A 3 Day Journey📍 John Muir Trail, California
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“He shot my mom in the face first. Then shot my stepbrother in the stomach when he came through the door. I was sitting there and saw it all.”
His dad—now serving life in prison for murder—had come home with a shotgun in a rage. Shot his mom point blank in the face when she opened the door. Then turned on his stepbrother when he tried to intervene.
Tim, ten years old at the time, now nineteen, was watching TV on the couch when his world fell the fuck apart.
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We stood there, fishing lines dangling in the water, taking in the immaculate view before us. A placid lake nestled at the foot of a cascading valley in the High Sierras. A vast and beautiful rocky mountain range stretching across California, full of lakes and wildlife.
High above the city of Independence at nearly 13,000 feet. The air a bit thinner and crisp. The fading tree line evident of the change. Snow holding brush and growth. The smell of pine and nature all around. Boulders visible as the sun warms the valley. Patches of grass muddied as the snow thaws. The bubbling brook flowing down the steep embankment feeding the tiny lake beside us.
Sounds of nature erupting. Chirps and fluttering as swallows and other native fowl hit their mark, filling their bellies. The sun cresting the massive peaks before us. Revealing the presence of a new day.
We stood as men—facing the elements. Nature. God's work of art.
And God's a funny motherfucker, because right next to paradise He put Tim, a nineteen-year-old junkie who just described his mom's face getting rearranged like it was traffic school.
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Clothed in rugged jeans, t-shirts, hiking boots, and the occasional jacket, the four of us perched precariously atop our own vantage points to secure success. The native golden browns and rainbows visible below as they swim the continually living current of crystal clear glacier water. Their movement around our bait uninspiring as they ignore the neon yellow PowerBait dangling in front of them—a sure sign of their impending fate in a frying pan.
Tim had just finished telling us how his addiction to heroin started, leaving us silent in the moment.
Silence. On a fucking mountain. With a kid who watched his father become a monster.
And the trout don't give a shit.
The rest of our group—a band of misfits. Rough and tough street thugs from the IE, Inland Empire—still passed out in their tents on the other side of the lake.
Rich. Jimmy. And myself. The volunteers on this man-making adventure. Leading sixteen- to twenty-four-year-old young adults on an excursion of a lifetime. A three-day camping, fishing, hiking expedition. Starting at 9,000 feet in Onion Valley, hiking along the John Muir Wilderness trail to the crest at 14,500 feet over three days.
These hooligans never having stepped foot outside the busy city. Now completely out of their element. At our mercy.
And at the mountain's mercy. And the mountain's a cold bitch.
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Our journey began three days earlier in a church parking lot.
Yeah. A church parking lot. Where all great shitty ideas are born.
We had a beat-up van, two coolers of warm Gatorade, a tent that smelled like someone's uncle, and enough beef jerky to clog a coronary artery.
The kids showed up looking like they'd just lost a fight with a meth pipe. Hoodies in August. Eyes like smashed glass. One kid had a knife in his sock. Another hadn't slept in forty-eight hours because “the shadows were talking.”
And Tim? Tim got out of his mom's old Honda—she's dead, remember, so it's his now, legally—and just stood there. Staring at the cross on the church roof. Probably wondering if God was taking bets.
“You ever been camping?” I asked him.
“I been homeless,” he said. “That count?”
I laughed. He didn't.
That's when I knew: this wasn't a hike. This was a goddamn exorcism.
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Three days later, we're standing on the fucking mountain.
The kids cried. Threw up from altitude sickness. One kid tried to fight a marmot. Another had a panic attack because there were no sirens at night.
“It's too quiet,” he kept saying. “Something's wrong.”
Yeah, something's wrong, you little shit. You're in the most beautiful place on Earth and your brain is still looking for a drive-by.
But here's the thing. The humor—the raw, stupid, life-like humor—it showed up anyway.
When Rich slipped on a patch of ice and landed ass-first in a creek, we laughed so hard we almost passed out from the thin air.
When Jimmy tried to cook ramen with a lighter and set his eyebrow on fire, we laughed harder.
When Tim—dead-eyed, heroin-withdrawing, haunted Tim—caught his first trout and held it up like a goddamn trophy and screamed, “FUCK YOU, DAD, I'M ALIVE” at the top of his lungs?
We didn't laugh then.
We fucking cheered.
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We made fuckers into men.
Not by being nice. Not by holding hands and singing Kumbaya. By dragging their asses up a mountain until their legs quit shaking. By making them build a fire when their fingers were numb. By letting them stare into a lake at 13,000 feet and realize: I did this. Nobody shot me. Nobody stabbed me. I just… walked. And I didn't die.
Tim's still a junkie? Maybe. Probably. I don't know.
That's not the point.
The point is: for three days, on that fucking trail from Redlands to the John Muir crest, a ten-year-old boy who watched his mom die stood on a rock with a fishing pole in his hand and laughed.
Really laughed. At Rich's wet ass. At Jimmy's missing eyebrow. At the trout that got away because he fumbled the net.
And that's the insight, you sonofabitch:
You don't fix people. You just give them a mountain to climb and hope the view does the rest.
Now pack your fucking tent. We got more kids to ruin—I mean, save.