Just about three miles up Mines Rd is the gate with the red wagon wheels. It comes up sudden and there’s no place to turn around. so I keep driving, and just like he said, there’s an incline, and i know later from looking at the map I’m climbing up Horse Thief Canyon, and a few hundred yards further, the road widens and there looks to be a place up ahead, and i can see a couple of dudes in motor cycle jackets standing on the side of the road smoking, and I’m looking for a place to turn around, And then I see up ahead a little further another group of people, some standing in the middle of the road, and I slow down, and it dawns upon me, as I pass crawling by, I can see her, lying in road, almost like a child, staring up in the sky. There are some things that you cannot unsee, and death is one of them, and she was dead, and I passed by without looking again, but I’ve seen death, and she was dead. There was nothing for me to do, I wasn’t a witness, and there were almost twenty people stopped, so I kept driving. And then the thought occurred, what if I wouldn’t have turned around to photograph some horses, maybe I would have run right into it. As it was it was jolt, and now I had to figure out how to get back down, and get a shot of Coyote Creek with a dead person in the road.

The magical glen close to the junction of Coyote and Mocho Creeks, that t don’t have much of a chance to explore. It’s been about ten minutes and I can hear the helicopter take off. Now i have to hoof it back up, pass by the dead girl again, and move my car. I’m getting a work out, and since I don’t like photographing dead people, I’m not getting many photos. But that isn’t what’s important, I realize, and La Vereda del Monte is not something in the past, nor is it about geography, it isn’t about a dead girl, or Joaquin Murrieta, and it isn’t even about the light, it’s an energy that courses through me, and I suspect, all things.