Hiker Going to Great Lengths in Baja

When Graham Mackintosh stopped in to say farewell to friends the other day at one of this bustling little border town’s most famous landmarks, the Tecate brewery, he left his floppy-eared traveling companion in the truck.

“I’m not going to try to drag him through the streets of Tecate and make a fool of myself,” Mackintosh said. “I’m not even familiar with

him yet. I’ll wait until I get to the outskirts of town. Then we’ll get to know each other.”

Will they ever.

Mackintosh, 46, after hugs and handshakes from a few dozen acquaintances, drove to the outskirts of town, kissed his wife goodbye, patted his burro on the shoulder, then man and beast walked off into the Baja sunset.

The diminutive red-headed Englishman and the grayish-blond burro are taking a historic stroll of sorts, commemorating this month’s 300th anniversary of the founding of the first Catholic mission in the Californias in what is now Loreto by walking down the middle of Baja from Tecate to Cabo San Lucas.

“If I got on with it and kept walking, I could do it easily in six months,” Mackintosh said. “But I’ll be meeting people and, if they’re friendly, staying with them. . . . I’ll be in no hurry. I should finish [next] March or April.”

Walking to Cabo may sound like a crazy idea, and perhaps it is. The Baja peninsula, nearly 1,000 miles long, features some of the most inhospitable and sun-scorched terrain on the planet. Its interior is home to scorpions, rattlesnakes, coyotes and cougars, but very few people.

But Mackintosh is no stranger to either the country or its denizens. He is a friend of the coyote and has rattlers for dinner. “They taste like chicken,” he says.

The former schoolteacher developed a liking for snakes out of necessity in the early 1980s, when he walked around Baja, covering about 3,000 miles of oft-forbidding coastline over two years. He lived not only on rattlesnakes but fish, seaweed, cactus, urchins, sea slugs and whatever else he could find.

He stuck to the coast when he could, but was occasionally forced inland to get around impassable cliffs and canyons.

After that journey he wrote an entertaining, enlightening book on his experience, “Into a Desert Place.” His unsung chronicle (published by W.W. Norton & Company) made him famous primarily among Baja aficionados and adventure groups.

One segment deals with his relationship with another burro, a jack named Bonny.

Mackintosh acquired Bonny for $30 in Mexico during the last of four grueling stages of his trip. The two didn’t get along at first, Mackintosh pulling and Bonny holding his ground in true jackass fashion. But the two eventually became inseparable, Mackintosh letting Bonny lead the way. They stuck together, Mackintosh going so far as to risk his life on one occasion by pulling his ass out of quicksand at Magdalena Bay.

Finally, within sight of the famous arch at Cabo San Lucas, realizing that his long adventure was almost over, Mackintosh lay down in the sand in front of Bonny, looked him in the eyes and said an emotional goodbye.

“I muttered something about him being the best burro in the world, and thanked him for all his help and assistance over the past difficult months,” Mackintosh says in his book. “He looked at me as if I was an idiot.”

LURE OF THE LAND

Mackintosh decided to walk around Baja not long after his first visit in 1979, a brief vacation that turned into an extended hitchhiking trip the length of the peninsula.

He fell in love with the vast, unspoiled land and its people, and while atop a mountain above the small town of Bahia de Los Angeles, overlooking the shimmering Sea of Cortez, he vowed to one day walk Baja’s coastline and write a book about his experience.

He trained by hiking across the moors in England. He had no money and no sponsors to speak of, but he had a backpack and plenty of determination. The rest is history, and Mackintosh is still a hot item on the lecture circuit.

With a slide projector and a whimsical manner, he often performs before a full house, and he usually brings the house down. But his presentations are also popular because, for anyone with more than a casual interest in the untamed frontier beyond our border, it’s a chance to see Baja through the eyes of a man who actually became part of Baja.

Mackintosh survived, in part, by learning to think and act as the wily creatures of the peninsula, which have flourished in a seemingly uninhabitable land for hundreds of years.

“My advice to anyone lost off the beaten track in Baja, especially if you want to parallel the coast, is to find a coyote trail, and think long and hard before leaving it,” Mackintosh told his audience recently at the Discover Baja travel club in San Diego. “Go with nature. You might come face to face with the occasional coyote. If so, thank him. He will almost certainly guide you safely around cliffs, through steep arroyos and difficult brush.”

Mackintosh more recently had settled into anything but the life of a wild animal, taking an occasional Baja excursion and giving an occasional Baja talk, but otherwise enjoying the creature comforts at his home in east San Diego with his wife, Bonni (no connection to Bonny the burro), and their two children, Elspeth, 12, and Andrew, 9.

He had no complaints, but the spirit of adventure--and perhaps a yearning to get back to the simplest of simple living--had bitten again.

“Actually, it just came to me one summer day while I was sitting at home, watching TV, doing the couch-potato bit,” he said. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I said, ‘I’m going to walk down the middle of Baja,’ and that was that. I was getting fat and lazy and thought it was time to do something again. After all, it had been 12 years since my last trip.”

TAKING THE HIGH ROAD

Mackintosh spent his first night away from home in a small rancho about six miles outside Tecate, then loaded his burro with supplies and hit the trail leading to the high country.

Whereas his first trip took him along the coast of Baja, this one will take him down its spine, through Baja’s many mountain ranges--the Sierra de Juarez, Sierra San Pedro Martir and Sierra De La Giganta, to name a few.

In the heavily forested San Pedro Martir, Mackintosh will be traveling high enough to be snowed on. Picacho del Diablo, at 10,154 feet, is the highest peak in Baja.

“I’ll be on trails for most of the trip, terrible as they might be,” he said. “There’s the old mission trail, old Indian trails and horse trails to the many ranches. Most of these are on my maps.”

And where Mackintosh had stills to turn saltwater into drinkable water on his previous excursion, he now hopes to capture rain when it falls, to steal from creeks and to borrow from the many ranches he will visit along the way.

“Most of the ranches, like the missions, are in locations where there is water, otherwise they wouldn’t be there,” he said. “I will live off the desert, eating cactus and snakes and all that again, but hopefully I will be able to go on shopping sprees in the vegetable gardens of all those ranches.”

Mackintosh learned on his previous journey that the residents of Baja, no matter how poor they might be, are among the most hospitable on earth.

They gave him tortillas, water, cerveza, or beer, and literally the shirts off their backs. In return, the funny-looking, strange-talking foreigner with a carrot-colored mop and bright, cheery smile, walking into one remote fish camp after another, gave them a conversation piece that will last a lifetime.

Now on the mission trail, Mackintosh will soon be in Baja’s high country, where in some areas legend has it there lives a strange and diminutive people called Dwindes, who are similar to leprechauns in that they dress in green and keep to themselves. And they are seen, naturally, by only the most imaginative of people.

Should one of these imaginative folks come face to face with the 5-foot-6 Mackintosh strolling amid the pines, burro in tow, he probably will go crying through the forest, claiming to have seen the biggest Dwinde of them all.

Mackintosh laughed when he heard about the Dwindes and said he would keep an eye peeled, but stressed that he has other concerns, such as flash floods in this, the year of El Nino, and mountain lions waiting in ambush on the trail.

“Mountain lions are my biggest concern,” he said. “And I’ll be concerned for my burro as well as myself. I’ll carry a machete by day and sleep by a blazing fire by night. Hopefully, that will discourage the lions from coming into my camp.”

Asked if he had any medical supplies, he tipped his glass and smiled at one of the Tecate honchos, playing up to one of his major sponsors, and jokingly replied, “Yo necessito solamente cerveza. [I need only beer.] That’s why I’m bring the burro. He’s going to carry it.”

Mackintosh also is going to carry some lightweight satellite equipment he hopes will enable him to keep his web site (sdwebservices.com, then click on America’s Finest City). Don’t look for any immediate updates, though. Mackintosh said he hasn’t a clue how to work the stuff.

“But I’ll have plenty of time to figure it out.”