On one of those chill rainy days in the Week of Information I unearthed a couple of Sierra Club books from half a century ago, one obviously picked up some years after its publication given its marked-down price from half what a 1941 Dodge panel truck cost around then to $25.00 and finally $12.50, “Baja California”.  Although always a favorite location of mine Robert Wood Krutch’s crackpot theology came across as a little ridiculous and though Fairfield Porter’s brother’s* pictures were gorgeous they weren’t exactly the Baja I was looking for.

Not so the earlier book; Tom Horbein’s “Everest, the West Ridge” was much more the real deal, the nuts and bolts [as long as one skipped over the S. Club’s inexorably interspersed platitudes] of mountaineering and still just the thing, these many years later, for a rainy afternoon.

Somehow, despite the sun’s reappearance and increasing evidence [again, so who can say] of Spring this led or veered me into the pre-digital realm of Radar Ranch, my own West Ridge

so back to eighties slidereels…

or early early nineties, while outside

as weather inexorably warmed

I remained inextricable; Onyx, a long gone dog

and the Radar Ranch

with that long gone time of building on mountains

or moving buildings on mountains…just the kinds of things we did

when L wasn’t building other things or dressing for mountaineering.

All exhumed from within the Deep Archives, these and much else…

far away from 21st century days on the Straits of Carquinez/Martinez

and the 19th century alleys

of Benicia…

whereat we’re at.  For now.

* Eliot Porter; he and RW Krutch were David Brower’s go-to writer-photographer crutch in the proselytizing years after the Sierra Club’s Glen Canyon debacle [at least Muir knew what was UP with Hetch Hetchy!] as the organization transitioned from a bunch of wildass mountain climbers into the lawyerly lobbyists it remains to this day…but then this IS [and has been] the Great Era of Lawyerly Lobbyists, no question.