Years ago I was rambling along a lost remaining portion of the original Portolá expedition trail route. Alan Brown, the scholar who’d translated the (then unpublished) Juan Crespí journals of the expedition, had sent me those pages and his own notes. So that I could ground-truth and maybe slightly amend Alan’s map of how that segment of the trail runs.
And my rambling took me into an inholding of an old quicksilver mine where there was a ramshackle old cabin. And a damn interesting Vietnam vet caretaker who became a friend of mine. Though the first time we met, standing across the creek from one another, it was the barrel of the gun I noticed most.