stones are offerings of respect to the Panchamama, or Earth Mother/Goddess.

We began to climb up. This construction was built on the side of a mountain as a fortification, a sanctuary.

There was a trail to the northern lookout post.

Closer to the watching point.

As we climbed higher Carlos detected a juvenile rattlesnake resting in the shade of the stones. Good not to lean against the wall here, not without checking first.

We didn't bother him, and he didn't bother us.

Close to the top.

We descended from the ruins and visited the museum, which had English subtitles on the videos. It was very well done.

Then it was time to drive on to Cafayate, where we were to spend the night. We would follow the valley north and cross from Tucumán province into Salta.

Along the way Carlos noticed some new avians worthy of a stop. The view was better with binoculars.

As we approached the town two grey foxes dashed across the road ahead of us. In town, Carlos kept his eyes open for the La Casa de La Bodega, our hotel, as we cruised down the main street and then another, but we couldn't find it. His GPS was telling him that it was 19 km (12 miles) outside of town, of which he was skeptical. A phone call went unanswered. With no other alternatives, we obeyed the GPS and headed out of Cafayate.

We turned off the paved road and journeyed down a narrowing dirt road. Carlos joked nervously about spending the night in the car. We came to an intersection where the GPS wanted us to go straight ahead, while signs pointed to the right. We turned right.

The first hotel-like structure we encountered was obviously still under construction. Oh no  -- were we way too early? But we pressed on and found the boutique hotel, which would have been easier to reach had we gone straight ahead.

It was good to relax and have dinner after a long day on the road. The next morning we would explore Cafayate a bit before moving on.