Can't Keep Up the Pace

I am posting today out of sequence. It appears a walk is much easier than a write. We are heading down to California (two day trip by car) to resume our walk at the base of the Sierras. At a perfect spot where grassland gives way to oak-covered hills and rock formations, our band of three (Steve and daughter Irene, with visiting walkers on and off) will bake our way up south of Don Pedro reservoir, along remnants of the wagon road that carried John Muir into Yosemite Valley, along the North Rim of Yosemite Valley to Toulomne Meadows, down Bloody Canyon, south of Mono Lake and out past Benton Hot Springs to the Nevada border. I am hoping for the miracle of cool weather but will try to relish the heat if that is what we get.

Just a note about earlier travels, still left undescribed. There is a wonderful feeling when your feet have carried you from one ecotone to the next. Jubilance at reaching the Central Valley, and then seven days further, amazement and jubilance at having crossed that Valley to such a clear portal of up and over. I learned so much in the Central Valley about food and treatment of animals, about almond farming, kindness and good luck, and my marriage. This trip has been a thrill. I don't know if I will finish the fine scale writing of it before the internet and blogging has long faded away from the human scene. The walk is a sustaining life event for us. The writing has been important, and I will do more, but probably not before August as the walk gets lived, and the writing is necessarily postponed.