They turn west, up a road that heads straight into the mountains. “Here comes the tricky part,” Tash says. “We only have a wilderness permit for one, so we’ll have to take evasive action on the way in.”

“You have to get a permit to go into the mountains?”

“Oh yeah. You can get them at Ticketron.” Tash laughs at Jim’s expression. “It’s not a bad idea, actually. But sometimes it’s not practical.”

So they track up the immense slope of the range’s eastern face, following a crease made over eons by a lively stream. Tashi’s car slows on the steep road. They leave behind the shrubs and flowers of the Owens Valley, track up among pines. Their ears pop. They follow a series of bends in the road, lose sight of the valley below. The air rushing in Tashi’s window gets cooler.

They come to a dirt road that forks down to the stream on their left. Tashi stops, drives the car off the track, hums down the dirt road on battery power. “Fishing spot,” he says. “And still outside the park boundary.”

They put the extra food in the backpacks, put the packs on, and walk up the asphalt road. It’s getting light, the sky is sky blue and soon the sun will rise. The road flattens and Jim sees a parking lot and some buildings, surrounded on three sides by steep mountain slopes. “Where do we go?”

“That’s the ranger station. We’re supposed to check in there, and real soon a couple of rangers will be out on the trails to make sure we have. There’s another one stationed in Kearsarge Pass, which is the main pass here, right up on top.” He points west. “So we’re going north, and we’ll get over the crest of the range on a cross-country pass I know.”

“Okay.” It sounds good to Jim; he doesn’t know what a cross-country pass is.

They hike around the parking lot and into a forest of pines and firs. The ground is layered with fragrant brown needles. The sun is shining on the slopes above them, though they are still in shadow. They reach a fork in the trail and head up a canyon to the north.

They hike beside a stream that chuckles down drop after drop. “L.A.’s water,” Tashi says with a laugh. Scrub jays and finches flit around the junipers and the little scraps of meadow bordering the stream. Each turn of the trail brings a new prospect, a waterfall garden or jagged granite cliff. The sun rises over a shoulder to the east, and the air warms. Despite the rubbing of his boots against his heels, Jim feels a small trickle of calmness begin to pour into him and pool. The cool air is piney, the stream exquisite, the bare rock above grand.