Adventures of a Discoverer

In southern Mexico it is common to find a species of grasshoppers known as "chapulines": being abundant there, eventually people figured out they could be used as food, and they became a typical dish of the region. Last weekend, Jenn and I went on a date on a very nice Mexican restaurant in Seattle named  Poquitos , which was offering chapulines as an appetizer and, given that I hadn't tried them before, I decided to have some. They are served in a small bowl with a slice of lime, which you should squeeze over them to add a little extra flavor. The bugs are throughly roasted, so there is no "goo" left in them: in fact, they are quite crunchy and have a nice texture as you chew them. They taste good too, especially with lime and salt, although there is an important note I should make: in this restaurant, the chapulines are offered in the traditional southern Mexican way, i.e., really spicy. Given that I'm not a big fan of spicy food, at the end of it my mouth...

On Saturday of the last week I spent a really nice afternoon at the HONK Fest West - it was my first time there. HONK Fest is the name of various music festivals in the United States and abroad in which street bands get together to play in a public space and in this way bring the community together and enjoy some fun music. They happen in New York City, Boston, Providence, among other American cities, and also in Seattle, where we have the HONK Fest West. The organization put this year's festival in a public park in Columbia City, a neighborhood in South Seattle, and it happened on Friday, Saturday and Sunday of last week. It was a very well organized festival: there were four different stages for the bands to show up, some of the streets around the park were closed, there were porta-potties and hand-washing stations, maps and programs of the festival, and etc. Surprisingly, for such a well put together event, it is completely free - tips are recommended, but everything is taken ca...

The hiking season is just starting: the snow is melting on the mountains and that is revealing the trails underneath. However, that means that most trails still have large stretches of snow, which is not so fun to go through. Fortunately, some are already fully snow free, and yesterday I could check one of them: the trail to Pete Lake. The lake is in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, on the eastern slope of the Cascades. The trail to get to it is interesting because it's mostly flat, which makes it relatively easy. In addition to that, there are a number of good campsites next to the lake, so many people choose this trail to make their first backpacking trip: it's a great way to get used to carry a full backpack around. And, indeed, yesterday I could see quite a lot of backpackers on the trail and many tents set around the lake. I noticed something a little bit concerning on this trail, that increased the level of effort needed: I had never seen this many logs on a trail....

Just yesterday I did my first hike of the year: I followed a trail to two amazingly beautiful waterfalls in the middle of the forest, the Otter Falls and the Big Creek Falls. It was a very nice and surprisingly easy hike and it couldn't have been a better way to start the hiking season. The falls are located in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, deep into the woods past the Snoqualmie river. A somewhat rough dirt road takes you to the trailhead, and then you follow the Taylor river through what used to be a forest road: that makes for a trail with little elevation gain and a relatively wide path, so it is pretty easy to cover the more or less four miles until the Otter Falls. I've been blessed in my life that I have been in places where you can say that pictures don't do them justice. That is very much the case of the Otter Falls. They sit on this vast rocky mountain side, a narrow stream of water going all the way down to a small lake. The only way to absorb the sca...