"This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere: the dew is never all dried at once: a shower is forever falling, vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls."

John Muir

While in the Corps, I spent time one summer on voluntary active duty at Bridgeport, California. I was an instructor at the Mountain Warfare Training Center. This base is high up in the Sierra Nevadas, northeast of Sacramento, waaaay out in the boonies. The base camp there, Pickel Meadows, is over six thousand feet, and the training areas has peaks that reach twelve thousand. Snow remains on them year round.

That's me in the middle...

On the weekends, when on liberty, most of the Jarheads would head for the fleshpots (the closest one was Reno) to soak up some beer and hookers. The company first sergeants would set up chartered buses for the trips. We called them the Poontang Express. :-)

Believe it or not, I never went. :-) Figured I could get enough of that when I got back to Houston.

Most of the time I'd just hike up to some mountain meadow, carrying next to nothing. Just a knife, some matches, a poncho and a blanket for the chilly nights.

The base is thousands of acres in the middle of a national forest, so there may not have been another human for miles.

Up Above The Snowline

I'd hang out, read a paperback or two, and nap naked in the sun. I'd catch little eight inch brook trout on a handline, and roast them on a stick with the little wild onions you could find up there. I drank from the natural springs that welled up from the hillsides, putting my lips right to the little hole in the earth where the water gushed out and sucking it down straight from Mother Earth like a baby hanging on his mother's nipple. Which, of course, in the largest sense, I was.

I took my camera a few times, an old Pentax Spotmatic. I set the delay and took a coupla pics of me up there. Once, on a lark, up above the line where the snow sits all year, I took some nekkid pics in the afternoon sun. Even so, that high up, it was chilly, so the "shrinkage" factor came into play. I've resisted the urge to ummm... retouch the photo. As I said the other day, in my discussion of being totally transparent online, once you're naked on the internet, what's left to hide? :-)

All good things come to an end, though, and it was soon time to return to the real world.

After months of that outdoor life, living at altitude, hiking sometimes well above the treeline to ten and eleven thousand feet, when my plane landed back in Houston, the air felt so thick and full of oxygen it was like I had to remind myself to take a breath every minute or so.

Those days instilled in me a love of mountain country that has never left me all these long years later. Had I not such strong family ties here on the Gulf Coast, I think I would have left long ago to return to them.