by Harley McAllister

At 3,098m (10,164 ft.), Pico Duarte is the tallest mountain in all the Caribbean.  And let's face it, it would also be the tallest mountain in all of the Eastern U.S.  We had our eyes on tackling this challenge for several years, and had even had some plans fall through, before we finally got our chance in April of 2013. 

Pico Duarte is located in a national park, and you are required to hire guides.  The guides come along and bring mules which are used to carry most of your food and equipment.  As a result, all you really need to carry is your food and water for the day, which is nice in some ways, particularly with kids.

Before this starts to sound to cushy, consider that the trailhead in La Cienega is about 3,600 ft., but your first day will find you 12 miles in and about 6,000 feet higher!  On the next day you summit an additional 3 miles and 1,500ft in both directions, and then come all the way out 12 miles again the final day.

For more details and photos of this challenging trip, visit our Pico Duarte page.

As we became more comfortable and more familiar in our new surroundings, we found that we were able to utilize many of the same skills and passions for the outdoors in our new home, the Dominican Republic.

If you are like me, when you envision a Caribbean island, you think warm, blue water and white sand beaches lined with palm trees.  Well, we do have that Playa Grande, and we have enjoyed it!  But actually, we are more mountain folk, and surprisingly they have that here as well.  The island the Dominican Republic shares with Haiti is about the size of NH and VT combined.  And it is crossed by several mountain ranges.  Some are coastal and relatively small, but the central range, the Cordillera Central, is quite large and has several peaks over 10,000ft in elevation!  I mean, there are pine trees up there!  And with abundant rainfall there are numerous streams, a number of waterfalls, and a thick forest canopy with true jungle ecosystems in places, albeit without any large mammals.

With this natural wealth in place, but with a lack of public access, it just took a little extra digging to find places to go.  Some of our favorite finds included local mountain hikes and river canyons to explore that were posted on the site previously.  Since then we have added trip reports of remote beaches where we have camped and explored, as well as a reasonably priced eco-tourism coffee farm and nature preserve  that became our go-to camping spot. And finally, what would a Caribbean adventure list be without some quality snorkeling at a place called "Paradise Island ".

More adventures to come in the next installment.

We are coming to the end of four years spent living in the Dominican Republic.  My wife and I have always lived in the west (CO, CA, WA), but then in 2010 we sold everything and took our kids with us to go and serve as teachers in a non-profit Christian school in the D.R. It has been a wonderful time for a variety of reasons, but as we look back there is one thing we want to share that continues to impress itself on our minds.

We have always loved to be active and outdoors, even once we had kids.  So our first weekend here, in what was still a very foreign place to us, we threw the boys in the car and started on a dirt road out of town.  Jarabacoa is a small town, so it didn't take long!  Soon we crossed a decent sized stream, and we applied the old adage that anything below the high water mark must be public land.  We jumped out by a bridge and started splashing, exploring, and playing in the small stream. As we prepared to leave and were hiking back to the car, a gentleman kindly informed us that this was private land, and we should be more careful about where we ventured (how we understood him with our limited Spanish I will never know).

This was but the beginning of something we were soon to realize; there is very little public land in the D.R.  I am finding it hard to put into words just what a shock to my system this reality was.  Quite simply, I had grown up my entire life recreating on the vast public lands that are afforded to us as citizens of the U.S.  I had been to countless National Parks, I had camped and hiked through myriad National Forests, I had hunted and fished on obscure BLM properties in numerous states. Heck, even the ski areas leased their lands from the Forest Service!

In the coming weeks and months, it even started to effect how I saw myself as a father in this new place.  I had always thought of myself as a good Dad, and to me a big part of that included taking my boys camping, fishing, hiking, skiing, etc.  But how could I do that here? Where would I do that here?

Accordingly, we set about trying to figure out what activities we COULD do here. And we came to learn that our first impressions were not entirely accurate.  Many larger streams did allow for public access for canyoning, and the region had several impressive waterfalls that one could hike to through the stream bed.  Also, there are national parks in the Dominican Republic, but they typically are highly controlled and require you to hire a guide to access them.

Nevertheless, and with the help of new friends who had lived here longer than we had, we were able to find some really great places to adventure in this country.  For more details on some of these excellent adventures, check out the “Dominican Republic” section of our Trip Reports page. In the coming weeks, we will share more about how these experiences have shaped and informed how we are choosing to return to our native land - together with our new son whom we recently adopted from the Dominican Republic!