I don't have anything profound to write about my recent hike on the edge of the Andean-jungle border.  Nothing amazing happened on the backpack, and I didn't come to any deep realizations.  But I did get to see some amazing country on the drive there, and the vegetation in the jungle was pretty spectacular.  Here are some snippets of beauty we saw:

Snow on the ride in!! It was mostly hardened and crusty, but it was still SNOW!!

There were 20 of us, not my ideal of a great backpack size, but it turned out to me not quite as bad as I thought.  In a group of random 20 people, mainly Latin Americans, there was a young woman, Nanette, who happened to be living in Colorado and is from Spokane (where I went to college).  Her family lives a couple blocks from my aunt, uncle and cousins!  Small world.

We saw a fair amount of loq'osti, or wild tumbo, that Humberto and I have harvested before.  It was fun to be able to identify plants in Bolivia for the rest of the group!

Collin, Julie and I shared a tent, camped right in the middle of the old road we used as a trail.  The road is more than a half century old, and built so well that miles and miles of it have stayed passable after decades of little or no use.  It was only when we began the descent into the jungle that landslides had made the road impassable for cars.

The moss we camped on, which grew in the road almost the whole hike, was so soft it felt like carpet.  In Bolivia, this type of moss is also called "Nacimiento de Jesús", or "Birth of Jesus" because it's harvested and sold in cities around Christmas time for decorations and making Nativity scenes.  We took our shoes off, and I backpacked barefoot for the first time, enjoying the spongy softness beneath my feet.