Santa Ynez Valley and Santa Barbara, September 2005
Wyoming, August 10-14 2005
Two years later almost to the day, I was again standing at the Elkhart Park trailhead in Wyoming's Wind River Range. This time it was 10pm, absolutly silent without even a breeze whispering in the forest, and rather dark on account of partly cloudy skies and a crescent moon. Sean and Doug had left me off and gone on towards the Tetons, taking with them the bag containing my toothbrush and leaving me with a very similar looking bag carrying my phone battery charger and other useless items (my mistake). I crept off into the trees and found a place to sleep that felt relatively safe, atop a small rise away from the trail and the parking lot, and then promptly canceled out all safety precautions by hanging my bag of food on a short cord a few meters from my sleeping bag (not the best thing to do in a place frequented by thousand pound bears, but it was too dark to do anything else). The night passed with only a few mosquitoes visiting and shortly after sunrise I was on my way east. After a short while I met Don, a retired petroleum geologist, coming along in the opposite direction with a rock hammer and two bottles of water. We chatted for a while and he decided to walk with me for a short way and gave me his photocopied trail maps. They were nice to have because I had none. As we paused in the mottled early sunlight to look at the maps, I glanced up and noticed a large cow moose and her calf ambling along beside us about 60 feet away. They crossed ahead of us, a quarter mile farther on Don turned back, and I proceeded to walk about seven miles in to a picturesque lake. The afternoon was far too long; I didn't want to continue on because I'd need to get out the next day by early afternoon and besides, the mountains did look rather similar to one another. Finally the sun set and I slept for half the night and conveniently woke at an optimal time to step outside and watch the Perseid meteors streak down, one every few seconds at times. The night was cold enough that the mosquitoes were gone so I watched for a long time, admiring billions of stars and the jagged silhouettes of nearby peaks. In the morning I walked out and hitched a ride with two fellows from Ohio. They let me off on a dusty, barren stretch of road near Half Moon Lake where I and friends from Pasadena had a cabin reserved. Not thirty seconds after I'd walked to the edge of the road, pulled out a paper with the cabin information, and shouldered my pack, the Pasadena crew sped up in a white van that had come straight through the night from California. That seemed a bit odd, but it's actually not out of character for me to appear randomly. We spent that day and the next sleeping, piloting a paddleboat with an unruly engine around Half Moon Lake, and partaking in the merriment of Matt and Jenny's wedding there on Fremont Lake with the evening sun lighting the flower arrangements and glasses with rich colors and fantastic sculptures of cloud scudding southeast over the Wind River Range.
San Francisco, August 2005
