SURVIVOR HIKE

There’s a hiking area not too far from my friend Pat’s Santa Fe home. It’s both flat and hilly, sandy and rocky, and has typical desert vegetation. Quite frankly, it didn’t look like much of a challenge, and I soon became restless as I was walking in the area with Mary and Rat last week. Heck, we could still hear and see vehicles traveling on the highway parallel to where we were. This called for action!

“Let’s get off of the trail and head on up,” I suggested.

Rat expressed a little concern about snakes, but he was still game, as was Mary, so we got off the beaten path.

“This reminds me of Survivor Man,” Mary said, as we zigzagged our way up a rocky hill.

“Who’s that?” Rat asked.

“Oh, this goofball guy named Bear who has a TV show about surviving in the outdoors. He’s a hoot,” I said.

“Yeah, he takes off his pants, blows 'em up, and uses them to float across a lake instead of just walking around it,” Mary added.

We kept our pants on, continuing to weave through dry creek beds, stickery bushes, and the like. At one point, Rat got on his cell phone to call a friend back east, telling her that we were surely lost in the wilds of New Mexico. Eventually, we got high enough to see where the car was parked.

“Civilization, at last! And not a minute too soon,” Survivor Man would say, exhausted.

We picked our way back and finally found the trail from which we started. Before getting to the car, though, we found an escarpment that we’d somehow missed earlier in the day.

“I wonder what made those holes in the dirt?” one of my companions asked.

“The perfect hand and foot holds,” I said and took off to climb the little wall.

It was a cinch to scale, but I pretended it was tougher than it actually was. Mary turned camera person and photographed the stunt, while Rat just laughed at me grunting and groaning, a la Survivor Man. I pulled my way to the top and collapsed in victory.

“Who’s next?” I asked.

They did what any smart survivor would do: walked around it.