A red-shouldered hawk at Deer Flat

I'm not sure, but I think that if Chris Clarke isn't about my age, he's younger than me, and therefore I might have enjoyed this post more if he hadn't decided to paint himself as an old man just because a seven mile hike up some steep hills gave him a few aches and pains.

I might have enjoyed it more.  It's hard for me to imagine how I could enjoy any post more than I enjoyed this one:

But my boots had other ideas and took me up toward Murchio Gap, and I lie now in the pine’s sparse shade. It is comfortable. A consolation of a long hike: you can throw yourself down about anywhere and be comfortable for a time, until the flies find you. A breeze and a swallow of water, and I lay my head down on my upturned pack to watch the sky for a while.

A perfect blue sky, with some few needles of Pinus sabiniana, now called “gray pine” so as not to validate the use of racial epithets. A half mile off, a turkey vulture spirals sunward, moving not a wing, not a feather. And the feeling comes over me so imperceptibly that by the time I notice it, it is as if I have always felt this way:

This is the best moment of my life.

Read the whole thing.

Comments

[Chris Clarke]

47 in January.

Actually, it wasn't the seven-mile hike up the steep hills that did me in, it was the subsequent seven-mile hike back down.

(Thanks.)