August 7

Shasta is visible throughout the day, standing alone, overseeing a whole circumference of forest. I get to see this mountain from all angles, framed by ever changing foregrounds, a screen of fir, a sweep of rock.

Whole days now spent under forest canopy. Red fir, sugar pine, Jeff pine, Mountain Hemlock. Under the tree shade, the climate shifts instantly, becoming almost airconditioned. Especially, under the red fir stands, where the shade is solid and impenetrable it is no mistake that red fir is one of the most shade tolerant western trees. The forest floor is heaped with the organic wreckage of dead limbs and fallen trees occasionally a whole log that has soaked back into the soil leaving nothing but a carpet of mulch, a pile of debris the nutrient cycle completed.

Whole days spent in logging country. The machine rutted soil and the acres of stumps. There are selective cuts and there are clearcuts. The selective cuts leave a thin shadow of a forest, the clearcuts leave thickets of low lying manzanita, a storm of shrubs choking out regrowth. Most of all, we cross road after road, each one is a unique intrusion, each one divides the forest into increasingly smaller units until the forest is no longer a cohesive thing. Until the forest is a series of isolated stands. Until the forest lacks a heart. No wonder the god damn grizzly is gone from this place there was no place for it to be. To roam, to hide.

I love moving swiftly and powerfully over the land, strata of rock vertical to one side of me and panorama of runaway hills to my other side. I move like an animal, my muscles tuned to climb and my eyes engaged forward on the trail unrolling ahead of me. To my south, Lassen. To my north, Shasta. Two epic rocks between them ripples of a swaying forest through I run. Canopied gullies, masked ridges. I feel efficient, not for the sake of mere speed but simply not to squander energy. All tasks are performed quickly: water, shit, eat, maps; and then I move on.

I came out here to encounter something larger than myself. To dissolve my private phantoms in a sea of otherness, indifference, brutality.