Mary Panttaja

Sitting on a ridge after dinner (maple schezwan pork with garlic green beans and salad; Seghesio Zin). We still need to wash the dishes but the ambiance of the sunset is hard to pass up. The sun has dropped behind Mount Whitney and we are watching the shadows climb up the Inyo Mountains.

We are between The Alabama Hills and Mount Whitney Portal. We visited Lone Pine today. (I want to call it a village because it’s small, but village sounds like a corner in Vermont, and doesn’t fit our hot, raggedly, dusty small towns.) We hiked up part of the Mount Whitney trail—just a little to get a taste. It feels good to be able and confident about taking off on a trail from 8400 feet and head up. It wasn’t very steep, an easy trail. And everyone else there was more able—a common problem when you get off the beaten track—but we headed up an hour and then back down. Trouble with my knee—the muscles seemed to want to freeze up. But all good.

We are here in the Alabama Hills (named by miners who were Confederate sympathizers after a war ship) because, through a weird adjustment in time and space in my storyline, I needed somewhere John and Sarah could camp in March. So we ended up in this desert. The Alabama Hills have been the site of numerous film projects. A very strange and unearthly place of rock formations and desert chapparal.

The moon is up and I guess we’ll have a full one before we leave the desert. Tomorrow we hope to take a run up to Bishop and see the Galen Rowell studio, Mountain Light. He was an inspiring artist/adventurer who really seem to have caught his updraft. I am in the midst of the retrospective book they published after he and his wife died in the plane crash.

The mountains are a gentle fading pink against a wispy cloud cover—dark is coming. The quail are ‘chawaka- ing’ in the brush.