Sublime

descending into long gullies, ascending back to the ridgetop, contouring across knolls, negotiating rough, scoparia-covered slopes, and detouring around rock buttresses on highly exposed ground. The going was slow and deliberate: I cautiously moved

The hills immediately west of the Tillman abode are honeycombed with mine shafts that once yielded a bounty of mercury ore. It was the most valuable mine in California during the latter half of the nineteenth century, but the diggings were shut down in 1975, after which the site was designated a forty-two-hundred-acre recreational area and thirty-f

Aspen groves blazed like flares on the slopes. Whole copses of hundreds of separate trees, but all joined together underground by a single root. An aspen wood was all one organism. The largest living thing on earth.