Pushing to the base

After leaving the oasis, we continued to move up along the main creek a short distance, perhaps a half mile, then the valley and the creek we had been following all day forks left and right almost equally.  We went up the right fork but no longer had the creek to guide us.  We knew we had to move up this new valley of rock with mountains on both sides, but we weren't sure initially where to go.  On our first trip, after about an hour of hiking up this valley, we turned back, tired and a little confused.

Behind me in the picture above and to the left is the place where we made a wrong turn in our first attempt several years ago. We made a wrong turn and climbed up a very steep slope with very loose rocks. The higher I climbed, the looser the rocks became to the point where every time I moved either one of my hands or feet, I could feel the entire ground beneath me move as well. This started a rock slide nearly killing Father. He told me later that the first words out of my mouth were not "Are you OK" rather "I've never seen you move that fast!"

Now we were at about eleven thousand feet and it was cold and there was a lot of snow and to the east we could see immense snowcapped ranges and whoee levels of valleyland below them, we were already practically on top of California. Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums

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