The Companions

Adventures fly or fall based on one's choice of travelling companion. Good companions laugh at your jokes, drink at the same pace you do, light up at the cool things you see and share the pure zen of what you are doing in the great outdoors.

I don't have a lot to say about bad companions, because I have been very, very fortunate to know a few dozen intrepid souls in my life who love adventuring in the same way I do.

My favorite part of sharing an adventure is the moments in which I am completely one with nature, where the place and the experience reach into my soul and take hold and I glance over at my companion, catch his or her eye and know that at that moment, nature got them in the same way it got me. At moments like that, nothing else matters - and I know when I hit that search key and find the next one, these are the people I'll call.

Don and Julian are those kind of people.

I've known Don for thirty years now, and I first met him within an extraordinary group of Frisbee players at Sonoma State University, where I spent my formative years. That was such a fun group of people, and I know all of us still feel that way about each other. Every now and then, I'll see one of this group of 40-50 people, and we all have the same black and white group picture, taken at a tournament in about 1977.

I think Don must smile all the time, and he's got a spirit that doesn't quit. He's a great athlete, and he meets the prerequsites of an appreciation for nearly any kind of bad humor, a taste for beer and owning a servicable mountain bike.

Don did me an amazing favor last year. When I moved east about ten years ago from Marin Country, I had in many ways given up on mountain biking. To leave Mt. Tam and its hundreds of miles of trail and dirt roads was a bummer, and I resisted mountain biking here in favor of the road. I always kept cycling, but I left behind something that was a true passion. Last spring, while I was on a business trip to San Diego, Don borrowed a mountain bike for me from a friend, and took me out into the high desert for a ride. It was like being born again. A week after getting home, I had ordered a new bike. Two weeks later I was back riding every day. A month later I ordered another bike. And now, I can't get it out of my system. Thanks, man.

Don is the star of one of my other blogs, The Big Lemon Tour of Southern Mexico.

Julian is a refugee from New Zealand, now living in New York and dividing his time between is vocation as an ace software designer and his avocation as a filmmaker, African drummer and tribal dancer. He too rides a mountain bike every day, but the path he travels, through downtown traffic with a thirty-pound drum on his back, are far more trecherous than the trails Don and I ride.

I met Julian many years ago through his partner Kate, who I had met in the early eighties while doing my mid-college Eurail trip through Europe. I discovered their love of hiking, and for years, I would entice them to come West for trips into the intense beauty of the Eastern Sierra.

Somewhere in the midst of all these trips, Julian and I learned of the stunning John Muir Trail, and in 1999, we spent an intoxicating three weeks hiking the JMT in celebration of our 40th birthdays. That trip is chronicled here.

This will be a good combination, I think.