Outdoor Adventure USA

Anza Borrego is mentioned in this article on Yahoo Travel today.

http://travel.yahoo.com/p-interests-236 ... gtOS0xOA--

We like Anza-Borrego!

I vote for on "Top of the World"

I am a sailor and a quiet freak. Anza Borrego has jet traffic, coyotes and late night off road maniacs. Yes the jets are very high, the coyotes are sort of soothing and the off road maniacs are usually friends but you can hear them just the same.

Laguna Hanson in Baja California has to be one the quietest places on earth. It was deafeningly quiet, as if nothing was alive. No bugs, no coyotes, no planes, no nothing. Dead silence! I mentioned this at the campfire and everyone stopped talking for a moment. Dead silence except for the sound of the crackling fire. The crackling became a roar and all at once everyone resumed talking.

gon2srf wrote:I am a sailor and a quiet freak. Anza Borrego has jet traffic, coyotes and late night off road maniacs. Yes the jets are very high, the coyotes are sort of soothing and the off road maniacs are usually friends but you can hear them just the same.

Laguna Hanson in Baja California has to be one the quietest places on earth. It was deafeningly quiet, as if nothing was alive. No bugs, no coyotes, no planes, no nothing. Dead silence! I mentioned this at the campfire and everyone stopped talking for a moment. Dead silence except for the sound of the crackling fire. The crackling became a roar and all at once everyone resumed talking.

I'm a city boy, and don't mind ambient noise. So, to me, Anza Borrego, Big Bear, Calico, Mojave, and most of the places I off-road are very quiet to me. I enjoy fighting the roar of the fire to here friends talk, instead of fighting the drone of Muzak in the restaurants...and when I really want to experience a quiet place, I concentrate on the empty space between my ears...

It was interesting to me that a few of the places in the list are actually quite loud, but as they say loud in a natural way. Victoria Falls has got to be pretty noisy, as well of some of the beaches on the list. Ocean surf can be quite loud, but I do find it soothing.

It's not on the list but I'm sure the whole Cedar Mesa area in Utah is pretty darn quiet. After spending some time there the sound of the wind rustling through the wings of a raven flying overhead actually seems pretty loud. There are occasional planes flying overhead, but not too many and they're very high in that area. A few coyotes at night, but not very many.

I'd guess quiet and dark nights are often found together. Natural Bridges National Monument, which is at the northwest corner of Cedar Mesa, is also the world's first International Dark Sky Park, and the stars there are truely amazing. It's rated a 2 on the Bortle scale, which is a 1-10 scale of night sky darkness with 1 being the darkest.

This spring I stood on a glacier with my guide in the Glacier Bay area, it was almost dark and the only noise was your labor breath from the hike and the southing creaks and pops of the glacier beneath your feet, we used the last of the light to set up 2 small tents and crawled in. It took me a long time to fall asleep that night, the cold was not a bother, it was the fact that the only sound was the ice alive under your sleeping bag. around midnight I fell asleep and slept so well that at 5:30 I was refreshed and ready to hike back to base camp. I will never forget waking up and standing in just a pair of jeans out on a sea of ice and being so in awe the cold did not affect me.