The slope looks like the back of a horse and I know I’m close, I can feel it. The rude rock just in front is referred to as serpentine barrens with unusually high concentrations of iron, chromium, nickel and cobalt, like weathered hands, that have shaped, and been shaped, it is a reminder of my place in the world. Just out of view is a locked gate and I can go no further without a combination. I meet a guy at Oak Flat campground and he tells me the combination is on my permit, I go back to my car and look, but see nothing resembling a combination. This is news to me, there was no mention of a gate, and no gate anywhere on the maps I reviewed. Obviously I have missed something crucial and I think of my own advice, posted a while back – Chance favors the prepared mind – and I am further humbled. I am on the trail, this is certain, but it is not taking me where I want to go. So it will take me where it wants me to go. I should make a decision soon, before it gets dark, where I am going to spend the night. Maybe here, maybe back at Condon Peak.

Looking down on Clear Creek, climbing to the ridge in the San Benito Mountains, I’m in a part of California that I have never been in. Murrieta followed this creek 175 years ago, changed only by the rain, the wind, and the patter of deer along the path that disappears into the manzanita. On a dirt road, I take it slow, not much faster than the dun colored horse he rode, broken in the corrals somewhere outside of Stockton, stolen and ridden hard through the San Antonio Pass and along the backbone of the Diablo Range, keeping herd on a hundred head wrangled from ranch lands near Livermore and San Jose. Joaquin made a living stealing horses, and gold dust, and it seems to me much of what he did was for the challenge of it as it was for anything. What struck me was the hard light and the color that put an edge on everything. Every rock, every tree, each rise in the land seems to have its own place as if it were determined to come into being just the way that it did, It is the will of nature I am witnessing, as if for the first time becoming itself, unique, without division, an individual consummate whole that breaks my brain in two, entering the point of awe when I open mouth and not a word comes out. As I make this climb, I pause, retrace my steps and repeat myself, for the journey is not a straight one, both image and story collide taking me in the direction that it does as if I too, were becoming for the first time and determined to bring myself into being. There are two stories I wish to tell: One is of these mountains as I travel, the other is of Joaquin Murrieta’s as he rode these same trails. Where the two will meet I do not know, but I do know that I’m following the Mountain Trail, La Vereda del Monte, for others have taken it long before me and given it a name.