The Territory
Groveland & the Sierra Nevada
A little town in the foothills on Highway 120, the road to Yosemite — Gold Rush country, an hour up from the valley floor. From here the stories run east over Tioga Pass to Mono Lake and the eastern Sierra, and south into the desert toward Death Valley and Trona. Most people can't find Groveland on a map. That was always part of the charm.
Frank's Keys
Early summer 1982, weeks before Daff Dome. A caravan of hippies takes the gated back roads home from El Portal — Frank from the Dam in the lead with the keys to every locked gate, a river crossing the baby-blue Datsun fords on its own power, and a late-night homecoming to the Evergreen Lodge.
Read →Daff Dome
Summer 1982. Over Sonora Pass to Mono Lake with his rock-hound mother and his friend Zack, then the Datsun dies in Tuolumne Meadows and strands them a week beneath Daff Dome. A ropeless climb kept secret, and a yellow wire that brought the car and the boy home to the foothills for good.
Read →Windowpane
Sonora in the mid-1980s. Benjamin Figs, the creek tunnels, a first encounter with clear gel tabs from a Dead show, and the late bus home through fields at the edge of everything.
Read →Hippie Bro and the Mashed Potatoes
Big Oak Flat in the summer of 1985. A mother's boyfriend from D.C. known to all as Hippie Bro, a duct-taped Datsun, the Iron Door Saloon, and a 2 a.m. mashed-potato fight that became a forty-year-old story.
Read →Purple Octopus / Rainbow Pools
A shortwave radio talking back. Old Priest Grade at night. Coulterville frozen in amber. And the Tuolumne River — thirty feet of air, cold water, and the leap that every foothills kid eventually takes.
Read →The Long Way Around
Spring break, 1986. A punk-teenager Brooks, his rock-hound mother, and Hippie Bro cross an early-open Tioga to the hot springs, Whitney Portal, and the floor of Death Valley. Then the pass slams shut behind them and the long way home becomes the trip where the Datsun first starts to die.
Read →If You Hit the Third Cattle Guard
A map to the secret hot springs of the eastern Sierra, drawn on an Iron Door cocktail napkin and navigated by counting cattle guards. A long weekend that became an epic — Tioga Pass, Mono Lake, a rock-hound mother reading the deep time, Crazy Irvin's one rule, and Frank from the Dam materializing out of the trackless desert.
Read →The Tape from Cal Poly
A Groveland summer, home from that first year away. The summer of 1989 — an empty condo at Pine Mountain Lake, a cassette tape carried home from Cal Poly, and the night Midnight Oil's Diesel and Dust quietly widened one nineteen-year-old's whole world. Not part of this collection, but its close cousin.
Read the companion piece →