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DELTA-SIERRA GROUP |
| Explore, enjoy and protect the planet. |
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Mumford Bar to Italian Bar,
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| For Paul Plathe
who slowed the pace, and Ed, Eric, Ross, Randy, and Paul, floaters for an hour in that very peaceful place. |
| The American River scrambles sweet, or seething
with so many granite protrusions like a dragon caught in an avalanche. It has no flat flower-strewn trail like the boulderless Metolius, (a slow Oregon river with the consistency of a benign snake.) |
| I saw him do it, saw the distinctly wet show print - that
sweet spot - at the boulder-to-boulder leap to land a twenty-pound pack and my boots on top of the one smooth rock, or fall and crack. I flew, because the rest of them were so way the hell up ahead that the exhaling angst of each whisper and groan of each muscle and bone could be heard by no one, but God. |
| I've been told that the miners had a hold rope, told
they took their lusty strides straight up their mountain silk and shale. The poison oak-strewn path kept me pathways and I knew--with shuffling baby steps, one at a time--that the twenty four hundred feet of it would be mine. |
| My daughter,
moppet-headed and track-paced, strives for an eight-minute mile. My mother, bedbound and humbled by failing health, can only hope there's no falling between her "here" and "there," neither of which will ever again exist beyond her front door. And I, sweat-headed welted and worn, chose the gorge, and peaked. |