Slow Baja - Outfitter Trudi Angell Talks About Forty Years Of Paddling and Saddling In Baja

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

Trudi Angell has been living in Baja since the mid-'70s. She made her first trip South to attend a 12-day Sea Kayaking course at the National Outdoor Leadership School in Mulegé. Angell fell in love with the people and the place -and stayed six-weeks. When she finally returned home to Calistoga, she quickly bought a folding Klepper Kayak, a roof rack for her 1964 Rambler American, and blazed a trail straight back to Baja. Sea kayaking was taking off as an adventure sport just as Baja was on the rise as a travel destination. An opportunity to guide a kayak trip down the coast allowed Angell to launch her company Paddling South in Loreto. Angell says she was "in the right spot at the right time." With a love for logistics, and a desire to go the extra mile for her clients, she cultivated a great business which she ran for thirty years. While riding on a mule trip with her friend and fellow outfitter, Tim Means, she was amazed by the grace the hired vaqueros showed as they interacted with their families. Angell had an epiphany, bought a horse, and took up riding. Soon, she was visiting ranches near and far. She launched Saddling South in 1987. "This opened up a huge world for me -both for studying the history (of the vaqueros) and learning the Ranch culture." In this conversation, Angell talks about her life and work, and her deep admiration for the vaqueros and traditional Baja ranch life. She shares stories from the 1000-mile Mule trip (the Mula-Mil) that she organized to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1963-64 expedition by Andy Meling, Joanne Alford, Eve Ewing, and others. Additionally, she shares insights about making "La Recua," a documentary film about a traditional overland pack-mule trip featuring 70-year-old vaquero Dario Higuera, a team of 13, and a cast of 25 animals, also known as "Dario's Dream." Listen to the podcast here. Visit the Bell Mare website here. Follow Saddling South on Instagram Follow Saddling South on Facebook

Hey, this is Michael Emery. Thanks for tuning in to the Slow Baja. This podcast is powered by Tequila Fortaleza, handmade in small batches and hands down my favorite tequila. Hey, Slow Baja is brought to you by the Baja XL rally. The Baja XL is the largest and longest amateur off-road rally on the Baja Peninsula. It's 10 Epic Days, L.A. to Cabo to L.A. Check it out at BajaxL.org. I'm delighted to be in Calistoga today with Trudy Angel. We're going to talk about saddling south, maybe a little bit of paddling south, Dario's dream, and how you Calistoga native got off to Loretto and barely come back. So, Trudy, hello. Delighted to be here. Hi, Mike. Great. Glad you could drive up today. Thanks.

Yeah, easy. I wish I was in Loretta with you, but I'm delighted to be here in Calistoga. And, you know, I got, I knew of you and was recently talking with Edie Littlefield Sunbee, and she mentioned your name. And a light bulb went on, and I thought, I need to talk to her. So I'm, again, just delighted to be here. So tell me, how did you, how did you get to Baja? How did it get a hold of you? Tell me a little bit about your life pre-Baha, and then what you've been doing for what, almost the last 50 years.

Yeah. Well, I grew up here in the Upper Napa Valley and always love the outdoors. And when I was 20, I ended up hearing about a school called National Outdoor Leadership School based in Lander, Wyoming, but they had and have branches

in different areas around the world. Baja, California, Mexico was one of them down in Muleche. And so when I was 20, I thought, no, winter mountaineering, nah. Backpacking with heavy packs. Nah. Oh, kayaking in Baja. Wonder what that's about. So I hopped on a plane and went down. I signed up for a 12-day course and stayed for six weeks. Came back here to Calistoga, found a folding cleper kayak for sale on some bulletin board somewhere bought it and was that same year back down in Baja again. So putting that folding kayak into the back of some car onto the roof of some car or something,

is that how you did it? Yeah, my old Rambler, 1964, Rambler American with a roof rack. Nice. I can picture that, actually. I'm a bit of a car guy, so I can picture that. So were you in college when you took the Knowles course? No, I had basically graduated. from high school here,

taken a few junior college courses over in Santa Rosa. And those always seemed, the thing that attracted me, even before I went to Mexico, was Spanish, Spanish language, and Mexican history and things like that. So those were the courses I gravitated to. And lo and behold, when I went down to Mexico,

I had taken quite a number of years of Spanish in high school, here and junior high and when I was in St. Helena for a little bit and got to Mexico and I went, oh my gosh, that, boy, I sure study a lot and I sure didn't learn very much. But the background of all of that led me to once I started speaking with actual Mexican people in Mexico, set me on my way for learning Spanish pretty well. Yeah, you learn quickly, don't you? Yeah, yeah. When you live and are immersed in it, then it comes around. So, you and the Rambler, heading down the Baja Peninsula, you got to La Paz, Loretta, where was the first destination? Well, because I had been in school, or basically kayaking school, which was really taking off for two or three weeks of paddling from Muleche, actually, all the way down to.

Loretto. So the first time I arrived in Loretto was by kayak in 1976 January. So pretty soon I get to say that it's been 45 years since I did that. Amazing. Yeah. Wow. And then I, like I said, went back and bought my own kayak. And I went back and kind of gravitated back towards the National Outdoor Leadership School base there and ended up working for them as a kind of an intern and then getting a position there and helping them lead some courses down that coastline and did that for a number of years. Then somebody asked me to lead them on a trip from Mulehe down to La Paz, which I already knew the coastline down that far. And I thought, great, pay me, okay, pay me to go to go do this. This will be really great. So that kind of started my guiding

lifestyle back in 1983. Wow. And how soon after that was paddling South hatched or born? Well, pretty much it didn't take long because I loved doing that and it became Baja as a destination in the early and mid-80s. Sea kayaking as adventure travel thing that was up and coming. I kind of came together for me at the same time, and I was in the right place at the right time. I gathered another boat or two, and I think my first promotion was I drew up some little five-by-six pictures of palm trees and beaches on a recipe card, and I posted them around Berkeley and got seven trips together that year. Amazing, how it worked in those days. Yeah.

And it must have been a little bit of right place, right time, not a whole lot of competition. Right. And being, you know, the highways, what, 10 plus years old? I mean, people wanted to go to Baja, wanted to have a sense of exploration. And as you said, kayaking was kind of a new thing. Yeah. And so you did that for some years, correct? Right.

And so for about 30 years, I was running the company called Paddling South out of Loretto. And it was just an easier destination because of the international airport that's there and the infrastructure in the town of Loretto to be a jumping off point for trips where we could go north and go up to Muleje and paddle the coast back down. Or we could start in Loretto or just south of there and head on down even to La Paz on. the longer trips. And so we had, and then the islands, of course, off in front of Loretto and down to Agua Verde, became kind of our, what we would call the milk run route, a couple nights on the island south of Dancente or South Carmen Island, and then hop off and head on down to Agua Verde, where there was road access, so you could pull a group off the water. And, and, well, hearing you say milk run, makes it sound a little bit pedestrian,

but awfully good milk run if you can get it. It was a very good milk run. Yeah. And, you know, you get out there on the water, and even though you're running the same route over and over again, because of the people, because of the weather, because of just different things that happen during a trip, it really can be exciting every time you do.

do it. But after a while, my sights got set towards the mountains. My friend Tim Means, who had started Baja expeditions in La Paz, about the same time that I was starting in Loretto, Tim Means started Baja expeditions, doing various kinds of tours. But he had already been going and taking people up into the rock art, the rock art areas in central Baja and up to the north. So right at about the state line between northern Baja and southern Baja, or Baja California Sour, there's a beautiful mountain range called the Sierra de San Francisco. And he had already started running very remote mule packing trips or hiking and packing trips into that area as the rock art area became, even before it was designated as world heritage

and then managed by the Department of History and Anthropology in Baja, it was a wonderful destination. He got together groups. A lot of people from San Diego would drive them down and hike for two weeks to go out and visit these amazing, amazing, what are now world heritage rock art sites. Well, on my last trip to San Diego, I had a chance to meet and talk to Harry Crosby, who I honestly didn't know was still alive. And he's 95, and he's, you know, was very gracious to open his house in these times and have me in. And we recorded a conversation. And I'm itching. Of course, I've read his books years ago, and I'm itching to get down and do some of that, that trail riding and cave painting.

Don't you feel just so lucky, super lucky to have met Harry and Joanne in their home in lovely? Yeah, I mean, obviously, lovely. And they were very gracious, again, especially in these COVID-19 coronavirus times, to open your door to anyone is kind of amazing. And on very short notice, E.D. just called and said, do you want me to ask Harry if he'd see you? And Harry's? Yes, yes. Do I have to beg? And he was terrific.

So, again, I'm, you know, my background is. as a photographer and so, and I had a love of Baja since the middle 80s when I was a college kid in San Diego. So his work was the work that one referenced when you were thinking about, you know, what's in Baja, what's off the highway, what's, what's, you know, out of the way, you know, back roads, backwoods. And he was, he was the work that I was referencing. And so, again, very surprised that he's still with us and I had a chance to see him. So I'm itching now to know how you just made the transition from paddling to saddling. So let's jump into the Baja Mill and your ladies in a thousand miles on donkeys. And was it, were horses, donkeys, burrows?

Your Baja mill, tell me about that. The cross between a burrow or donkey and a horse makes a mule. A mule, right. And so there are different variations there. But we won't go into that. That's animal husbandry. But horses are large, and so mixing, crossing them with the donkey gives you a large animal with long ears and very, very stable in the rocks. So in the Rocky Mountains.

And there are lots of rocks. Yeah, lots of rocks in lots of areas. Anyone who's been to Baja, some people just listen to the show. They've never been there. But in Baja, there are lots of rocks. There are lots of rocks. Some of them are loose. Not much rock climbing.

in our area. So here in the Napa Valley, as I was growing up, I had horses from the time I was 12 to 17. And so I was able to ride all around the country here. It was before there were fences here in the valley. So the freedom of getting out into the hills on horseback was part of my growing up here. and when Tim Means invited me to come along on a friend and family trip, his daughter was a year and a half old, his son was four years old, and so that was my first experiences, was going up into the Sierra San Francisco,

my first experience on muleback or horseback in Baja was to ride down into this incredibly steep canyon. into the Canyon de Santa Teresa or San Pablo, depending on which area you're in, and getting on the back of a mule, going off and riding for 10 days with them, overnighting, and seeing how they dealt with, and the local cowboys dealt with, traveling with young children, it was just all very natural, and that's the way people lived, and I loved it. So I had gotten back on a mule again, after being off a mule for almost 15 years or off horses. And as soon as I got on that mule, and back out of the mountains and back to Loretto,

I did pretty much the same thing I did with the kayaking. Bought a horse, started traveling around, getting to know the countryside, getting to know the people up in the ranches to the west of Loretto, the San Javier area. And at that time, everything was either ranches were roadless or they were, had just dirt roads to them. Sun Javier, the village now has a 25-mile road that goes up to it.

But back then, I don't know what year that was, but in the late 80s, I guess, I went off then riding with a girlfriend and an old rancher guide with a donkey for a pack animal, and we rode off to Komondou. And as we got our first days out, our first nights out, we stopped at these amazing ranches with lovely, hospitable people. Every time we were invited to a meal or sleep on their back porch or just amazing hospitality. And we went on a loop trip at this one time in 1987, and I came off of that trip thinking, ah, well, this could be a business. And different from kayaking where you have one route that you do and the same campsites, this opened up a huge world for me, both for studying the history, learning the ranch

culture, and then being kind of endless on this whole peninsula of so many places to go and camp and ride to. And I think I came into just about the tail end of when many, many people were still riding up in the mountains. And there are still people now, but not as much, going out on roundups and camping out and using mules and horses as transportation. And you don't see that so much. Now there are fewer and fewer roadless ranches throughout the whole southern Baja Peninsula and north. and of course. But I got to see the tail end of that and get a taste of a tail end of that. And hear about people who had other people who had been exploring up there in decades prior to myself.

And that was like Annetta Carter, the famous botanist from Berkeley area. Had you ever heard about her? I haven't done a lot of research. I've heard her name because I'm in this field now and I'm researching interesting, especially interesting women who've been involved in Baja, fewer than the men. So I've been trying to seek out, which is why I'm here today talking to you, trying to seek out women who have done interesting things in Baja and share their stories. But I'd love to hear more about her.

Yeah, I don't know a lot about her, but I have seen photographs. Once in a while, I'll run across a photograph or I'll run across a story and did a fun thing, retracing her steps with John Rebman, who rewrote the Baja Plant Guide, re-edited the whole thing, and he's also the director, curator of botany for the Natural History Museum in San Diego. So it was really fun to go trace some old lost plants that Annetta Carter had discovered and actually had one named after her, of several probably. in Baja and traipsing around and interviewing people myself out at the ranches about their history with some of these earlier gringa explorers who were out there on the trail. Yeah, so imagining myself in your saddle, so to speak, it must have been a trip for some of these old rancheros and their vicaros and their wives to see you pop along.

Yeah. And what a real link for you to be, you know, a link to that world and to your world and have a foot in somebody else's history in the past and trying to uncover that as well. Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting. You use that word link. I was using that word before it became a popular computer term saying that my company, what I was doing there, felt like a link, like an eslaban, the word for link, or chain link in Spanish, that links those cultures together, that helps people from the North Country who come down as tourists to really

understand and get a feeling, more of a feeling for the real heart of the ranch culture. Well, making an analogy here, I've been traveling in Baja since the middle 80s, just as a college kid and then in a Volkswagen van driving down to Mulejahe and other places. And now I have this old 1971 land cruiser with, you know, fabric doors and no top. And it's, I think I'm the last person driving around in Baja who doesn't have their windows up and air conditioning on now. So I've seen the transition from, you know, people really driving old broken down cars, you know, cut the roof off, turn the little Dotson into a pickup truck, a little Dotson sedan.

on three bald tires, running on three cylinders, to, you know, you see a lot more, more modern cars, windows up, you know, just more or less like you're in Southern California in a lot of, in a lot of Baja. So I'm really thinking the way I'm seeing Baja and my old land cruiser, I'm slowing down, and I'm taking a time trip. I'm a time traveler, but going on a pack mule, it's a whole. another filter. It's another world. You've changed channels to a much, much slower way of going than I'm going 25 miles an hour, and I thought that was slow. But you're, you know, at what four?

Try two and a half. Yeah. Exactly. So I see a big smile across the room from me here. But really, it must really kind of, hopefully the people who are traveling with you really know what they're getting into because it must really be amazing and sometimes more than people can handle not to have daunting daunting more than you know not to have their devices at their disposal and yeah i actually when i when i take people on the tours into the rugged rugged mountains even though a lot of people go there basically blindly without knowing what they're getting into when i signed somebody up for a trip into the rock art canyons, or they want a particular route because they have read Harry Crosby's books, and they say, hey, I want to go to this spot. I have to feel, I feel like I need to give them a

phone call, talk to them, see what their abilities are, what their expectations are, and really kind of give them an overview of what they're really going to get into. I'd say, yeah, going into the, especially into the canyon, the San Francisco canyons, I have had most people go into the canyon and they're expecting to see rock art, rock art, rock art. They come out of the canyon and they're saying, oh my gosh, we saw amazing lifestyle. The cowboys, the mules, the donkeys, the stars, the countryside, the trails. Oh, and we saw rock art. And it's a great way to get people introduced to that area, that lifestyle, that culture, and then they get hooked often. I've had people who were in tears because they see the steep trail and they're not quite comfortable on a mule maybe until they get to trust their mules four feet.

And they go down into the canyon. and I've had people with lumps in their throat with tears coming down their faces. And by the time they get out, traveling up out of the canyon four days later, they're signing up for the next trip. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that really must be something special that that could be, I mean, it's your business,

but it's your life more than anything. You have their lives in your hand, so to speak, and you're exposing them to something truly out of the ordinary. Yeah. And again, kind of almost on our doorstep. Now, again, it's harder to get to the interior of Baja than many of the, you know, Cabo or even the airport in Loretto is not exactly the easiest airport to get to. You know, how many flights do we have a week there now? Two.

Two, yeah, that's been the problem for years from the Loretto side. But it's also, I think, what's been keeping Loretto somewhat, you know, undeveloped or less developed. Yeah, which I have always trying to run a business. You see that side of it. But loving the fact that five minutes out of Loretto in any direction, you can basically or 10 now, you can get into wilderness on the sea or in the mountains. And so that's why I continue to live there and why I love it as my main home now, Calistoga, is now where I come to in the summers to be with family. But basically, I feel like I've got the best of both worlds here, too. Yeah, Calistoke is not so bad.

And growing up here, riding around here, some similarities to Baja from a hot, hot, dry climate, rattlesnakes, scorpions, you know, things that are creepy crawlies and scary to a lot of people. No cactus, so to speak, but, you know, blackberry brambles. Yeah, blackberry bushes, yeah. So, you know, some similarities. So I would love to know about how you got involved. with the film Corazon de Vicaro. Is that, is that the film? Yeah.

Corazon Vakero. Corazon Vakero. So how did you, that was, what, 2006 or eight somewhere in there? 2006 was the beginning. The light bulb came on with Gary McClintock and his son, Cody McClintock, that Gary McClintock, who's always been a traditional old-style saddle historian in the San Diego area up in the mountains in El Descanso had his saddle shop up there. He called me maybe in 2005, 2006, and said, hey, Trudy, I've traveled a bit in northern parts of Baja,

and I would like to go to an area where people are still making traditional saddles, like the old vacera saddles, that are so historic from the Spanish. the Spanish era. And do you know of anybody? Could you take me out? We have a week. We want to go buy a mule, mostly if we can, and we'd like to visit anybody who's doing old traditional craft. Ha ha. I thought, yep, I know where I'm going to take you. And I took him out to Dario I Geras Ranch. And we had the great fortune to have Eve Ewing and Teddy Botham, Montez, along with us.

Teddy has been doing some genealogy study around the peninsula with old Baja families for a number of years. Eve E. E. viewing, have you heard of her? Sure. Yeah. And I'm hoping we're going to spend a little time here.

This is going to be an extra, extra long version of the, the Blahaw podcast because I really want you to dive into those women as well in their lives and tell us a little bit about them. Okay. Because I see the glint in your eye and they're special. So tell me about the film, first of all, and then let's circle back to the ladies. Okay. So the five or six of us took off on mules and we traveled two days riding out to Dadio's ranch.

and I pretty much figured that the character of Dario, the personality of Dario, would be pretty much the star of the show for Gary and Cody, who wanted to make a film about Old California traditions, ranches, and history, and saddles in particular. And sure enough, that happened. And a year later, then Eve and Gary and. And Cody went back to film for a number of days and got a lot of the good meaty part for the film, Corazon Vacero. Have you seen it? I have. Okay, sure. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

When it was, it felt like being a Baja lover, it felt like it was kind of a special thing when that was circulating around on DVDs. It wasn't like you could just go to Netflix or YouTube and type it in. It was like, you had to have a friend or somebody who bought it and then was sharing it with you. And, you know, I thought it was like really cool to share it with my friends. And of course, it got out of my care and never came back. So I haven't seen it probably in eight or ten years. I actually can get copies. So I know people have said, oh, my gosh, they cost $200 on Amazon.

You can't find them anymore. But, yeah, no, I can get them for ten. Terrific. Terrific. I'd love to see it again. Yeah, although Gary is no longer with us. He passed away a couple of two, three years ago. and his son Cody is hoping to still put together a bilingual version

so that it will truly be bilingual. It's mostly for English speakers now, although there's some spoken Spanish. So anyway, so they also decided to go up and film. Actually, the film Corrosso and Vacero had a different focus when they first started out, but as documentary films go, they often unravel into something else or follow a different thread as you get going into other

stories that come through. And so it became more of a, this is about the ranching lifestyle and the lifestyle of those people. And they actually truly had wanted to put in more information about what women do on the ranch. It's more of a ranching and male-oriented focus on that film. But Gary's original intent, too, was to get more of the women's stories in there. But I think we can come up with something like that later.

Do you think you have another film in you? I know you've bitten off a lot with Dario's Dream. Yeah, yeah, I have. This is my first film. So Dario's Dream, or what will be officially called La Requa, which means essentially the pack train or the caravan, is a story of my friend Dadio's dream,

Dadio, who's one of the actors or one of the stars of the show of Coliseo and Vacado. He's not an actor. I don't know if he's acting. It looks like it's a documentary of him in his world and his dream. Yeah. And he's about 70, has a beautiful face and a big mustache and a beautiful grand son.

Yeah. So touching, touching stories. just the clips that I've seen of it on the internet. So a few years ago, about three years ago now, a little bit more. I was at his ranch with a small group of people, and he's always on center stage when we show up, and he's always talking about the historical pieces of equipment and ranching saddle equipment, mostly, and gear that he has made himself. He's a traditional saddlemaker, tans the hides, the whole thing.

Yeah. Yeah. So he and Gary McClintock were just like fast. friend buddies immediately because they both had that same spark in their hearts about keeping the old history alive. So we were at Dottia's ranch about three years ago and he said, Trudy, I've been, I'm almost going to be 70 and I really want to do, I've always wanted to do a historic old pack trip that would go, say, from La Pudisima or Komondu and just like the old days like my grandfather did and other people go down to La Paz and carry a whole pack train

full of Dulce de Komondou, the sugar cane candy from that area, goat cheese, dried meat, dates, things like that, that were the traditional old things that would go from the interior ranches to the big city where they would trade then for beans and rice and things that they couldn't grow so easily. Wine and alcohol, wine and tequila or mess. Mescal or whatever they... Yeah. Moonshine, whatever they made, yeah. Yeah.

And so he said, I really want to do that. I really want to put together a pack train and take off for three weeks to get an old traditional pack train down to Bahá called Arrequa, down to La Paz. And he said, but, having been in Corazon Bakero, he said,

but I want it on film. And I went, okay, I'm in, I'll help you. And little did I know, three years later, three and a half years later now. We're still working on it. We're almost at the end of the film documentary called La Requa, which is basically another bringing Dadillo's history, Dario's story, Dario's history of his ancestors, and the way commerce was run before any of those roads. not even the dirt roads before any of those roads were developed in the whole peninsula. Imagine that. Yeah, well, I've seen the clips and I've listened carefully to the discussion of them and not an easy undertaking. You didn't just decide you're going to get a GoPro and go along one person making the film. I mean, you had 13 people, 25 animals. Is that the right number?

That's it. That's a logistical nightmare. Out in the middle of nowhere? Uh-huh. You're laughing or you're smiling. There's a gleam in your eye, but I mean, that's a lot to take on. Yeah. Because I'd had the background of running a pack trip, much smaller group, of course, in the 2014 and 2015, 2013 and 2014, when we left San Jose,

De de la Cabeo and rode mules all the way to Tecate. Now this is the Baja Mill with the leaves. That was the mula mill. Yeah, the mula mill, excuse me. The mule 1,000. Right. And because I'd had that experience and many other trips where we would do shorter runs of two or three weeks, but smaller groups.

because I had been doing logistics for everything from kayak trips to mule pack trips for 30 years. You had a list, you checked things off? Yeah, exactly. I was able to pull it off. And, yeah, getting, it was a little daunting to try to get 25 animals together and everyone together. The more daunting part was as we started out, as everyone will see in the movie, when it's finally out in a few months, we hope. You'll see that Dario had bronchitis.

Your star almost dies. Yeah, the star almost dies on the trail. That was one glitch. It's a nice bit of excitement on day two. Could have been a glitch. He didn't die. Thank goodness. Thank goodness.

Holy Toledo. His grandson had chicken pox when we started out. So things had to change. And so again, in the business of running. tours. Flexibility is the name of the game very often because you're always dealing with weather, people, whatever, things that come up. And so flexibility is the name of the game. And I wrote a fun little overview journal just for my own sake, which eventually I hope to turn into either some kind of a memoir or whatever. Someday I've got to write a book they all tell me. And so

I wrote this 10 or 12th page overview of really what it took. I did that within two days after finishing up the whole ride of La Reque. A couple days after we were done, I just sat around and wrote all the details, and it's going to be really a fun story. For the next person who's never going to do this. Yeah, right. But to complicate that, so you've... You've got the action of what's happening. You've got Dario and his dream and his grandson and the other Vicaros and the pack animals that they've outfitted with historic saddles and bags and whatever went into making these things the way that they were made in years past.

That's all been done. And you've got the actual the meat of the story. and then you have the people who are hired or cajoled or convinced to record the story. So you've got three photographers, a sound person, whatever, I'm assuming you are along on the ride, whatever your role is, director, you know, you must have had 50 different jobs at any given time on on any given day. And you've got to keep that thing all moving along and keep people from, you know, having the difficulties of the day brew to a point where they can't stand each other and they just want to get away and you can't get away because there's a there's a story to be told and you better be in it to the end yeah so i pretty much handpicked who was going to be along as a photographers people who i knew had a little bit of experience and a great love for telling the story of the culture of the outback people and

But then, within a week or so after we finished the ride in La Paz, I wrote an email to, especially for everybody who was on the trip, the camera person, the sound people, the three camera people, the sound people. Everyone who was involved at some level for some number of days on the trip and asked them, tell me. your three favorite things and your three least favorite things about the trip and i'll tell you right now the three the first favorite thing of everyone on the trip was how much they enjoyed the trip by sense the sense of camaraderie the humor and um the respect of the elders for the children and the children for the elders, just being able to see how the whole mechanism worked. And so we were the eye watching this. It wasn't being invented. It wasn't being something that a director would come up with and say, hey, now do it this way. It was a true Verite documentary where you just take pictures of what's

going on. And I'd say everybody on that trip said their very favorite thing was just watching and listening to the camaraderie, humor, laughter, and how resilient these people from the eight-year-old grandson to the 70-year-old grandfather were as we traveled down that trail. Hey, you know that we're itching to get our old land cruiser south of the border soon, and when we go, we'll be going with Baja Bound Insurance. Their website is fast and easy to use. You can check them out at BajaBound.com and tell them slow Baja sent you.

And we're back with Trudy Angel, and we're talking about Edie, Littlefield Sunby right now, about how that call came along and Trudy took care of Edie with the promise of a mule for 10 days and a vicaro for five. And what happened after that? And so take it away. Yeah. It was quite funny. Edie called me and said she had hiked from the missions here in Alta, California. and she wanted to now go on the route.

And Harry Crosby actually was the first person, I think, who told her about me. And then so she contacted. And I thought, well, okay, she's not going to be able to do any of this unless we figure out a cowboy for her for every leg of this trip. And so we got Chama and Che for the first five days. And so it was kind of like passing her along like a baton, like a relay baton from Loretto all the way to farther north to try to get her up to. Yeah, she said there was a magical handoff every 30 to 40 miles. She didn't seem to know how they communicated to each other. But through you.

So let's just pull the curtain back about you mentioned logistics. before. Cell phones, home phones, satellite phones, carrier pigeon, how are you communicating to all these... Telepathy. Yeah, how are you communicating to all?

I know it's Baja, and I know you just have to say one thing to one person, and there's a magic game of kindergarten telephone that gets that message all the way to the intended recipient. You don't know what's going to get there once it gets there, but you know that some message is going to get there, and people are going to act on them. but it's just different. So how did you manage that?

Yeah. And given your position, as a thoughtful person, with what Edy was trying to accomplish in her state, I mean, honestly, let's just say that. You've got somebody who's contacted you, who's, you know, has, let's put it politely, massive health challenges.

And now she wants to do the most crazy, thing in the world walking the El Camino from, you know, the bottom of Baja to the top. Yeah. And so when I met Edie for the first time, I thought, oh, my gosh, she doesn't know what she's getting into at all. Yeah. And so, but boy, this is a determined woman. Yes.

So I thought, okay, well, let's try it. And Edie came down to Loretto when she started out. And I had started the wheels turning by thinking of, because I know all these people up and down the peninsula from having ridden two or three times now up and down this peninsula. And we're going to get to that again. We're not going to miss out on the Baja meal. We're going to get to that, the Mula Miel.

And I thought, okay, how am I going to find all these connections that are needed to run Edy from Loretto to as far north as Tijuana or Tecate, wherever she ended, nearer to Tijuana, I think. So I found Chema and Chee pulled them together with a couple mules, and Edy was pretty determined that she was going to walk, and I said, Edy, you're going to walk. Maybe three days. By day three, you're going to be riding a mule. Oh, no, no, no. I'm going to walk it the whole way. I'm a walker. Even Father Sarah got on a mule.

Uh-huh. And in three days, she was on a mule. She said, Trudy, I'm going to make it in 40 days up to whatever the whole route was, because that's what Padre Serra did. Okay, well, now, Eadie, I think by about day 40, you're going to be at Velikata, where Padre Serra started. from, actually. And so, well, on that leg anyway. And so I called her husband or emailed him on day 40 or 41 and said, because Edie was sending him GPS messages all the time. And I said, so, Dale, where is Edie right now? And he said, day 40, she's at Velikata. I said, yep, I thought so. to know that stuff. It's really fun to drive now up and down the peninsula because I go 10 minutes and I'm thinking, okay, one day, another 10 minutes, two days. If you're on a mule, that's the rate that you go at. And so I kind of figured, you know, about the rate that Edie was going to go because she

was alone. It was going to be just a little faster than what we usually do with a larger group of people. But it was pretty fun to do that puzzle, to work on that puzzle, to have that challenge of trying to get her from Loretto up to Comondue, guide switch. From Comandu to La Purissima, another guide switch. From La Purisma to Sane, closer to San Ignacios, the Guadalupe's, another guide switch. From there to the next spot, another guide switch. Another one. The trickiest part actually was in San Ignacio, when I knew that Edie had no clue what had to be done to jump through hoops to get her officially up through the department, the area in the Sierra San Francisco that is authorized only by the Department of History and Anthropology. You have to have permission to go through those ranches. You can't get through there.

through that area. I suppose you can. You can sneak through or you can drive through sometimes, but if you want to be off trail on El Camino Real, then you have to get permission for that particular area. And so I knew it was going to be a bit of a hassle, but we did it. She got to San Ignacio, and she was told by the director of history and anthropology or the director of the visitation period that she was not able to continue on. And so we were sitting there on the phone. I happened to be in San Ignacio the day that Edie was coming through. Helpful.

Got her on the phone, listened to how it wasn't going to happen. But then Edie somehow, Guardian Angel came through and by two days later she was back on the trail again. Wow. So, yeah. Wow. And then she was met by Sonovio Gamboa, who lives. north of San Quintin and organizes a lot of the Kabal Gattas, a lot of the cowboy trail rides that go up

in those areas. And he was the one who connected her with three or four of his key people in that area. So all of these connectors, basically, as Edie even mentioned, she just got her from one place to the next. And her determination was really respectable what she had to do just to trust that we were going to get her to her destination. Yeah, well, we can't spend the whole time talking about Edy. I just did a podcast with her, and it's a good one. I hope people listen. But being at her home in La Jolla and seeing her there, it's very difficult for me to say,

that's a woman who's going to sleep in the dirt night after night and be on the back. of a borough and eat whatever she has packed and make her own coffee and dig a hole when she needs to go do her business. And it's a lot. She's been through an awful lot. And to be sitting there in her presence, seeing her, and knowing what that Baja trip must have been like. Yeah.

It's amazing. Yeah. I mean, really, it is truly inspirational. And I mean that with the capital I. So, yeah. I'm going to pivot here and get back to your ladies and the trip that you took on 1,000 miles on a mule. The mule a mule, the Mula mule, the Baja 1000. Mula mil, the Baja 1,000 by mule.

So it all started with Eve Ewing. Right. Can we just talk about her a little bit? Sure. on the original Melling expedition, if I'm not mistaken, correct? True. Wow. And that was put together in 1963 and 1964 with, it was put together by Andy Meiling from the

mailing ranch and his friend Joanne Alford, who just decided they would take a bunch of mules and start into Cante and ride to Cabo. as you do as you do as you do yeah why not and it would take

six months and so they pulled it off and e viewing said she saw an article eve viewing who has lived in San Diego for years has been involved

with her father being one of the first people who flew into bahon did whale counts for scripts Eve used to work for scripts, did some writing. She's been a totally enthusiastic rock art enthusiast ever since that first trip in 64 when she showed up in the Sierra San Francisco and met all these amazing people out in the back country, as you can well imagine before there were hardly any roads down there.

Right. And so lots and lots of people riding around by mules at that point at the time when Harry Crosse, was just beginning to, he did that photography book in 1964 for Tijuana. And anyway, so she hopped on a mule in

L.A. Bay, joining the group after they'd been on the trail for a little bit, and rode all the way to La Paz with Andy and Joanne. A number of other people were along. She could name probably six other people who were there. One of them

was Reed Moran, who was then the director of botany, I think, of the Natural History Museum in San Diego. So they were going to tops of mountains to collect samples of plants and see if they could come up with some new stuff, even back then. And so E-viewing is this amazingly fun person to travel with. She has so many stories. She is now 80-something. And she basically when she turned 60-something after having led many other trips after she fell in love with Baja after that first mule ride she fell in love with Baja travel by mule and started running some of her own tours and in her 60s she was like Trudy I'm too old for this now I'd like you to take over

and that's when we all met on that trip with Gary McClintock and and she began hiring me to lead some of her groups down into the mountains. But what was fun was... The baton was passed. Listening, yeah, the baton was passed. And listening to her stories on the trips, there was a Canadian woman who was, along with us, on a few tours.

And she happened to be on one of Eve's tours, and she totally got sparked by the idea of this, the mailing expedition, and what Eve and Andy and all those folks did 50 years earlier almost. And this woman Leslie Pringle said to me, hey, Trudy, in two or three years, it's going to be the 50th anniversary of this ride. Let's do another ride like that. And I said, yeah, yeah, sure. People say those kinds of things. I'll be back. I'll be back. I'm going to learn Spanish. This is so exciting. And then life gets in the way. Well, about several months prior

to the anniversary date of the mailing expedition. Leslie does call me up and says, okay, Trudy, it's a few months away. Are we in? I'm like, gulp. Yeah, I guess so. Let's do it. And so we actually hunted down Joanne Alford,

who was in her 90s at the time, who shared some information with us. It had some Alzheimer's, but still, you know, how even though you have memory loss, you could remember some of them. remember the old stuff. Fifty years ago was a lot easier than what I had for lunch.

So she and Eve and Andy and Leslie and I got together one day and actually did a nice little reunion meeting with them and got their blessing basically for continuing on and kind of honoring their trip from 50 years earlier. That was a very special time. And so... So jump into who was right? riding there with you, and how did that go? So Eve, not having been able to ride with Andy and Joanne to the very end of the trip,

having... She had unfinished business? Yeah. She had other things that had come up. And so she... At what age? I mean, you can approximate for the listeners, 70-something, right? 70-something, 76, 77, 78, something like that.

Yeah, I didn't get the full thousand in the last time. I better do it this time. Yeah, so she wanted to finish up that last leg. She said, Trudy, can I be, you know, can I ride? I'd love to ride. We wanted her to ride. Yeah. And she said, yeah, yeah, I'll come down.

We'll start from Cabo and I'll ride as far as La Paz with you. And so she did. And we got her on a mule and she had some difficulty riding, but she was still tough. She's tough. She's an avid, avid, Baja mule rider just loves being out there. So all of that just overshadowed any kind of pain that she might have had for riding for a number of days in a saddle. We offered the support vehicle, which we had at some times when we had road access, we had a support vehicle instead of donkey packing on parts of that trip.

And she said, no, no, no, I'm riding. You can't get me off this mule. And so it was really lovely to have her along and midway along on the trip. we got to Toto Santos. There was a woman there who was also doing radio shows on the computer, doing a radio show, and she interviewed each one of us. Teddy Montez, Botham, was also with the trip. Give me two minutes on Teddy because it's another name.

That's another name in my bag of people that I have to track down soon. Yeah. She's up in Oregon, and she has a wealth of information on some of the genius. of some of the families, and she has actually done almost what could be considered doctoral work, even though she's an amateur genealogist. DNA testing of all the rancheros, right, to figure out where they're from, and how they're, how and if they're related. Yeah.

And a really fun story was, there was a double whammy on this, one of these first meetings that we had of someone who helped us. to get started on the trip out of San Jose del Cabo in November, early November in 2013, people had been telling me, you need to contact this guy, his name is Alejandro Maron. And the funny thing was, Teddy's ancestral, from her Mexican background, a family name had Maron in it. So she was particularly looking for people named Marron. Well, I finally got in touch with the guy two or three days before we were actually getting the mules down to Cabo, tailing them down, and being able to get on the trail. I call up this guy and said, hey, I've been trying to contact you or doing this trip,

and I've been told to contact you because you can, you know, get in touch with the police chief who will get us the authority to be riding through town on this caravan, and, you know, we need some kind of police. support or roadblocks or whatever when we're crossing highways and stuff. And so Mr. Marron says, so what do you, what's this about? I said, well, there was this group in 1963 who came down from Tecate and on a pack trip with Burros and they went down to San Juan, down to Cabo San Lucas. And he said, wait, stop. What do you mean? He said, that trip,

I have a picture of myself when I was five years old riding the donkeys that my father bought from those people who rode down from Tecate 50 years ago. He said, I'm 55 now. I was about 5 or 6 when I have a picture of me. riding the burros that my father called Los Tecateinos because they were from Tecate. Wow.

Yeah. Amazing. And a photograph, which is no easy feat in those days either, 15 years ago in Baja. Yeah. Wow. And so, you know, they're all, when you get on the trail in Baja to do a ride, or you get out in the back country, as you mentioned earlier, you've got this telephone, telepathic, you know, whatever it is, the connection, the universal connection there, that makes things run smoothly or puts something in your path that you needed, and it just works.

I've told people, it's not just, you know, the movie, six degrees of separation. Okay, well, in Baja, it's one degree of separation. Yeah, and you've talked to that. We're going to wrap up here, too, but you've talked a little bit about that, or I've pulled my notes in researching you, the quote, the kindness of strangers. And that's really important in Baja. And I'm not sure how many people really understand that.

Yeah. And it's, you know, from the distant people in the mountains that you're running now guided trips to visit. But to the everyday people in the towns on the road, you know, if you get a flat tire, there's going to be a tire repair guy or somebody's going to help you. I mean, it's a place where people traditionally have had less and have helped each other get by. And I think that that's a spirit that lives there. Tell me a little bit about your thoughts on that. In 1978, the first time that we paddled the coast from Mulejah down to La Paz,

that was probably a five or six week trip that we did by kayak. and we soon discovered that if you name dropped a name from the person at the last fish camp or the last ranch up the coastline to the one down the coastline, that they would be a cousin or a brother or a brother-in-law or whatever. And suddenly your family. If you speak a little Spanish and you show some of your own interest in them and they were certainly interested in us because you get into those remote places and you're the best show in town. You're the, you know, no television, no internet, no nothing. And so the people who show up in front of you are the things that you connect to.

And so that works the same in the mountains especially. there are for all of the years that it has been since say those pack trains used to travel between mountain villages to get to La Paz

or the people who were the Fayoukeros you'd read about that in Harry Crosby's book that his main guide his main guide Tacho Arce was the uncle of everyone and was a traitor and they would carry gossip or news from one ranch to the next. And so that was the connection. It was a human connection. It wasn't, didn't have anything to do with radio back then.

Didn't have anything to do with either the UHF radios that they currently use. You just had human voices to listen to. And so those kinds of connections. as the travelers, the people who do travel, bring the stories and they're your entertainment, and you share something with them, and they share their hospitality with you. It's just natural. And as you said, a name from one camp to the next camp is golden.

All of a sudden you're in. Tell me a little bit about this. This is another quote that I have from you. The world is not as scary as we are led to believe it is. The world seems very scary right now. Tell me about your nearly 50 years in Baja, a lot of people must have thought, you know, you were out like Jane Goodall, out in Gombie.

You were out in another world doing dangerous things. You were going to get eaten by a shark or captured by a fishing camp and, you know, held hostage, or you're riding mules up into the middle of nowhere. You're going to just disappear. No one's going to know where you are. It's people must have thought it was very scary what you were doing, but seemingly you just took it stride. Didn't think it was scary at all.

No, uh-uh. I didn't think it was scary. I think because of my love of the outdoors, for one, and feeling comfortable in the outdoors, and going back to that National Outdoor Leadership School, the training of that school was basically how to take care of yourself. It was not a survival thing. It was a how to prepare yourself. for traveling in the wilderness with your first aid kit, with a little bit of knowledge of first aid, just doing your preparation ahead of time and making your lists and checking off and making sure you have what you need.

Now, that said, when we go out on a pack trip, we have tables and chairs and things like that often, and, you know, we have a lot of comforts of home. But when you watch how the people in the desert move in their own environment. When you learn from them how to feel comfortable in their space, it is an eye full and very inspiring to see how little you can get by without. And so they use the cactus if they get a cut. They'll cut a piece of cardone and slap it on their finger if they have a cut. that's their first aid kit. And so just watching that over the decades. And what's really fun is in this film that we're doing, you see that the children feel so comfortable in their own space, too. I've had people on trips say, I can't believe how centered these children are. They're just

so in their environment and in their space and comfortable. And like I mentioned, one of the best things about doing that filming ride was seeing how the adults respect the children. The children respect the adults because they all have skills to live together on very basic levels. Right. Well, again, we're going to wrap up. You've been super generous with your time.

A question I like to ask people, especially to have somebody in front of me like you, who's been in Baja nearly a half a century, seeing so much of the country. Where's a place that you haven't explored or you've been and you want to get back to? Tell me about one of your favorite spots, maybe not your secret spot, but maybe a favorite spot in Baja that might not be right under people's noses. I really loved being as far away from civilization as possible. So the mountains to the north of the Sierra San Francisco that are basically not very much traveled and not very well explored

would be another place that I would like to get back to just because they are so pristine. And nature is all you have out there. Okay, and how about how can people tell me a minute or so on Saddling South? That's your current business. You've sold paddling South, correct? Yes. Sold, is that the right word here?

So you're no longer in Paddling South. Friends at Sea Trek and Sosceledor now are running that, correct? Yeah, yeah. Bob Licked and I started out, the owner of Sea Trek. You're going to connect me to him. He's on my list of people to talk to. Yeah, okay. Yeah, he and I started out paddling in different realms.

At about the same time, I would go down to C-Trek when I was first starting to kayak, and then they started coming back down, coming down to Baja and paddling down there. So over the years, they have had their Baja branch as well. And so they were ripe for expanding and taking over paddling south. So that worked well. So on to Saddling South? How can people find you at Saddling South? if they want to get on a mule and get into the interior?

Yeah, so there's a website. So it's saddling south.com. That'll be in the show notes. Okay. And there, I just posted a few of the upcoming fall trip dates. But what I like to tell people, and this is a great place to be able to put the word out, is if you have a particular date that doesn't show up or a time frame or a place that you want to go to in all of Baja, basically, I can put it together for you so I can customize trips.

And so if there's not a date on there that interests you, I can definitely do custom trips as well. Seemingly, you can make anything happen. Kind of. If you can move 25 animals and 13 people on a film. And let's jump onto the film. The trailers are out on YouTube and Vimeo and their spectacular. Dario's Dream.

How can people find out about Dario's Dream and how can they help you financial contribution? Where can they send it? How can they help you finish this film and get it out for everybody to see? Yay, that's a good subject right there. Yes. So at the Facebook page, Facebook, La Requa, that's two words, L-A, and then R-E-C-Y-E-C-Y, and then R-E-C-Y, U.A. La Reque slash Dario's Dream. You can go onto that website, and you'll see I've just started posting again after a few months off, because of various things.

But if you go back down to the bottom, bottom of where I started posting in March 2018, it's a fun story just to go through the photographs. Yeah, and you go up and up and up on all those photographs. and posts, and you can basically see how we did it, what we did, where we went. And in order to contact me, to, if you're interested in any kind of funding, that would be wonderful. There's still a little bit, 10% or so to finish up. And so that is Trudy, me, at, well, the best one would be Tour Loretto, the email account, Tour Loretto, all one word, all lowercase, at aOL.com.

And we'll have all those in the show notes. So you'll have links to the Facebook, links to your email. And again, we are looking for generous donors here to get this film finished so we can all see it. It's really a beautiful, beautiful tribute to a way of life and a dream of Darillo and his magnificent grandson. Mm-hmm. All right. let's wrap it up. Take us out on a positive note. Your life experience in Baja, how do you sum it up? Boy, am I lucky. I just feel so lucky all the time. Whenever I get out on the trail, sometimes I think,

oh, I should have been born 40 years ago and been out here when, I mean, should have been started to travel out there 40, 50 years ago when there were still some of the old ranch parties and festivals. But like I say, I did get on the tail end of that, that sense of the just old ranching lifestyle in those Baja mountains. And I just very much feel very lucky to have, feeling like I still can transfer some of that historical information and link that will just illuminate, helps a new traveler in Baja understand where their neighbors, their hosts of that country, and the neighbors in the mountains came from, and their backgrounds and lifestyles and some of the history. You want to hear about one more woman?

Love to. Yeah, let's go. So back in the 1950s and early 1900s, there was a woman who was the only, as far as I have found out so far, the only woman, the only woman, Fayukera, peddler by muleback. She rode mules and donkeys and did 30-day loop trips through the mountains before there were roads to take goods to different ranches, just as Tacho Arise had done. she was the only one I could figure out. She used to live in Komondu, and if somebody wanted to travel,

a whole family, wanted to travel from Komondu to move to Tijuana or Mexicali or other places, North Ensenada, she would load up all of their gear on her boroughs and take off for two or three months at a time and travel by a mule up north

to move a family into a new country. And that was in the 19th. So that was before roads. The first road was, what, 1935 or something like that, dirt road into the peninsula. So she was the only woman, Fayukera. Her name was La Marigita. And there's some records of her so far, no photographs. If anyone has a photograph out there in your files from old days traveling down on the peninsula,

in the 50s, in the 40s, probably she was still traveling. She passed away at age 70-something in 1954 in Komondu. And so if anyone has a photograph of La Marijita, a short little woman riding mules and donkeys and packing people and things around the peninsula, I would love to have a photograph. I was in Komondu in January of 2019,

first time driving through an unexpected amount an oasis, an unexpected lush mountain town. I mean, you must have spent some time there. But what can you tell me about Comandu? The Comandu's. The Comondos, it's a beautiful place. The Comondos, from my interviewing other people who live in Comondou and getting some background history of Coimandu, it's really surprising.

That Komondu was actually a larger hub culturally than even La Paz back in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s even. When you think about it as commerce, as things came down from the north, even movies way back then, they would come to Komondu first on the Baja Peninsula on their way to La Paz. So Comandu was a little A little bit of a nose in the air Sense of We're a little bit on the upper end Even more so than La Paz

As having seen the first Clark Gable movie Or whatever came through There were traveling gypsies Interesting Interesting so it's the Boston to New York We're just a little better even though we're smaller Yeah exactly

But it was interesting to me Again, the riches that are there, the water obviously, where everything comes from. But there's just water everywhere. And so everything is growing there, fruit. And I imagine finding that location and realizing, okay, let's get a mission right here and let's get the farms going. And we've got the water and let's get the trees planted. And it must have just been, again, when you're dealing with what most of Baja looks like to get there is just paradise. Yeah, it is paradise. It's a tiny little town. It's had its heyday in the early 1900s, like I say,

it was the only road. You rode, that's how you got through down to La Paz from, say, Santa Rosalia, Muleche. Back then, you didn't go through Loretto. You went through Commondeau. Loretto was kind of bypassed until the main highway went in in the 1970s. and so Comandu was on the main route and so the early 1900s it was the heydays up until the 70s and it has dwindled

now but because of the water because of its little oasis atmosphere it's building up again slightly yeah it looks like it has some el triumphu potential looks like somebody might polish up a couple of those old adobes.

Yeah, and so there's a very nice little hotel there. You might have run into it. The Hacienda Don Mario run by our friend Jacqueline Verdugo, who operates that hotel. She's a mover and shaker in the village, and as her grandfather was an original inhabitant. And so she has helped the community bring it up a little bit and put it on the map a little bit. that were these at the beginning of this century now. Right. Well, promise me that we get to do this again when you're in Loretto,

and I'll come and see you there. Because I don't think we're done yet. No, I don't think so. There's a lot to talk about. Well, Judy, thank you so much. We'll have the show notes so everybody will know how to get a hold of you, and hopefully there's an angel out there that will help finish your film. Way bien.

Thank you so much. Grazie. Bye-bye. Hey, you guys know what to do. Please help us by subscribing, sharing, rating, all that stuff. And if you missed anything, you can find the links in the show notes at slowbaha.com. I'll be back before you know it. And if you want to receive notices on new episodes, please follow Slow Baja on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook for you old folks.