The Crest over Pinecrest

I drive through Central Valley—long hours of strip malls and dust—and decide not to go to Yosemite. I don’t have a camping permit or a bear canister or a Subaru minivan packed with toddlers and a carabiner-pocketknife-combo ($99.99 at REI), for when you’re rock climbing and need to slit your throat.

I’ll go to Pinecrest.

I’ll climb Big Sam Mountain.

I won’t see anyone.

The sun blurs behind the valley’s fog-haze like a porch-light in smoke; the sky, blue-white and soft, blushes above the dust-fields. The cloud-streaks rust.

Fifty yards in front of me, a truck streams dust, orange and illuminated in the low-light. Powdered gold. Sunlight and dust and tule-fog, I can’t see shit.

*     *     *     *     *

Outside Pinecrest at the end of Crabtree Road, I park. It’s dark, and there isn’t a car, a light. Somewhere close a river pours—I love the sound—and under a million stars, in the light of my headlamp, I pitch my tent. The air smells like pine. My breath-puffs swell and fade.

I awake to sunwarmth, sunlight through the pine trees. Frost glitters on my shoelaces, my car, the frozen ground. The river gushes.

I walk down to the river—it’s not thirty feet from me—and breathe its cold. White light jumps from wet rock to standing wave, rests in an eddy. In the November woods I drink, pack my tent. Hike west. 

*     *     *     *     *

The trail cuts the trees and switchbacks up, out of the forest, into the blue-cold sky. No snow on the trail—I’m surprised—and I walk on a network of roots under roots, over granite. A breeze, and aspen leaves flutter through the sun-sky like yellow rain. I stand in it.

Around nine-thousand feet the trail falters, breaks. Disappears under snow. A mile west, Big Sam Mountain rises into the sun. The trail steepens and I kick, toe above toe, up the slope. The snow: ice-crust over powder. Ice-crust: slippery. Powder: light, solid as air.

I slip—slide down fifteen feet, stop on an ice-crust-ledge.

I breathe. The air, frozen and too blue, burns my chest.

I tremble. Toe-kick over toe, I climb.