Roxanne Downer – My Articles

Whatever Burkes: A master of cooking in high places shares one of his favorite recipes

Gone Fishin’: This angler’s paradise is truly in the middle of nowhere.

For centuries, Panama’s mythic Darien Jungle has simultaneously intrigued and terrified everyone from conquistador Vasco Balboa to Romantic poet John Keats. Referred to by one sixteenth-century traveler as an “abyss and horror,” the isthmus that connects the Americas remains shrouded in mystery even today — in no small part because it’s where the otherwise uninterrupted Pan-American Highway stops dead in its tracks. But concealed in this sultry terrain of dense forest is a coastal oasis where bikini-clad fishing-show hosts and the mayor of Margaritaville reel in the big ones. Read the rest of this entry »

The scent of mesquite trees fills your nostrils as you skim between a pair of sheer, chalk-faced cliffs, barely five feet above the cracking red clay of a dried-out riverbed. To one side of you, a platoon of miniature warthog-like creatures feasts on a breakfast of prairie grass and prickly pears. Above you, the New Mexico sun rises to greet a tranquil blue sky. No human — save perhaps those ancient Native American vision questers — has ever set foot where you are now. Read the rest of this entry »