03.08.10 - 9:16 am

i have a sunburn.

in march.

we left with red stinging faces. Some of us had rocks in their palms. another had a bruise smeared across his forehead. one with a shaved piece of finger missing. small tokens of reminiscence gifted to us by 1800 acres of high desert country and a weekend that had been trying to bring us together for years.

brain. sphinx. myself. brian. adam. derrick.

brain and i arrived in complete darkness. all i knew of the land was what the headlights offered to show me: clandestine gravel roads. dead grass. crude fencing. a turn of the century house surrounded by decaying metal and sun bleached wood. the kind of house you would expect to find wandering in the darkness. the nightmarish kind of house with skulls and bones scattered throughout the yard and some form of painful death inside its walls.

we gathered wood from the wood house. loaded up everything from our car into the bed of a small pick up truck and headed out again. the campsite brain had in mind was at the peak of a small hill destined to be the build site of his fathers home one day. we unloaded our supplies from the truck and quickly found some large rocks from the earth to encircle a fire. once it got going, we got word the others had arrived and needed a guide to our site. i was left with koda and the fledgling fire. miles of darkness quickly raced to surround me as the truck disappeared. for the first time in my life, i think i assembled my tent completely alone in a foreign place without the luxuries of sight and sound. i would call for koda frequently, her two reflective blue eyes somehow protecting me from the wild creatures or murderers of my imagination, all desperate to steal me into the night. it was a primal rush. irrational fear. the thrill of complete solitude. i would love to try it again, for an extended several day period some day in the future.

when the others arrived, the fire was secure. the cold had seeped into everything. the voices and bustle of tents and gear and coolers ended with six guys surrounding the only source of heat available to us. it was 30 degrees when brain and i arrived, it was probably colder now nearly an hour later and several hundred feet higher in elevation. we would remain around that fire until sometime after 1 in the morning. unable to leave a foot or two outside of its radius, we cracked open PBRs and choked down uncarbonated home brew. derrick arrived in flip flops and a t shirt. pure madness at this temperature. when the cold finally snuffed out our conversations to simply silent gazes into the fire we retreated to our icy tents and frozen sleeping bags.

the next morning we were awake by 8 am. none of us could feel our toes. in spite of my double wrapped socks, my toes stung painfully throughout the night while my body remained remarkably comfortable. there was frost layering our tents, had there been more moisture available, im sure it would have been a sheet of ice. on all fours, crawling through sleeping bags and the flaps of my tent i found myself lifting my eyes from the rocky grass covered ground to the breath taking panorama that stretched in every direction. a stunning row of massive snow covered mountains lined our horizon to the west: Hood, Jefferson, Washington, Three Sisters, Three fingered Jack. all of them piercing the blues and pinks of the dawn sky.

to be continued