My Father and Me: Pine Mountain

A Story of Father/Son Dynamics in the Mountains

Photo by Zeke Tucker on Unsplash

Sometime in the winter of 2013—when my father was 67 and I was 30—Dad and I decided to backpack for two nights in Pine Mountain, in my hometown of Ojai. My parents still lived in Ojai at that point, where they’d lived since 1991. I was born in nearby coastal Ventura but grew up in Ojai, a small mountain town 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles. This was seven years before Mom and Dad left Ojai to move to Santa Barbara, and eight years before my father’s terminal cancer diagnosis.

All my life I’d been backpacking with my father, ever since my first time around the age of 10 or 12, circa 1993 or 1995. Historically we’d go to Matilija Canyon, off Highway 33. We’d go a few miles up to the second or third camping spot, crisscrossing the rushing creek, both as a kid and when I was an adult, always during my Christmas visit. It would be cold and lush and gorgeous and often devoid of other people. Things changed in 2014 when I got into what became a long-term relationship; I started going backpacking with her.

Dad and I didn’t know this would be our last and final backpacking trip together.

*

I don’t remember why we decided to do Pine Mountain. We’d never been there before. Perhaps we simply wanted to try something new, fresh, original, different. For twenty years we’d hiked the same area. Why not mix it up?

We hadn’t checked in with the rangers in town, and we hadn’t done as much research as we should have.

We ended up bringing my parents’ yellow Lab Cruise, now deceased. This was the only time we’d ever brought a dog on a backpacking adventure. We wore shorts and thick T-shirts. We weren’t prepared; we hadn’t bothered to check the elevation change. Turned out it was close to 6,000 feet. An achingly tough scramble up the mountain—absolutely no one was around; it was pristine and totally silent—only to find ourselves in a thick white blanket of snow.

New, fresh, thick snow, knee-deep in some parts. It was actually quite glorious.

But it was cold. Damned cold. Bone-cold. Douglas Fir jutted up beautifully everywhere, the snow hanging on green branches, making the environment look more like Shasta County than Ojai. It suddenly seemed we were in a foreign land. I remember Dad’s signature translucent blue eyes, the steam puffing from his mouth, his olive-green water canteen continually bumping against his hip, held by the thick olive-green strap across his chest. His white-dirty reebok shoes, size 12, crunching along the snow. We shivered.

At some point I’d gotten ahead of my dad quite a ways, perhaps a football-field-and-a-half, and the steepness smoothed out and flattened. My Keen REI brown hiking boots crunched in the snow. I shivered with lovely, lush excitement. Passing a barely frozen wide, long pond, with a thin sheet of ice along the top, I kept going until I reached a lookout point over a valley. I stopped and gazed down. All I saw was bright, sun-reflecting white snow everywhere, and green Douglas Fir. Northern California, I thought again to myself. Shasta.

Then I heard my father’s voice, from a ways back. He had called to me, making sure I was not too far ahead. I didn’t respond. I don’t know why. Something called internally to me about the white hot thrill of being here, being alone, of Dad not knowing exactly where I was. I yearned for the mystery of it. I’d always possessed this mystic side of myself: It’s what had compelled me to hop freight trains and blackout drink and drive 100 MPH with the headlights off approaching a 90-degree blind turn, drunk at 3am with a carful of friends in high school. Death. Testing the limits. Fear. The edge.

I watched down the valley for a few more seconds, took a long, slow, painfully cold breath of air, exhaled the warm frothy steam, smiled down into the void, and walked back.

Just as I arrived near the pond and saw my father’s figure emerging from the steepness, from the thick green woods, Cruise leapt forward, his paws noisily crunching along the snow, and he leapt—without giving it a moment’s notice—right onto the pond. He slid along the thin sheet of ice, and Dad and I laughed uproariously. Look at Cruise!, we both mused, entertained.

Then Cruise broke through the ice sheet, dramatically, splashing into the freezing cold water.

We tried to get him but the pond was too big, too wide, too long. He struggled and then finally dog-paddled straight ahead, getting to the snowy edge and slowly pulling himself up and out. He shook his furry wet body violently, sending sprays of freezing water all over the place. Dad and I eyed each other and shrugged.

“Well that’ll be a good family story,” my father said.

“That it will,” I confirmed.

Another mile of flat and we arrived at an undesignated spot perfect for camping. It was near dark already; for reasons I can’t quite recall now, we’d started very late that day, later afternoon. So we set our heavy packs down and set our tents up and Dad cooked us the one-pound New York Steak he’d cooked the day before and wrapped in tin foil.

*

That night after eating we got into our respective tents. Dad’s tent was a bigger one than mine, made for three people. Cruise slept in there with him. Like I said we were ill prepared for the cold. Especially me. I had one pair of jeans, a thick shirt and one jacket, plus my beanie. I put all of that on and nuzzled deep into my bag. My bag, though, was more for spring and summer light low-elevation camping. The bag was probably good to about 35, 40 degrees. We didn’t have a way to check the temperature but the next morning Dad and I agreed it must have dipped down below 20 degrees. Certainly it was in the teens, perhaps even low teens.

So the short story is: I shivered wildly all night. I barely slept, only passing out in snatches for an hour here, an hour and a half there. I kept waking, freezing, confused, my whole body trembling, feeling like I was basically just sleeping naked outside in the snow with no bag at all, no warm clothes, no protection.

I was up very early, before dawn. Maybe it was 5:30am. Dad was silent in his tent, still asleep. I heard no sound from Cruise. Immediately, my blue hands shaking—I stupidly hadn’t brought gloves—I made a fire using sliced up bits of paper we’d brought, dozens of tiny sticks I found, and waterproof matches. It took me half an hour just to get this done due to my cold, shaking, stiff fingers. But finally I did and I grew the fire and I sat on a log near the fire and I warmed my hands. I thought of the classic Jack London short story—one of the few pieces of fiction my father loved—called To Build a Fire.

After an hour of warming myself I made hot English Breakfast tea and oatmeal and sat and watched the sun come up in the east, spectacular against the perfectly silent cold whiteness of the smooth snow. It felt very dramatic to me. I was Jack London.

*

After Dad got up that morning we took our time. Dad ate and had the instant coffee he’d brought. I read the current book I’d been obsessing on, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. I wrote a little in my physical journal. Then Dad and I discussed what to do: Go home early, due to the extreme cold and our lack of proper preparation, or stay one more night. We both waffled but in the end we decided to stay one final night.

That day we wandered around the camp, at one point “hiking” in waist-deep snow. Cruise followed us around, yapping and barking and crunching his paws along the deep snow. We talked about the usual things Dad and I always talked about, which were both superficial and exciting and which was our bond: My grandfather; my dad’s childhood (briefly); chemistry and math and science (my dad’s specialties); our mutual love of nature; Mom; movies; etc.

That night we ate early—this time Top Ramen—and made a big fire. We sat and warmed ourselves as the sky darkened and night fell and the bright white stars pulsed and shone in the sky like pulsating diamonds you could reach out and grab. But by 7:30pm it was getting freezing again. We said goodnight after putting the fire out with gobs of snow. The sound of our ten zippers flying in a circle carried us inside to our own private refuges. We said goodnight. I lay there and tried to not think for a while, gazing up through my see-through tent ceiling watching the midnight-black sky and the stars and wondering, What does it all mean?

*

It was another bone-chilling, brutally cold night. Same as before, for me: Tossing and turning, that feeling as if I were sleeping naked outside, my whole body trembling like some machine. Finally I passed out for a few hours. I awoke at 3:12am and had to pee desperately. I tried to ignore it but it was impossible. Damn it. I forced myself up, unzipped the tent, got out, and, my boots still on for warmth, I peed two feet from my single-man REI tent. I saw the steam rise from the golden spring. It made a little figure-eight in the snow. I shivered violently. I moved back into my tent. Zipped up. Nuzzled into my bag. Passed out.

*

The next day we got up late. I was surprised. When I woke it was sunny, almost 8am. Dad was already up, packing his stuff. He’d made oatmeal and there was a steaming bowl waiting for me. I stretched, got up, made tea, glugged and ate. We chatted for a while. Took our tents down. The sun was bright and daring, glinting off that hyper-white snow.

An hour later we were packed and raring to go. I took the lead. Everything this time would be easy, downhill. We’d had an experience. That was what I loved about backpacking. You went up into the mountains. You lost cell service. You ate and drank from your pack. You didn’t shower. You got dirty. You smelled. You felt as if you were “of the land.” Man and Nature intermingled. We’re all dirt in the end.

A few hours later we arrived down the mountain. There was Dad’s truck. We hefted our packs up and over, into the bed of the truck, their dinged aluminum poles clacking with exaggerated echoes against the metal bed. We stood there a moment gazing back at the mountain we’d just climbed. Dad smiled. I nodded. We got into the truck. He flipped the key. The ignition exploded to life. Dad flipped a U-turn and headed back towards home.

Our final adventure was over. I was 30 years old. Dad was 67. It was 2013. Never again would we stay the night in the mountains.

And by summer of 2023, at the age of 77, Dad would be dead.